Chapter 8 Flashcards
5 Purposes of Criminal Sanctions
- Deterrence: The offender, or other possible offenders, through various methods, such as certainty of punishment, should come to the conclusion that crime is not worth the risk of the resulting punishment.
- Incapacitation: the offender, usually through prison or exile, should be denied the opportunity to commit further crimes.
- Retribution: the offender should pay back society for the harm he or she has done.
- Rehabilitation: the offender should be transformed in to a law abiding person through programs of medical, psychological, economic, or educational improvement.
- Restoration: the community, victim, and offender are involved in the sentencing process with the aim of restoring the victim and the community to its previous state.
Restorative Justice - revitalized paradigm that calls for participation by the offender, victim, and community in the sentencing process and allows the offender to atone for the offense and be restored to community life. Offender must understand the harm caused by the offense, take responsibility, and repair the harm done.
Roots: Judeo Christian religious thought
Sentencing Practices
Have increasingly become more humane over the centuries. European countries have made efforts to reduce sentencing severity for a number of crimes. There has been a worldwide reduction in the number of countries that utilize the most severe penalty – capital punishment.
6 common forms of punishment:
1. Corporal punishment: any sentence in which a person’s body is subjected to physical pain, such as flogging, mutilation, electric shock, or branding. Countries with great economic disparity are more likely to use corporal punishments, like Saudi Arabia.
2. Life imprisonment: any sentence in which a person is deprived of liberty in an institution of any kind for the duration of their natural life.
3. Deprivation of liberty: a variety of forms of detention, including combined or split sentences, jail and any period of incarceration short of life imprisonment.
4. Control in freedom: includes probation, electronic monitoring, any conditional sentence with supervision requirements, and other forms of controlled liberty that have special requirements.
5. Warnings: also called admonitions; suspended sentences, conditional sentences and dismissals, formal and informal warnings with findings of guilt, and conditional discharges.
6. Fines: all sentences that involve paying a sum of money
Non-Custodial Sanctions
Alternatives to incarceration. Legal sanctions handed out to offenders that do not require time served in a correctional facility. The calls for such alternatives became intense in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when European criminologists voiced widespread disillusionment with the practice of increased imprisonment.
Types:
- Monetary payments: Fines, Confiscation and Forfeiture, and Restitution and Community Service.
- Community supervision: Probation, House Arrest, Electronic Monitoring, Exile, and Warnings.
- Imprisonment: Prisons and Jails. Most severe and problematic.
International Prison Data
The female prison population has grown 16% since 2006.
The rise in imprisonment for females is believed to be directly related to the international fight against drugs.
In the United States 60% of its prison population is Black or Hispanic. This is a problem because Blacks and Hispanics makeup only 13% and 16% of the U.S. population respectively. England and Wales, France, and Germany also have experienced an increase in minority incarceration in recent years. Other countries also have a high percentage of foreigners who are incarcerated. The reason for such high numbers is controversial and undetermined. Some say it’s because of societal racism, some say certain communities commit more crime, and others say people go to prison because of a combination of social and economic factors.
Politics has played a major role in the punishment trends in many regions of the globe. One trend has been to increase the use of punishment for certain crimes and to increase the lengths of punishments for criminal offenders.
Penal populism - term given to criminal justice policies that are designed to appeal to the public appetite for punitiveness with little concern for program effectiveness or the clear understanding of community views.
Death Penalty
Been a sentencing option since the beginning of civilization.
Trend - worldwide abolition of the death penalty. Abolition is an important issue for the international bodies. International treaties to abolish the death penalty have been created. However, abolition has not been accepted as customary international law.
Certain standards regarding the death penalty have become customary international law:
- Capital punishment may be imposed only for the most serious crimes.
- Capital punishment may not be applied retroactively.
- Capital punishment may not be imposed on juvenile offenders under 18 years old when they committed their crime.
- Capital punishment many not be imposed on mentally incompetent or insane person.
- Capital punishment may not be imposed on pregnant women or new mothers.
U.S. has received some pressure from the international community to reconsider its stance on the death penalty. Also of concern is the impact that continued support for the death penalty would have on the fight against transnational crime, including terrorism. Europeans countries have begun to refuse to extradite criminals who have escaped to their countries as long as penalty of death is a possibility in the United States.
United States move toward abolition may also be spurred by recent news of offenders who have had their convictions overturned or sentences commuted because of inequities in the system or legal mistakes found in the investigation or trial. Between 2000 and 2011 there was an average of five such exonerations per year. It appears the American public’s support of the death penalty is decreasing.
