NCJ Number
169529
Date Published
1997
Length
7 pages
Annotation
This paper evaluates the merits of incarceration and of current sentencing policy.
Abstract
The paper outlines the evidence on crime and lethal violence and shows how broadening the range of prison offenses has shifted the focus of penal policy away from appropriate priority. The offender who kills takes from the victim and the victim's family something that cannot be returned; compensation for property losses can be made with insurance or other loss-spreading devices. It would appear, therefore, that the criminal justice system would make the prevention of serious violence its dominant priority. This has not been the trend in recent American criminal justice. The American system is making prison the presumptive punishment for an ever-widening list of offenses, a significant symptom of a diminished sense of penal proportion. The diverse offenses found in a modern penal code involve not only many different kinds of harm but also substantially different degrees of social cost. Policies that tend to homogenize punishments and spread them evenly over offending populations are not only problematic because potential offenders may miss important differences in culpability, but also misleading because citizens and those who enforce the law may regard all criminal harms as morally indistinguishable. Figures, references