In the developing world, incarceration goes beyond the idea of applying a just punishment upon the offender for committing a criminal action or following a destructive behavior that disturb the public interest and the stability of the community. Incarceration also holds the responsibility to prepare the offender to integrate with the community after he goes out. This rehabilitation should be done on healthy bases that assure the mental health of the offender.
When the American prison system began, it was believed that rehabilitation, the act of restoring one’s character, could be beneficial for criminals to start over. According to Tom Wicker, “The system…began as a reform impulse, the idea that if offenders were isolated, shielded from the public mockery that had accompanied hangings and the stocks, given time to repent, and worked hard, they could be turned away from crime and transformed into useful citizens” (xii). Criminals could become better citizens and have a positive outlook for a future if they worked hard and were secluded from the outside world. Although this idea seems more humane, it did not last long in the prison system because many people believed that any crime committed deserved
Batley (2005) stated that restorative justice is about restoring, healing and re- integrating victims, offenders, as well as the society and also preventing further harm. In this assignment, I will be discussing approaches to restorative justice and illustrating their advantages and disadvantages to offending. I will also provide the applications of these five approaches of restorative justice which are retributive approach, utilitarian deterrence approach, rehabilitation approach, restitution approach and restorative approach in the given case study. I will then explain my preferred approach to justice through identifying a personal belief or value that underpins my choice.
Not only does Berstein call for an overall reform of this nation’s juvenile prisons, she goes as far as saying the practice of locking up youth is in need of a “more profound than incremental and partial reform” (13). The fact that Bernstein outlines the numerous failed strategies and goals of this practice with her compelling use of studies and statistics is enough to promote an audience to reject the practice of locking up youth. The statistic she shares that “four out of five juvenile parolees [will be] back behind bars within three years of release” as well as the studies she conducted on numerous instances when a guards abuse of power lead to the death of a child work to further prove her point: being that “institution[s] as intrinsically destructive as the juvenile prison” have no place in a modern society (13, 83). Bernstein refutes this false sense effectiveness further by sharing her own ideas on what she believes works as a much more humane solution to rehabilitating
Mark, age 17, is serving 13 years in the L.A. County Men’s Jail and when asked about how he felt about the situation he said, “little kid, he should be put in a program. When you send them to the pen all you making is a better criminal.” What Mark said is right criminal youth would be better off being placed in programs that help them get their life back on track, not placed into prison with a bunch of adults who have been criminals for years. A teen placed in a prison rather that a juvenile facility faces much more risk of repeating their criminal behavior and continuing down a dangerous path.
Where an adult offender is assessed as presenting a risk of serious harm to children, the offender manager should develop a risk management plan and supervision plan that contains a specific objective to manage and reduce the risk of harm to children. In preparing a sentence plan, offender managers should consider how planned interventions might bear on parental responsibilities and whether the planned interventions could contribute to improved outcomes for children known to be in an existing relationship with the offender. Youth Offending Teams YOTs are multi-agency teams responsible for the supervision of children and young people subject to pre-court interventions and statutory court disposals.
Incarceration has long been part of our corrections facilities in maintaining and holding criminals confined to themselves and harmless to the outside world. That’s not the exactly the way it is anymore, now they are creating treatment programs to rehabilitate people into better normal class citizens in prison because of the effects it has on prisoners in and outside the walls along with people they are associated with. For instance one article stated how in Germany they created state of the art treatment programs to help treat the criminals with their addictions. It was said to have great results in the treatments, but the program was very costly, so it was shut down. While another program in New York is trying to help the incarcerated fathers, by letting them portray the father
Incarceration refers to the constitutional deprivation of an offender the capacity to commit crimes by detaining them in prisons. The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any free nation. The U.S incarcerates five times more people than the United Kingdom, nine times more than Germany and twelve times more than Japan (Collier, 2014, p.56). Incarceration has several objectives. One of these is to keep persons suspected of committing a crime under secure control before a court of competent jurisdiction determines whether they are guilty or innocent. Incarceration also punishes offenders by depriving them of their liberty once the court of law has convicted. Moreover, incarceration deters criminals from committing further crimes
The messaging in Moonlight converges with academic and legal discourses of public protection, welfare, and diverges with responsibility and punishment. Although they intersect and disseminate in an endless and opposed course. Under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, concern for the welfare or best interests of children has been made marginal to concerns with holding young criminals more accountable like adults and controlling them in custody and in the community through measures based on risk management and the outcome of Chiron reveals a more punitive approach (Trepanier, 61). Interventions, therefore should prioritize the welfare needs of individual children which are better responded to outside the criminal justice system. The answer is the objective to be needs centered and non-criminalizing.
First you hate them, then you get used to them. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That 's institutionalized.’ A prison should aim at retribution, incapacitation, deterrence and rehabilitation. I am very well convinced that prison has served its first three purposes by depriving offenders’ freedom, but the
If it is understood how parental incarceration affects children, adult imprisonment of these children may be preventable in the future. It is expected to observe a change in behavior or psychological health due to the absence of one or both parents. If a change is apparent, it would be useful to know if it was due to the incarceration or other factors. Despite the reason, the goal is to discover exactly how a parental incarceration affects the child’s future and whether or not they face a heightened risk of being incarcerated. Risks for children whose parent(s) had been incarcerated includes: increased delinquency and possible incarceration if it persists, aggression, physical or sexual abuse, depression, antisocial behavior, anxiety, trust
While I find both views on punishment convincing and effective in different ways, I believe that the reductivist approach to punishment is and will be the most effective to decrease levels of crime in society. People with alcohol, drug and mental health issues should be rehabilitated and should be taught right from wrong while in incapacitation, to protect the public from the particular offender until they do reform. While retributivism focuses on harming offenders to ‘teach them a lesson’, it will never have a positive effect as they are then taught a lesson by more violence which doesn’t resolve the crime they have committed. If offenders pay their time in prison and get support through treatments and programs provided by prisons, they can come back into society viewing the world in a different way. I also believe that with the support given to offenders who need that help, there will be considerate decreases of crime as criminals need specialist help to overcome the problems they have, as the reasons they have committed crimes such as robbery, theft, drug dealing, will be because of these problems and has a knock on effect to them becoming criminals.
The court system should acknowledge the offenders past and realize that the reasons they are committing crimes are not their free will, it is elements in their past that have caused them to act in a deviant manner. Furthermore, Cullen and Johnson (2017) agree by stating, “science has demonstrated that un-chosen individual traits (e.g., temperament, self-control, IQ) and un-chosen social circumstances (e.g., family, school, community) can be
It is not surprising that the main focus of the CJA is on child offenders, as the legislation is primarily designed for them. As elsewhere, the outcome in child justice matters in South Africa is not contingent on securing the engagement or agreement of victims.[107] Victims are, however, expected to play a role in the process of reforming and reintegrating child offenders into society. Though the main objective in the CJA is the management of children at risk, victims are given opportunities to participate and by doing that they may simultaneously benefit in some way or another. For those who thus choose to participate in encounters with offenders or give impact statements during sentencing, there will more often than not be some therapeutic dimension in the
Worsening the problem, as the increase in the incarceration of individuals continues, the sense of rehabilitation for inmates has been heavily reduced. This is not just by chance, but rather because the capitalistic private prison industry does not view incarcerated individuals as