Alternative Methods to Prison Sentencing in Britain Essay

While ‘Crisis’ may seem like an over-exaggerated term to describe the current state of the penal system, it emphasises the clear difficulties and potential dangers that which the penal system is facing. Factors related to a penal crisis include overcrowding, a breakdown of control, bad prison conditions, understaffing and a loss of security (Cavadino and Dignan, 2002).

Incarceration is thought of as a positive form of punishment, and negative form of punishment. The opinion varies with the type of person, and their experience from jail if they have gone. Most inmates while in prison will tell you it is a horrible place that should be gone. That would allow criminals to be free and that would let them cause harm to others or other illegal activities. Incarceration was not designed to be a paradise, it is a detention center for the bad, and meant for them to be punished. Without jails the world would be filled with even more evil, and would leave people in more danger than they already are.

Talking about making our communities safer, judges have increasing sentences to the offenders and over 90 per cent of offenders who fail to comply are now returned to court for tougher punishment. Re-offending rates are down. There has been a major reduction in the number of re-offences committed by both adults and juveniles a 22.9 per cent fall for adults and an 18.7 per cent fall for juvenile. Public confidence in the criminal justice system has risen in recent years, although corrections still need to do more to demonstrate to communities that the system is on their side in delivering justice. Personally, there is still too wide a gap between the reality about crime and the public’s perception.

“Lock them up and throw away the key” – that is usually the headline when in regards to offenders going to prison. However, billions of dollars are going into maintaining prisons, yet the rate of recidivism is around 44% (Pearsons, 2011), so it is clear that prisons are no longer effective. The main argument of this paper is that because prisons are inefficient, they should be abolished so other forms of punishment can be found and acted upon. Firstly, this paper will discuss the function of prisons in regards to penal abolition. Also, it will identify what penal abolition is and explain three alternatives to prison – housing alternatives, restorative models, and

While it’s cheap to put someone on probation or parole, it is expensive to incarcerate a person for a year. It costs $45,000 to house and feed an inmate for one year. “There are approximately 1,325 state prisons and 84 federal prisons in operation across the country today”. (Schmalleger pg 390) If you have 2000 inmates in one prison then that will cost roughly $90,000,000 to support those prisoners for just one year and that is only for one prison. From 1991 to 2007, there was a 37% decrease in the national crime rate and a 62% increase in the rate of imprisonment. The Public Safety Performance Project released a report that predicts the nation’s prison population will rise to more than

No matter how you look at it, the prison system within the US holds too many people without valid reason. The last decade has seen a lot of states cut down on crime while also cutting down on their prison populations. In the years between 1999 and 2012, for example, both New York and New Jersey cut their prison populations by 30%, and crime rates fell “faster than they did nationally.”

The second supporting argument that Parliament imposes the judiciary to place too much emphasis on incarceration is characterized by the reduction of credit for pre-sentence custody credit. Fortunately, this was amended in 2014. The Truth in Sentencing Act, one of the government’s early “tough on crime” laws was passed in 2009, but became operative on Feb. 22, 2010. This Act contributed to the changes regarding the credit offenders received for pre-sentence detention or “dead-time,” that does not count towards any parole or early release eligibility. This curbed judge’s ability to give a break on sentencing when a convicted offender has spent lengthy time in pre-trial jail custody. This discount in sentencing had evolved to recognize that

Similar to the Sentencing Reform Act, the purpose of the United States Sentencing Commission is to prevent inequity of sentencing among federal judges. It’s role is to serve as a strict guideline for Judges to adhere and limits the discretion at which a Judge may alter the length of sentence. The goal of this commission is to hamper factors such as race, sex, socioeconomic status, etc to affect the length of sentence, and aims for the guideline to stand on a neutral ground.

Despite the large amount of criminals in prison, the crimes: murder, rape, and others has only “accounted for 10.6 percent of the total Crime Index” (Access Integrity Unit). The vast majority of criminals locked up are held on drug addiction or petty theft charges and not more serious offenses such as murder or assault. To put it simply, the cells that were built with taxpayers’ dollars holds 89.4 percent of criminals that are of no real threat to society. While the jail cells continue to fill up with occupants that has no business being behind bars, the general public will not feel any safer until new laws are passed to insure lesser offenders can get the help they so desperately need.

Discuss the aims and development of the penal system within the UK over the last 200 years.

Our criminal justice system is complex and multi-faceted. When people talk about criminal justice reform, they are actually referring to a number of distinct issues and problems. On a national level, the focus on reform can be seen as a recognition that the “tough on crime” legislation that was all the rage in the 1980s and 1990s – mandatory minimums, “three strikes” laws, enhanced sentences for drug crimes to name a few examples – created more problems than they were designed

Today, the United States has more people incarcerated than ever before. More than 2 million people in the United States alone are in prison, three times the amount than before there were sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums (Bernick and Larkin). “The Federal Bureau of Prisons is overcrowded, operating at nearly 40 percent over capacity and housing a large population of non-violent drug offenders, at a significant cost to taxpayer” (Bernick and Larkin). Every year taxpayers are paying to keep inmates incarcerated. The average cost to keep one inmate in prison for a year is around $29,000. In state prisons alone, taxpayers spend over $50 billion dollars

Within this paper, you will find a comprehensive review of the United States prison system, and why it needs to analyzed to better support and reform the people of this country. I plan to persuade the other side (politicians and society) into seeing that the way the prison system is now, is not ethical nor economical and it must change. We have one of the world’s largest prison population, but also a very high rate of recidivism. Recidivism is when the prisoners continuously return to prison without being reformed. They return for the same things that they were doing before. So, this leads us to ask what exactly are we doing wrong? When this happens, we as a nation must continuously pay to house and feed these inmates. The purpose of a prison needs to be examined so we can decide if we really are reforming our inmates, or just continuing a vicious cycle. What is the true purpose of prison besides just holding them in a cell? There must be more we can do for these hopeless members of society.

When the objective became getting more people behind bars, we should have realized that something had gone terribly wrong. The current nightmare; also known as our prison system, has gotten out of proportion. Since the early 1970s until 2009, prison population grew exponentially by a staggering 600%. Thanks to the policies made during the War on Crime and Drugs, jails and prisons around the country crammed with as many inmates could fit in. Even though there has been a slight decrease of the incarceration rate since it peaked in 2012; the declining numbers don’t seem significant enough. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 1.5 million prisoners in the U.S or 450 convicts for every 100,000 U.S residents for during 2016.

Prison system is one of the most important compositions in law system. It’s been a long time since society has tacitly approved that criminals should be put in jail as a punishment. However, more and more drastic debates over whether to punish criminals or to rehabilitate them emerge in society. The public has gradually changed stereotypes about criminal punishment and came up with the idea of prison abolition, which can be defined as utilizing more humane and efficient systems to replace the conventional prison system. Three points are included in this essay to support prison abolition, which are that unfair trail caused by racism and poverty has already damaged the justice of prison system, that prison