CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM: COMMUNITY REACTIONS

Criminal Justice System: Deterrence, Incapacitation, Retribution and Rehabilitation

Criminal Justice System: Deterrence, Incapacitation, Retribution and Rehabilitation

Introduction

Society has always made provisions to punish those who have violated its rules. For much of correctional history, correctional philosophy and practice has been like a swinging pendulum. The classical focus on strict application of the law regardless of the individual case gave way to an emphasis on dealing with offenders on a person-by-person basis, and then the pendulum swung back again. However, revenge, retribution, and rehabilitation have long remained the three consistent themes in correctional policies. This paper discusses criminal justice system: deterrence, incapacitation, retribution and rehabilitation in a concise and comprehensive way.

Purposes of Punishment

Allen and Clifford (2000) mention that when a person commits a crime and is punished by the state, there are four main purposes of the punishment: retribution, incapacitation, deterrence, and rehabilitation. Retribution involves inflicting pain upon offenders through imprisonment or some other method of punishment that makes them “pay their debt to society” for their harmful actions. Incapacitation is the direct result of incarceration. While offenders are imprisoned, society at large is protected from their potentially harmful actions.

Deterrence may be divided into two categories, general deterrence and specific deterrence. General deterrence is aimed at the public, which sees the punishment inflicted upon offenders and avoids actions that might have the same consequences for them. The public is deterred by the punishment inflicted upon offenders for their criminal actions. Specific deterrence uses the painful consequences of punishment to discourage convicted offenders from repeating their criminal behaviors (Allen and Clifford, 2000).

With rehabilitation, the criminal justice system attempts to change the behavior of offenders and transform them into productive and law-abiding citizens. Unlike retribution, rehabilitation focuses on the offender rather than the offense. Attempts are made to discover the cause of a convicted offender's criminal behavior and to treat that behavior through correctional programs. The ultimate goal of rehabilitation is the reintegration of offenders into society. This philosophy of punishment dominated correctional policy and practice for over seventy years. In the 1970s, however, it came under attack for its failure to reduce crime and prevent future criminal behavior by convicted criminals. In the period from the 1970s to the present, there was another shift in correctional ideology: In an effort to get tough on crime and criminals, the emphasis has been on retribution, just deserts, and punishment (Martinson, 1994).

Rehabilitation

Rehabilitation, as has been mentioned, emphasizes the treatment of the offender rather than the punishment of the act. The ideology behind the correctional emphasis on rehabilitation grew out of the progressive movement in the United States. Coming from academic backgrounds, progressives were upper-class, benevolent men and women who were opposed to institutionalizing the deviant, delinquent, and the mentally ill. These reformers advocated discovering the causes of crime and curing crime, delinquency, and mental illness on a case-by-case basis. From their perspective, offenders should be treated on an individualized basis with case-specific remedies (Martinson, 1994). The progressive correctional reforms grew out of the positive ...