Please help me to review my IELTS writing task 2 - topic CRIME

Hello AlpheccaStars,

This is my 2nd essay on crime topic. Please help me to review this.

Thanks a lot!

Question:

Sending criminals to prison is not the effective method to deal with them. Education and job training should be used instead. To what extend do you agree or disagree?

People have different views about whether criminals should serve prison sentences or not. I completely disagree with the idea that education and vocational training should replace prison sentences to deal with crime.

The first reason why prison sentences still play an important role in wrongdoer punishment is that education is only useful to people who commit petty crime but not tough enough on dangerous criminals. Firstly, it is difficult to educate dangerous criminals in the society. Simply, if a person who poses a serious danger still lives in society without paying penalty for their crime, law-abiding citizens might feel indignant and counter him. As a consequence, the gap between the criminal and other people in society is increasingly wide and thus it is hardly to have a chance of rehabilitation for him, even his possibility of recidivism is very high. Secondly, education does not help criminals to perceive strictness of the law. For example, a horrible murder is likely to be unaware of his crime and probably commit a crime again simply because he only has to be educated after killing a person.

In addition, I strongly believe that prisons are necessary environment to educate criminals. First of all, prisons prevent them repeating the same offence. According to International Police Organization, at least 10 percent of criminals are unaware of their crime and want to back to the former criminal lifestyle after being convicted a criminal. Therefore, prisons seem to be the best place to reform them. Furthermore, nowadays vocational training courses are provided by almost prisons to help criminals to acquire skills to reintegrate back into society. The fact that more than 70 percent of ex-prisoners find jobs related to the skills that they acquired during the period in prison shows that these programs are generally effective.

In conclusion, I am of the opinion that prison sentences are essential to deal with crime. I think education and vocational training should be applied for petty crimes and combined with prison sentences.