The Problem
The criminal justice system (CJS) has the role of prosecuting people who violate the law. However, the CJS faces many problems with arguments of discrimination, racial profiling, and other issues that diminish the people’s trust on the CJS. The system works in collaboration with the courts, the police, and other agencies with the intention of prosecuting the criminals. However, the different ways of punishing to enhance rehabilitation of the convicts. The current U.S. criminal justice focuses on sentencing guided by the concepts of retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and restoration. However, due to the need of enhancing immediate changes and ensure that the criminals understand the repercussions of violating the law, incapacitation has been the main way of punishing the offenders.
Incapacitation is the limitation of the individual’s freedom of movement by confining the offender in prisons, their homes, among other ways to limit movement and other individual rights. The move by the government to use mandatory sentences for drug offenders is one of the leading cause of the current overpopulation in the U.S. prisons. The increasing rates of incarceration makes the U.S. to have be the leader if imprisonment in the world with most nations having 100 prisoners per 100,000 whereas the U.S. has 500 prisoners per 100,000. The U.S. forms just about 5% of the entire population but has over 25% of the prisons in the world. The figures of the high incarceration rates has resulted in the enormous financial burdens to the taxpayers. For instance, in 2010 the cost of maintaining the highly populated prisons was $80 billion, which has led to the need for more prisons such as private prisons (Naughton, 2013). In 2013, Ted Gest argued that the U.S. criminal justice was too expensive that every American irrespective of age paid $670 to support it (Russo, Drake, Shaffer, & Jackson, 2017). The high rates of incarceration of the U.S. compared to other developed and autocratic nations result in questioning the significance of democracy and human rights. The over 2.2 million adults incarcerated as of 2014 depict that the U.S. correctional system’s addiction to incarceration. The current overpopulation in the prisons and the increasing rates of private prisons hinders the goal of rehabilitation of the offenders. Criminology studies depict that mandatory determined sentencing such as tough-on-crime result in high rates of incarcerations. As more people are jailed financial, social, and economic costs increases.
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The Effects of the Problem
Incarceration mainly affects men more than women and blacks more than whites. These variations result in separating families and requiring the women to play the role of being the only breadwinner in the family. These factors hinder the economic and social development of children with childhood development studies depicting that children with stable families tend to be better academically and higher economic standards in the future careers due to the completion of higher education. The lack of role models also diminish the community as loss of fathers and brothers leaves the young males venerable to the joining gangs to survive in the societies.
Past incidents have depicted that officers in the correction centers have engaged in criminal activities such as selling drugs, sexual exploits with the prisoners among other wrongdoing. These facts support the claim by anti-prison activists that claims that prisons transform petty criminals into hardcore gangsters rather than make them law-abiding citizens. This is one of the main social costs of the overwhelming rates of incarceration. The failure to rehabilitate the inmates to become law-abiding citizens increases the rates of re-arrest after release since the prisoner does not have adequate skills to transit back into the society. The overpopulation in the prisons in the bid to enhance safety, punish offenders has failed in enabling behavioral change that is essential in reducing the high costs of maintaining the prisons in the U.S.
The essence that the U.S. sentencing focuses on incarceration rather than rehabilitation is the sole cause of the elevating number of inmates in the federal and states prisons. Failure to change this dominating trend of sentencing will only increase the financial, economic, and social impacts of prisons with the loss of valuable workforce lost in maximum facilities. The prisoners remain in the prisons where they are expected to suffer or learn from the limited freedoms and transform towards being law-abiding citizens (Russo, Drake, Shaffer, & Jackson, 2017). However, rather than learn to become better citizens, the inmates become hardcore criminals as they interact with gangs, murderous, and other hardcore criminals. Therefore, Americans pay more to maintain offenders in prisons who end up becoming more dangerous than they were before their arrests. Hence, the call for changing the sentencing with the intent to facilitate rehabilitation and restoration to the community. This change reduces the prisons’ population and enhances transformation rather than continuing with a system, which has proven to be insufficient in mitigating crimes.
How Sentencing should help solve the problem and achieve the goals outlined in the prompt
Sentencing is the main cause of overpopulation in the prisons. Therefore, changing the mode of sentencing and policies related to sentencing would enable the realization of a smaller prison population and increased rates of restoration of offenders into the society without risks of rearrests. The criminal justice system operates as a system with different departments working towards the interpretation of the law and enforcing it. These different agencies can either hinder or promote justice but in the current criminal justice system, overlapping pathways to investigating and arresting criminals tend to complicated based on the type of crimes and the victims of the crimes (Russo, Drake, Shaffer, & Jackson, 2017). For instance, the murder or rape case of a celeb or a political leader result in the police and the district attorney doing everything in their power to ensure that the perpetrator is arrested and put to justice.
However, victims of rapes and murder from the minorities or immigrants do not get the attention and efforts needed which creates a discriminative aspect of the justice system. In some cases involving rape, prosecutors are only willing to go to trial if they believe that the evidence they have is enough to win a trial. The essence that victims are not included in the formal system or pathway of the criminal justice leaves victims venerable to questioning by the police that may be too much to take. The lack of acknowledging the pain of the victims of crime and weak evidence where the victim of rape is depicted as having played a role in the crime increases the number of unreported rape cases. The decrease of reported crimes depicts the notion and trust issues related to criminal justice. The lack of punishment that the public believe is suitable or enough for a particular crime increases distrust and lack of confidence in the criminal justice system. Therefore, it is difficult to develop a sentencing strategy that will enable rehabilitation and restoration without affecting the public’s trust and confidence in the criminal justice system.
Road Map
The next chapter analyzes the different types of sentencing and their impacts on both crime rates and rehabilitation. The literature reviewed in this section will demonstrate the different types of rehabilitation-based sentencing and their impacts on the offenders in different countries. The other major issue is based on maintaining a high public confidence by changing the system to be equal for all offenders and encourage community-based punishment in the bid to prepare offenders to transit to the community. Community involvement increases the acceptance of former offenders by the community rather than stigmatization.
References
Naughton, M. (2013). Introduction. The Innocent and the Criminal Justice System, 1-11.
Russo, J., Drake, G., Shaffer, J., & Jackson, B. (2017). Envisioning an Alternative Future for the Corrections Sector within the U.S. Criminal Justice System . Retrieved October 28, 2018, from https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1720.html
