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Topic

Our philosophy regarding crime and punishment has shifted at various times in our history. Describe the relationship between social contexts and the justification for punishment.

Ans. Historically, society's beliefs about crime driven crime policy, sentencing practices and correctional techniques?

Sentencing courts and corrections agencies are not communicating about what matters. When imposing sentence, a judge rarely states clearly the purpose of the sentence or the process by which corrections is expected to achieve it. When correctional agencies are left guessing, they revert to routine administration of the generic penal measures (prison, probation, and parole) and let offenders under supervision in the community decide who will earn revocation. If courts and correction are to work in harmony (which our collective interest in justice and public safety requires they do), more than incremental investments in generic penal measures are needed. Major restructuring is called for—restructuring of penal and corrections law, and restructuring of correctional strategies and penal measures. Imaginative sentencing judges and innovative community corrections professionals have the practical knowledge necessary to begin that restructuring. The transformation will not be easy, as it requires a fresh look at what public safety is and how correctional agencies can contribute to it. In the press and in political discourse, “public safety” usually means more arrests, more illicit drugs seized, more sentences to incarceration, and fewer reported crimes. These definitions have achieved currency because publicly accountable officials do know how to arrest and imprison offenders, have built a substantial capacity to do so, and do know how to count crime complaints. But experience has taught us that rising numbers of arrests and prisoners are often indicators of the absence of public safety. Similarly, a falling crime rate can be cause for alarm when it means only that citizens despair of reporting crimes or when fear of crime so restricts their activities that they are afraid to leave home. (Anderson, et. al. 2002)

Public safety must be more than an increase in the number of imprisoned offenders. It cannot be the same as a lower crime rate— an expression of aggregate data reflecting the volume of complaints about a host of different crimes committed in divergent communities where the facts and circumstances affecting public safety change and move in different directions all the time. But if public safety were defined, as it should be, by the degree to which people and property are free from the threat of harm in particular places and at particular times, publicly accountable officials would face the daunting prospect of creating the conditions of safety in the many places and at the many times in which they do not exist. We suggest that public safety is defined as it is today because those officials as well as the body politic lack confidence in government's capacity to produce the real thing. If the value of equality requires that “like cases be treated alike,” and if, as is commonly assumed, gravity of offense and prior record are the only facts relevant to the “likeness” of ...