Recidivism: A Deficiency Disease

Why does the prison system, with its stated objectives of reform and rehabilitation, turns three out of four first-offenders into recidivists to harass the community again and again? Alastair W. MacLeod, drawing on relevant psychiatric literature to interpret the findings of a small-scale study of criminality made with the cooperation of inmates in a Canadian penitentiary, advances the hypothesis that damaging degrees of deprivation brought about by various kinds of social isolation during ...