The prison system

"At thirteen, Bobby was nabbed while robbing a Jordan Marsh department store. The remainder of his childhood was spent mostly in the state reform school. That was where he learned how to fight, how to hot-wire a car with a piece of foil, how to pick locks, and how to make a zip gun using a snapped-off automobile radio antenna, which, in those days, was just thick enough to barrel a .22-calibre bullet. Released upon turning eighteen, Dellelo returned to stealing."
[Source: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande]

See anything wrong in the above paragraph? Anything illogical that shouldn't be happening?
A criminal, spending time in government custody, isn't having anything close to a change of heart and a betterment of life; instead, he's learns more about crime, and returns as a worse criminal.
This is a real life story. It isn't an isolated event either. There have been many such reports of such happenings in daily newspapers and magazines. And, if you think about it, putting in many criminals of varying "expertise" in the same place is logically going to lead to this outcome only - the criminals are going to make friends and learn some new tricks. So, in effect, prisons are training centres for criminals, a place to meet different varieties of their own people and learn from them. Is this what we want our tax money to be spent on? Is this the way to curtail crime and make a better society? I definitely don't think so.

We've come up with so many advances in various fields, but in this one field, we're pretty much imitating what people did thousands of years ago. Well, except for adding new ways of torturing war criminals. Not much constructive experiments, not much innovative ideas. Our "prison reformation" ideas are limited to one or two prisons, one or two people like Kiran Bedi. If those reforms were so good as to deserve Asia's Nobel prize, why aren't they being implemented more widely?

I believe that the general apathy towards this area is because people think "prison reform" only means a better life for the criminals. And obviously, they couldn't care less about criminals when they've got their own problems. But that's completely missing the point: we need prison reforms not for the criminals' sake (at least not only for that), but for building a better society for ourself. When we have prisons where the criminals have an opportunity to better their lives, ways to learn and improve themselves, we'll have a better society, one with less criminals. It would mean the difference between a one-time hunger thief becoming a lifelong burglar, and becoming a doctor or an entrepreneur; it might mean the difference between losing your life savings to him, and having your kid's life saved by him.