Outline the main approaches to dealing with crime. Critically compare two contrasting perspectives.
... of minor offences. Imprisonment – with the exception of fines, imprisonment is now the most common form of penalty imposed by the criminal courts. For some crimes, the main being murder, the fixed penalty is life imprisonment. However many life prisoners are released, and so with this in mind, the trial judge can indicate a minimum term which he thinks that the murder should in fact serve Capital Punishment – this is the penalty or sentence of death for committing a crime. Capital Punishment was banned in the UK in 1964. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, most executions in the United States have resulted from murder convictions. However, the sentence of death has been imposed for such serious crimes as armed robbery, kidnapping, rape, and treason. All of the above are ways of dealing with crime. In implementing these punishments, it is supposed to deter others from committing crimes and for the original offender to commit a crime again. This is the government’s way of dealing with crime. However not everyone agrees with the outlined ways of dealing with crime. For example there are contrasting perspectives on the effectiveness of prison. ‘The underlying principle of modern prisons is to “improve” individuals and prepare them to play a fit and proper part in society once released.’ Prisons themselves and the dependence on long prison sentences are seen as a powerful way to deter people from crime. The main question at hand is do prisons have the intended effect of transforming convicted criminals and preventing future crime? One of the main reasons that putting people in prison has not been an effective method of crime prevention was put across by Professor Petersilia. She said that the reason for this is the state governments, (in an effort to look tougher on crime and to save money), cut back on rehabilitation programs, like drug treatment, vocational education and classes to prepare for life outside prison. Jails used for temporary confinement existed back to the start of history, but confinement as punishment were recent inventions developed as a more humane alternative to public ridicule, banishment or execution. Increasingly, especially since the 1970s, social and individual problems are less likely to be dealt with on the community level and are instead criminalized. According to a Justice Department study (1994) despite the amount of new prisons erected, the rate at which convicts released from prison committed new crime actually rose (in the US) from 1983 to 1994. This suggests that the increased number of criminals being put behind bars is not effective in deterring crime. Criminologists generally agree the increase in prisons and the number of criminals being put in prison has helped reduce the crime rate. But this is because the criminals are being kept off the street and not because criminals are reformed after being released from prison. Prisons began as places to hold a criminal as a guarantee of security. In the early nineteenth century, places such as Amsterdam and Ghent started giving individually tailored punishments and constant supervision. This central emphasis was given to work partly because idleness was seen as the roots of crime: they offered nothing less than a ‘reconstruction of homo oeconomicus’ [‘economic man’]. In England, model prisons added isolation of inmates in an attempt to reactivate the moral subject, as a deliberate ‘reformatory’. This model appeared in the USA in a number of variants of ‘penitentiary’, one which featured compulsory wage, close supervision and regimentation, lots of solitary confinement foe the intractable, and conditional sentences. Prisons became secretive organisations for the first time, offering treatment that was personal to the prisoner and the guards. They featured a deliberate attempt to alter minds, and kept detailed records of individuals based on observation, classifications, and estimates of danger represented by the prisoner. In this way, 'prison functions... as an apparatus of knowledge' (page 126). Prison became future oriented, offering methods to reform and individualise. Prisons helped solve the contradictions between egalitarian law and the need for disciplinary subjection in the form of a more civilised penalty. It soon seemed as if there was no alternative. Since personal liberty was highly prized, a restriction of it just seemed right and egalitarian, and this could even be quantified. Prisons can also generate labour for the benefit of the whole society -- 'paying off a debt', as we have seen. They seemed to be only an extension of familiar disciplinary mechanisms, and they always offered to reform individuals. The growth of prisons led to the development of advanced record keeping, as a kind of 'moral accounting' . This was the only way to implement the intentions of the sentence, and had the additional advantage of being cost-effective. The real achievement, however, was the emergence of an entirely new object - the delinquent. This is a person...