Explain the major objectives and justifications for punishment.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Legal scholars have traditionally identified four major objectives or justifications for the practice of punishing criminals: retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation. Criminal justice scholars have recently added a fifth purpose to the list: reintegration. Retribution is a “just deserts” model that demands that punishment matches as closely as possible the degree of harm criminals have inflicted on their victims—what they justly deserve. Those who commit minor crimes deserve minor punishments, and those who commit more serious crimes deserve more severe punishments. The principle behind deterrence is that people are deterred from crime by the threat of punishment. Deterrence may be either specific or general. Specific deterrence refers to the effect of punishment on the future behavior of persons who experience it. For specific deterrence to work, it is necessary that a previously punished person make a conscious connection between an intended criminal act and the punishment suffered as a result of similar acts committed in the past. General deterrence refers to the preventive effect of the threat of punishment on the general population; it is thus aimed at potential offenders. Punishing offenders serves as examples to the rest of us of what may happen if we violate the law, as we noted in the opening vignette. Incapacitation refers to the inability of criminals to victimize people outside prison walls while they are locked up. The term rehabilitation means to restore or return to constructive or healthy activity. Whereas deterrence and incapacitation are mainly justified on classical grounds, rehabilitation is primarily a positivist concept. The rehabilitative goal is based on a medical model that used to view criminal behavior as a moral sickness requiring treatment. Today, this model views criminality in terms of “faulty thinking” and criminals as in need of “programming” rather than “treatment.” The goal of rehabilitation is to change offenders’ attitudes so that they come to accept that their behavior was wrong, not to deter them by the threat of further punishment. The goal of reintegration is to use the time criminals are under correctional supervision to prepare them to reenter (or reintegrate with) the free community as well equipped to do so as possible. In effect, reintegration is not much different from rehabilitation, but it is more pragmatic, focusing on concrete programs such as job training rather than attitude change.