The ideals of rehabilitating criminals into productive members of society may have its merits, but this is the USA, where most people are prejudiced to believe that these criminal offenders are not worthy of a 2nd chance. I'm in California, where employers prefer hiring illegal aliens to inmates released from jails and prisons. Because employers are hesitant to hire them, they often resort to criminal petty theft, illicit drug sales, prostitution, etc... to sustain themselves. People believe that once a criminal offender, he is forever branded a potential repeat offender.
To further exacerbate the problem, prison guards are hoping inmates return to prison, to give them job security through overtime hours of working overcrowded prisons. California passed the 3-strike law to supposedly get tough on crime, but the law had resulted to people who commit non-violent misdemeanor cirmes to qualify for a minimum 25-year prison sentence. Under the guise of getting tough on crime, the 3-strike law was really meant to give job security & more overtime hours for prison guards. Thus, prison guards in California have no desire to help inmates to becoming law-abiding productive citizens when inmates are eventually released. They foster a hostile environment by allowing gangs to run the prisons. They create an underground male prostitution market by allowing homosexual men to mix with the general prison population.
The COs have an ulterior motive of promoting an anti-social hostile environment, which is counter-productive to the rehabilitation process. For example, they restrict packages, claiming drugs & contrabands are smuggled in, & force us to buy exorbirant-priced merchandise from approved vendors. So why don't they just charge us, say a $10 search fee to inspect each package, instead of forcing us to pay triple prices for merchandise ?? They're making it expensive for us to keep contact and support loved ones, which in turn causes some inmates to resort to violent anti-social behavior. This, in turn, disqualifies them for early release when their parole review comes up. By compelling inmates to act out of frustration for lack of contact from friends & love ones, inmates end up serving a longer term, which only serves the guards' ulterior motives of job security and more overtime hours.
Another example is email service; email would speed up communication with loved ones, and eliminate contraband issues. But the prisons in California refuse to accept email because it would eliminate the staff of mailroom COs whose job is to inspect and read each letter. With email, there are software that can scan a letter document in 2 seconds for words or phrases that are indicative of forbidden topics. Email service, combined with automated software editing, would eliminate the entire mailroom staff to only 1 or 2 persons.
Failure to plan (for the future), is planning for inevitable failure in life. Those who don't learn from past history, are condemned to repeat history.