What are you comparing imprisonment too? are you writing about the advantages / strengths of imprisonment vs the death penalty, or some other form?
anyways, you hit on the biggies, retribution, deterrence, and removal from society. Make sure you note that retribution and deterrence are completely separate ideas (though one is often conducive to the other). Retribution implies that the punishment is an end in itself, that you are simply canceling out the negative action by punishing the person who did it (crudely an eye for an eye). detterence on the other hand treats punishment as a means to an end, we punish people so that not only will the individual be deterred from committing future crime, but also so others who are aware of the potential punishment will not want to commit crimes.
Pretty much every legal system in an industrialized democracy has a mix of all three elements involved in their prison system.
if your paper is about the Prisons versus the death penalty, than a good strength to focus on is the ability to undo a punishment. Obviously you can't give someone back the time they served, but you can at least set them free if they are found innocent later, whereas you can never bring a man back to life.
That's an nice little analysis, although you missed out rehabilitation, which has tended to dominate theory from 1960s until recently. In truth, most systems tend to draw on ideas from all theories, although one "theory" tends to dominate at the crux of the problem. The clearest thing is that Joe Public is not a fan of prison merely as a means to make people "better" or to "rehabilitate" them. Joe wants his slice of revenge for what he sees is a public wrong. He sees crime, or should I say victimising crime, as more than just a violation of Jane's rights and humanity. Personally I think Joe is onto something. We all are harmed by the career criminal's wrongdoing. Even if he does not violate each of us personally, he promotes a world in which we are afraid of being the victim of his acts. When you add that consequence to Jane's' suffering and torment, it strikes me that is justifiable that the state takes a little retribution on all our behalf, although especially on behalf of his physical victims.
Retributive theories have in the past suffered from bad image. And quite rightly so in the its crudest form. However, the new retributivists tends to approach the theory from a liberal perspective.; that is, whilst punishment is still an end in itself, there are also other desirable ends that can be achieved such as rehabilitation. Ultimately, unless society is going to lock up every wrongdoer for the whole of their lives, we still have the problem of what happens to these people when they return to society.
As such, it seems sensible, and I think the moral thing to do, to ensure that the hardened criminal is given the tools to cope with life outside of prison. With that mind, there have to be opportunities available for prisoners on the inside. These can be things like access to education, learning a trade, learning to build confidence and on, and on, and on. This is where we have to depart from commonsense views on retributive punishment. It might sound to some that we are not really punishing at all, but rewarding crime. We are giving criminals opportunities that some people on the outside do not have. To a degree, we ought to bite the bullet on that and accept that we are going extra lengths with these people, and for good consequential and deontological reasons. The punishment might be an end in itself, but the prisoner is also a human being and should never be treated merely as a means to an end (I think Kant might have said something like that
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But we're also not forgetting Joe and Jane's ounce of flesh, and they're going to get it. The regime needs to be harsh, although not vicious. Plenty of physical exercise, stringent rules that if broken, are backed up by punishment. No gang culture can be tolerated. Prisoners must work, and for no pay. They don't have access to a myriad of entertainments because in our prisons they are too busy to lounge around watching TV. They wake up, shower, go to work, exercise and go to bed. As a prisoner progresses he is gradually moved to a mellower regime which begins to encompass his rehabilitation. In this system he is made to feel important because we believe that his chance of a productive life is very important end to pursue. We give him the attention he deserves and equip him with the tools necessary for life on the outside. If he shows disinterest, he's back to the hard regime.
So we get the two following theories in play: Retribution; first and foremost; and rehabilitation as a follow up, which is the icing on the cake. Obviously, we also achieve a deterring factor in that many people would like to avoid my prison, and we have removed a dangerous criminal from society, which has to be a good thing.
