Purpose and History Paper

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Purpose And History

CPSS/215

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The following are five of the most commonly seen types of criminal punishment:Incapacitation seeks to prevent future crime by physically moving criminals away from society. This punishmentcan be traced to ancient times, Terance Miethe and Hong Lu write in Punishment: A Comparative Historical Perspective. Banishment was a common penalty in antiquity. Later, it was common for colonizing European countries to ship convicts and undesirables overseas. In modern times, house arrest, incarceration and the death penalty are all forms of incapacitation.

The goal of deterrence is to persuade citizens and possible offenders or re-offenders to conform to the rules of law. Miethe and Lu explain that four types of deterrence are generally recognized:

1.)  Specific deterrence analyzes how effective punishment is on an individual’s future behavior.

2.)  General deterrence seeks to understand how individual punishment can deter others from committing crimes.

3.)  Marginal deterrence seeks to reconcile how effective different types of punishment are as either specific or general deterrence.

4.)  Partial deterrence refers to situations in which the threat of penalty has some deterrent value even when someone engages in illegal behavior. (For example, a criminal simply robbing a victim, instead of also causing physical harm.)

As one of the oldest forms of punishment, retribution has roots in the Judeo Christian tradition of justice. In her book Criminal Law, Lisa M. Storm explains that retribution prevents crime by giving victims or

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society a certain sense of satisfaction that a defendant has been punished appropriately, reinforcing the belief that the criminal justice system is working effective. A radically different approach to criminal punishment, the goal of restoration is for the offender to make direct amends to both the victim and the community in which the crime was committed. Although a relatively new practice in modern times, the concept of restorative justice can be found in the early legal systems of Western Europe, ancient Hebrew justice and precolonial. African societies. A common prison policy in America up until the 1970s, rehabilitation focuses on helping criminals and prisoners overcome the barriers that led them to committing criminal acts. This includes developing occupational skills, as well as resolving psychological issues such as drug addiction and aggression, explains the American Psychological Association (APA). Considered the opposite of retribution, the ultimate purpose of rehabilitation is to transition offenders back into society. The founding reasons for the two penitentiaries operations were similar to the operations at the Walnut Street Prison. The leading operations included emphasizing the opportunities for prisoners to reform themselves. The reformation would be instilled through hard work and at the same time reflecting on the crimes that these individuals had committed (Bosworth, 2002). This particular operation would then be

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referred to as the Pennsylvania prison system. This system was as well referred to as the separate and silent system. In the Pennsylvania prison

systems, the offenders and criminals were not morally contaminated and they would be trained on how to commit crime by other prisoners. Despite the fact that these two systems were in one way or the other similar, it is the Auburn prison system that was being considered as being cheaper to construct and to maintain and permitting the production of goods unlike the Pennsylvania prison system where it required more staff to see to it that the inmates were kept apart and they would only engage in production of goods individually as thus efficiency was not up to par with the Auburn system (Bosworth, 2002). The more goods that were produced by the systems translated to more income that the states would record and as thus the Auburn system was at an upper hand to the Pennsylvania system.

Some ethical issues that may take place in prison systems are: training in practical skills, allowing spouses to visit prisons often, religious teachings, and education.

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References

https://online.pointpark.ed./criminal justice/types-of-criminal

https://bohatala.com/comparison-of-pennsylvania-and-auburn

https://ivypanda.com/essays/unethical-and-ethical-issues