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. Todays 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...
Deterrence justifies punishment based on preventing offenses in the future and as a warning to others from committing similar offenses (DAmico 1112). The central premise of rehabilitation is that punishment can prevent crimes in the future by reforming the offenders 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 offenses nature, the courts under the DOJ at the federal, state,...
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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.
The dedication of the private prison as rehabilitative centers before the inmates can be released where they undergo cognitive behavioral therapy in the public prison and vocational training in the private prison system would, with industrial attachments under supervision, facilitate the realization of their objective effectively (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime). The money generated from the industrial attachments would factor into the private prisons profit structure, presenting an incentive for the…
