Question

Every society punishes offenders. Explain four justifications for punishment. Point out how each has come to the fore at different times in history, and explain this pattern as best you can. What evidence is there that punishment actually accomplishes what we say it does?

Answer 1

Answer.

The concept of punishment during the past half-century has shown a shift from efforts to reform and rehabilitate offenders to protecting the society by excluding criminals from society. The four justifications for punishment currently used in society are retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation and societal protection, which attempt to lower crime rates.

Retribution is defined as a proportional moral pay-off to satisfy the conflict caused within society to make the offender suffer as much as the suffering caused.  It can explained in terms of a moral exchange of equal justice; An eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth.

Deterrence is the attempt to discourage crime by punishment.This idea evolved in the eighteenth century when examples of punishment were made known to everyone ahead of time as a warning against breaking the law. It is based on idea that citizens will not break the law if they think that the pain of the punishment will outweigh the pleasure of the crime.

Rehabilitation was designed to reform the offender to prevent later offenses in the nineteenth century. The rational that was given to justify the use of punishment in the legal justice system was that Regukation or control of the offender’s environment can lead to a deviation from his / her normal society. Reformatories or houses of correction such as juvenile homes or Alcoholics Anonymous support groups for alcohol dependent offenders emerge as significant settings where people could learn proper behavior such as rehabilitation as the most forgiving and positive punishment of the four justifications discussed because it promises the offender a second chance at life.

societal protection favors the society by rendering the offender incapable of further offenses temporarily through imprisonment or permanently by capital punishment . Compared to rehabilitation, it offers a different approache to deal with law offenders in that no special treatment is given to the offender in order to change him/ her. Rather, change is created in the lawbreakers’s access to finding new victims in society.