Severe penalties and longer prison sentences do little in reducing crime and creating safer communities. While any punishment is better than no punishment, increasing the severity of punishment does not affect deterring crime since it does not stop people from committing crimes. At the same time, criminals have more intense convictions for committing an offense and are less likely to be deterred by harsh punitive actions. Deterrent seeks to prevent crime by directing the threat of sanction at potential offers to dissuade them from reoffending ( Cullen, Jonson & Nagin, 2011) . Although criminal justice agencies have adopted an increasingly tougher approach in response to crime, they have failed to make communities safer. Instead, harsher punishments have only expanded the prison system that places considerable strain on government budgets.
Today, the criminal justice system emphasis more on using harsh punishments in deterring crime, but its effectiveness is yet to be achieved. The severity of punishment looks to scare potential criminals from committing a crime by showing that the offense is not worth the risk ( Cullen, Jonson & Nagin, 2011) . However, it is unlikely that using harsh punishment can deter crime and create a safe community, and it has little impact on people who do not believe they will be apprehended for their actions. On the contrary, longer prison sentences have been associated with higher rates of re-offending among criminals with crime rates increasing when prisoners return to communities.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Sociological journal
The journal used for this assignment is by Donald Ritchie (2011) titled “Sentencing matters-Does imprisonment deter”. This is a research review of evidence investigating whether increasing the length of time in prison reduces criminal behaviors of offender’s ad recidivism to meet the goal of deterrence. The paper’s scope focused on examining the sentencing purpose of deterrence without concluding the effectiveness of imprisonment in reducing crime through incapacitation. Usually, imprisoning criminal offenders has several goals including to deter crime while keeping the community safe. However, most offenders are eventually released from prison and incarceration looks to prevent criminals from engaging in the further criminal behavior.
Harsh punishment has become common in Canada and all over the world that has increased the incarceration rate relative to other western industrialized countries. Today, more courts are handing longer prison sentences to offenders with an assumption that more punishment will deter them from the criminal behavior while making the community safe. Using evidence-based approach, the journal concluded that there is little evidence to show that harsh sentences deter crime and keeps a community safe ( Ritchie, 2011) . The journal examined evidence of the strength of imprisonment in deterring crime suggesting that it has an adverse effect upon the crime rate while having a little deterrent effect. It also demonstrated that increasing the severity of punitive measures through lengthening imprisonment sentences did not have a corresponding rise in deterring impact among the offenders.
On the contrast, the journal showed that it is possible to achieve deterrence effect in the community by using certainty of punishment rather than its severity ( Ritchie, 2011) . Increase in the confidence of apprehension was explained to have a significant positive deterrent effect on offenders. Certainty can be in the form of a city announcing that police will be deployed looking for drunk drivers rather than sentencing them to lengthy jail terms.
Analysis of the journal
The paper analyzed empirical studies and criminology literature regarding the effectiveness of imprisonment in preventing crime. The author analyzed different studies that have examined aspects of deterrence such as the threat of imprisonment in deterring potential offenders and whether an increase in the severity of penalties ( Ritchie, 2011) . The various empirical researches suggest that higher penalties do not result in increased deterrence. The evidence from these empirical studies indicate that increasing the severity of punishment generates a small general deterrent effect, showing that harsher penalties do not deter or make communities safe. As such, it does little in reducing recidivism. On the contrast, the opposite was found to be right where longer sentences increases recidivism due to the prison environment ( Cullen, Jonson & Nagin, 2011) . As such, increasing the severity of penalties does not correspond with the associated deterrent effect.
The strength of this study includes using a rich compression of evidence to support the hypothesis. He gathered various evidence and research articles touching on the relationship between harsh penalties and deterring effect among offenders. The journal examined a variety of literature reviews as well as empirical studies that tested effectiveness of imprisonment on deterrence ( Ritchie, 2011) . Several studies suggested that harsh punishment does not affect the reoffending nature of an individual showing that it does not deter offenders. Some of the reasons for this failure of lengthened imprisonment to prevent crime include prisons creating learning and breeding environment for criminals.
Sociological theory
Deterrence theory is a sociological theory that correlates increased sanctions and decreased crime rate and one of the principal objectives of sentencing. Courts regularly use deterrence as a reason to increase penalties in criminal matters while looking to discourage others from committing similar offenses, which makes deterrence theory applicable. This theory follows a classic economic theory of rational choice whose assumption is that human beings use a cost-benefit analysis when making a decision ( Cullen, Jonson & Nagin, 2011) . The theory states that imposing harsh sanctions on offenders discourages other people from breaking the law. This theory applies to this case because of the significant assumptions that increasing the punishment will result in a subsequent increase in the deterrent effect.
However, this area of criminal law presents the greatest discord between legal theory and social reality, which argues that general deterrence, does not work. This is because people commit crimes for several reasons apart from just rational thinking. For example, offenders commit crimes for social, economic or psychological reasons and may not be determined by the severity of the punishment. They thus rarely think about the severity of the sentence when committing a crime and therefore do not respond to harsher penalties
The article
The article analyzed for this paper is titled “why punishment does not reduce crime” ( Kelly, 2018).The author stated that longer prison sentences are not the way to cut crime or keep a community safe, which is contrary to claims that increasing the length of prison sentences reduces offending. In the article, the author claimed that severe punishments only deters crime to a limited point and therefore not useful in keeping a community safe ( Kelly, 2018) . Thus, increasing the severity of the penalty to prevent crime only ignores the reality and strict policies only increase the population of prison systems while achieving little deterring effect.
Kelly (2018) stated that after years of increased sentences that have drained the treasury, countries need to acknowledge that harsh punitive sentences have little impact on keeping communities safe. The crime rate is not lower than it was a few years ago despite increased penalties that have raised the price of incarceration. At the same time, the harsh conditions within the prison also increase the rates or recidivism. Instead, the article state that much more can be done to radically reduce crime and make communities safer by getting to the root of the offending behavior. In many cases, harsher punishments do not challenge an individual’s behavior, and they are more likely to fall into the cycle of offending.
Conclusion
For a long time, the criminal justice policy has been dominated by an approach that requires getting tough on offenders. However, increasing punitive measures have failed to deter crime or reduce recidivism in the community, instead of leading to a rapid population of a prison system that strains government budgets. Therefore, the criminal justice system cannot rely on punitive measures to deter crime based on the context of psychological of human conduct. This study concluded that harsher punitive measures do little in deterring crime. However, this does not mean that punishment never works. Instead, punitive measures work reasonably well with specific people who are future-oriented and who can make the connection between behavior and negative consequences. However, many offenders in prison are not like this as they never think about the effect of
References
Cullen, F. T., Jonson, C. L., & Nagin, D. S. (2011). Prisons do not reduce recidivism: The high cost of ignoring science. The Prison Journal , 91 (3_suppl), 48S-65S.
Kelly, W. R. (2018, April 25). Why Punishment Doesn't Reduce Crime. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/crime-and-punishment/201804/why-punishment-doesnt-reduce-crime
Ritchie, D. (2011). Sentencing matters-Does imprisonment deter. A review of the evidence. Melbourne: Sentencing Advisory Council .
