Crime Control In The Criminal Justice System

While many conservatives oppose the rehabilitative measures restorative justice offers offenders and demand more prisons and penalties, advocates for restorative justice counter this demand with research. Restorative justice advocates call for restitution rather than retribution. According to promoters for restorative justice, imposing harsh penalties on offenders and lengthening prison sentences is futile. “Critical theorists argue that the ‘old methods’ of punishment are a failure and that upwards of two-thirds of all prison inmates recidivate soon after their release” (Siegel, 2008, p. 188). While conservatives want to build more prisons and lock away more offenders for longer terms, supporters of restorative justice believe that a more rehabilitative approach is beneficial for not only the offender, but also the community. “The offender is asked to recognize that he or she caused injury to personal and social relations along with a determination and acceptance of responsibility. Only then can the offender be restored as a productive member of society” (Siegel, 2008, p. 190). Placing an offender in prison for any amount of time is shown to be harmful to the offender, their victim, and society. “Rather than reduce recidivism, harsher punishments may increase the likelihood of reoffending” (Siegel, 2008, p. 86). A conservative asking for more prisons would likely be met with a barrage of evidence explaining why restorative justice will and

We can date the United States criminal justice policies all the way back to the 17th Century. Although it is nothing compared to what we have today, there have been improvements along the way. One of the major reform needed in our corrections system are the war on drugs and overcrowded prison. The history of corrections in the U.S. has been seen through four major eras known as the Penitentiary, Reformatory, Reintegration, and Retributive Era. Each era has tried to explore the best way to deal with people who have broken the law. Based on the ideas of each era, we’ll explore which reform needs to be implemented.

The criminal justice system in America is a system designed to work in three distinct steps. The first being to fairly identify those breaking the law, second, create a process through which to both punish and rehabilitate criminals, and lastly integrate them back into society. The current system typically goes unquestioned, as those in the system seem to be deserving of what ever happens while they are in it, even once they have served their prison sentence. It is only upon deeper inspection that we begin to realize the discrimination and unfair tactics used to introduce certain groups of society into the criminal justice system and proceed to trap them there. This is the issue addressed in Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and it is through arrests, sentencing and further upon release from jail that this oppressive system is created and maintained.

The criminal justice system used today is to follow principles that protect and establish equality for all and while the United States criminal justice system may strive to follow these right of the people, but unfortunately, this is where the system falls short of fundamental American principles. Repeatedly the criminal justice system does the adverse of what it’s supposed to do. It does not protect the many liberties the people should have. Some may argue that the criminal justice system is indeed fair for

In the United States, each day approximately 1,600 adults are released from state and federal penitentiaries to reintegrate back into the community (Gunnison & Helfgott, 2013). Reentry programs have been created all over the nation to help offenders successfully transition from prison into society. Offenders are confronted with numerous obstacles when attempting to reintegrate back into society. Ninety-five percent of offenders are released to reintegrate back into the community (Davis, Bahr, & Ward, 2013). Upon release, ex-offenders realize that despite the fact that they are no longer incarcerated, they face many restrictions. The restorative justice development rose to address the disappointment of the criminal justice framework to manage victims, offenders, and communities in an integrated way. A core focus of this development has been to expand the role of the community in advocating changes that will avert the issues and conditions related with crime and the demand for a criminal justice intervention (Hass & Saxon, 2012).

"Local faith-based and community organizations (FBCO) reentry programs can provide ex-prisoners with the compassion and services they need to thrive in the communities they are returning to. Placing ex-prisoners in steady employment that matches their abilities and needs is an important effort that helps ensure the safety of America’s streets and the successful integration of ex-prisoners into America’s communities. Recidivism is a vicious cycle of crime, prison, more crime, re-imprisonment, and so on. Statistics show that more than two-thirds of released prisoners will be charged with new crimes within three years following their release, and over half will be reincarcerated. According to criminal justice experts, an attachment to the labor force through stable employment, in concert with family and community

Today we see five prevalent goals of corrections including retribution, incapacitation, deterrence, rehabilitation and restorative justice. Goals employed in corrections change over time depending on several factors including the trends of thought in society and issues within the prison system. Politics as well as prison overcrowding also factor into determining which goal dominates. Retribution has a long-standing history as the most culturally accepted goal because people fended for themselves prior to organized law enforcement (Bartollas, 2002, p. 71). Incapacitation, the dominant goal currently, eliminates the threat by placing the criminal outside society, typically through incarceration, and preventing the criminal from having the ability to commit additional crimes. Deterrence, like retribution, has continued as a goal throughout history. In an effort to reduce the risk of crime, law enforcement attempt to deter criminals from committing crimes. Rehabilitation gained enormous strength with an attempt at moral redemption of the offender. Reformists believed corrections needed a makeover as they worked towards rehabilitation. Rehabilitation places more focus on the individual rather than the act in an attempt to rehabilitate the person. America did not begin to look at the corrections system more substantially until the 1970s as the idea of rehabilitation fell (Bartollas, 2002, p. 75). Restorative justice promises to restore the victim as the offender

The criminal justice system focuses more on criminalization and incarceration than it does on rehabilitation. The United States of America wins the award for the highest incarceration rate in the world with over 2.3 million people in correctional facilities. America itself contains only about five percent of the world population, but accounts for twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners (American Civil Liberties Union). With a longstanding history of mass incarceration and

The current crime and incarceration trends have declined since early 1990s, which in part is due to the current reforms that takes place within the criminal justice system, such as early release dates for drug charges and non-violent crimes (Mauer, 2011). The incarceration rates in the United States are “three to four times that of other industrialized nations,” and the punishment scale is viewed as “out of proportion to that of other industrialized nation” (Mauer, 2011).

During the research for this discussion board, I found that there were many devils advocates that view restorative justice as infringing on the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. As Lucas noted, restorative justice does not hinge on a specific religion but rather on the notion of accountability. For this reason, it should be viewed as a viable option towards Criminal Justice reform as it can harmonize competing perspectives. Currently, the Criminal Justice system utilizes retributive justice as a means of deterrence and, as a result, has pushed jails and prisons to be more like warehouses of human beings. The key to reform lies in changing one’s view towards delinquency, offenders, victims and accountability for crimes.

Penal abolition is the attempt to reduce or eliminate the prison system and replace with an alternative form of modification to help the offender reintegrate back into society. Prisons and punitive tactics produce tremendous ideological rigidity and despair. Incarcerating an individual fails to repair the harms between the offender and society, as well as address interpersonal violence, substance abuse, mental illness and sexual abuse. “Yet despite persistent and increasing recognition of the deep problems that attend U.S. incarceration and prison-backed policing, criminal law scholarship has largely failed to consider how the goals of criminal law—principally deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and retributive justice—might be pursued by means entirely apart from criminal law enforcement” (McLeod, 2015, Pg. 1156). The prison system simply fails to address the appropriate needs to each individual offender and fails to reintegrate individuals back into society upon their release.

The Crime Control Model is by far the most important function of the criminal justice system. The crime control model stresses the need for efficiency and speed to generate a high rate of apprehension while dealing with limited resources. In the crime control model a presumption of guilt exists prior to a suspect becoming a defendant. Police departments can exhibit different structures and procedures under the crime control model by adopting the mission of crime prevention and control, using the strategy of preventative patrol, and displaying the quasi-military organizational style from the first modern police department.

Two central philosophies anchor the commonly accepted idea of criminal justice. The first is a ardent requirement for increased conviction rates and the second is the perception that the people in prisons deserve punishment rather than rehabilitation. These philosophies have especially grave consequences for the underprivileged and marginalized.

Criminologist and politicians have debated the effectiveness of correctional rehabilitation programs since the 1970’s when criminal justice scholars and policy makers throughout the United States embraced Robert Martinson’s credo of “nothing works” (Shrum, 2004). Recidivism, the rate at which released offenders return to jail or prison, has become the most accepted outcome measure in corrections. The public's desire to reduce the economic and social costs associated with crime and incarceration has resulted in an emphasis on recidivism as an outcome measure of program effectiveness. While correctional facilities continue to grow, corrections make up an increasing amount of state and federal budgets. The recidivism rate in

Convicting, sentencing, and imprisoning are just the first few steps of reducing crime. All the effort, time, and money that go into keeping criminals locked up and off the streets are really for nothing in the end if he or she commits the same crime again after release. James Haley, who is the book editor of “Prisons” points out, “Every year, close to six hundred thousand inmates are released from state and federal prisons around the country. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, two-thirds of former convicts commit new crimes and one-half are re-incarcerated within three years of being released from prison” (138). Are US prisons truly effective when so many prisoners are committing new crimes upon release? It is for the better interests of American safety that some prisoners are locked up for life, but this should not include the constant return of re-offenders. The life of most convicts involves committing a crime and being sentenced to jail only to repeat the same process again. Many re-offenders see incarceration as a ticket to a place to sleep and food to eat.