In the US Criminal Justice System, rehabilitation ought to be valued above retribution

The current strategy of incarceration causes recidivism.

Warren writes

Although initially effective in locking up serious and dangerous offenders, overreliance on incarceration is today of limited and diminishing effectiveness as a crime-control strategy. Offender recidivism rates have increased.Three quarters of state prison commitments are for nonviolent offenses, resulting in overcrowded prisonsand shorter prison terms for more dangerous offenders. We over-incarcerate some offenders, and under-incarcerate others. Most important, unlike 30 years ago,there is today an enormous body of sophisticated research proving thatunlikeincarceration, which actuallyincreases offender recidivism, properly designed and operated recidivism- reduction programs can significantly reduce offender recidivism. Such programs are more effective, and more cost-effective, than incarceration in reducing crime rates.

http://static.nicic.gov...

The current strategy of incarceration causes recidivism.

Rehabilitation lowers recidivism rates by allowing convicted criminals to be reintegrated into society.

Rosansky states

Otherprograms including drugrehabilitation, family services, and educationhave allproven to reduce recidivism rates.The United States mustreverse its trend of increasing prison populations andreduce recidivism by involving convicted criminals in these programs. Restorative justice is a system of criminal rehabilitationthat focuses on the damages caused to individuals and communities by criminal offenders.Its goal is to make offenders take responsibility for their actions. Advocates of restorative justice feel that incarceration does not teach offenders that their actions are morally wrong.Their crimes are treated as violations of state laws and not wrongs against their peers and communities. The theory of restorative justice is built upon human morality.The victim of a crime plays a central role in the reconciliation of the offense which is usually accomplished through restorative dialogue and reparations. The process of restorative dialogue serves two purposes. First, the victims are given a chance to confront the offender and bring closure to the incident. Second, the offenders are brought face to face with the victims of their crimes and forced to see the effects of their actions. Criminal hearings are usually impersonal and bureaucratic. They create an adversarial relationship between the offender and the court system. The offender is focused on his legal situation and how to reduce the penalties for his actions.The system [of incarceration] does not help the offender to realize the human costs of his actions. The process of restorative dialogue forces the offender to sit face to face with his victim and personalizes his crime (Duzr and Wertheimer 2002).After restorative dialogue offenders can begin to be reintegrated into society. http://www.palmbeachstate.edu...

Reintegration lowers recidivism rates.

Rosansky 2 states:

Reintegration is anessential part of restorative justice.Once the victim has gotten closure and the offender has taken responsibility for his actions, the offender can begin to become a normal member of society. The current corrections system stigmatizes offenders. It labels them as criminals who deserve to be punished and casts them out from normal society. Albert A. Duzr and Alan Wertheimer wrote, “Stigmatization is ultimately counterproductive because outcasts tend to reject their rejecters” (2002: 8). Reintegration is a process in which an offender’s community expresses their disapproval of the offender’s actions but agrees to accept the offender back into their society. In this way the offender isnot cast out butassimilated into his community. Ideallythis would reduce the recidivism rate of offenders by reintegrating them into societyinstead of ostracizing them as criminals (Duzr and Wertheimer 2002).

My second argument is that rehabilitation will lower prison overcrowding.

Only since 1970 has our country put its focus on incarceration and retribution. Prior to that, rehabilitation was a primary goal. There are many statistics that show just how dramatically things have changed for the worse since then in the prison population:

Overcrowded prisons lead to terrible living conditions.

Haney writes:

Among other things, these changes in the nature of imprisonment have included a series of inter-related, negative trends in American corrections. Perhaps the most dramatic changes have come about as a result of the unprecedented increases in rate of incarceration, the size of the U.S. prison population, and the widespread overcrowding that has occurred as a result. Over the past 25 years, penologists repeatedly have described U.S. prisons as "in crisis" and have characterized each new level of overcrowding as "unprecedented." By the start of the 1990s, the United States incarcerated more persons per capita than any other nation in the modern world, and it has retained that dubious distinction for nearly every year since. The international disparities are most striking when the U.S. incarceration rate is contrasted to those of other nations to whom the United States is often compared, such as Japan, Netherlands, Australia, and the United Kingdom. In the 1990s, as Marc Mauer and the Sentencing Project have effectively documented — the U.S. rates have consistently been between four and eight times those for these other nations.(3) The combination of overcrowding and the rapid expansion of prison systems across the country adversely affected living conditions in many prisons, jeopardized prisoner safety, compromised prison management, and greatly limited prisoner access to meaningful programming.The two largest prison systems in the nation — California and Texas — provide instructive examples. Over the last 30 years, California's prisoner population increased eightfold (from roughly 20,000 in the early 1970s to its current population of approximately 160,000 prisoners). Yetthere has been noremotely comparable increase in funds for prisoner services or inmate programming.In Texas, over just the years between 1992 and 1997, the prisoner population more than doubled as Texas achieved one of the highest incarceration rates in the nation. Nearly 70,000 additional prisoners added to the state's prison rolls in that brief five-year period alone. Not surprisingly, California and Texas were among the states to face major lawsuits in the 1990s over substandard, unconstitutional conditions of confinement. Federal courts in both states found that the prison systems had failed to provide adequate treatment services for those prisoners who suffered the most extreme psychological effects of confinement in deteriorated and overcrowded conditions.(4)

http://aspe.hhs.gov...

Retribution causes thousands of people pain every year. This pain could be solved simply by Choosing to rehabilitate instead of incarcerate. There is much evidence presented in this case to prove my point, so if you believe that all of the pain that criminals go through is unecessary and execive, I urge you to vote pro.

Thank you and good luck to my opponent.