Thirty years ago, policy makers declared a war on drugs and began to believe that criminals were not being punished enough. They wanted to come up with a way to give harsher punishments to those that broke the law. So, they came up with the idea of retributive justice. Retributive justice came from the notion that we needed to be tough on crime, particularly tough on drugs. Laws needed to be “toughened up”, or so people thought. This led to the apprehension and incarceration of more individuals, as well as the more frequent use of execution. Some states do not have the death penalty, and so the solution for this was to take these people that they could not sentence to death and throw them in prison for life without the possibility of parole.
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We often hear people say that they want to see criminals be in prison for so long that they die and rot there. Eventually, it got to the point where we, the United States, have the longest prison sentences in the world. These tough laws have also led to more prisons being built, because more and more people were being sentenced to prison. This is ridiculous, because some of the people serving long terms have not caused any harm to anyone or to society. It also costs us as taxpayers a lot of money to keep building these new prisons, maintaining them, and to keep someone in prison for a long period of time. The average cost across the United States for keeping someone in prison for a year was $31,000 in 2010 (Jacobson, …show more content…
This motion of justice requires that victims testify to what they experienced and what their feelings were at the time of the crime. Because this is high priority in criminal cases, it causes the victim to have to relive that horrible experience over and over again, playing in their head countless times. As if that was not bad enough, they have to go through this recollection in front of a large number of people that they probably have never met. For example, often rape cases are built on victims testifying; if the victim does not wish to cooperate, there is almost no case to convict the rapist. In front of an audience, they have to describe and feel that feeling of weakness, of helplessness, that humility, all over again. I do not know how others might feel, but I do not think that I could relive that in front of strangers. I think that is partially why some victims choose not to report their
We often hear people say that they want to see criminals be in prison for so long that they die and rot there. Eventually, it got to the point where we, the United States, have the longest prison sentences in the world. These tough laws have also led to more prisons being built, because more and more people were being sentenced to prison. This is ridiculous, because some of the people serving long terms have not caused any harm to anyone or to society. It also costs us as taxpayers a lot of money to keep building these new prisons, maintaining them, and to keep someone in prison for a long period of time. The average cost across the United States for keeping someone in prison for a year was $31,000 in 2010 (Jacobson, …show more content…
This motion of justice requires that victims testify to what they experienced and what their feelings were at the time of the crime. Because this is high priority in criminal cases, it causes the victim to have to relive that horrible experience over and over again, playing in their head countless times. As if that was not bad enough, they have to go through this recollection in front of a large number of people that they probably have never met. For example, often rape cases are built on victims testifying; if the victim does not wish to cooperate, there is almost no case to convict the rapist. In front of an audience, they have to describe and feel that feeling of weakness, of helplessness, that humility, all over again. I do not know how others might feel, but I do not think that I could relive that in front of strangers. I think that is partially why some victims choose not to report their