One of the Strangest Things...

I was reading the BBC website today in a procrastinaty sort of way and ended up reading an article about Thriller's 25th birthday.
In said article (musing on the importance of Thriller the album, single, video...), it mentioned that if you went onto YouTube you could find tributes to the video from a wide range of sources - including a Bollywood version and one from 1500 inmates of a Philippines prison. What?!
Clearly, I had to go and see.
So the clip itself didn't excite me that much. They were indeed prison inmates, complete in orange uniforms, doing, as close as they could, the video for Thiller. Not the full 14 minutes version I noted but still a 4min 25sec effort.
What really grabbed my attention though was what came up in the "Related Videos" panel.
Blacked Eyed Peas by the prisoners. Numerous Sister Act songs by the prisoners. Radio GaGa by the prisoners. The Algorithm March by the prisoners (I didn't know what this was, turned out to be a record breaking attempt at it, whatever it was).
So it seems that this prison spends quite a lot of time teaching its inmates dance routines, BIG dance routines, using lots of the prisoners. Which is really quite an interesting thing. I wonder what success rates they have in terms of successful sentences (minimal violence, blackmarket etcetc) and in terms of reoffenders.
When I was working (albeit very briefly) in a prison, there was much debate between punishment and rehabilitation. One officer said to me that whichever way you veered, it made little difference: the light had to go on in the prisoners head. Until that happened (and she suggested it usually happened around the age of forty though when she started as an officer 14 years ago, it happened more around the age of thirty), there was very little difference to be seen between a rehabiliatation approach and a punishment approach in terms of the success options above - particularly reoffending.
I would expect something like the dance routine option adopted in the Philippines to assist reasonably well on the violence etc while in prison option but you aren't exactly equipping them with skills they can use on the outside to help prevent reoffending.
Perhaps they just do it for the record breaking attempts. Still, it seems to have been on CNN in the US from some of the comments and there are a lot of posts for it...perhaps it will help with the not-reoffending element when they are all offered film contracts on release.