There are really two philosophies in running prisons. Some wardens and officers feel that the sentence is the punishment, not the way they treat them, and that they should treat the inmates as human beings, and that they have a future, and that they need to be prepared to return to the community. These wardens take the word ‘correction’ seriously. [By contrast] there is a whole other group that are basically bureaucrats. … Take a DMV office, string barbed wire around it, and give the clerks guns.
So says Pat Nolan of the Prison Fellowship Ministries, quoted in the Nieman Watchdog.