Incarceration In The Twentieth Century

When we are talking about the changes in incarceration rates there are many aspects that need to be covered. First, when looking back on last week’s literature, we learned a tremendous amount of knowledge that showed us that the early twentieth century and throughout the mid twentieth century; we saw more push towards rehabilitation. We also saw a push for the more political aspect involved in criminal justice to be not necessarily eliminated, but scaled down. There was a use of professionals in the criminal justice system, and the courts and government were satisfied by this, they believed this should be left up to the professionals. However, going into the late twentieth century we were going though change with penal code. According to …show more content…
Speaking about how capital punishment is used we have to understand that in earlier societies there were heinous public executions, then we moved to a more rehabilitative era, and now we are back to using capital punishment. However, we now use this type of punishment more administratively. By this, I mean that there are more laws, policies, and procedures in place that the legal system must go through before an offender is actually put to death. According to Garland (2010), there is an average of around twelve years in which an offender waits to be …show more content…
During the 1960’s the average wait time an inmate waited to be executed was only a few weeks. Therefore, due to this more managerial process we have longer wait times. An offender has numerous options to have his or her case be heard, and it takes lawyers a great deal of time to go through all the legal steps. For just sentencing an offender it takes about nine steps. Another significant change is who actually decides a person’s innocence or guilt. In the late twentieth century there was the use of juries to judge the offender based off f evidence. However, this allowed racial bias to come into play. Garland (2010), mentioned that there was actually a rank system about the potential for a certain race to get sentenced to the death penalty. Therefore, this aspect of the criminal justice system has changed significantly to a more private use of punishment. In conclusion, I look at supervision of an offender as one of the most significant changes throughout the twentieth century. As mentioned above, in the early to mid-twentieth century there were professionals in place to determine what kind of care an offender needed, as well as they were the ones who were supervising them and wanting them to be rehabilitated. The rehabilitation movement was focused on being able to get the offender the treatment he or she needed to be able to successfully reintegrate them back into