Cesare Lombroso 's The Modern Criminal Justice System

According to the Durkheimian perspective, the public sees drug use as an unacceptable behavior and recognizes it as a threat to morality and values. As such, drug users must be punished in order to restore societal harmony and deter future offenses. The increasingly punitive reaction to drug use in the 1980’s can be seen as a reaction to the public’s increasing perception that drugs are a threat to the moral fabric of society. By inflicting severe punishment on drug offenders, the community is satisfied with the knowledge that drug addicts are paying for

In most cases, one of the main objectives of courts and the sentences they impose is that of rehabilitation. This is evidenced through a growing move in favour of a more holistic approach to justice, trying to address the issues which may have led to the crime, rather than just punishing the end result. One of the prime examples of this therapeutic approach to justice is the introduction of the Drug Court. Governed by the Drug Court Act 1998, the Drug court has both Local court and District court jurisdiction, and seeks to target the causes of drug-related criminal behaviour. It achieves this by ensuring that those who go through it receive treatment for their addictions, thereby reducing their propensity to reoffend, as many crimes are motivated by the need to satisfy addictions.

In her article “The meteoric, costly and unprecedented rise of incarceration in America”, Badger reports that between 1980 and 2010, the incarceration rate for drug crimes increased ten folds. This was consequence of the “war on drugs”, a corollary to Lyndon Johnson’s “war on crime” and laws enacted by Congress where “mandatory minimum” sentences and “Three strikes laws” took effect.

Mark A.R. Kleiman, Jonathan P. Caulkins, Angela Hawken. Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford University Press, 2011.

In Douglas N. Husak’s A Moral Right to Use Drugs he attempts to look at drug use from an impartial standpoint in order to determine what is the best legal status for currently illegal drugs. Husak first describes the current legal situation concerning drugs in America, citing figures that show how drug crimes now make up a large percentage of crimes in our country. Husak explains the disruption which this causes within the judicial system and it is made clear that he is not content with the current way drugs are treated. The figures that Husak offers up, such as the fact that up to one third of all felony charges involve drugs, are startling, but more evidence is needed than

We jail a grand amount of the population most times, who don’t necessarily produce any harm or those who have not committed violent crimes. Most arrest, convictions, and sentencing are a product of drug related issues. “Sentencing policies of the War on Drugs era resulted in dramatic growth in incarceration for drug offenses” (The Sentencing Project, 2016, p.3).

The use of illegal drugs is most often perceived by society as purely negative. As in, individuals who partake in the illegal activity and are caught deserve to be punished and serve their time in jail. Now, this solution may aid in keeping criminals away from society for the time they are serving but it does not help dramatically reduce the likelihood that these individuals will relapse into their drug addiction once they are out. Drug and substance abuse should be perceived as public health and safety crisis rather than a moral dilemma. Therefore, the criminal justice system needs to implement a treatment program that goes along with a drug user’s jail time to increase the chances that they will become actual functioning and contributing members of society.

Pereira posits that something should be done to curb the cyclical nature of drug use and incarceration. She notes that since the advent of the war on drugs the amount of offenses created by arresting drug users has increased the workload of officers significantly, rather than reduce their workloads. She felt the criminal justice system was biased against her because she was not a “good mother” and that the judge only took her child into account in order to punish her. In the end, she was a twenty eight year old mother, addicted to heroin, and convicted of smuggling one kilo of cannabis resin who’s “sentence was 10 years with a non-parole period of 6 years.” (Pereira, 2002, p. 154) She viewed the punishment as more severe than was necessary, proposing that the judge also punished her for being an unfit mother.

Available research in the Critical criminal justice issues: Task force reports, shows that the crime associated with drugs has not diminished despite increasingly punitive local, State, and Federal Government interventions and social control (1996). On the contrary, these social issues have shown an increase in the midst of an increasing and costly “war on drugs”. It is obvious that the current correctional system is not correcting anything. The rising number of incarcerated and recidivism does not show that incarceration alone lowers the crime rate. Many of those in jail doing terms could have been handled in other methods over incarceration. A large portion of the population imprisoned is there because they had committed a low-level crime. How can the seriousness of drug abuse warrant a reliance on incarceration as a solution knowing the social significance of incarceration? This paper will address offenders who are convicted of low-level crimes connected to drug abuse, the social implications of the social problem, research data showing the individual and social implications, how society has responded; and the outcome from those responses, a discussion of alternative responses to the problem, and the effectiveness of those alternatives.

There needs to be a change in the criminal justice system. Convicted felons who are charged with any drug felony should not be put into jail or prison because it doesn’t help solve the problem. Rudy Haapanen states, “It is now generally agreed that the criminal justice system fails to rehabilitate offenders, to make them less likely to commit criminal acts as a result of treatment or training; that the system fails to deter potential offenders, to make then less likely to commit criminal acts out of fear of penal sanctions”. In this paper I will discuss drug use in the population, drug dealers, drugs and regulations. I will discuss drug use in the population so that you will see

In the early to mid-1980, there was a drug epidemic in urban cities across the nation. As a result of this, Congress created the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which gave drug offenders a higher sentence in the criminal justice system. Over the past thirty years, the United States has seen an unprecedented rise in the rate of incarceration. Between the years 1972-2000, the rate of incarceration has risen at an astonishing rate of 500%. This act in particular, had no toleration towards these offenses, consequently leading to the disappearance of probation “federal courts sentenced [twenty-six] percent of convicted drug offenders to probation. By 2014, the proportion had fallen to [six] percent, with judges sending nearly all drug offenders to prison” (“Public Safety Performance”). Not only has the rate of incarceration increased so has the sentences for these offences “from 1980 to 2011, the average prison sentence imposed on drug offenders increased [three] percent—from 54.6 to 74.2 months—even as it declined [three] percent for all other offenders” (“Public Safety Performance Project”). This leads to the larger issue in the incarceration system, which is that penalties do not match the offenses. With the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 in practice, it influenced the establishment of a five-year mandatory minimum for small drug traffickers. If a

Laws are created by parliament which is made up by the MP’S society votes for during the election process. The Misuse of Drugs Act (1971) was introduced to prevent the misuse of controlled drugs such as cannabis, amphetamine and other drugs stated in the Act. The Act attempts to prevent the misuse of drugs by making it a criminal offence to be in possession or supply, manufacture, import and export drugs (Drugscope, 2015). The Act also gives the Home secretary authority to ban new drugs and increase the penalties associated with them.

The criminal justice system has been evolving since the time the system was created. The criminal justice system has helped control the crime in the United States and also attempted to help those charged to lead better lives. The government has enforced and passed legislation that drastically alters the criminal justice system and how authorities should treat those convicted. In the YouTube video, John Oliver directly hits major points and concerns in the criminal justice system. He unleashed information that most people do not want to discuss about the system and John Oliver made it an awareness to the public to realize how the system is failing those incarcerated. Throughout the paper, the topics that will be discussed includes the drug problems

Over the past few years the merit of placing criminals who have committed a nonviolent crime in jail has been heavily contested. Upon further research, I found a majority of people believe that these offenders do deserve punishment, but not to the extent of jail time. The reasoning of this greatly varies, but two main arguments against their incarceration are the high cost of keeping a man in jail, and the high incarceration rate already in place. Thus, to resolve the problem of an astronomical mass incarceration rate, nonviolent drug criminals should warrant little to no jail time.

Drug abuse and crime is not a new concept and the statistics around the problem have continued to rise. According to (Office of Justice Programs, 2011), there were an estimated 1,846,400 state and local arrests for drug abuse in the United States. Additionally, 17 percent of state prisoners and 18 percent of federal inmates said they committed their current offense to obtain money for drugs (Office of Justice Programs, 2011). Based on this information, we can conclude that our criminal justice systems are saturated with drug abusers. The United States has the highest imprisonment rate and about 83 percent of arrests are for possession of illegal drugs (Prisons & Drug Offenders, 2011). Based on these figures, I can conclude that we should be more concerned about solving the drug abusers problems and showing them an alternative lifestyle rather than strict penalty of long term incarceration which will inevitably challenge their ability to be fully functioning citizens after release.