 Wys³any: Sob 23:35, 14 Gru 2013 Temat postu: Prisons and Punishment in the U |
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| Prisons and Punishment in the U,[url=http://nikefreetilbud.hcslnet.com]nike free run[/url]
Warning: this post is slightly wonkish. John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham Law School, lists some myths about prison growth the United States: Myth No. 4: In the past three decades, we newly diverged from the rest of the world on punishment. Given that our incarceration rate before the mid1970s is oneseventh the rate of today, it is easy to think that we suddenly acting like outliers. But the fact is that American views on punishment have been harsher than Europe since the birth of this country (although politicians may overestimate the extent to which they must be tough on crime to win elections). More strikingly, if we look back historically at the lockup rate for mental hospitals as well as prisons, we have only just now returned to the combined rates for both kinds of incarceration in the 1950s. In other words, we not locking up a greater percentage of the population so much as locking people up in prisons rather than mental hospitals. Viewed through this lens, what seems remarkable is not the current era of mass incarceration but the 1960s and during which we emptied the hospitals without filling the prisons. Any reform agenda that does not acknowledge the ingrained nature of our punitive impulses will surely fail. We need to focus less on highprofile drug statutes and more on the ways smallfry drug convictions cause later crimes to result in longer sentences. Once we start admitting fewer people to prison, we should shift money from prisons to police. If this seems like tinkering, rather than a sweeping fix, that because it is. See Myth No. 4: Reformers shouldn waste their breath trying to turn us into Europe. I always interested in comparative criminaljustice in fact, I writing a book about it now. and Europe. right that European attitudes toward crime seem to be somewhat less punitive than American attitudes. But they not much less punitive. Europeans have "ingrained punitive impulses" too. You need only read a few issues of a tabloid like Bild in Germany to determine that there are millions of ordinary citizens who would love to see much stricter punishment of criminals. and Europe since the 1980s. That is a huge difference in policy outcomes. and Europe, and one that I find curiously understudied (hence book), is that average European voters unlike their American counterparts have almost no influence over their nations criminaljustice policies. me state a general case. In the UK and almost every European nation, serious crime is always regulated by one nationwide penal code. These codes were written by commissions of experts (law professors, criminologists, sociologists). They are updated relatively rarely, and then only by the national legislature. When the legislature does want to update the penal code, it will usually turn to a similar commission of experts for advice. Thus, penal code reforms are infrequent, incremental, and subject to expert screening and approval, whether formal or informal. After a string of robberies, a state legislator will draft a law doubling prison sentences for robbery, and then immediately introduce it onto the floor of the state legislature (since American criminal law is made on a statebystate basis). If the law the approval of 51% of the other legislators, it part of the penal code. There will be no expert commission, in fact, the legislator will usually not even bother to consult a law professor. In many states, citizens can directly enact criminal laws by popular referendum. I know, I know many European politicians grandstand with toughoncrime rhetoric. But if you carefully examine the actual changes in the law that follow the rhetoric, they either never happen, or they consist of minor tinkering around the edges of th existing legal framework. has enacted. and Europe is not what average voters think about crime and punishment, but rather how much direct influence or she over the government policies. Federal prison populations have exploded since the 80s. The sentencing guidelines are, quite literally, a study in cruelty that is excused by the alleged pursuit of fairness and consistency. (The entire edifice can be summed up by one line from Monty Python Pirahna Brothers, "He was a cruel man!. but fair."). This illusion of justice as fairness is achieved at the federal level by turning punishment over to an administrative agency a committee, in fact advise by experts, that is part of the judicial branch, and, therefore, supposedly shielded from political influence. This thoroughly bureaucratic apparatus then churns out tables charts and forumla that puts a numerical value on criminal conduct and, invariably, assigns long prison terms ostensibly based on neutral calculations. The stated purpose for the Federal Guidelines is to "combat" crime using the criminal justice system. Peeling away the abstraction, the goal is to combat criminals; and it is the militaristic goal of the American system, moreso than bureaucratization of Europe that differentiates the two versions of criminal. police and prosecutorial power, for reasons having a lot to do with race, resides disproportionately at the county level. While that does not come without its share of undesired effects, namely the people often feeling they have no hand in government decisions save for the one time every four years they get to cast their vote, there are some areas where this approach can make sense. Criminal justice may be one of these. It is one thing to call for evertougher legislation to "put bad people behind bars", but the question is, what are the ramifications? In German law, punishment must be suitable, appropriate and necessary (geeignet angemessen erforderlich). Moreover, paragraph 2 of the Strafvollzugsgesetz (Criminal Corrections Code) states: "Im Vollzug der Freiheitsstrafe soll der Gefangene fhig werden, knftig in sozialer Verantwortung ein Leben ohne Straftaten zu fhren (Vollzugsziel). Der Vollzug der Freiheitsstrafe dient auch dem Schutz der Allgemeinheit vor weiteren Straftaten." This primary goal of imprisonment enabling the inmate to lead a socially responsible life without criminal acts once he leaves prison (with protecting the public from the offender merely being a secondary goal), is a carefully crafted result of governmentappointed expert input that has largely remained unchanged in the last decades. on the other hand, there has been a trend fueled by "popular demand" of long mandatory sentences even for not always very severe offenses sentences that focus on "protecting the public" (and retribution) rather than rehabilitating the offender. California Three Strikes Law which was drafted by an ordinary citizen and adopted almost unchanged into California criminal code is one such example, and another one might be Megan Law and the Adam Walsh Act, which address very serious issues and offenses that do deserve due punishment, but may be going a bit overboard. If you, Andrew, are interested in the evolution of German penal law over the past 40 years, here is an opinion article you might find worth reading:But can the comparatively soft course in the US in the 60ties and 70ties also be explained by voters direct influence? Is the thesis of a mere shifting of inmates between mental hospitals and prisons plausible? Did you really just "empty the hospitals" while the laws didn change, but more defendants had pleaded for mental deficiencies? This does not really concern the USEurope comparison, which interests you, but I find the claim quite disturbing. Boiled down to basics it seems to mean that neither penal laws nor crime rates nor incarceration didn change all that much in the last 50 years, but for about 20 years you just put more people into mental institutions instead in prison. |
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