This is interesting in relation to this thread..
The Stanford Prison Experiment
Volunteers were asked to take on the roles of prisoners and guards. The ones who were picked were deemed to be the most mentally stable, and none had criminal histories.
"The researchers held an orientation session for guards the day before the experiment, during which they instructed them not to physically harm the prisoners. In the footage of the study, Zimbardo can be seen talking to the guards: "You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they'll have no privacy... We're going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we'll have all the power and they'll have none.""
I presume this is how you think it should be in prisons ToughTed?
Except this is what happened. Remember, none of the prisoners were actually violent criminals.
"on the second day the prisoners in Cell 1 blockaded their cell door with their beds and took off their stocking caps, refusing to come out or follow the guards' instructions. [... ] After only 36 hours, one prisoner began to act "crazy", as Zimbardo described: "#8612 then began to act crazy, to scream, to curse, to go into a rage that seemed out of control. It took quite a while before we became convinced that he was really suffering and that we had to release him." [...] The results of the experiment favor situational attribution of behavior rather than dispositional attribution. In other words, it seemed that the situation, rather than their individual personalities, caused the participants' behavior."
The other issue with having the prison set up like that is the affect it has on the guards, as other posters have pointed out you will end up with thugs working in prisons. Surely the idea of prison is to deter/rehabilitate/keep away from the public the criminals, not create more?
Back to the Stanford experiment
"Finding that handling nine cell mates with only three guards per shift was challenging, one of the guards suggested that they use psychological tactics to control them. [...] Several guards became increasingly cruel as the experiment continued; experimenters reported that approximately one-third of the guards exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies. Most of the guards were upset when the experiment concluded after only 6 days."
Something else worth considering is that there has (recently) been a prison where the focus was on hardship/punishment.
"When the Abu Ghraib military prisoner torture and abuse scandal was publicized in March of 2004, many observers[who?] were immediately struck by its many similarities to the Stanford Prison experiment. Chief among them was Zimbardo himself, who paid close attention to the details of the story. He was dismayed by official military and government representatives' shifting the blame for the torture and abuses in the Abu Ghraib American military prison on to "a few bad apples" rather than acknowledging it as possibly systemic problems of a formally established military incarceration system."