Drugs and Crime Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment

The idea of crime and punishment axiomatically holds that no person is immune to the law. For every crime committed, the individual responsible has to be held accountable. Today’s society has placed the responsibility of holding criminal offenders accountable on behalf of the population using means that measure up to the level of the offense. However, crime rates across the country differ depending on the social and economic status of the residents. Consequently, incarceration rates disproportionately affect the residents of the regions that have low social end economic status (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 1). Consequently, the government has taken the initiative towards a rehabilitative approach in the incarceration facilities with early dismissal with good behavior and recognizable changes in the character of offenders. However, the rehabilitation programs have come under criticism in how they are implemented with a great challenge of their current mechanisms and the inevitable incarceration of the individuals who go through these programs after that.

There are five fundamental theoretical justifications of criminal punishment that form the foundation of sentencing decisions across jurisdictions: incapacitation, deterrence, retribution, and reparation. Incapacitation of offenders is the responsibility of the state to protect the public from wrongdoing in the future. It is accomplished through incarceration, death penalty, house arrest, and withdrawal of operating licenses. Deterrence justifies punishment based on preventing offenses in the future and as a warning to others from committing similar offenses (D’Amico 1112). The central premise of rehabilitation is that punishment can prevent crimes in the future by reforming the offender’s behavior and helping them become self-reliant. Retribution is predicated because all individuals who are convicted of a crime deserve to be punished and propose an appropriate response as a punishment proportional to the offense.

The Department of Justice is tasked with determining the sentencing of offenders that is proportional to the offense. Once the sentence is decided, the Department of Corrections (DOC) determines where the sentence will be completed. Depending on the offense’s nature, the courts under the DOJ at the federal, state, county, district, and municipal levels. Since 1985, the Department of Corrections’ leaders felt fully competent to manage any needed prisons (National Institute of Justice 63). As a result, in 1993, the legislature passed a second law, the Correctional Privatization Act, that created a separate agency to execute its directives. This led to establishing a more aggressive approach to privatizing jails, with 3,877 prisoners in privately managed prisons by 1998.

The objective of the privatization program was the improvement of conditions for confinement in the prison system. The regulation of the privatized prisons advanced to rely upon contractual obligations to obtain constitutionally agreed conditions. The evaluation of the private prison’s performance compared to public prisons was contested since they could alter their reports’ living to suit the established criteria in their contracts (National Institute of Justice 54). The core difference between the private and public prison systems is that the government holds the primary responsibility of providing the prison building, staffing the guards, and administration in public prisons. However, they may outsource some functions, such as cleaning, food provision, and maintenance services. For private prisons, the contracted prison takes on these responsibilities, and the role of the DOJ is to sentence, classify, and assign inmates to prisons and provide oversight. Additionally, private prisons are profit-oriented, while public prisons are not interested in profit.

To generate profit, private prisons are paid by the government based on the inmates in prison. Notably, this business structure incentivizes the companies that run private prisons to hold more inmates for long periods to increase the profit margins generated. This presents a challenge in evaluating their accountability to the terms of the agreement since they may alter reports to meet the agreed-upon terms or inflate the costs per inmate to increase the payments by the government. The reduction of costs is the objective of all profit-oriented businesses; consequently, the prisons may deprive the inmates of some of the identified amenities dedicated towards the rehabilitation of inmates and developing life skills that are aimed at making them self-reliant and law-abiding (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 1). Further, in the interest to lower the costs of operation and remain a suitable, cost-effective measure for the management of inmates, they may offer decapitated living conditions for inmates and only improve when they are under review at the expense of the inmates’ welfare.

Besides the concerns raided on the welfare of the inmates, rehabilitation programs do not have a well-defined protocol that ensures the efficacy of the programs. Some of the offenders are diagnosed with psychological illnesses. They require advanced cognitive behavioral therapy through developing thinking skills, anger management, and relapse prevention to reduce their likelihood of committing an offense in the future (Nagin et al. 118). Since the prison population is already high, to derive the highest value from the prison system, vocational education training integrated with cognitive behavioral therapy can be implemented in the private prison system to overcome the challenge of evaluating their efficacy.