Punishment or Treatment: What are our prisons for?

Punishment or Treatment

What are our prisons for (NAME

I . INTRODUCTION

Today , we always hear news about crimes being committed by many people Moreover , those people who commit crimes tend to offend again their previous criminal acts . The repeating of doing such criminal act is known as recidivism . Specifically , recidivism is the term used when someone , who after receiving a punishment or negative consequences of the criminal behavior , repeat his or her criminal behavior

Due to the alarming increase in recidivism cases , policy makers in a given country try to

find out what will be the best option or solution that will help in decreasing the number of criminal cases and one of their options is the implementation of punishment or what they call deterrence and the other method is rehabilitation

Deterrence had been a hot issue regarding on its ethical background and most especially its effectiveness in counterattacking recidivism . Many said that it is not effective in its sole purpose . They added that there are other ways to prevent an individual in committing crime again other than forcing those individual to be punished by law

But there were studies that concluded deterrence to be an effective tool in decreasing crime rate among crime violators whether the deterrence is specific or general . The most popular form of deterrence is imprisonment . Imprisonment brings fright to those possible committers And this limits them to do crime again because deterrence brings bad experience to those who were found to have committed crime

II . OBJECTIVE

The main audiences of this are the policy makers that are concerned on recidivism issues . Lawmakers will make certain policy that will guide these offenders and will treat them offenders . The said audience is not limited only to policy makers but also to those people like parole and rehabilitation officers who assess and guides these criminal committers in their probation program

This will try to analyze recidivism occurrence . This will have a deep analysis on the reasons why people tend to commit again their previous criminal behavior given that they were already given the right treatment and appropriate consequences to extinguish that behavior

The will not only tackle recidivism but also take a look on the current situation on the policies and actions given to those people who commit criminal acts again . Potential intervention to reduce the risk of recidivism will be one of the focuses of this . The effectiveness of the current actions will be emphasized as it will serve as a guide to the people who handle this kind of issue . The will compare deterrence and rehabilitation as the two most popular solutions and actions when dealing with recidivism . Is longer deterrence and rehabilitation will lead to minimize recidivism or will just increase the repeating of undesirable behavior after they have either experienced negative consequences of that behavior , or have been treated or trained to extinguish that behavior ? The will try to answer all these questions to enlighten and give...