“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jail. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” [Nelson Mandela]
Brief History on Crime and Imprisonment
Throughout history, people within organised communities and societies were amongst few if not many that would affront the rules and regulations of these communities and societies. The way in which authorities dealt with the said offenders changed throughout history, and is still changing to this day, but the most common form of restraining these offenders was to send them to prison. Prison is known to be a place where people are physically confined and usually underprivileged of a wide range of personal freedoms. Imprisoning has, in itself, not always been a form of punishment but rather a way to confine offenders until such time as corporal or capital punishment was ordered.
Introduction
Is Imprisonment an effective way of dealing with most violent offenders? This question is one of the most difficult questions to give an exact, “same for all circumstances”, response to. Because there are countless categories of criminal acts wherein someone can offend, there are countless categories of solutions. “As prison has the highest profile of any sanction in common use in our kind of society, it plays an important part in reassuring people that ‘something is being done’ about the problem of law and order, and the social threats which they are persuaded to take most seriously.” This essay will discuss the effectiveness of imprisonment with most violent offenders and what needs to be done to improve some aspects of this course of action. Today we see prisons as a way of protecting society from those who are at risk of harming the majority and not co-operating with the law. Modern society has a view