explosion blame the extremely conservative ideology that permeates our society, "an individualistic, every-man-for-himself ideology" (Rocawich, 1987, August, p. 16). When it comes to crime, the prevailing attitude is "lock 'em up and throw away the key."
Research bears this out. Judges are handing out longer sentences than before because they perceive a public demand for them and are sending people to prison for crises that formerly did not merit incarceration (Rocawich, 1987, August, p. 16. To maintain this attitude, Americans are spending $9 billion a year to operate state prisons and billions more on the federal level.
In addition, the cycle of repeat offenders is very disheartening. In a recent California survey, 511 criminals were sentenced to prison and 511 others were put on probation. All subjects bad closely matched personal and criminal backgrounds. The comparison showed that over a two-year study period, 1,300 new charges were filed against the 1,022 subjects. About 45 percent of the charges were for crimes against property, 28 percent for violent crises, 12 percent for violation of drug laws and 15 percent for other charges (Prisons versus probation, 1987, May/June, p. 3).
Further, findings on imprisonment and length of time served indicates that, for the most part, imprisonment neither rehabilitates nor deters. They can't commit crimes while locked up, but will most likely commit crimes once the sentence is served.
Probation is a way to keep the prison population down, however, as statistics have shown, 75 percent of adult felons on probation commit new crimes while on probation (Szumski, 1985, p. 116). Those on probation tend to continue committing crime because in reality they are victims of an overloaded judicial system, one in which judges and prosecutors tend to concentrate on the speedy processing of cases. This in turn, encourages "bargain justice" that is frequently neither. When a probati...