FInal Exam Flashcards
(44 cards)
What is rehabilitation and what forms of punishment are used to accomplish it?
The attempt to reform a criminal offender
rehabilitation generally works through education and psychological treatment to reduce the likelihood of future criminality.
What is deterrence and what forms of punishment are used to accomplish it?
Deterrence seeks to inhibit criminal behavior through punishment or the fear of punishment
General deterrence–Seeks to prevent future crimes like the one for which the sentence is being imposed
Specific deterrence–Seeks to prevent a particular offender from engaging in repeat criminality
Deterrence is compatible with the goal of incapacitation, as at least specific deterrence can be achieved through incapacitating offenders
What is incapacitation and what forms of punishment are used to accomplish it?
The use of imprisonment or other means to reduce the likelihood that a particular offender will commit more crime
Modern incapacitation strategies separate offenders from the community to reduce opportunities for further criminality. Incapacitation, sometimes called the “lock ’em up” approach, forms the basis for the modern movement toward prison “warehousing.” Unlike retribution, incapacitation requires only restraint, not punishment.
What is retribution and what forms of punishment are used to accomplish it?
A just deserts perspective that emphasizes taking revenge on a criminal perpetrator or group of offenders
The primary sentencing tool of the just deserts model is imprisonment, but in extreme cases capital punishment (i.e., death) becomes the ultimate retribution
What are the differences between the Pennsylvania and the Auburn prison systems?
imprisonment in the United States began with the Penitentiary Erain 1790. That era began with the conversion of Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail into a penitentiary by the Quakers living in Pennsylvania. The Quakers viewed incarceration as an opportunity for penance and saw prisons as places where offenders might make amends with society and accept responsibility for their misdeeds. Since penance was the primary vehicle through which rehabilitation might be achieved, the word penitentiary came into use. Prisoners kept in the first penitentiary were strongly encouraged to study the Bible. Solitary confinement was the rule, and the penitentiary was architecturally designed to minimize contact between inmates and between inmates and staff. Fashioned after the Philadelphia model, the Western Penitentiary opened in Pittsburgh in 1826, and the Eastern Penitentiary opened in Cherry Hill, Pennsylvania, 3 years later. Solitary confinement and individual cells, supported by a massive physical structure with impenetrable walls, became synonymous with what soon came to be known as the Pennsylvania system of imprisonment.
Auburn—As prison populations began to grow, however, solitary confinement became prohibitively expensive. One of the first large prisons to abandon the Pennsylvania model was the New York State Prison at Auburn. Auburn introduced a “congregate but silent” system, under which inmates lived, ate, and worked together in enforced silence. This style of imprisonment, which came to be known as the Auburn system, featured group workshops rather than solitary handicrafts and reintroduced corporal punishments into the handling of offenders.
While isolation and enforced idleness were inherent punishments under the early Pennsylvania system, Auburn-style imprisonment depended on whipping and hard labor to maintain the rule of silence. The Auburn prison soon became the site of an experiment in solitary confinement. The experiment was a failure, and much of the rest of the country moved on to adopt the congregate system of imprisonment that had been developed at Auburn. One of the reasons for the Auburn system’s success was likely the lower cost that resulted from the simpler facilities required by mass imprisonment and from group workshops that provided economies of scale unachievable under solitary confinement.
What three principles did Elizabeth Fry promote for female inmates?
- women should be housed separately 2. women should have female guards 3. teach the women basic hygiene and skills such as sewing
At what security level are most state prison inmates serving?
The typical American prison today is medium or minimum custody. Some states have as many as 80 or 90 small institutions, which may originally have been located in every county to serve the needs of public works and highway maintenance. Medium- and minimum-security institutions house the bulk of the country’s prison population.
What are the theories used to explain increasing prison populations?
the just deserts philosophy provided what became for many an acceptable rationale for continued prison expansion–imprisonment is seen as a fully deserved and proper consequence of criminal and irresponsible behavior
there is also a “lock-em-up” philosophy with emphasis on keeping offenders behind bars as long as possible.
(Ch. 11)
What are our jail populations?
jails are short-term confinement facilities whose traditional purpose has been to hold those awaiting trial or sentencing.
Inmates who have been tried and sentenced may also be held at jails until their transfer to a prison facility
today’s jails sometimes hold inmates serving short sentences of confinement.
What has the War on Drugs done to prison populations?
“the increase in expected time served by drug offenders was the single greatest contributor to growth in the federal prison population beginning in 1998,
Increase is 1000%
Why are so many offenders being sentenced to some type of community sanction?
Community sanctions include probation and parole. Alternative sentences include the use of court-ordered community service, home detention, day reporting, drug treatment, psychological counseling, victim–offender mediation, or intensive supervision in lieu of other, more traditional sentences such as imprisonment and fines. Community-based sanctions are becoming increasingly popular as corrections budgets continue to rise, and overcrowding remains an issue
Why is incarceration more harmful than community sanctions?
When incarcerated, prisoners cannot contribute to their family’s living or to the economic health of the community,
They also cannot contribute to victim restitution.
When incarcerated, prisoners cannot maintain social relationships which may benefit them and their families.
Prisons have been called “schools of crime” where prisoners learn all about the criminal life.
There are not as many treatment programs available to inmates.
There is less chance for rehabilitation in prison.
Prison is more expensive.
Describe the development of probation in the US?
Probation has a long history. By the fourteenth century, English courts had established the practice of “binding over for good behavior,” in which offenders could be entrusted into the custody of willing citizens. American John Augustus (1784–1859) is generally recognized as the world’s first probation officer. Augustus, a Boston shoemaker, attended sessions of criminal court in the 1850s and offered to take carefully selected offenders into his home as an alternative to imprisonment. At first, he supervised only drunkards, but by 1857 Augustus was accepting many kinds of offenders and was devoting all his time to the service of the court.
Augustus died in 1859, having bailed out more than 2,000 convicts. In 1878, the Massachusetts legislature enacted a statute that authorized the city of Boston to hire a salaried probation officer. Missouri followed suit in 1897, along with Vermont (1898) and Rhode Island (1899). Before the end of the nineteenth century, probation had become an accepted and widely used form of community-based supervision. By 1925, all 48 states had adopted probation legislation. In that same year, the federal government enacted legislation enabling federal district court judges to appoint paid probation officers and to impose probationary terms.
The federal probation system, known as the United States Probation and Pretrial Services System, is approximately 80 years old. In 1916, in the Killets case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal judges did not have the authority to suspend sentences and to order probation. After a vigorous campaign by the National Probation Association, Congress passed the National Probation Act in 1925, authorizing the use of probation in federal courts. The bill came just in time to save a burgeoning federal prison system from serious overcrowding. The prostitution-fighting Mann Act, Prohibition legislation, and the growth of organized crime all led to increased arrests and a dramatic growth in the number of federal probationers in the early years of the system.
Although the 1925 act authorized one probation officer per federal judge, it allocated only $25,000 for officers’ salaries. As a consequence, only eight officers were hired to serve 132 judges, and the system came to rely heavily on voluntary probation officers. Some sources indicate that as many as 40,000 probationers were under the supervision of volunteers at the peak of the system. By 1930, however, Congress had provided adequate funding, and a corps of salaried professionals began to provide probation services to the U.S. courts. Today, approximately 7,750 federal probation officers (also known as community corrections officers), whose services are administered through the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, serve the 94 federal judicial districts in more than 500 locations across the country.At any given time they supervise approximately 151,000 offenders—a number that has increased annually throughout the past decade.
How does one get their probation revoked?
Those sentenced to probation must agree to abide by court-mandated conditions of probation, with a violation of conditions possibly leading to probation revocation. Conditions are of two types: general and specific. General conditions apply to all probationers in a given jurisdiction and usually require that the probationer obey all laws, maintain employment, remain within the jurisdiction of the court, possess no firearms, allow the probation officer to visit at home or at work, and so forth. As a general condition of probation, many probationers are also required to pay a fine to the court, usually in a series of installments, that is designed to reimburse victims for damages and to pay lawyers’ fees and other court costs. Special conditions may be mandated by a judge who feels that the probationer is in need of particular guidance or control. Depending on the nature of the offense, a judge may require that the offender surrender his or her driver’s license; submit at reasonable times to warrantless and unannounced searches by a probation officer; supply breath, urine, or blood samples as needed for drug or alcohol testing; complete a specified number of hours of community service; or pass the general equivalency diploma (GED) test within a specified time. The judge may also dictate special conditions tailored to the probationer’s situation. Such individualized conditions may prohibit the offender from associating with named others (a codefendant, for example), they may require that the probationer be at home after dark, or they may demand that the offender complete a particular treatment program within a set time.
How are fines typically used in our system?
Fines are often imposed for relatively minor law violations, such as driving while intoxicated, reckless driving, disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, public drunkenness, and vandalism. Judges in many courts, however, report the use of fines for relatively serious violations of the law, including assault, auto theft, embezzlement, fraud, and sale and possession of various controlled substances. Fines are most likely to be imposed where the offender has both a clean record and the ability to pay.
What does the 4th Amendment mean for House Arrest? For your prison cell?
Hudson v. Palmer 1984 Fourth Amendment A prisoner has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his prison cell and no protections against what would otherwise be “unreasonable searches.” Ch. 12
U.S. v. Hitchcock 1972 Fourth Amendment A warrantless cell search is not unreasonable.
But this is a gray area according to the professor.
What are the models of incarceration? Name the model and which prison security level it fits.
Three models of incarceration have been prominent since the early 1940s:
The custodial model – based on the assumption that prisoners have been incarcerated for the protection of society and emphasizes security, discipline, and order subordinating the prisoner to the authority of the warden.. This model was prevalent in corrections before World War II and dominates most maximum-security institutions today.
The rehabilitation model – developed in the 1950s, it emphasizes treatment programs to reform the offender.
Medium- and minimum-security institutions offer a number of programs and services designed to assist with the rehabilitation of offenders and to create the conditions necessary for a successful reentry of the inmates into society
The reintegration model – linked to the structures and goals of community corrections, it emphasizes maintaining offender ties to family and community.
How do prisons differ from other government institutions?
No control over clients. No control over when they leave,. They house people against their will. Relies on guards and inmates to cooperate. Inmates outnumber guards. Prisons rely on inmates to perform facility jobs.
How can the exchange of relationships between officers and inmates create problems?
Carroll study p.329 in Studies + ?? (Not sure about this one….)
The organizational conflict, uncertainty over job expectations, and court decisions affording inmates certain constitutional rights created a frustrating and stressful work environment for the correctional officers employed at Eastern Correctional Institute. Carroll found that some officers entered into exchange relationships with inmates as a means of gaining their compliance. Consistent with Sykes’ observation, Carroll found that officers relied on persuasion and bribery to make sure inmates complied with their orders.
The racial biases of correctional officers coupled with some Black inmates’ revolutionary status meant that Black inmates were not in a position to enter into exchange relationships with the guards in the same fashion as white inmates. White inmates manipulated the officers’ authority by diffusing dangerous altercations before they got out of hand. Guards would return the favor by ignoring rule violations. Black inmates, on the other hand, challenged the authority of officers through various confrontational tactics. Officers were intimidated by the solidarity among Black inmates. Carroll believed that this also helped to explain why Black inmates received more disciplinary reports yet were not sanctioned more severely than whites.
What are the characteristics of correctional officers?
Correctional officers perform direct custodial tasks in state institutions: 61% of corrections employees work for state governments, followed by 35% at the local level and 5% at the federal level.On a per capita basis, the District of Columbia has the most state and local corrections employees (53.3 per every 10,000 residents), followed by Texas (43.8). Across the nation, 70% of corrections officers are Caucasian, 22% are African American, and slightly over 5% are Hispanic. Women account for 20% of all corrections officers, with the proportion of female officers increasing at around 19% per year. CH. 12
What is a major obstacle faced by correctional officers?
Little opportunity for advancement.
What do inmates use as currency?
Barter–trade drugs.
How do female subcultures differ from male subcultures in prison?
Some authors have suggested that violence in women’s prisons is less frequent than it is in institutions for men. Lee Bowker observes that “except for the behavior of a few ‘guerrillas,’ it appears that violence is only used in women’s prisons to settle questions of dominance and subordination when other manipulative strategies fail to achieve the desired effect.”
It appears that few lesbian liaisons are forced, perhaps representing a general aversion among women to such victimization in wider society. At least one study, however, has shown the use of sexual violence in women’s prisons as a form of revenge against inmates who are overly vocal in their condemnation of lesbian practices among other prisoners.
Many studies of female prisoners show that incarcerated women suffer intensely from the loss of affectional relationships once they enter prison and that they form homosexual liaisons to compensate for such losses. Those liaisons then become the foundation of prison social organization.
Owen concluded that prison subcultures for women are very different from the violent and predatory structure of contemporary male prisons.Like men, women experience “pains of imprisonment,” but their prison culture offers them other ways to survive and adapt to these deprivations.
a significant aspect of sexual activity far more commonly found in women’s prisons than in prisons for men involves sexual misconduct between staff and inmates.
Although a fair amount of such behavior is attributed to the exploitation of female inmates by male corrections officers acting from positions of power, some studies suggest that female inmates may sometimes attempt to manipulate unsuspecting male officers into illicit relationships in order to gain favors.
Ch. 12
Also see p. 312 in Studies….
One of Giallombardo’s objectives was to determine if female inmates experienced the same deprivations described by Sykes. Based on her observations and interviews, it was her conclusion that “ . . . prison life is depriving and frustrating for the Alderson inmates”. Females experienced the same losses of liberty, autonomy, material goods and services, heterosexual relationships, and security. However, Giallombardo found differences in the degree to which female inmates felt these pains and the nature of the prison experience. The prison environment was less severe for women, but the deprivations were still present.
the nature of the social relationships between female inmates distinguished them from male inmates. Females engaged in homosexual activities to cope with the loss of heterosexual activities, but this was primarily done in the context of a meaningful relationship. Many of the relationships were stable, long-term arrangements where two inmates considered themselves to be married. For those inmates choosing not to participate in such a marital unit, many established “kinship links” or close knit family units. Inmates took on the roles of brother, sister, son, or daughter. Giallombardo believed that these family units helped the women adapt to an environment that deprived them of their female identities.
What percentage of the prison population is female?
Males comprise 93% of people in prison; 7% are female. (Ch. 11)
But according to Raymond, professor said 9%
The percentage of females serving time for murder (11% of all sentenced females) is similar to that of males (13%).
In jails, as opposed to prisons– women make up only around 13% of the country’s jail population but they are the largest growth group in jails nationwide.
