deterrance

DETERRANCE, INCAPACITATION, RETRIBUTION, AND REHABILITATION:

Modern criminal justice systems are base don several rationales (razones).
1. Threat (amenaza) of punishment dissuades potential offenders from breaking the law
2. Locking criminals up (encerrando los criminales) keeps them from victimizing more people.
3. Those who violate the law deserve (merecen) to be punished.

And others: criminal justice system is to reform offenders through treatment.

Deterrence (prevenir)

Deterrence is the inhibition of criminal activity by state-imposed penalties. When people perceive the threat of punishment to be wakened often crime rates rise. Deterrence it is base don the idea that punishment should be used to prevent crime.

SPECIFIC DETERRENCE occurs when individuals who are punished for a particular crime do not commit that crime again because their risk-reward (riesgo-beneficio) calculations have been altered by the punishment.

GENERAL DETERRENCE is the inhibition of the desire (deseo) to engage (dedicarse) in crime among the general population through the punishment of certain offenders. Most research focus on general deterrence rather tan on specific deterrence.

The MARGINAL DETERRENT EFFECT is the extent (extención/alcanze) to which crime rates respond to incremental changes in the threat of sanction.

Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham argued that the punishment of criminal acts can deter potential offenders by making the negative consequences of crime greater tan its rewards.

Punishment should be as certain as possible and as harsh as necessary to deter potential offenders. Punishment should be consistent with the principle of retribution or just deserts.

Assumptions (suposiciones) about behaviour.
The deterrence model assumes that people engage in an act only after carefully and rationally considering its costs and its benefits.
In the deterrence model, the rationale for punishment is to affect future behaviour, rather tan to inflict pain that offenders might deserve because of their past actions; the latter is the retribution or just deserts rationale for punishments.

The deterrance model assumes free will or voluntarism, suggesting that people choose how to behave; even in they are limited in their choices by social, psychological, and biological factors. However, not all behaviour is governed by carful consideration of costs and benefits; mush of it is unplanned or habitual.
Deterrence and other effects of penalties.
The law has an “eye-opener effect”, directing attention to punished acts and inviting reflection on the reason those acts are condemned. Punishment also keep people in line by convincing them that those who violate the law will gain no advantage over those who abide (toleran) by the law.

One analysis suggest that three distinct forces operate indepently and have additive effects on keeping crime in check (bajo control):
Moral commitment (compromiso), or internalized (interorizadas) legal norms.
Social disapproval, or fear of informal sanctions by peers (grupal).
Threat (amenaza) of legal punishment, or fear of physical and material deprivation from legally imposed sanctions.
Only the third factor is called deterrence.

These three factors interact with one another. Subjective appraisals (valoraciones) of social disapproval and the threat of punishment affect criminal behaviour, but involvement in crime can alter perceptions of social disapproval.

Deterrence and the criminal act
William Chambliss suggest that some crimes are more easily deterred than others. The distinction between instrumental and expressive acts is not always easy to make. Champliss also links deterrence to the offender’s commitment to a life of crime.

DETERRENCE AND CONVENTIONAL CRIME: some conventional offenders commit crimes without carefully assessing (evaluar) risks. Risk taking can even make breaking the law exciting and thus rewarding to the offender.
Hasher penalties may not deter persistent property offenders, because those criminals focus on the rewards they expect from their crime but rarely give much thought to the risks they are taking.
Young minority-group members from urban ghettos even regard prison as a “shelder from the strorm”.

DETERRENCE AND WHITE-COLLAR CRIME: some criminologists have suggested that their crimes should be easily to deter. Although individual white-collar offenders might be deterred by the threat of punishment, corporate offenders are not easily deterred.
A study found that although imprisonment might have adversely affected the personal live or job opportunities of the offenders, it had no marginal deterrent effect over the experience of arrest, conviction, and a sentence other than prison. Few white-collar offenders receive any criminal sanction at all.
As a result, more severe penalties will probably have little deterrent impact on white-collar crime unless there is a substantial increase in the certainty with which those penalties are imposed.

Deterrence and the sanctioning process

SEVERITY OF PUNISHMENT: criminal behaviour can be deterred by harsher (mas duro) sanctions, but there is not enough research on marginal deterrence to know how much crime is prevented by a specific increase in punishment. Harsh penalties are costly, and sometimes they backfire (contraproducentes).

A heightened sense of the severity of sanctions does not necessarily lead an individual to avoid criminal behaviour; it can also produce a sense of injustice that leads to more crime.

CERTAINLY OF PUNISHMENT: One study revealed that residential burglars’ decisions to commit crime were more influenced by perceived risk of arrest than by the severity of the threatened sanction.

The exact combination of certainty and will maximize deterrence is unknown. A certain sentence of a $10 fine or a day in jail will probably deter few robbers, because they will think crime pays if he costs are that low.

PROMPTNESS (pronitud, puntialidad, rapized) OF PUNISHMENT : the promptness with sanctions are admintered can also affect criminal behaviour. If an offender is punished soon after committing the crime, both the specific deterrence of that individual and the general deterrence of the public may be greater than if the offender is no punished until months or years later.

TYPES OF PUNISHMENTS: little is known about the relative deterrent effects of imprisonment, restitution, fines, probation, and other sanctions. Marginal deterrence is often examinated by focusing on the reduction of crime that results from using more of one types of penalty, rather than from using a different kind of penalty.
The exact combination of severity, certainly, promptness and type of sanction that will maximize deterrence for different kinds of crimes is not known, but these factors are important influence on the effectiveness of punishment in reducing crime.

Deterrence and the criminal justice system
Economists have raised (planteado) the problem of SIMULTANEITY: sanctions might reduce crime, but the crime rate also affects the sanctions meted out (impuestas) by the criminal justice system. An inverse relationship between crime rates and the certainly of punishment might exist because the threat of sanctions reduces crime, but it could also exist because high crime rate reduces certainty of sanctions.

DETERRENCE AND THE POLICE:
- Deterrence and size of the police forces: Some researchers have found that increases in police strength lead to decreases in crime rates, but others have found that within the range of officers per capita that exists in the US, cities with larger police forces do no have lower crime rates than cities with smaller police forces.
Eck Maguire (2004) concluded that there was no “consistent body of evidence supporting the assertion (afirmación) that hiring (emplear) more police is an effective method for reducing violent crime”.
- Deterrence and risk of arrest: Some researchers have found an inverse relationship between clearance (liquidación) rates and crime rates: the more crimes the police solve, the fewer crimes of that sort there are. Another study found no consistent evidence that higher clearance rates reduce crime rates.

- Deterrence and police patrol tactics. Changes in police patrol practices had “little value in preventing crime or making citizens feel safe”. Kansas city experiment found no evidence of a DISPLACEMENT EFFECT, a change in the pattern of crime without a reduction in total amount of crime

Visible police patrols could alter patterns of crime, but the Kansas City study found no evidence of such displacement as a resolute of variations in police patrol tactics. There is evidence from other research that the police sometimes displace crime from one area to another where there are fewer officers or patrol cars, or form a time when there are more officers around to a time the police are less likely to be present.

Overall, greater numbers of foot patrol officers do not seem to produce consistent and substantial decrease in crime.

Several studies suggest that problem oriented policing can be effective, but this approach need to be introduces more widely and evaluated more rigorously to determine if it can significantly reduce crime rates.

DETERRENCE AND THE COURTS: there is an inverse relationship between crime rates and the risk of conviction (condena) lower crime rates are associated with higher conviction rates. A lower risk of conviction might increase the crime rate, but a higher crime rate can make convictions less likely.

DETERRENCE AND THE PRISONS: higher incarceration (encarcelamiento) rates reduce crime rates in subsequent (posterior) years through a combination of deterrence and incapacitation.

DETERRENCE AND CAPITAL PUNSISHMENT: A justification for capital punishment is that it deters crime, but faith (fe, certeza) in this deterrent effect is more widespread (extendido) among the general public than among criminologists.
Most research has found no evidence that either death penalty laws or actual executions deter homicide.
A few studies have found that capital punishment deters homicide.
Another considerations it that because capital punishment statues apply only to specific kinds of murder those laws are unlikely to deter al types of murder.

Incapacitation

Incapacitation is the custodial control of convicted offenders so that they cannot commit crimes against the general public. Incapacitations assumes that offenders will commit a certain number of crimes over and given time if they remain in society, and that those crimes can be prevented by incarcerating the offenders for that time.

James Q Wilson argues that incapacitation will work if three assumptions are correct:
1. Some offenders are repeaters
2. Offenders who are taken off the street are not immediately and completely replaced by other offenders.
3. Prison does not increase crime by changing inmates in ways that offset (compensar) the reduction of crime from incapacitation.

Estimating the impact of incapacitation on crime rates is difficult. Because we do not know how many offenses different criminals will commit in a given period of time, it is hard to determine how much crime will be prevented by locking up offenders.

Selective incapacitation:
SELECTIVE INCAPACITATION is a policy that aims to separate high-risk offenders from low-risk ones and hold only those who are the most likely to be dangerous if released (si se liberan).

Peter Greenwood discovered that the offenders who had committed the most crimes has the following characteristics:
An earlier conviction for the same offense
Imprisonment for more than half of the two years prior to the current arrest
A conviction before the age of sixteen
Previous commitment to a juvenile institution
Use of heroin or barbiturates during the previous two years
Use of heroin or barbiturates as a juvenile
Unemployment for half or more of the preceding two years.

Greenwood claim that implementation of his system of selective incapacitation would allocate (distribuir) the limited amount of prison space more efficiently and reduce crime rates.
Critics claim that many errors would be made if Greenwood’s scale were used to predict which offenders should be incapacitated.
One objection to selective incapacitation is that penalties should reflect the seriousness of an offender’s crime rather than his o her prior record, and greenwood’s system does not base punishment on the amount of harm (daño) done.
Critics have also opposed selective incapacitations systems that use predictive criteria over which offenders have no control.

Career criminal programs
District attorney’s officers around the country have established units to prosecute career criminals who repeatedly commit felonies (crimes, delito). These programs concentrate resources on suspects who have prior records of serious crimes in order to incapacitate them as quickly and as long as possible.

“Three Strikes and You’re Out”

Three strikes and you’re out laws required the long-term incarceration of offenders repeatedly convicted of serious crimes.

This laws encourage offenders who are facing a third felony conviction to use violence against he police to avoid arrest. Jails have filled with defendants awaiting trial under three-strikes laws, and inmates serving time for misdemeanours (delito menor) have ben released to make space for them.

Three-strikes law do not seem to reduce crime, partly because their provisions are rarely invoked. An assessment of that was concluded that if had failed to reduce rates of serious crime and petty theft, once prior trends in crime rates were taken into account. The three-strikes law had little impact because serious offenders had already been getting long sentence prior to passage of the law, juvenile offenders were unaffected by the law, and those subjects to the law ere older offenders whose criminal activity was already diminishing. Many more second- and third strike convictions were for nonviolent crime than for serious violent offenses.

Retribution(castigo/pena)

The retribution or just deserts (merecido) theory proposes that offenders should be punish because they deserve to suffer for the harm they have caused and that their punishment should be proportional tot hat harm and to their own blameworthiness (culpabilidad, reporchabilidad). This theory assumes that offenders freely choose to break the law and know that punishment might resolute from their actions. Retribution is oriented toward behaviour that offenders have already engaged in (comprometido), rather than toward their future conduct or the conduct of potential offenders.

Retributions differs from VENGEANCE, which is private and personal and not imposed by an established authority such as the state. Retribution requires an authority with the acknowledged right to sanction convicted offenders. Whereas vengeance is motivated by the desire to be gratified or compensated for a loss, retribution is justified by the need to enforce the law and maintain social order.

Retribution is commonly associated with lex talionis, the principle of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. Retributivists claim that offenders should be punish because they deserve to suffer but that they should be punished only in direct proportion to the harm they have caused.

Retribution theory claims that people who violate the law are blameworthy (culpables) and deserve moral disapproval for their acts. This disapproval is seen as the basis for punishment, even if the punishment does not serve social useful functions such as deterring people from crime or rehabilitating offenders. This contrasts with the deterrence perspective, which aims to control crime by punishing offenders so that they or others will not commit crime in the future. The principle of retribution also differs form the rehabilitation perspective, which seeks to reform criminals so that they will not again make the incorrect decision to break the law.

Retributivists assert that deterrence and rehabilitation are secondary foals of punishment; the primary justifications for punishment is thus that offenders deserve to be punished in proportion to the harm they have inflicted on the victim and on society. Others suggest that deterrence and rehabilitation should play a part in determining sentence.

One philosopher says that “a modified retributive theory is perfectly possible, one which only uses retributive considerations to fix some sort of upper limit to penalties and than looks to other factors to decide hoy much and what sort of pain shall be inflicted”.

A system of just deserts (un sistema de merecido justo)
A workable (factible) system of retribution or just deserts would require the rank (nivel) ordering (pedido) of crimes by relative seriousness and the rank ordering of punishments by their relative unpleasant (situacion desagradable). Seriousness of crimes and unpleasantness of penalties are not objective factors, so these rankings have to be based on subjective evaluations.

THE SERIOUSNESS OF CRIMES: a scale that ranks offenses by seriousness (gravedad) might be based on the amount of harm caused by a crime and on the blameworthiness (culpabilidad) of the offender, with harmfulness (lesividad) and blameworthiness combines into a single measure of the seriousness of the crime: seriousness = harmfulness + blameworthiness.

Harmfulness of crime: various components of a crime could be assigned scores, with a summary score then derived for the offense. This made it possible to rank crimes by their harmfulness and to state how more serious one crime was than another.
Scoring system allows for a more meaningful (significativo) measurement of crime than is possible just by counting the number of incidents.

Blameworthiness of offenders: One form of retribution theory claims that penalties should be imposed only for the harm caused by the crime; this position would ignore the offender’s blameworthiness. Another form of retribution theory holds that because offender should be punished, as they deserve, their blameworthiness must be considered in determining their sentences.
Blameworthiness can be measured in different ways. One I to consider motivation or mental state. Another is to look at the circumstances of the crime.
Usually blameworthiness is measured by the number and seriousness of an individual’s prior convictions, the assumption being that a crime is more serious if an offender has committed another crimes in the past. Another view is that a first-time offender warrants (justifica) a “discount” from the usual penalty for a crime.

An important problem with using prior arrests or convictions to indicate blameworthiness is that doing so can lead to “a cyclic reconfirmation of criminality”. Research showing that lower-class suspects are more likely than middle-class suspects to be arrested, convicted, and severely punished for the same crime suggest that the use of prior records to indicate blameworthiness and determine penalties can lock lower-class offenders into criminal careers.

THE UNPLEASANTNESS OF PENALTIES: a retributive system of punishment requires data on how people perceive the relative severity of penalties.
There is general agreement on how unpleasant criminal sanctions are. Probation (libertad provisional) is undesirable because it imposes restrictions on offenders. Fines are disagreeable because they deprive offenders of property. Imprisonment deprives offenders of freedom of movement and contact with the outside world. Restraint on freedom of movement is subject to many gradations, with the amount of tie and the institution in which an offenders I confined indicating the severity of the penalty.

The only two sanctions they regarded as less punitive were community service and regular probation. These studies suggest that eventually it might be possible to convert different penalties into a common quantitative measure of perceived severity such a measure could be used to compare judges and jurisdictions in terms of the severity of penalties give. It might even be used to have convicted offenders choose from a list of equivalent penalties.

LINKING PENALTIES TO CRIMES: developing a scale that measures the seriousness of crimes or the unpleasantness of penalties is easier than determining how severe a penalty should be administered to a person who commits an offense of a particular degree of seriousness.

When the public is asked to recommend sentences in the way that judges do its recommendations for punishment approximate those of judges. People are most punitive toward offenders who appear to have committed their crimes intentionally, seem unrepentant, and have committed crimes before. These offenders are seen as especially likely to repeat their crimes, because they do no acknowledge the moral validity of the law.

Retribution and the criminal justice system

Considerations of just deserts have always played an important role in the American criminal justice system, but that role has increased in recent years.

RETRIBUTION AND THE POLICE: one way to determine the goals of the police is to look at their organization and their use of resources. Police departments include detectives and squads that specialize in the investigation of the most serious offenses and they allocate more resources to the investigation of crimes that rank high on the scale of seriousness.

RETRIBUTION AND THE COURTS:
Prosecutor’s decision making: prosecutors assume that the defendants against whom they bring charges are guilty and should be punished appropriately by the criminal justice system. To save the court’s time and ensure (asegurarse) a conviction, prosecutors pressure defendants to plead guilty.
One study of prosecutor’s attitude toward different offenses produced unexpected results.

Judges’ decision making: In considering how much punishment a convicted offender deserves, judges are primarily influenced by the crime that has been committed and the offender’s prior record, although extra legal factors such as race, income, sex, and age can affect sentencing.

Indeterminate sentencing a system in which legislators establish long maximum sentences for different crimes, and judges can impose any penalty up to the maximum. Sentence are often a range of years to be served in prison.

Determinate sentencing use fixed terms of imprisonment, which can sometimes be reduced by credit for good behaviour while incarcerated.

Another way is to introduce mandatory minimum sentences, which require certain offenders to be sentences to at least a specified amount of time in prison.

Truth-in- sentencing requires offenders to serve a certain percentage of their sentence in prison.

Determinant sentence have also been implemented by sentencing commissions that use sentencing guidelines to define a range of penalties for offenses of a given degree of harmfulness committed by offenders of a specific degree of blameworthiness. A sentence can depart form the range required by the guidelines only in extraordinary circumstances. The vas majority of penalties handed out by judges in states that use sentencing guidelines have fallen within the required ranges.

Michael Tonry proposes that a just sentencing system would have no mandatory minimum sentences but would include noncustodial penalties that are intermediate between prison and probation. A sentencing commission would create and monitor sentencing guidelines, which would ne compatible with existing correctional resource and facilities. Custodial penalties would include maximum terms of confinement for all offenses and minimum terms for the most serious ones. For minor crimes, judges would choose among noncustodial penalties. For more serious offenses, they would choose between noncustodial penalties and therms of full or partial confinement. Within established guidelines, judges would impose the least punitive and intrusive sentence appropriate to the case.

Juvenile justice: All states now allow or require some juveniles accused of serious crimes to be tried in criminal court as adults, where they can be punished more severely than in juvenile court. Even states that use specific criteria to identify “dangerous” juveniles for treatment as adults “single out many juveniles whose records do not appear to be very serious and fail to identify many juveniles whose records are characterized by violent, frequent, and persistent delinquent activity”.
Transferring juveniles to criminal court apparently leads them to commit more frequent and more serious crimes and return to crime more quickly after release than is true of offenders who are dealt with by the juvenile justice system.

The impact of juvenile records on sentencing is no yet clear, but one study concluded that even if such records are available, they do not always affect sentencing. A prior juvenile record had little impact if there was a clear predisposition for or against incarcerations; it influenced the sentence only when decisions was less clear-cut.

RETRIBUTIONS AND THE PRISON:
The blameworthiness of the offender and the harmfulness of the crime largely determine the kind of institution to which an offender is sent.
Baceus sentences in some states cover a range of years the decision about how long an inmate stays in prison is made by the parole board rather tan the court. Decisions about when prisoners are to be released are predictable to a large degree from the harmfulness of the offense for which they have been imprisoned, their prior criminal record, and their conduct while in prison.

RETRIBUTION AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT:
Opponents of the death penalty claim that even if certain offenders deserve to die, a civilized society should not execute them.
Those who favour capital punishment do not always agree about when is it appropriate to put offenders to death.

Looking at the harmfulness of the offense and the blameworthiness of the defendant, a judge or jury could choose the death penalty only if there were aggravating circumstances defined by state law and no mitigating circumstances counteracting those aggravating factor.

The American public strongly supports capital punishment, but there is little support for the death penalty in the intellectual community.

Those seeking to abolish the death penalty argue that when an error is made and an innocent person is executed, there is no way to rectify the error as there is with other penalties.

Support for an opposition to the death penalty are based to a large extent on considerations of just deserts. Even if the were irrefutable evidence that the death penalty does or does not deter crime, the ultimate decision about its use would be based on values concerting the sanctity of human life and the requirements of justice.