Week 4: Imprisonment & Community Corrections

Question 1

Types of Justice

Answer 1

• Personal justice (revenge for victim/family)
• Ecclesiastical justice (the Church)
• Secular justice (the State – harm is an affront to society!

Question 2

Carceral foundations of Criminology

Answer 2

Early criminology – began as legal/penal reform movement

Classical school – people make rational choices about crime using the pleasure pain principle

Proportionality – ‘let the punishment fit the crime’, it should be just enough to dissuade a person from committing a crime.

General deterrence should be guiding principle of reform:
- Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham
- Led to the birth of the prison

Positivist school – the task was to understand the ‘scientific’ laws that governed human behaviour, and to
create conditions which could manipulate that behaviour
- Auguste Comte (founder of sociology)
- Cesare Lombroso (founder, Italian School of Criminology) ‘Phrenology’
- Rehabilitation

Question 3

Classical School

Answer 3

• General Deterrence as a key principle
• The ‘Panopticon’ – the ultimate prison plan (Bentham), where prisoners are surveilled without knowing.
• Prisons as ‘penitentiaries’ – places for offenders to be penitent.
• Imprisonment preceded by ‘workhouses’, places to keep the poor and homeless off the street (think Les Miserables).
• Prisons were used to control the ‘socially threatening’.
• Principle of less eligibility

Question 4

Principle of less eligibility (Classical School)

Answer 4

Prison conditions should be harder than those experienced by the lowest of the labouring classes.

If conditions are poor, then prisons become a rational option for deterrence.

Question 5

Imprisonment/Corrections Issues

Answer 5

• Overuse of Remand
• Cost of Corrections vs Imprisonment ($9,398 = average annual cost per offender in community
  corrections vs $147,900 = average annual cost of prison for one prisoner)
• Private prisons – opportunities for corruption and abuse
• High number of prisoners with mental illness
• Children in detention
• Raising Age of Criminal Responsibility
• Indefinite detention punishes people for what they may do in future

Question 6

Types of Community Corrections

Answer 6

• Probation
  o Parole
  o Supervised Bail (Not available in VIC)
  o Diversion programs (e.g. drug diversion)
  o Community Service
  o Home detention (Not available in VIC)
  o Suspended sentences (Not available in VIC)
  o Fines / compensation
  o Electronic monitoring
  o Intensive supervision

Question 7

Challenges of Community Corrections

Answer 7

o Too soft?
o Community protection
o Discretion – who decides?
o Program availability
o Community distrust