AMERICAN CORRECTIONS

American Corrections/ Criminal Justice



American Corrections

Introduction

Life is beautiful! But various cruel incidents of life make our heart and our selves hopeless and dead. Some people cannot bear the pain of these misfortune events that life show to us and ultimately they want an escape from facing all this by choosing a way which not only harms others but also harmful for their own self. Such people choose a path of wrong doings and indulge in activities that are an offense of criminal laws, rules and regulation. Such people can enjoy by getting benefits from these activities of a criminal offense for a short time but eventually they end up spending some part or the whole life in prison in punishment. Those who commit a serious and severe nature of a criminal offense have to suffer from punishment for the lifetime while others only spend some part of life in prison. Those who spend their lifetime in prison suffer from misery and severe punishment. Whereas those who spend few years in the prison not only suffer when they remain in prison but also face difficulties when they get out of the prison and make an attempt to adjust their lives according to the rules and regulations of the society. Punishment is given to the criminals and offenders of law so that they do not repeat this action again. For this purpose there should be a proper system. In United States there is a system of Corrections. The aim and objective of this paper is to talk about American Corrections from variegated perspective.

Describe the historical context of American corrections

The fundamental methods and goals of criminal sentencing in the United States have changed throughout history. The concept of punishing criminal offenders by excluding them from society for a measured time period was initiated in the United States immediately following the American Revolution. Between the late 1700's and early 1800's, the length of the sentence became the critical mechanism in criminal punishment. During that time, legislators went about the business of drafting the codes to equate the severity of punishment with the seriousness of the crime. However, for most of the 1800's, attention shifted away from the mechanism of sentencing to penitentiary functions. At this stage of the history, the attempt to control crime focused on the internal routine of the institutions, rather than on the procedures that sent offenders there in the first place (Kahn & Kahn, 2007).

The evolution of the penitentiary

The prison is a special location in which to place people for punishment for their crimes, was introduced soon after the revolution, ostensibly as a device to reform offenders. Americans adopted the concept “penitentiary”, where felons would “be kept in quite solitude, reflecting penitently on their sins in order that they might cleanse and transform themselves”. After several decades of building and running penitentiaries, the state more or less gave up on reformation but continued to use the prison as the main form of punishment for serious ...