Philosophies Of Sentencing

In America today, crimes are happening every second of every day. From possession of drugs, burglary, grand theft auto, to murder. I 'm going to be discussing how an offender is sentenced after committing a crime. Also what all the different types of sentences the United States has. Then I will go through the major philosophies of sentencing and some differences and similarities they have between each other.

In today’s society there are many different types of sentences that can be given to an offender. To start off we have the determinate sentence this is where an offender is given a certain amount of time they have to serve, but the imminates sentence can be reduced based on good behavior and or earned times. Next is indeterminate, typically …show more content…
Retribution is one of the oldest and basic justification for punishment. All in all it refers to deserts, which are people who break the law and deserve to be punished. This certain philosophie is not the one that will help and try to reduce the crime or stop the offender from doing that crime again. Moving on to deterrence that helps to deter one from committing the crime because in the end the punishment for that crime is not worth it. Next is incapacitation, meaning that one cannot commit a crime for the fact that he or she is already behind bars. Lastly rehabilitation is the attempt to get inside the mind of an offender to change one 's mindset, so he or she will not commit crimes again. One example for rehabilitation would be sending a drug user to a treatment center to get help and detox off the drug. “Theories punishment can be divided into two general philosophies utilitarian and retributive. The utilitarian theory of punishment seeks to punish offenders to discourage or “deter” future wrongdoing. The retributive theory seeks to punish offenders because they deserve to be punished.”(Theories of …show more content…
The three sentence process deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation all have one big thing in common, which is that they all want to help prevent crime from happening again. Whether it 's by sending offender to treatment centers or making the punishment for that crime not worth it. Those three just want the crime rate to go down. That leaves retribution, but these one does not care if it helps crime go down as long as the offender gets what they had coming to them. In this module I learned a great amount of new information about the different types of sentencings. I never knew that there were so many must be difficult to choose on when in court. I really enjoyed this module and it became one of my most favorites to read and write