Final Exam Flashcards
A method of penal control pioneered by Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary in which inmates were kept from seeing or talking to one another. This method is comparable to solitary confinement in modern prisons.
Separate-and-silent system
A style of penal control pioneered by the Auburn System, in which inmates were allowed to eat and work together during the day but were forbidden to speak to each other and were locked alone in their cells at night.
Congregate-and-silent system
A prison term that is determined by a parol board and does not state a specific period of time to be served or date of release.
Indeterminate Sentence
An incarceration philosophy developed by Alexander Maconochie in which inmates earned the right to be released, as well as privileges, goods, and services.
Marks-of-commendation system
A system in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in which companies and individuals could purchase the labor of prison inmates from state and county governments.
Convict Lease System
Established within the Department of Justice in 1930, this federal agency manages and regulates all federal penal and correctional institutions.
Federal Bureau of Prisons
A prison term that is determined by law and states a specific period of time to be served.
Determinate Sentence
In reference to criminal justice, a term that describes state laws that require an offender’s third felony to be punishable by a severe sentence, including life imprisonment.
Three Strikes
A method of control in which an offender is prevented from committing more crimes by either imprisonment or death.
Specific Deterrence
A method of control in which the punishment of a single offender sets an example for the rest of society.
General Deterrence
A philosophy that states that an offender who commits a heinous crime deserves death.
Just Deserts
A style of control in which offenders are punished as severely as possible for a crime and in which rehabilitation is not attempted.
Retribution Model
A closed environment in which every aspect, including the movement and behavior of the people within, is controlled and structured.
Total Institution
Deprivation that define the punitive nature of imprisonment.
Pains of Imprisonment
An extremely secure type of prison that strictly limits inmate contact with other inmates, correctional staff, and the outside world.
Supermax Prison
A sociological term that describes how an individual’s actions are transmitted into group actions that can exceed what any of the individuals in the group intended.
Collective Behavior
Groups established by women in prison to imitate familial roles in society.
Pseudofamilies
Legislation that restricts litigation by prison inmates based on the conditions of their confinement.
Prison Litigation Reform Act
The judicial attitude toward prisons before the 1960s in which courts did not become involved in prison affairs or inmate rights.
Hands-off Doctrine
A secure facility that typically holds arrestees, criminal suspects, and inmates serving sentences less than a year.
Jail
A form of corrections in which criminal offenders are managed in the community instead of in correctional facilities.
Community Correction
Punishment that is considered to be deserved.
Retribution
A perspective that considers recidivism to be a consequence, in part, of the negative labels applied to offenders.
Labeling Theory
A phenomenon through which criminal justice programs pull more clients into the system than would otherwise be involved without the program.
Net-Widening
The suspension of all or part of a sentence to certain conditions and supervision in the community.
Probation
A compromise reached by the defendant, the defendant’s attorney, and the prosecutor in which the defendant agrees to plead guilty or no contest in return for a reduction of the charges severity, dismissal of some charges, further information about the offense or about others involved in it, or the prosecutor’s agreement to recommend a desired sentence.
Plea Bargain
The report prepared by a probation officer to assist a judge in sentencing; also called a pre-sentence report.
Pre-sentence Investigation
A form of probation supervision that is contracted to for-profit private agencies by the state.
Private Probation
The conditional release of a prison inmate who has served part of a sentence and who remains under the court’s control.
Parole
The time deducted from an inmate’s prison sentence for good behavior.
Good Time
Time deducted from an inmate’s sentence for doing something special or extra, such as getting a GED.
Meritorious Time
A personal status that overwhelms all others.
Master Status
A form of supervision that requires frequent meetings between the client and probation officer.
Intensive-Supervision Probations (ISP)
The practice of sentencing offenders to prison, allowing them to serve a short time, and then granting them probation without their prior knowledge.
Shock Probation
Continuing to break the criminal law and returning to the criminal justice system after being processed for past offenses.
Recidivism
A person, usually under the age of 18, who is determined to have committed a criminal offense of status offense in states in which a minor is declared to lack responsibility and cannot be sentenced as an adult.
Juvenile Delinquent
Latin for “father of the country”, the philosophy that the government is the ultimate guardian of all children or disabled adults.
Parens Patriae
A session that takes place without a jury before a judge or magistrate in which evidence and/or arguments are presented to determine some factual or legal issue.
Hearing
Guarantees by the Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments that establish legal procedure that recognize the protection of an individual’s life, liberty, and property.
Due-Process Rights
An act that is considered a legal offense only when committed by a juvenile and that can be adjudicated only in a juvenile court.
Status Offense
A perspective that considers recidivism to be a consequence, in part, of the negative labels applied to offenders.
Labeling Theory
Similar to a “charge” in the adult system in which an authority, usually the police, parents, or the school, determines that a youth needs intervention from the juvenile court.
Referral
When the parties to a lawsuit accept a judge’s order that is based on an agreement made by them instead of continuing the case through a trial or hearing.
Consent Decree
A period during which a juvenile is required to stay out of trouble or make restitution before a case is dropped.
Informal Probation
The effort to deinstitutionalize delinquent and neglected children.
Diversion
A phenomenon through which criminal justice programs pull more clients into the system than would otherwise be involved without the program.
Net-Widening
The process in which a juvenile court determines whether the allegations in a petition are supported by evidence.
Adjudicatory Hearing
A term describing the manner in which U.S. criminal trial courts operate; a system that requires two sides, a prosecution and a defense.
Adversarial Process
A person who files a lawsuit; also called a plaintiff
Petitioner
An order by a judge upon conviction or before a trial that sends a person to jail or prison. Also, a judge’s order that sends a mentally unstable person to a mental institution.
Commitment
The party who must reply to a petitioner’s complaint. Equivalent to a defendant in a lawsuit.
Respondent
Any sentence of a juvenile delinquent to a residential facility where the juvenile is closely monitored.
Residential placement
A form of waiving a juvenile to criminal court in which a judge sent the juvenile to adult court.
Judicial Waiver
Provisions that exclude, without hearing or waiver, juveniles who meet certain age, offense, or past-record criteria from the jurisdiction of the juvenile court.
Statutory Exclusion
A form of waiving a juvenile to criminal court in which a prosecutor has the discretion to file charges in either juvenile or criminal court.
Direct Filing
The rate of ex-offenders who commit new offenses and are returned to prison.
Recidivism Rate
The policy of removing mentally ill people from public mental-health institutions and closing part or all of those institutions.
Deinstitutionalization
The theft or taking of money or property by a person who is charged by an employer or other authority to be responsible for those assets.
Embezzlement
The increased reliance on incarceration, surveillance, and law enforcement in the United States and its relationship to the establishment of for-profit incarceration and probation/parole services, and businesses that supply goods and services to prison and jails.
Prison-Industrial Complex
Emendation of laws or statutes to lessen or remove penalties for specific acts subject to criminal prosecution, arrest, and imprisonment.
Decriminalization
The total removal of legal prohibitions on specific acts that were perviously proscribed and punishable by law.
Legalization
The use of information technology to analyze vast amounts of data to allow law enforcement to better target their resources toward potential crime.
Predictive Policing
A law signed by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001, in response to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.
USA Patriot Act
A law signed by President Obama in 2015 that reauthorized parts of the USA Patriot Act but limited the bulk collection of U.S. residents phone records and Internet data.
USA Freedom Act
