I was looking up inferiority complexes, related to a lack of education, and I found the most interesting thing from the Lancet:
forensic-psych.com
especially note:
Possibly the most successful approach to the tertiary prevention of violence is education. Indeed, in some prison systems (Indiana, Massachusetts, and Folsom Prison in California), achieving a college degree while in prison has proved to be successful in preventing recidivism among murderers and rapists for up to 25 years after discharge. And it is understandable, in terms of the principles underlying the aetiology of violence just summarised, why education would be so successful in preventing violence.
A century and a half ago, public-health and preventive medicine discovered that cleaning up the water supply and the sewer system was more effective in preventing epidemics of illness and death than all the doctors, medicines, and hospitals in the world. When those same medical specialties are applied to the study of violence, we discover that cleaning up the social and economic system, by reducing the huge inequities in income and wealth between the rich and the poor, are more effective in preventing epidemics of violence and death than all the police, prisons, and punishments in the world. It is true that we will presumably always need some form of tertiary prevention for violence, just as we do for illness, since even the best systems of primary prevention cannot be expected to prevent all violence. The most important implication, however, is that it would increase the safety of every person and would endanger no-one, if we removed the inmates from every prison in the world, demolished all the buildings, and replaced them with buildings designed to serve an entirely different set of purposes in as humane and home-like a setting as possible. These would be locked, safe, secure residential schools, colleges and universities, and therapeutic communities with full access to medical, psychiatric, and substance-abuse treatment. It goes without saying that only those who had committed or threatened serious violence would need to be, or should be, deprived of their freedom by being quarantined in these centres for education and treatment.
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It is a good article, you might want to read the whole thing. It was simple serendipity that I found it. |
