Mr. Noah's prison reform proposal

Ezra Klein has a blog post about the horrors of prison rape, and suggests we "move towards a system dedicated to preemption and rehabilitation, rather than punishment and incarceration."

I agree. The question is how to rehabilitate criminals - for every one you successfully rehabilitate, there's bound to be another who simply fakes it until he can get back to his life of crime. After thinking hard about this, I've come up with a proposal for prison reform.

Basically, there's lots of people out there with no morals - no matter how hard you try, you're not going to convince them that committing crimes is wrong. Many criminals come from this group of people, for obvious reasons. The trick is to rehabilitate these people without convincing them of the wrongness of their actions.

So here's my proposal: Prisons should no longer be communal. All confinement should be solitary confinement - not in the sickening dungeon they call "the hole," but in carpeted, warm cells with pleasant incandescent lights. Prisoners should rarely be let out of these cells, and should never be allowed to socialize with their fellow inmates. In addition, prisoners should not be allowed access to weights or gym equipment of any kind, and they should be fed a healthy vegetarian diet. Each cell should come equipped with one computer, connected to the internet. A special system should be rigged, so that prisoners can enter text into search fields or web addresses, but can't send email or post anything on the Web (thus preventing them from doing drug deals from inside prison). Prisoners should not be given any manual labor to do - the only work they should be allowed to do should be with a keyboard. In addition, prison terms should be dramatically shortened for all but the most violent crimes - rape, murder, and aggravated assault. One year of the Noah System will, I predict, be more effective than ten years of our current system.

With my system, prisoners would be turned from hardened street thugs, socialized into a culture of violence, into docile internet-addicted homebodies. Sure, they won't leave and become active, social, upstanding members of their communities, but let's get real - there is no way to reliably turn criminals into such paragons of civic virtue, and until the development of biological technology of questionable ethical acceptability, there will never be. Jesus, pottery class, and prison rape have all failed to set criminals straight. Let's give the World Wide Web a try.


Addendum: I neglected to mention this, but it's pretty obvious that helping to fix poor communities will be a lot more important than prison reform in fixing the American crime problem. And that's a much bigger and more complicated task.