More people per1000,000 population are now imprisoned in England and Wales than any otherEuropean Union country, yet crime rates have fallen since 1995. Can this beexplained by theories of retribution or reductivism?

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More people per 1000,000 population are now imprisoned in England and Wales than any other European Union country, yet crime rates have fallen since 1995. Can this be explained by theories of retribution or reductivism?

This assignment will look at how both retribution and reductivism has led to rise in prison population and reduction in crime rate. I will be discussing both theories in detail and how they may have inflicted this conclusion. I will look at how past effect of these theories and how they are in tact now in the present. As we are aware more people in England and Wales are imprisoned (the rate is 129 per 100,000 population in 2001 Appendix 1) than any other country in Europe. There are now many more offences, which are now criminalized; this includes recent legislation of underage sex. Crime is rising, over the period of 1997-2001 recorded crime in the EU rose by 4 per cent (Home Office, 2003). In 2001 England and Wales had the highest per capita rate in the EU followed by Portugal (Home Office, 2003). This is due to longer sentences inflicted upon criminals. Crime sentences act 1997 gave minimum sentences for criminals, for example automatic life sentence for reconviction of rape and murder. In 1987 8,923 served 4 years and over and this had risen to 19,950 in 1997 (Cavadino, 2002).

 It is illegal to have sex under the age of 16. This is a tough legislation and many teenagers will carry on having underage sex without even realising they are breaking the law. Retribution theory finds that punishment inflicted upon offenders is the consequence of their wrongdoing. Retributivism is the view that the moral justification for punishment is that the offender deserves it. Retributive theory looks back to the crime and punishes in relation to the crime. The term retribution may be used in several minds. It can designate reprisal or a conclusion, however, it is today more commonly associated with giving the offender him/her just deserts and using punishment as a censure or denunciation. The term retribution originally referred to the repayment of debt (Walker, 1991 in Cavadino, M 2002) an idea which is easily seen in the very old notion of ‘an eye for an eye’ ‘a tooth for a tooth’ Lex Talionis (the law of the scale). Punishment is "justified as a means of making those responsible for a crime or harm pay for it" (Cavadino, M 2002). Punishment is internally related to wrong conduct. Punishment is essential for justice to be exacted. But only those who are guilty are to be punished, and only to the degree to which they are responsible. Finally, the punishment must fit the crime. The notion of desert is central here to the concept of justice that motivates retributivism.

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The retributive view of punishment is but a rationalization of a primitive urge for revenge; that the retributivists, instead of providing an answer to the question about the source of our moral right to add a new evil (punishment) to an already perpetrated one (the crime), simply assert dogmatically that punishment is an intrinsic good, i.e. something that needs no further moral justification; that it is impossible to apply the lex talionis in practice; that the retributivist thesis that the criminal has a right to punishment is ridiculous, because the criminal himself would be the first to deny that ...

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