Word: penalize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Civil Liberties Union-and, more ineffably, as an extension of two centuries of penal reform (see box). But most important, during the decade and a half after the war, the U.S. homicide rate stayed fairly constant and unalarming, never rising above 6.4 per 100,000 (in 1946). Year after year, there were roughly 8,000 killings (a third of the 1981 total), seemingly as predictable and steady as deaths from accidental drownings (5,000 a year) or falls (19,000). Americans felt unthreatened. They could afford the emotional luxury of indulging their instincts for reason. During 1964 and 1965, three...
Jaruzelski's "liberalization" proposal amounts to taking back with one hand what he was giving with the other. The ban on public gatherings, for example, will be lifted, but the penal code has now been amended to make it illegal to "incite public unrest." The punishment for the new crime: up to three years in prison. In addition, it is illegal to "collect" antistate publications; under martial law it was only illegal to print or distribute them. Similarly, the routine tapping of telephone conversations will be suspended. But the government will retain the right to tap phone calls...
...what? What are prisons for? Punishment. At that, prisons have easily succeeded, all the more so in a country like this one, with its lust for liberty, for room to move. By locking a criminal away, a community achieves retribution as well, a theoretical function of the U.S. penal system. Prisons also keep criminals off the streets for a while. Yet, oddly, this most successfully realized purpose?plain detention?has been usually regarded as almost incidental to prison's higher, far more problematic purposes. The loftiest and most desperately sought of these is rehabilitation, originally to be accomplished by religious...
...past year Florida's inmate population had a net gain of 4,457, and the prisons remain overcrowded despite the completion of a new Florida prison every eight months, on average, since 1974. "The South has been punitive all along," says the Rev. Joe Ingle, a Southern penal activist. With its currently teeming prisons, "it is in the process of affirming how punitive it can be." But many Northern prisons have impossible overcrowding problems of their own. During just the first eight months of 1982, California's inmate population grew nearly 12%. Illinois prison officials plan to build space...
...flurry of English penal laws forbade Catholic priests and Masses, and barred the Catholic laity from voting for Parliament or holding offices of public trust. Only in the early 19th century did the laity, against the wishes of the Catholic hierarchy, work out a formula that combined political loyalty to the Crown with spiritual loyalty to the Pope. Though the Vatican never withdrew its anathema against the Crown, this year's diplomatic recognition relegates it to history's dustbin. Catholics regained full citizenship rights in 1829, the English hierarchy was re-established in 1850, and devout Catholics were...