The Dungeon by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

What is the purpose of a penal system? Is it strictly to punish or can it be to reform? If it can reform what are the best methods of accomplishing this?

The romanticist Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a poem called The Dungeon, which is a soliloqouy from a man who resides in a medieval dungeon. He is lamenting more than his own personal situation, but the idea of what man has made of man. Do dungeons and prisons truly work for the guilty? Or do they make their souls even more rotted than when they entered?

And, of course, in the heart of a romanticist is an answer to the proper way to reform those souls plagued from within. Listen to find out Coleridge's proposed solution.