Week Twenty - The Rest Flashcards
Punishment and Authority…
Authority is part of the definition of punishment
Social order entails regulation entails enforcement - of which punishment is part
The power to punish is one of the ways we learn about authority and power (an authority is someone who has the right to tell us off)
Emotions…
“Emotions pervade penal law and the criminal justice system. Offenders, victims and witnesses bring their emotions to the courtroom, criminal courts deal with crimes of passion, and their decisions can occasion public outrage and anger, or feelings of vengeance among victims. Offenders feel shame and remorse when they have transgressed the laws, and offences provoke feelings of moral disgust. At the same time, victims as well as offenders elicit our compassion and sympathy.”(Susan Karstedt)
Emotional Reactions to Crime…
(Not only punitive rage but) “… grief, insecurity, fear, anxiety, sympathy, envy, jealousy, anger, hatred, revulsion, disgust, frustration, guilt, hope, pride, shame and others.” (Freiberg 2001)
For that matter, emotional reactions are often ambivalent – a mixture of anger, perhaps, in response to a grave crime, mixed with sadness and a sense of tragedy
Statutory Purposes of Sentencing (CJA 2003 s. 142)…
Any court dealing with an offender … must have regard to the following purposes …
the punishment of offenders,
the reduction of crime (including its reduction by deterrence)
the reform and rehabilitation of offenders,
the protection of the public,
the making of reparation by offenders to persons affected by their offences.
Incapacitation…
Is it just to ‘punish’ people for what they have not (yet?) done?
How good are we at assessing risk?
Delaying desistance
Punishment as Expressive…
Punishment often attempts to make a statement (‘a message’) to:
the offender, potential offenders, victims, everyone else
But it may not be assumed that this ‘message’ is received as intended – or even that there is a single intention
Punishing practices also ‘speak’ in another way, saying something about a society, its values and its view of wrongdoers
Punishment and the punishers…
We should think not only of what punishment does to the punished, but also of what it does to everyone else
And what it says about the society we are and aspire to be
The hard treatments of punishment require us to withhold empathy and the suspension of empathy is a bad habit to get into …
Especially if punitive attitudes start to extend to others
Bryan Stevenson….
“we’ve been taught to think that the real question is, do people deserve to die for the crimes they’ve committed? And that’s a very sensible question. There’s another way of thinking about where we are in our identity. The other way of thinking about it is not, do people deserve to die for the crimes they commit, but do we deserve to kill?”
Winston Churchill…
We must not forget that when every material improvement has been effected in prisons, when the temperature has been adjusted, when the proper food to maintain health and strength has been given, when the doctors, chaplains, and prison visitors have come and gone, the convict stands deprived of everything that a free man calls life. We must not forget that all these improvements, which are sometimes salves to our consciences, do not change that position.
Overview…
Reparative - reparation / making amends/restorative justice, reduction of crime (including by deterrence)
Reductive - rehabilitation, incapacitation, reform and rehabilitation
Retributive - retribution / just deserts, general and / or individual deterrence
