Mr. Santos:

I’m a student of Dr. Torres and I’ve been reading your book, Inside, and reading your blogs, which are both shinning a light to incarceration I never knew about. In your article entitled “Prison Administrators Can Lower Recidivism Rates by Offering Incentives”.You indicate that with recidivism being so high there should be a way to reverse this and find a way for prisoners to have incentives to gain freedoms. In your book you also wrote about your experience at Kent City Jail, where they practiced using incentives to get inmates to cooperate and improve their living conditions. From the way you describe it that system corrections does work in some places, like Kent, and could work in other jails and prisons also. I agree with the stand your taking on reforming our prisons to help induce inmates to prepare them to be law abiding citizens upon release. My questions to you are, what specific sort of incentives do you think are appropriate for the prison system? Should those incentives to gain freedoms be offered to all prisoners, regardless of why they are imprisoned? Also, how would correctional officers and their co-workers at prisons benefit from giving incentives for freedoms to prisoners?

I appreciate the time your taking to contribute to my understanding of corrections,
Stephanie Kidder