Torture - Punishment Without a Purpose

I believe the episode of Black Mirror we watched, 'White Bear', was intended to represent America's flawed correctional system. The woman on the show had her mind erased daily, after committing a crime, and had to live through the same horrific experience repeatedly. Her punishment was symbolic to the futility of our country's system of punishment. The woman on the show never knew she was being punished or what she was being punished for. Her punishment taught her nothing, and therefore it made any chance of her learning from her mistakes impossible. There was no attempt to reform her, and so her punishment was essentially a form of mental torture. Similarly, our prison systems lack any form of rehabilitation.

The intention of a correctional system in a society should be to keep its populace safe and functioning smoothly by punishing criminals through means of imprisonment, probation, etc. It should also attempt to rehabilitate its offenders and reform them into healthily functioning members of society. With a successful correctional system, any society should see a decrease in crime rate and an increase in its society's overall well-being.

By inspection however, it is apparent that America's Corrections System falls far from this idea of a successful system. Politicians since the Nixon Era have promised to crack down on drugs and be tougher on crime but to what end? This has only caused overcrowding in a penal system that is painfully flawed! Criminals, especially those with minor offenses, should be treated/rehabilitated; not thrown into to a cage, yet as prison population increases, the possibility of any reformation becomes further out of reach.

Sadly, our government seems to care less about this problem, in fact it almost seems as if our government wants the increase of population in our penal system. For example, they neglect to provide drug offenders with any drug treatment; they instead give them a mandatory minimum sentence. This method of punishment helps nobody. As studies show, over 90% of drug offenders relapse after being released from prison, so taxpayer's money is wasted on housing the inmate in an institution that ceases to yield any reformation. And with the high percentage of relapse after being incarcerated, it is likely that the drug offender will end up right back in the slammer. It's a vicious circle that will never end unless the system changes.