Cj101: Introduction to Criminal Justice

CJ101: Introduction to Criminal Justice

Crime and Punishment

Professor Fernandez

December 21, 2011

How does our correctional system punish offenders?

Punishment is defined as being subjected to pain, loss, confinement, death, etc., as a penalty for some offense, transgression, or fault. This was originally the only job of the prisons in our country. They were built to house criminals and facilitate punishment. Back then there was no recreation, it was just hard labor. Prisoners would do their time and get on with their lives. In the coming years, crime grew. With this growth in crime, came a growth in the need for housing for the criminals. In a matter of time we discovered that we did not have enough space to house all of the criminals. We were quickly overwhelmed. “We've seen that the American incarceration rate roughly quadrupled--that is, rose by about 300 percent--from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s” (Currie, 1998).

Then we were forced to come up with alternate methods of punishment outside of keeping the criminals locked up in overcrowded prisons. Some of those alternative methods included probation and parole. Now with the prison populations being what they are, we have decided to use those alternate methods as a first resort instead on a last resort. It was not until years later that we figured out that we had an obligation to the criminals/citizens to help them assimilate back into society after they are released from prison and have served their debts to society. It was also believed that this would have a residual effect of reliving some of the stress on the prison systems too. If you can rehabilitate a criminal, the chance of them going back to prison after they released is greatly reduced. With all of the pieces of the puzzle working together, we have been able to save some of the space in our overcrowded prisons as well as funds used to house prisoners.

How does our correctional system rehabilitate offenders?

There...