Word: crimeds
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Across the country, the law-abiding are in a punitive mood. A Gallup poll last spring showed 62% of Americans in favor of the death penalty. The public sense of justice, of the simple fairness and fitness of things, is frayed. The nation's crime rate has risen 300% in the past 18 years, though a part of the increase merely reflects greater attention to reporting crimes. These were precisely the years when society was at its greatest pains to humanize the justice system, make rehabilitation programs work and allow indeterminate sentences to relax the law's supposedly...
...four classic purposes of imprisonment have been: 1) to deter others from committing crime, 2) to protect society from the criminal, 3) to rehabilitate the criminal, and 4) to give him his "just deserts." Today the first three are not persuasive. The prospect of jail does not seem to be a very forbidding deterrent. Society is obviously not safer but more dangerous these days, even though America's prisons and jails burst with a population of 500,000 inmates. Nearly all rehabilitation programs are well-meaning exercises in futility. That leaves reason No. 4, just deserts-punishment, social retribution...
...were in itself a vestigial barbarity. But if progress implies a steady mitigation of punishment, then at some point "punishment" must logically lose its meaning, crossing over to become something else. Besides, not many people are pitilessly marched to jail today for stealing loaves of bread. Poverty may breed crime, but few thieves steal because they are starving in a society of food stamps and welfare...
...punishment should be punishment before it is anything else. If it does deter other potential criminals or rehabilitate the convicted, then that should be greeted as a pleasant surprise. The first business, without being bloodthirsty about it, is to keep society's contract with itself and punish a crime as it promised it would. Author C.S. Lewis has pointed out the totalitarian possibilities in treating criminals as sick people who need to be cured: "If crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call...
...measure is opposed by Governor Reubin Askew, clergymen, parimutuel operators-and many of the state's leading newspapers. But instead of merely editorializing against the threat of corruption and organized crime, the papers have become major contributors of money to the antigambling efforts. Their role raises thorny questions of ethics and propriety...