1. WHAT IS CORRECTIONS? Flashcards
CORRECTIONS
functions carried out by government and private agencies having to do with the punishment, treatment, supervision, and management of individuals who have been accused or convicted of criminal offenses.
Corrections is also the name-
we give to the field of academic study of the theories, missions, policies, systems, programs, and personnel that implement those functions as well as the behaviors and experiences of offenders.
PENOLOGY
Study of the processes and institutions involved in the punishment and prevention of crime.
Most people in the United States likely
know someone who is or has been in prison or jail.
Impact of the war on drugs:
37% of the arrests that result in a jail or prison term are for drug offenses.
THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF CORRECTIONS
sociological thinkers:
Human nature is essentially good and a blank slate at birth, which is molded by cultures and environmentalists to produce criminality.
THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF CORRECTIONS
Biological/Neurological thinkers:
There is an innate human drive to survive and reproduce, which results in evolution selecting for antisocial traits like low empathy and aggressiveness that can lead to criminality; they often believe that prosocial behavior must be learned.
PUNISHMENT
The act of imposing some unwanted burden on convicted persons in response to their crimes.
HAMMURABI
The earliest known written code of punishment. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
What did the Hammurabi laws do?
These laws codified the natural inclination of individuals harmed by others to seek revenge, but they also recognized that personal revenge must be restrained if society is not to be fractured by a cycle of tit-for-tat blood feuds.
CONTROLLED VENGEANCE
Means that the state takes away the responsibility for punishing wrongdoers from the individuals who were wronged and assumes it for itself.
ENLIGHTENMENT
Period in history when a major shift in the way people viewed the world and their place in it occurred, moving from a supernaturalistic worldview to a naturalistic and rational worldview.
Enlightenment ideas led to
The Classical School
CLASSICAL SCHOOL
School of penology/criminology that was a nonempirical mode of inquiry similar to the philosophy practiced by the classical Greek philosophers.
Beccaria believed in
just and reasonable punishment intended to preserve public safety and order, not to avenge a victim.
Beccaria elaborated on 3 elements of punishment:
Certainty, Swiftness, and Severity
PRINCIPLE OF UTILITY
The supposition that human action should be judged moral or immoral by its effects on the happiness of the community.
POSITIVISTS
Those who believe that human actions have causes and that these causes are to be found in the thoughts and experiences that typically precede those actions. Prioritizes science.
Emile Durkheim observed that
over the course of social evolution, humankind has moved from retributive justice to restitutive justice.
RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE
A philosophy of punishment driven by a passion for revenge.