Word: crime
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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What eludes U.S. penology (from the Latin poena, meaning pain) is the basic recipe of effective punishment: speedy, inescapable prosecution, a fair chance for a fresh start, and state-upheld values that offenders can reasonably acknowledge as superior to their own. For one thing, 77% of reported U.S. crimes are never solved; many are never even reported. Thus, most caught criminals see their problem as bad luck rather than bad character. Indeed, such are the human mind's defenses that the guilty often feel in nocent. Dostoevsky astutely depicts a would-be murderer viewing...
...selfesteem, this loser compensates by hating and hurting life's winners. And the U.S. criminal-justice system all too often reinforces his contempt for society's values. If the suspect cannot afford a skilled lawyer, he is pressured to plead guilty without a trial. For the same crime, different judges hand out wildly disparate sentences...
Perhaps the most appalling aspect of all this is the fact that the number of crimes is increasing because the number of young people is growing, and they commit most crimes. Viewing this situation objectively leads to two basic conclu sions. First, the U.S. is now spending $1 billion a year for corrections in ways that can only increase crime. Second, a dramatically different approach can decrease it - for the same money...
...notion that imprisonment corrects criminals is a surprisingly recent idea. Before the 18th century, prisons were mainly used not to punish but to detain the accused or hostages-the debtor until he paid, for example. To combat crime, Europeans castrated rapists, cut off thieves' hands, tore out perjurers' tongues. England boasted 200 hanging offenses. When crime still flourished, reformers argued that overkill punishment is no deterrent. In 1786, the Philadelphia Quakers established incarceration as a humane alternative. Seeking penitence (source of "penitentiary"), the Quakers locked convicts in solitary cells until death or release. So many died or went...
...criminal commitments. Through claims of either "incompetency to stand trial" or "not guilty by reason of insanity," thousands of accused criminals have spent decades imprisoned in institutions that authorities benignly call "hospitals for the criminally insane." In the vast majority of cases, these people have been convicted of no crime. The medical and legal problems that they present have been reversed and confused, since a psychiatrist's statement that there is mental illness is enough to cause incarceration in these institutions. But the euphemism of "hospital" rarely corresponds to the reality...