Heather Cunningham
CJS/230
April 3, 2013
Viviyonne Lee
Punishment is the infliction of an unpleasant or negative experience on an offender in response to an offense. Today, punishment includes rehabilitation, deterrence, retribution, incapacitation, and reparation. Punishment is a penalty that results as a rule or law violation. Once a criminal has been punished through physical or economic sanctions then the criminal is considered square with his victim along with society. Punishment is required for justice to be served. You have to do the time if you decide to commit the crime. Our society defines justice as a means of a victim seeking out the harshest punishment for their offenders. However, this often leaves the victim feeling empty and unsatisfied after getting what they sought out. Punishment of a criminal does not address the other needs that a victim has. It is only one step in the recovery process. Punishment cannot restore a victims loss, answer questions that they may have, take away their fears, or help them to make sense of what has happened to them. It also does not help to heal the emotional wounds for the victim either. Our criminal justice is broken. We do not know how to fix it either. Violence is exploding out of control in our city streets. One suggestion on trying to mend this situation is to reward the criminal instead of punishing them. Convicted criminals are to be given monthly checks in order to prevent them from committing more crimes.
References
Corrections: The Fundamentals B. Foster (2006)
References: Corrections: The Fundamentals B. Foster (2006)
You May Also Find These Documents Helpful
-
Sam is a security officer for ABC Corporation in the Phoenix area. He is always stationed at the security desk in the main lobby to greet employees and visitors. One day he observed an employee from the finance department muttering something under his breath and acting strangely as he walked by the security desk. He noticed this same behavior the following day. On the third day, there was a shooting in the finance department. The director of finance and her administrative assistant were shot and killed by the employee exhibiting strange behavior; the employee committed suicide prior to the arrival of the police.…
- 813 Words
- 4 Pages
Good Essays -
Punishment is defined as the infliction of a penalty for an offense. The novel Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky took place in St. Petersburg, Russia, mid 1860s. The main character, Raskolnikov, committed the murder of a pawn broker and her sister which he became ill with guilt. He is accused as the murderer but denied it until the end where he eventually confessed and was sent to Siberia. In the novel, Raskolnikov had an unbearable amount of guilt, faced punishment by imprisonment, and gave his heart to God for forgiveness. Conflicts he was put through helped illuminate the meaning of the novel: For all crimes, there will be punishment.…
- 493 Words
- 2 Pages
Good Essays -
Court Support Staff: Clerks of court, court reporters, pretrial services personnel, bailiffs, court administrators, victim/witness assistance program personnel, rape crisis center…
- 2002 Words
- 7 Pages
Powerful Essays -
Jury nullification is a constitutional doctrine that allows juries to acquit defendants who are technically criminals guilty, but who do not deserve punishment. It occurs in a trial when a jury reaches a verdict contrary to the judge 's instructions as to the law. A jury verdict contrary to the letter of the law does not belong only to the particular case before it. If a pattern of acquittals, however, develops in response to repeated attempts to prosecute a statutory offense, it can have the de facto effect of invalidating the statute. A pattern of jury nullification may indicate public opposition to an unwanted legislative enactment. In the past, it was feared that may unduly influence a judge alone or a panel of public officials to follow established legal practice, even if such practice had drifted from its origins. In most modern Western legal systems, however, often instruct juries only serve as "finders of facts", whose role is to determine the veracity of the evidence, and the weight accorded to evidence, to implement these tests the law and reach a verdict, but not decide what the law is .…
- 1286 Words
- 4 Pages
Powerful Essays -
Prisons, unlike jails, confine felons sentenced to longer then a year to serve their sentence within the facilities. They are operated by state governments but the Federal Bureau of Prisons also houses federal offenders in Federal penitentiaries. Since its establishment of prisons within the United States, over-crowding has always been a growing problem in both state and federal prisons. Since the beginning of the first state penitentiary in America, which was Walnut Street Jail led by Dr. Benjamin Rush in Philadelphia in 1790, officials and scholars have always been looking for more humane and reformed alternatives to punishments for criminals. Through the years state prisons have found ways of making the penitentiaries more humane and reformed through public work services and other forms of labor. In the 1930s, state prisons developed prison work camps in which inmates would be made to work various labor jobs as “slaves of the state”. Today prisons are much different where they do offer labor programs in some states, prisons are more for reforming the criminals through educational and religious programs. As well as work there is also the variety of security levels for prisons present today which are: Maximum-security prisons, Close high-security prisons, Medium-security prisons, Minimum-security prisons, and Open-security prisons. Most state prisons have multilevel prisons to house various levels of securities depending on the offender. State prisons aren’t the only one that has history throughout the years, as there is also Federal prison. Congress passed the “Three Prisons Act” in 1891, establishing the Federal Prison System implementing the first three prisons: USP Leavenworth, USP Atlanta, and USP McNeil Island. Throughout the years of federal prisons…
- 443 Words
- 2 Pages
Satisfactory Essays -
From the beginning of time, society has not always accepted that the punishment fits the crime. There is always uncertainty and bitterness with the belief that the punishment has been too harsh or too lenient.…
- 983 Words
- 4 Pages
Good Essays -
The five goals of criminal sentencing as listed in the 6th edition of Criminal Justice Today are retribution, incapacitation, deterrence, rehabilitation and restoration. Retribution is defined within the text as, “the act of taking revenge upon a criminal perpetrator.” (Schmalleger, p.366) Retribution is often linked to early societies when punishment such as death and exile were carried out very swiftly without a…
- 5792 Words
- 24 Pages
Powerful Essays -
This topic of civil action and criminal action has been a little confusing for me, the more I read about the differences between the two the more I slowly start to grasp just exactly how different they really are. According to the text book civil law is set forth to protect the individual instead of the public also a civil action is brought up by the individual and not by any state or prosecutor (Lippman 2006). From what I understand this basically happens when an individual wants to sue another party when there is not enough evidence to criminally prosecute or there was not a true criminal act in play, but rather just an injury to a person or their property.…
- 763 Words
- 4 Pages
Satisfactory Essays -
A penitentiary was built upon religious beliefs. A penitentiary had one main goal. This goal was to give a criminal a secluded place to think about his crime, to realize that what he did was wrong, and to say he would do better (Foster, B., 2006). Penitentiaries were meant to turn criminals into law-abiding citizens.…
- 706 Words
- 3 Pages
Good Essays -
Earlier responses to crime were to be brutal, which included torture, humiliation, mutilation, and branding. These kinds of punishments often attempted to relate the punishment to the crime, as close as possible. The first response to crime incorporated linking criminal acts to sin and developing strict punishments. Throughout the years, this thought process has changed into a more humane system. The reason for corrections to is to protect the society but also to provide rehabilitation to these individuals. Punishments for criminals now include main objectives that widely differ from the first believed aspects of punishments. Punishments now embrace objectives pertaining to deterrence, incarceration, rehabilitation, retribution and restitution.…
- 1495 Words
- 6 Pages
Good Essays -
Let’s first begin with what punishment means. Punishment is the infliction or imposition of a penalty as retribution for an offense. While completing my research I was able to stumble across two definitions that caught my attention. The general definition for punishment is “aversive stimulus that follows an undesirable behavior, and is intended to decrease or eliminate the occurrence of that behavior. It may be triggered either due to the performance of an undesirable act (negligence) or the non-performance of a desirable act (disobedience). Punishments take the form of presentation of an unpleasant stimulus (criticism or warning) or withdrawal of a pleasant one (employment or promotion). Threat of punishment usually also constitutes a punishment”. The definition of punishment pertaining to the law is “Confinement, fine, penalty, sanction, or loss of a privilege, property, or right, assessed and administered as deterrence or retribution by an authorized court to an entity duly convicted of violating the law of the land”. [ (Buisness Dictionary, 2013) ] Punishments must be adequate match the reasons why the crimes were committed. History shows that Cesare Beccarua who was an Italian theorist, first suggested linking crime causation to punishments in the eighteenth century. He is known as the founder of the Classical School of criminology. The classical School is the theory linking crime causation to punishment, based on offenders’ free will and…
- 1359 Words
- 6 Pages
Better Essays -
There are a number of sanctions available to the criminal justice system to reprimand those who commit criminal offences, such as: jail, probation, prison, parole, and execution; each of which has their own definition and guidelines. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, jail is defined as a place of confinement under the jurisdiction of a local government. Jail is generally reserved for those who have been accused of a crime and are awaiting trial or for those who are convicted of minor offenses, such as misdemeanors, where the period of incarceration is less than one year. Probation is the action of suspending the sentence of a convicted offender and giving the offender freedom during good behavior under the supervision of a probation officer. This can be issued…
- 2546 Words
- 11 Pages
Powerful Essays -
Several different objectives exist in sentencing, including “deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation and retribution” (2012). Retribution is a sentencing objective that has proven to be the most effective in…
- 903 Words
- 4 Pages
Better Essays -
Senator Jim Webb writes in Clear and Frost’s article, “ America’s Criminal Justice System has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace.” And that is the truth. The criminal justice system has many flaws that need to be fixed. There are several issues that need to be handled and dealt with properly. Tweaks need to be made to ensure that criminals are sentenced properly. But the way that criminals are picked out and failed by the system is preposterous. Although the Justice System establishes rules and makes sense out of chaos, the justice system needs reform because 25% of the nation is incarcerated, there are more drug users than murderers or serial offenders, and there are private prisons that…
- 1469 Words
- 6 Pages
Better Essays -
This is not to say that the justice system is justified in putting our criminals through excruciating torture and interrogations in order to ensure that they never commit a crime out of fear. However, this means that retribution makes more sense than rehabilitation…
- 1387 Words
- 6 Pages
Good Essays