Two of the United States correctional system functions are punishment and rehabilitation. Black's Law Dictionary describes punishment as: "Any pain, penalty, suffering, or confinement inflicted upon a person by the authority of the law and the judgment and sentencing of a court, for some crime or offense committed by him, or for his omission of a duty enjoyed by law". In recent years we have all but eliminated the pain and suffering found in this definition. We have now come to think of punishment as the penalty and confinement one suffers for committing a crime. They define rehabilitation as: "Restore something to its normal or near normal capabilities after a disabling event occurs". In this context, the person we are trying to restore is the criminal. When we send someone to rehabilitation we are trying to return them to a normal or non-criminal capacity. This paper will clarify three questions regarding this subject. 1) How does the correction system punish offenders? 2) How does the correction system rehabilitate offenders? 3) Which method is more effective in reducing crime?
How we, as people of the court, punish criminals depends on the circumstances of the individual case. Crimes of a state level are prosecuted by the State District Attorney because they are considered offences against society. The punishment for these crimes are regulated by state statutes. In Maine this statute is Title 17-A: Maine Criminal Code and separates crimes into the following categories: Murder, Classes A, B, C, D, E, and Infractions. Murder, and Class A, B, C crimes are heard through the state superior court. Whereas, Classes D, E and Infractions are heard through the district court. According to Title 17-A murder is punishable by incarce...
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...eles: SAGE 2009.eBook, Data: eBook Collection: Found at http://ehis.ebscohost.com.lib.kaplan.edu/eds/results?sid=4074fdc5-0c13-46ba-b18a- 1db5ffc81986%40sessionmgr112&vid=1&hid=106&bquery=criminal+rehabilitation&bd ata=JmNsaTA9RlQmY2x2MD1ZJnR5cGU9MCZzaXRlPWVkcy1saXZl
State of Maine Judicial Branch: Criminal Case, found at http://www.courts.state.me.us/maine_courts/district/crimial.html
Schmalleger, Frank J. Criminal Justice Today: An Introductory Text for the 21st Century, 11/e VitalSource ebook for Kaplan University. Pearson Learning Solutions. VitalBook file.
United States Sentencing Committee, 2013 USSG Guideline Manual, Chapter One - Introduction, Authority, and General Application Principles, Part B -General Application Principals, S1B1.9, Class B or C, Misdemeanors and Infractions: found at http://www.ussc.gov/Guidelines/2013_Guidelines/index.cfm
Seigal, L. J., & Worrall, J. L. (2012). Introduction to criminal justice (13th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Throughout his novel, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire, author and professor Robert Perkinson outlines the three current dominant purposes of prison. The first, punishment, is the act of disciplining offenders in an effort to prevent them from recommitting a particular crime. Harsh punishment encourages prisoners to behave because many will not want to face the consequences of further incarceration. While the purpose of punishment is often denounced, many do agree that prison should continue to be used as a means of protecting law-abiding citizens from violent offenders. The isolation of inmates, prison’s second purpose, exists to protect the public. Rehabilitation is currently the third purpose of prison. Rehabilitation is considered successful when a prisoner does n...
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Rehabilitation is firmly entrenched in the history of corrections in the United States. Penitentiaries, for example were formed in 1820 with the belief that offenders could be morally reformed (Cullen, & Jonson, 2012, pp. 27-28). In 1870). The National Congress on Penitentiary and Reformatory Discipline documented the merits of rehabilitation (Wines, 1871, p. 457). However, by the end of the 1960s, the United States had experienced several years of discontent within its prison systems which resulted in a national call for prison reform and the development of a disillusionment with rehabilitation (Martinson, 1974, p. 22). In 1966, Robert Martinson was hired to evaluate the effectiveness of rehabilitation, the result of which was his infamous “What Works?” paper, in which he posits that empirical evidence does not support rehabilitation (p. 23). By the mid-1970s, correctional policy shifted from one emphasizing rehabilitation to one emphasizing just desserts/retribution, deterrence and incapacitation (Cullen, & Jonson, 2012, p. 22). The result of these “get-tough” policies, which sought to control crime through strict laws and lengthy sentences, was unprecedented growth in our custodial population, which we can no longer support, either financially or spatially (p. 1).
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Schmalleger, Frank. Criminal Justice Today: An Introductory Text for the 21st Century. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2013. Print.
All over America, crime is on the rise. Every day, every minute, and even every second someone will commit a crime. Now, I invite you to consider that a crime is taking place as you read this paper. "The fraction of the population in the State and Federal prison has increased in every single year for the last 34 years and the rate for imprisonment today is now five times higher than in 1972"(Russell, 2009). Considering that rate along crime is a serious act. These crimes range from robbery, rape, kidnapping, identity theft, abuse, trafficking, assault, and murder. Crime is a major social problem in the United States. While the correctional system was designed to protect society from offenders it also serves two specific functions. First it can serve as a tool for punishing the offender. This involves making the offender pay for his/her crime while serving time in a correctional facility. On the other hand it can serve as a place to rehabilitate the offender as preparation to be successful as they renter society. The U.S correctional system is a quite controversial subject that leads to questions such as how does our correctional system punish offenders? How does our correctional system rehabilitate offenders? Which method is more effective in reducing crime punishment or rehabilitation? Our correctional system has several ways to punish and rehabilitate offenders.
Over the past 30 years, the criminal justice systems sentencing and corrections practices have changed immensely. Going from a rehabilitative approach in the early twentieth century, to the current uniform approach of the justice model in the 1970s (Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 2001). These changes have had an immense impact on probationary practices and terms. Under the rehabilitative models, probations goal was to focus on individualize treatment that would work to better the offender, help make him/her a productive individual and community member. A focus was placed on the criminal, rather than the crime. However, with the increase in crime rates during the 1960s, the rehabilitative approach to crime quickly ...
Schmalleger, Frank.(2008). Criminal Justice, a Brief Introduction. Pearson Education, Inc., Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.
Throughout the decades of correction, there has been an argument between rehabilitation and retribution. Although people think of prison as a reformatory, a place where criminals who have committed crimes pay their debt to society and learn their lessons, in order to return to society. People think of prison as a place of punishment, where the loss of freedom, limited privileges and rights are undertaken to enforce a punishment on criminals and to protect society. The question is which of these beliefs, retribution or rehabilitation, is more effective or important.