Kentucky recently became the latest state to initiate a program to notify crime victims and their neighborhoods of the release of their assailants upon completion of the assailant’s sentence or parole. This program, which some call a model for the nation, is similar to systems existing and proposed which make public the records of all convicted sex offenders.

Although each of these programs received massive support, do they not violate ex-convicts’ rights to privacy? When a prisoner has been released they are reformed, right? Otherwise, why would they be released?

Certainly, there are some freed prisoners who are reformed, but the vast majority I would not trust to shine my shoes. The fact that notification programs like Kentucky’s exist is a blazingly clear signal that our criminal justice system does not work.

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Solving this problem by giving up hope and branding criminals for life is unnecessary and undemocratic. The system itself must be reformed.

Currently, the only accomplishment of our prisons is in protecting ourselves from the worst among us for a few years, not reformation; a convict’s only motivation for such is to prevent future stays in prison. While I am glad these people are not raping, thieving and killing for a time, I would rather they not come out unchanged. Worse yet is this too common situation:a kid is convicted for a minor offense maybe he was caught with pot, and he is sent to a warehouse of experienced and hardened criminals. There he learns from the more experienced, makes black market connections and is released a better criminal than when he came in.

The problem is that many criminals remain criminals because of their lack of any notion of responsibility; this, in addition to the fact that most criminals are poorly educated, prevents them from any hope of finding a job and living a reasonably stable life.

One answer is obvious. When poor areas have notoriously poor schools and directly proportional high crime rates, our educational system is obviously in dire need of reform. In the long term, this would solve many of our problems; in the short term, prisons remain ineffective.

Reform has already begun in some areas. California introduced a new prison design that prevents convicts from having control over their environment and forces them to attend classes designed to help them learn how to get and keep a job. Not only are releasees less likely to be sent back, the new design is less expensive to build and operate. Some boot camp programs for first-offenders have been equally effective. Florida’s Everglades Boot Camp forces the inmates to learn to trust and ultimately respect each other and has a strikingly high success rate.

On the other hand, the solution of disclosing a criminal’s record to the population taken to its logical conclusion would result in a nation where every ex-convict must wear a color-coded armband identifying what sort of crime the individual committed and subjecting them to discrimination for the rest of their lives. It is a notion which assumes humanity is hopeless and incapable of change.