First, I'd like to applaud everyone for their thoughtfulness in the replies they've made to Farrell's inquiry.
Second, I'd like to share a quote:
"To Punish a man, You must Injure Him;
To Reform a man, You must Improve him;
And Men are not improved by Injuries." (George Bernard Shaw, if I'm not mistaken). I had seen it written on an index card, taped to the wall, in a prisoner's cell....
Third, What have we learned since the Mock Prison Experiment, at Stanford University, in the early 1970's? The primary Researcher in that was Philip Zimbardo, who wrote about that, and more recent events at Abu Gharib prison, in his book: The Lucifer Effect: Understanding how Good People do Evil. What criteria do we use to "judge" people's and organization's "behavior"? Is it Mature and Responsible or Immature and Irresponsible; or is it just "Right" or "Wrong"...Harry Allen Overstreet wrote a book about that titled: "The Mature Mind"....
Lastly, another quote: "The quality of a civilization can be judged by entering its Prisons"-I don't recall the author-at the moment...
P.S. In the Introduction of The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo wrote about the role of our "Individualistic Culture", and how we acknowledge exemplary behavior ("Heroes") and abhorrent behavior, in our three primary institutions: Law, Medicine, and Religion-where we have "Law-Abiding Citizens" and "Criminals", Healthy people and "Sick" people, Saints and "Sinners". Is labeling people like defining them, and do we create "Self-fulling prophesies", when we do that to others? And where does "Unconditional Positive Regard" come in.
The U.S. had an answer to the end of "Slavery" (Irish, Chinese, and African), at the conclusion of our "Civil War", and "Peonage" took the place of "Slavery", and relied on locating certain industries in close proximity to Prisons. We, in the U.S., had already taken action to deal with "Native Peoples"-relegating them to "Reservations"-and ignoring many of their Civilized accomplishments, like the constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy-which gave Women the Rights to Assert, Debate, Vote, and Declare War, almost 1,000 years before the U.S. Constitution granted Women the Right of Franchise (Voting).