Prison has never been an effective measure of crime control. According to the Oxford dictionary, prison is defined as "A building to which people are legally committed as a punishment for a crime or while awaiting trial." This definition displays in clear view the problem society has with the reason for prisons. It is societal belief (shown in definition) that a prison's main purpose is to punish offenders rather than rehabilitate them. Up until the mid-1970s, rehabilitation was a key component in the U.S. prison policy. Prisoners were highly encouraged to develop and acquire occupational life skills and to resolve psychological problems (Benson, E. 2003). Prisons in the current day have indefinitely strayed away from this policy and the proof is in how the word "prison" is defined. North American societies are more focused on justice and punishment, rather than rehabilitation. It all begins with the community. The best way to fix crime is to fix society itself. If society and communities all work together, crime can be reduced, and people's lives will be saved. Rehabilitation is almost a rarity in the prison world. One in every two criminals will reoffend within one year of being let out of prison (Waldfogel, J. 2007). Also, for each one-prisoner reduction induced by prison overcrowding litigation, the total number of crimes committed increases by approximately 15 per year. The social benefit from eliminating those 15 crimes is approximately $45,000; the annual per prisoner costs of incarceration are roughly $30,000 (Levitt, S. 1996). There are many factors that attribute to the reason why the number of rehabilitations is so low. The main factors include the over-representation of specific groups, deteriorating and inexcusable prison conditions, and overcrowding.
Within prison to scale, certain groups are overrepresented. In Canada, these groups are aboriginals and blacks.