Should prisons focus on punishment, rehabilitation, or both? Using American Penology, discuss their utopian origins, failure over time, and key historical shifts like the “Nothing Works” doctrine.

In its origins, the penitentiary was a place of penance, of reform, and therefore of silence and work. By the Progressive era, the idea was to rehabilitate not reform prisoners. We still struggle with these issues today. The neoconservative reaction to Penal Modernism is sometimes called “Nothing Works.” Prison officials today have mostly abandoned rehabilitative models. Relying on Blomberg’s book, American Penology, answer the following questions: Should prisons be places of punishment, rehabilitation, both, or neither? Be clear and use examples from the book. Also, describe the ways in which the idea of the prison was a dream of utopian thinkers at the founding of this country, and in what ways is the prison is now a failed experiment. Be sure to note how the authors of American Penology mark the movement of the prison over time, noting what factors went into the prison’s history that doomed it to failure or made it successful.