Incapacitation

Abstract: Incapacitation or Deterrence? Is it really a matter of one or the other or is it the matter of properly using both stratagem for the efficient, and effective management of the criminal justice system in America? Furthermore, in a decade where the penal system seems to focus on strictly punishment I seek to discover if there is a better way. According to Todd Clear and Natasha Frost (2014) by the year 2002 the penal system of the United States had exceeded two million inmates. Furthermore, according to the statistics laid out in their book The Punishment Imperative after the turn of the millennium roughly 5 million Americans had spent time in the penal system (Clear and Frost 2014). Worst of all they estimate that…

Through the clever use of vocabulary Wild (2013) engages the reader from the beginning. It is a story retold, of people trying to escape the brutality of war, forever remaining hopeful, and moving on to a better life. However, as Tunnell (2008) notes, it is not the subject or the characters that dictate if a book is well written, but the manner in which it is written. The choice of vocabulary can either tell the story to the reader, or show them, by immersing them into the story. The latter…

For this week’s assignment, the class was asked to review an article written by Kempinen and Kurlychek. The article that they wrote surrounded itself with the attempt to determine if rehabilitative programs within a particular setting, such as a boot camp, reduced recidivism. The author’s performed their study regarding this very subject around the state of Pennsylvania’s Motivational Boot Camp Program. The boot camp program had two primary focuses which was to reduce prison overcrowding and…

A caveat to all the aforementioned measures of recidivism is that risk of recidivism is not equal across offenders. Offenders are a heterogeneous population, characterised by diverse individual, social, and contextual risks that impact their rates of reoffending. While some offenders present very high risks of reoffending, others present very low risks of reoffending. Consequently, the profile of offenders in contact with the corrections system necessarily influences recidivism (Bonta, Rugge,…

Auerhahn (1999) discusses the purpose of selective incapacitation and its progress with high rate offenders. She states in her article that selective incapacitation is supposed to reduce crime early in an offender career. Auerhahn (1999) believes that a lot of attention has been devoted to inquiry into the potential consequences of selective incapacitation. But the evidence has been overlooked by other researchers and politicians in this particular area. In this article, a study was shown…

Specific deterrence and incapacitation are two important methods for preventing already convicted offenders from committing crimes in the future. Specific deterrence has the goal to focus on the individuals and their future behavior. This methods wants to prevent offenders from committing future deviant actions by the imposition of punishments that negates pleasure of any kind or advantages gained by the participation in criminal activity. Incapacitation has the goal to prevent future crimes…

of the correctional system, I believe the most effective for reducing recidivism and crime is incapacitation. Accordingly, incapacitation is removing an offender’s capability to further commit crime. Society typically thinks of incapacitation as imprisonment, but there are several other forms of incapacitation such as, sterilization, execution, and car breathalyzers installed for DWI’s. If we look at the history of American corrections and incapacitation, banishment from one’s community was the…

. Selective Incapacitation Selective incapacitation reduces crime by protecting society from high-risk criminals by individualising sentences based on the predicted likelihood of committing further criminal activity (Vollaard, 2013). Through this method, longer sentences and sanctions are given to individuals who are considered to be high-risk offenders. It is an ideal method used for sex offenders who are at risk of repeating offences. There are some strengths and weaknesses when using this…

reasons behind prisons are retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, or incapacitation (Gilmore 2007:14). Retribution and deterrence are closely linked. Retribution keeps functions to stop previous convicts from committing the crime again, based on their knowledge of the prison, and deterrence stops people from committing the crime in the first place because of stories told by released inmates. This is how these two concepts are intended to work, but statistics have not been favorable to this…

As a result, it is unknown whether incapacitation works better than another strategy, such as a rehabilitation program. Instead, incapacitation effects compare an offender’s stay in prison to simply being free with no control. Thus, the research about incapacitation effects is inherently flawed, for it fails to reveal whether it works better then other possible intervention techniques (Cullen & Jonson, 2017). There is little reason to doubt whether an incapacitation effects exists, but whether…