100 Final Flashcards
What does the 8th amendment protect against?
Cruel and unusual punishment
Define cruel and unusual punishment
A sentence or conditions of confinement that in the time period of sentencing or confinement goes beyond what is acceptable to society
* cruel AND unusual, not or
Why is the Supreme Court hesitant to consider 8th amendment violations cruel and unusual?
They make something unusual by declaring it unconstitutional, and it will then never be usual again
* if they make death penalty unconstitutional, it can never come back
What does habeas corpus protect against?
Illegal detainment
What is a writ of habeas corpus?
A written judicial order requiring that a prisoner’s case be reviewed in court to determine if the prisoner is being held unconstitutionally
What are some limitations in habeas cases?
• Reviews detainment facts only, not trial
• Accused cannot plead innocence or claim procedural errors, only that detainment is unconstitutional
What are presentence investigation reports?
Information supplied to a trial judge for making a sentencing decision
* things to know before sentencing
PIR can contain: (5)
• Personal history of the offender
• Victim impact statement
• Sentencing recommendation
• Personal data on offender
• The state’s and the defendant’s versions of the offense
Goals and Models of sentencing: (4)
• Retribution
• Deterrence
• Incapacitation
• Rehabilitation
Retribution: (3)
• Focused on punishment that matches the crime
• Focused on social order -> if the state doesn’t get retribution, the victims will get it themselves
• Punitive; little focus on likelihood of future criminal behavior
Deterrence: (1)
Focused on preventing future crime from occurring by convincing the offender and others that punishment will be swift, severe, and certain
Incapacitation: (1)
Focused on preventing future offenses by imprisoning offender
Rehabilitation: (1)
Focused on preventing crime by helping the offender change their life
What is the difference between indeterminate and determinate sentences?
Indeterminate - offender is given a range of time they can serve, dependent upon how they behave in prison
Determinate - offender serves a precise period of time
What are the cons of determinate and indeterminate sentences?
Determinate - no incentive to behave well
Indeterminate - people could be released too early, overcrowding, expensive
What is the USSC and what did it do?
U.S. Sentencing Commission, created sentencing guidelines for judges
What are preventive detention laws designed to do?
Prevent particularly dangerous individuals from committing future crimes by imposing lengthy incarceration or placing them in mental health facilities
What do habitual offender statutes do?
Authorize enhanced sentences for recidivists (repeat offenders)
What is California’s “three strikes, you’re out” law?
Habitual offender statute
Mandatory minimum sentence after 3 felonies
What are some cons of habitual offender laws and preventive detention? (3)
Expensive, unsustainable, overcrowding
Define capital crime.
An offense punishable by execution
What percent of convicted murderers in the United States received the death penalty?
Fewer than 3%
What are some examples of suspension of habeas corpus? (2)
Guantanamo bay, Japanese internment camps
What happened to state capital punishment laws in the early 1970s?
The Supreme Court struck down all state capital punishment laws in 1972 due to arbitrary and capricious application
States were allowed to redraft their capital punishment laws to be fair
Describe Furman v. Georgia (1972)
Supreme Court ruled that states must hold bifurcated criminal trials
Describe McCleskey v. Kemp (1987).
Supreme Court ruled that defendant charging racial discrimination must show personal evidence, not overall trends
*discrimination against individual, not race
What is a mitigating factor?
A factor (such as abuse or mental illness) that is shown by a defense attorney as an attempt to reduce the severity of a sentence
Prosecution seeking death penalty must show ____.
Aggravating factors (cruelty or involving torture)
List some controversies surrounding death penalty. (7)
• Violates human rights, cruel and degrading
• Public opinion in US is slowly shifting away, though majority still favor
• Applied unfairly; African Americans disproportionately represented on death row
• Death row inmates later found innocent
• Doesn’t really deter
• Argument that life in prison is worse than death
• Expensive
Define corrections.
Society’s efforts to punish and treat criminals and thereby protect the public
Define corrections.
Society’s efforts to punish and treat criminals and thereby protect the public
Who manages corrections programs, services, and facilities?
Federal, state, and local authorities
- What are institutional corrections?
- What are community corrections?
- Incarceration in jails and prisons
- Post-incarceration programs, including probation and parole
Corrections:
1. What is the punishment philosophy?
2. What is the rehabilitation philosophy?
- Criminals must pay for crimes and serve as deterrent to others
- Offenders can and should be helped to change
What is the problem with punishment being used as a deterrent to crime? (2)
• Most criminals don’t give thought to getting caught or punishment
• Harsher sanctions don’t deter crime or recidivism
Define recidivism.
Habitual relapse into criminal behavior
What were plague towns?
Communities designed to confine individuals, not a physical building
What was galley slavery?
Offenders were used as slave labor on ships for rowing
Workhouses:
1. They held who?
2. What happened to them?
3. What were they forced to do?
4. Where was it popular?
- Jobless vagrants, debtors, sometimes serious criminals
- Stripped of possessions, segregated by gender and age
- Forced to work, sometimes until debts paid off
- Europe, used widely in England
What is transportation?
The export of criminals to other lands (penal colonies)
Hulks:
1. Define.
2. How long did this practice last?
3. Why did it start?
4. Why did it end?
- Abandoned ships reconfigured as enormous holding blocks in which offenders were chained
- About 15 years
- Began after American revolution when transportation was no longer an option
- Ended with resumption of transportation to Australian colony
Who started penitentiaries and what did they believe in?
Quakers in Pennsylvania, rehabilitation model
What did penitentiaries emphasize and why did this fail?
Emphasized solitary confinement
Failed due to overcrowding, caused mental disorders
Auburn System:
1. Define
2. Why is it also called congregate system?
3. 3 key factors
- Based on reformation and reliance on completely separate confinement of inmates
- Allowed prisoners to congregate in silence during day
- Cheaper to run, corporal punishment, forced labor
Reformatory System:
1. Why did it start?
2. What 3 things did it emphasize?
3. What were 3 problems with it?
- Brutal conditions and abuses of Auburn system led to a reform movement based on rehabilitation
- Education, indeterminate sentences with maximum terms, and the opportunity for parole
- Overcrowding, more popular in Europe, expensive
Industrial Prison System:
1. What was the focus of these prisons?
2. In the South, what percent of prison population was Black?
3. When did it end and why?
- Creating a productive work environment (not rehab)
- 75%
- 1930s, unions complained of competitions (restrictions relaxed after 1970s)
Therapeutic Prison:
1. What is the medical model?
2. When did it gain momentum, when did it reach height of popularity?
3. When and why did it end?
- The perspective that if people are not healthy, they’re ill
- 1930s, 1960s
- 1974, report was wrongly interpreted as suggesting that rehab doesn’t work
What is the assumption of the Punishment Model?
The offender is an inherently bad person and deserves to be placed under correctional authority for punishment
What is the primary goal of the Crime Control Model?
Where is it used?
• Suppress and contain criminal behavior through incarceration, not focused on rehab or deterrence
• Medium, maximum, and supermaximum prisons
Rehabilitation Model:
1. When and why did it start?
2. What is its core effort?
3. What are 2 key features?
- Late 1800s, response to harshness of punishment model
- To change an offender’s behavior, often using medical approaches
- Indeterminate sentences, strong classification system
Reintegration Model:
1. Why was it developed?
2. What is the primary goal?
- As a logical extension of the rehab model
- To help offenders readjust and fit successfully back into the community
What is a halfway house?
What model is it part of?
• A structured pre-release community
• Reintegration
What are the principles of restorative justice? (2)
What model is based on these principles?
• Offender must atone
• Offenders are held accountable for damages
• Reintegration
How many people in U.S. are under some form of correctional supervision? Percent of population?
The U.S. incarcerates what fraction of the world’s prisoners?
~7.8 million, ~3%
Half
What does the chivalry hypothesis say?
Corrections system treats women very differently than men
Prisoners incarcerated for what offenses make up the largest share?
Drug offenses (over half)
What is privatization?
The transfer of government programs and functions to the private sector
Private Prisons:
1. What are they made for?
2. Are they more or less expensive?
3. How do they save money?
4. What do they lobby for?
- Making money
- Same
- Take nicer prisoners, cut costs, tax breaks
- Longer prison sentences, more prisons
What are faith-based prison programs?
What is the problem with these?
• Rehabilitation and other services offered by religious organizations to inmates in private prisons
• Faith exists outside of prison but there’s still crime
What is preventive detention?
Holding persons who have not yet been found guilty of a crime but are considered at risk of fleeing jurisdiction
Define prison.
Secure facility where people serve a year or more after their trial and conviction
The U.S. prison population continues to increase largely due to “get tough” sentencing policies.
What are these policies? (3)
• Reduced use of parole
• Judges often required to impose long sentences for substance abusers
• Disproportionate incarceration of people of color
What are the different levels of prisons? (4)
Minimum, medium, maximum, supermaximum
*LOOK AT SLIDES
What are prisons classified into? Based on what?
Security levels, based on nature of inmates housed
Inmates are classified by custody levels. Define these.
Risk of danger inmates pose to other prisoners and correctional staff
What are custody levels determined by?
What is risk classification?
• Crime committed, sentence length, etc.
• As assessment of the level and kind of risk an individual presents
Define professionalism.
A commitment to a clearly articulated set of ideals and standards that instill pride in and raise the public’s view of the profession
What was the “hands-off doctrine”?
Courts reluctant to interfere with prison management; inmates had little legal recourse if subjected to abuse and neglect
Cooper v. Pate:
Prisoners granted right to bring civil actions against prison authorities for violations of civil rights
Wolff v. McDonnell:
Fourteenth Amendment procedural rights applied to prison inmates (due process)
Estelle v. Gamble:
Addressed Eighth Amendment rights concerning cruel and unusual punishment
“Deliberate indifference” must be proved
When was the Prisoner’s Rights Era?
What did it support?
• 1970-1991
• Rights of prisoners in accordance with Constitution
What First Amendment rights apply to prisoners? (2)
No interference with prisoner mail
Religious freedom of inmates
What is total institution?
Facilities responsible for, and in control of, virtually every aspect of life for those who live and work within them
*very structured, day-to-day schedule is same every day
What is institutionalization?
Person depends on institution to the point of being unable or unwilling to function in outside world
What is prisonization?
The process of socialization whereby individuals adopt the norms, values, and beliefs of the inmate subculture as their own
What are the 2 models of how inmate subcultures are formed?
• Deprivation model (pains of imprisonment lead to the development of a distinctive subculture to cope, forms inmate code)
• Importation model (inmate subculture is imported from the outside when offenders enter)
What are security threat groups?
Inmates who, when they collaborate, can jeopardize the institution’s security
What factors can lead to prison riots? (3)
Behavior of correctional officers, conflict between gangs, subculture of violence
What are the 2 reasons for solitary confinement?
• Punitive segregation (disciplinary reasons)
• Administrative segregation (supervision and control)
What is the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act?
Established the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission to develop national standards for detecting and preventing prison rape, and punishing perpetrators
What are civil commitment programs?
A judge decides a person is mentally ill and incarcerates that person indefinitely in a mental hospital rather than a prison
What is the difference between resident aliens and criminal aliens?
Resident: in US illegally but didn’t commit other crime
Criminal: commit additional crimes
AIDS-related conditions account for what percent of all inmate deaths?
~29%
What are community corrections?
Programs that allow offenders to serve their sentences within the community instead of in jail or prison
What is the most frequently used criminal sanction?
Probation
What is recognizance?
An accused person’s own word, a promise
What must an offender do while on probation? (3)
Let probation officer supervise, be productive, don’t commit crimes or associate with those who do
What is intensive-supervision probation? Who is targeted?
Supervised a lot, frequently
High-risk offenders convicted of serious crimes and in need of lots of supervision
What percent of those on probation are convicted felons? What percent is misdemeanors?
49%, 49%, rest is minor infractions
What is active supervision? Inactive?
Active: probationers have to report regularly
Inactive: not really supervision, recognizance
What are 3 tasks of probation officers?
• Sees that court orders are carried out
• Helps the court determine who should be placed on probation
• Assists offenders in solving everyday problems
How is success of probation measured?
By rate of recidivism
What is a technical violation of probation?.
What 2 things can a judge do?
Violating a condition of probation, not committing a crime.
Send the offender to jail or put them back on probation
Define parole
Early conditional release of a prisoner from incarceration after successfully serving a portion of the sentence there
What are 2 purposes of parole?
• Reward inmates who follow prison rules and behave well
• Provide citizens with a more cost effective form of supervision without sacrificing protection of society
What do parole boards do?
Grant parole to selected offenders
*Not judges, citizens with experience in criminal justice, appointed by governor
What are the 2 ways to be released on parole?
• Mandatory release (the law requires early release)
• Discretionary release (parole board decides whether offender meets requirements and is ready)
What is an assistance role of parole officers?
Officers developing parole plans that specify what inmates must have in place before released
Social workers to those paroled
Do most parolees successfully complete parole term? What percent returned to prison because of a technical violation?
No
70%
What are intermediate sanctions? What are they also called?
Do not require long terms of incarceration, but don’t allow offenders to remain in the community on protection with minimal supervision
Diversion
What does restorative justice emphasize?
The offender’s responsibility to repair the harm criminal behavior causes
Define restitution
Court-ordered monetary repayment to the victim
Define fines
Define day fines
Specific amounts of money offender must pay to state
Structured fines, determine what is a fair fine for a specific offender
Define forfeiture
The confiscation by law enforcement of profits made by committing a crime and property used to commit a crime
What is victim-offender mediation?
Brings them face to face to work it out
What is victim-offender meditation?
Brings them face to face to work it out
How does a juvenile usually enter the justice system?
Through police
What automatically triggers investigation by juvenile justice system?
Decision to make arrest, “detain”
What are the 3 types of cases in juvenile courts?
• Delinquency cases (minor accused of committing crime)
• Status offense cases (the offense is only illegal because they’re a minor)
• Dependency cases (a child’s parents aren’t taking care of them properly)
Define juvenile court waivers
Mechanisms to permit the juvenile court to waive jurisdiction and allow the transfer of these offenders to adult court
What are the 3 types of juvenile court waivers?
• Judicial waiver (prosecutor or probation recommends the child be tried as adult)
• Statutory exclusion (the law says they need to be tried as adult)
• Direct file/prosecutorial waiver (the prosecutor chooses)
In re Gault (1967)
Established due process for juveniles
In re Winship (1970)
Proof beyond reasonable doubt for juveniles
McKeiver v. Pennsylvania (1971)
No jury trials for juveniles
*too much like adult trials
Breed v. Jones (1975)
Double jeopardy, a person can’t be tried in both juvenile and adult courts for the same offense
Define intake process.
If the cases goes to court, what document is needed?
An official decides whether to release the juvenile, refer the case to court, or put them under supervision
Delinquency petition
What is the juvenile equivalent of being found guilty?
Adjudicated delinquent
Juvenile records may be: (2)
• Sealed (most people denied access)
• Expunged (destroyed)
What is the most successful type of juvenile correction facility?
Group homes
