Criminal Sentencing

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Sentencing                                                                                                                                                                                  

Criminal Sentencing

Beretta Smallwood

Juvenile Justice 301

Ron Nimmer

June 8, 2008


Criminal Sentencing

        Rules about punishment, such as how much punishment can be inflicted and for

what kinds of behavior, are of course contained in laws and regulations, so in this sense

law justifies punishment. However, the moral justification for punishment is a separate issue

from the legal justification because, although the law may provide for the infliction of punishment, society’s moral justification for punishment still has to be established. To punish a person for the crime they were convicted of committing. To sentence a criminal is to remove their freedom to move about in society for some specified period of time.  In this paper the author will discuss the purpose of criminal sentencing or punishment.
        150 years ago, there was a theory that criminals could be reformed in prison and returned to society as changed persons who would not voluntarily break the laws again. Most U.S. prisons required inmates to work to pay their keep. One prison warden in the East (an ordained minister), required all new inmates to spend time in solitary confinement when they arrived to reflect on the actions that got them there in the first place. They were not allowed to join the general prison population or engage in work until they understood what they had done wrong. The return rate for these prisoners was under 10%. This all ended with the rise of organized labor, who successfully stopped prison industries from unfairly competing with the free labor market in many areas of the country.

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        There are five main purposes of crime sentencing.  Rules about punishment, such as how much punishment can be inflicted and for what kinds of behavior, are of course contained in laws and regulations, so in this sense law justifies punishment. However, the moral justification for punishment is a separate issue from the legal justification because, although the law may provide for the infliction of punishment, society’s moral justification for punishment still has to be established. The first purpose of criminal sentencing is rehabilitation.  Rehabilitations goal is to change a offenders attitude to what they have done.  Rehabilitation also requires the ...

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