Hester Prynne’s prison sentence inspired me to think about the effects of harsh punishment, and why or why not it doesn’t work. The article I found, Harsh Punishment Backfires, led me to my essential question, why does harsh punishment minimize positive change?

In his article, Charles Montado explains that harsh punishments, specifically in prisons, do not work for two reasons. The first reason being that the prison systems do not have any type of rehabilitation set up for their inmates. When they get out into the normal world they are confused, and they have a hard time adjusting, which leads them to getting into more crime and more problems and they end up back in prison or jail, thus not changing at all.

Montado’s second explanation is similar. He explains that a majority of the inmates were on drugs or drunk when they committed their crime. Additionally, he writes, people have to be rational enough to understand the consequences before committing a crime. However, their mental state before their crime compared to their mental state after their crime doesn’t match and neither does their punishment.

The two reasons also connect to each other. Because of the fact that lot of inmates were on drugs or drunk when they committed their crime, they don’t need to be punished for the crime they committed, they need to be rehabilitated from drugs and alcohol, not simply stuck in a prison.
This can be generally applied to other things as well. Teenagers, for example, should not be so harshly punished for things they know are wrong because oftentimes there is something happening behind the scenes that is causing them to do that. Instead, their parent or guardian should seek to figure out what is making them act out and try and fix that instead of just punishing them and going on their way.