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One hot issue for today’s corrections professionals is punishment itself. Over the centuries, public sentiment has played a powerful role in determining what is illegal and what is an appropriate sanction for a violation of the law. Capital punishment has been the touchstone for this discussion. The death penalty is considered or even applicable for very few criminal violations. In Georgia, for example, kidnapping with bodily injury, treason, hijacking an aircraft, murder, rape, and armed robbery are capital crimes. One question both juries and those who work in the judicial system ask is, “Is death an appropriate penalty for someone who commits an offense that does not directly result in the death of another?”
What standard should society use to determine what crimes should be capital crimes? If religion is the grounds upon which one relies for advocating the death penalty, then the Old Testament verse calling for “an eye for an eye” implies that the death penalty is too great a punishment for crimes in which no one dies, even such crimes as rape.
Throughout your Criminal Justice Masters Program, you will encounter a number of compelling discussions on the various theories behind punishment. As a society, we have differing reasons for punishing different offenders, and those different theories can justify alternate forms of punishment. If our ultimate goal is to keep offenders out of society, incarceration and even death may be appropriate. On the other hand, if our goal is to reform or rehabilitate offenders, jail may not always be the best punishment. In the 1800’s, men who committed violent crimes were often hanged. Meanwhile, young men found guilty of non-violent crimes “served time” by moving in with a family to help them work the farm. The idea behind this punishment was that these men needed to be properly socialized by developing family and communal relationships. When agrarianism gave way to industrialism, however, families no longer worked at home and, therefore, no longer needed young men to work.
In addition, as more people lived in cities where they did not even know their neighbors, they were less likely to trust strangers or let them into their homes. Hence, prison became the only solution society could find to keep citizens safe. Nevertheless, one critic argues that “. . . the speed with which imprisonment superseded other traditional forms of legal punishment, and has come to represent a largely unquestioned resource of the criminal justice system, might give us pause and lead us to wonder whether it is not too convenient a device for dealing with the complexities of human failure” (Kleinig, n.d.) Despite these questions, as well as the high cost of keeping millions of men, and now women, locked up, average citizens prefer paying the necessary taxes rather than feeling unsafe in their neighborhoods.
Jonathan B. Zeitlin, J.D. and Rachel M. Lazarus, J.D.
Ashworth University School Of Legal Studies
