Alternative Sanctions: Life In Jail

In the United States there are four main goals when it comes to punishment which are retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation (DeJong, 2016, p. 288). The main goals for these punishments are to maintain order over society and to prevent recidivism (DeJong, 2016, p. 288). This ties into the Ecology perspective. By maintaining order over society and preventing recidivism, it ties into all of the issues regarding the Ecology perspective which requires for each issue to address the individual, family, community and society. Maintaining order over society and preventing recidivism strives toward making a safer environment for the individual, family, community and society. There is no universal agreement for making the severity of punishment just or fair (DeJong, 2016, p. 288). When it comes to retribution the person who is getting punished deserves the punishment (DeJong, 2016, p. 289). Retribution refers to when an individual commits a certain crime then that person must receive a punishment proportionate to that crime or suffering that they may have caused towards the victim (DeJong, 2016, p. 289). Regarding deterrence there are two types, general deterrence and specific deterrence (DeJong, 2016, p. 289). General deterrence focuses on the society in general and wants to scare everyone away from committing crimes (DeJong, 2016, p. 289). Specific deterrence focuses on criminals that have already been convicted and wants to prevent them from

“Finally!” Today I went to a school assembly about bullying. The principal said, “If anyone is caught bullying in school, you will be suspended for a week.” I told the principal that we need to make harsher punishments if anyone is bullying. Here are the reasons why there should be harsher punishments for bullying.

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.

The mandatory minimum sentencing is about a fixed ruling of a crime that a judge is expected to deliver. Congress has enacted mandatory minimum sentencing laws. It was to impose the mandatory sentencing an offender would receive for crimes that were committed. The mandatory minimum punishment guidelines would require for judges to hand down judgement for a certain length of time. This would mean that for crimes that are committed there are criminal sentencing guidelines, this would give judges a certain discretion on how to proceed in sentencing an offender. These minimum sentencing apply to many of the crimes committed on society, such as violent, drug-related crimes and for those habitual offenders. In cases where the offender commits a crime and is a repeat offender then it should be left up the presiding judge to serve out justice. People who commit low level crimes should be punished but not to the extent of going to prison for a long period of time. Congress has enacted these guidelines so that the criminal justice system would not be burden with smaller crimes or be overwhelmed. Lengthy sentencing hearings seldom are necessary, the disputes about sentencing elements must be resolved with sensitivity concern and carefulness. A dispute exists about any factor important to the sentencing determination then a judge will use his discretion to hand down equal and fair judgement. Legislator statements during debates on mandatory

The concept of mandatory sentencing is a relatively new idea in the legal field. It was first introduced in 1951 with the Boggs Act, and it made simple marijuana possession a minimum of two to ten years with a $20,000 fine. This was eventually repealed by Congress in 1970, but mandatory sentences came back with the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. Since then, the scope and presence of mandatory sentencing has only grown, especially mandatory sentences for drug related offenses. Recently, there has been a growing concern over the use and implementation of mandatory minimum sentencing, with many believing it reduces a judge’s ability to give out a sentence that they feel accordingly fits the crime. Many advocates for mandatory

The author of this article is Kallee Spooner is a PHD candidate at Sam Houston State University. Currently she works on a National Institute of Justice study as a Doctoral Research Assistant. Her focus is corrections, juvenile justice, and legal analyses in criminal justice (S.H.S University). In her article, “Juvenile Life Without Parole,” Spooner addresses the punishment of Juvenile life without parole and questions its constitutionality. She begins with raw numbers, including which states have the most juvenile serving LWOP. Further discussed are the facts that 98% of JLWOP inmates are male, and that black youth are 10 times more likely to receive the sentence than white youth. In terms of severity, LWOP is significantly harsher for

Intermediate sanctions and community corrections are increasingly used to fill the gap between the classic sanctions of imprisonment and probation. The applications of these intermediate measures, including particularly community service, have proved problematic. Fortunately, measures can be taken to greatly improve intermediate sanctions and community service, in particular, can be improved through communication.

Once introduced as evidence, a confession causes a negative chain reaction in the justice system and law enforcers and justice officials often include their biases in their judgment, which leads to justice miscarriage. The process of false confession starts with the law enforcement officials (Leo & Davis, 2011). According to Kassin, Meissner, and ReNorwick (2005), investigators have a high confidence in knowing a true confession but their accuracy is the same as that of the public. The investigators do not see deception but rather they infer

"What is eliminated in prison is choice. What is encouraged is obedience. Bruno Bettelheim illustrated the result when he stated 'a prisoner had reached the final stage of adjustment to the camp situation when he had changed his personality so as to accept as his own the values of the Gestapo....Can one imagine a greater triumph for any system than this adoption of its values and behaviour by its powerless victims?' Until choice can be freely exercised and caring behaviour encouraged, there can be no meaningful change and the 'rehabilitation' of 'criminals' will only be a system's triumph over the values and behaviour of the powerless in our society." (Knopp, Boward, Morris, Schnapper, 1976 p9)

The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported 6.7 million people were supervised by adult correctional systems in the United States at year end 2015. President Obama has conveyed tax payer pay $80 billion dollars to house incarcerate individuals yearly. The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 limited federal judge sentencing discretions. In 1980 the USA had 500k people incarcerated, the population of prisoners has more than doubled the last two decades. The United States Mandatory sentencing requires offenders receive a predetermined minimum sentencing for some offenses. Since the implementation of mandatory sentencing, prison populations have risen sharply with sky rocking costs. On certain offenses, Federal judges no longer have discretion on the sentence length. Mandatory sentencing laws have shifted the power of punishment to the prosecutor as they have the discretion of charges brought against offenders. According to Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy in their article “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2017,” the United State criminal justice leads the world in the percentage of its citizens incarcerated. Mandatory minimum sentencing has led to large prison populations, skyrocketing costs and social family challenges.

In the last few decades, there has been an increase in the number of individuals who have been incarcerated in both federal and state prisons. Indeed, research has shown that harsher sentencing policies and more punitive laws have resulted in the incarceration of more than 2.3 million people in the varied jails and prisons; thereby making the United States the leader as far as incarceration is concerned. Incarceration and sentencing systems have conventionally been aimed at having varying goals including rehabilitation, incapacitation, punishment and deterrence. Recent decades have seen the enactment of sentencing policy initiatives with the aim of enhancing the criminal justice systems deterrent effect.

The death penalty, or capital punishment, has always been a topic of much debate in the United States. There are those who support it and those who oppose it, and each side has their fair share of points being made, backed by supportive evidence. The topics range from the morality of this punishment, including the methods of execution as well as fairness issues in regards to sex and race. The first issue that will be addressed is in regards to the death penalty working to prevent violent crimes.

Since 1923, when Judge Learned Hand said that the American judicial system “has always been haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted,” the issue of wrongful conviction has been acknowledged to man (Halstead, 1992; Huff, Rattner, Sagarin, & MacNamara, 1986). After the judge made his innocuous statements, serious study of this phenomenon began. Contrary to the statement the judge made, time and technology have revealed that an unquantifiable number of wrongfully convicted persons have served prison terms and even been executed for crimes they did not commit and some that did not even occur. Research into wrongful conviction was virtually nonexistent until Professor Edward Brochard of Yale University published his book Convicting the Innocent in 1932. This book documented 65 such cases, addressed the legal causes of miscarriage, and offered suggestions to reform. Subsequently, numerous other researchers began conducting case studies and publishing findings that affirmed that wrongful conviction represents a systematic problem within the American judicial process (Huff, 2002).

Various scholars have determined that, “life without parole is examined as a form of death penalty, namely, death by incarceration as distinct from death by execution” in order to determine the difficulties that juveniles face when not given the option to serve their sentence through probation or parole (Johnson, Mcgunigall-Smith 2008, p.

I continue my research on the effects of life in prison opposed to the death penalty. Life imprisonment is any sentence for serious crimes that insures the offender spends life equivalency in prison or at least until parole. In a lot of cases when an offender is sentenced to life in prison they don’t get the advantage of parole. No one ever sentenced to life without parole has ever been released, they spend the rest of their lives in prison and they usually die of natural causes (Wilbur, 2012).