In response to Kathy Gyngell: Britain’s surrender to violence, therealguyfaux wrote:

‘The great and the good of the criminal justice system have uncritically fallen for the myth that prison does not work . . .’

Well, doesn’t that fairly cry out for the tough question to be asked, ‘Just what is prison supposed to do, anyway?’ and until you are quite clear what you want out of incarceration, you had better search your mind and soul until you have an answer.

Perhaps all incarceration does can properly be called ‘incapacitation’. That is, for the time someone is banged up, they are hardly likely to commit crime against the general public, are they? Perhaps that is all incarceration CAN do. And I believe it does that reasonably well.