What are today’s prisons like? What purposes do they serve?

What will be an ideal response?


Prisons have been influenced by a long history of using prisons to primarily punish. One goal of prisons is to reform offenders—the hope that through isolation and treatment the offender will change. Such efforts to rehabilitate are adversely influenced by the bureaucratic realities of prison organizations as well as changing attitudes about crime and punishment in the United States. The public has come to expect that prisons are places of punishment, and there has been public and political pressure to remove various types of treatment programming. The number of prisons, and the size of prison populations, has grown dramatically in the last 25 years. Many prisons are overcrowded because of the emphasis on just deserts. Prisons certainly punish and isolate offenders from society, but they are not very effective at rehabilitating offenders.

Criminal Justice

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Positivists rejected much of the philosophical basis of classical thinkers’ arguments, and instead relied on:

A. studies that declared that punishment should fit the offender rather than the crime B. a view of individuals as hedonistic C. similar punishments for similar crimes D. swift justice regardless of the circumstances of a crime

Criminal Justice

The most common method of waiver to adult court and the one with the longest history is ________.

A. legislative waiver B. judicial waiver C. prosecutorial waiver D. discretionary judicial waiver

Criminal Justice

The use of presumptions in the prosecution's case never present due process problems

a. True b. False Indicate whether the statement is true or false

Criminal Justice

Child abuse is committed more often by men than women

Indicate whether the statement is true or false

Criminal Justice