Alternative Sentencing

Punishment itself is a problem and has been since the beginning of human society. Some people today see punishment as a vestige of the human past that should have been left behind when human beings came out of caves and formed a social order. These people feel that we should today substitute measures that do not involve cruelty to our fellow man, and they believe that incarceration (especially in the conditions often found in prisons even today) is cruel. Others believe in punishment as a retributive instrument and feel that punishment must be used against anyone who breaks the laws of God or Man. Herbert L. Packer writes:

I think both are wrong, although the danger of the moment is that we will overuse the criminal sanction, not that we will abandon i

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use of power. The prison itself serves as the justice model, treating prisoners in a lawful manner and so influencing the behavior of the prisoners into the future. This begins with an understanding of what prison means: Simply stated, it is an enforced deprivation of liberty, the taking of some or all of the days of a person's life and his confinement within an area. . . Opportunities for self-improvement should be offered but not made a condition of freedom. Alternative sentencing seems to go against the grain of this model. The essence of the justice model is seen in the move to build more and more prisons to house the growing population in a fair and equitable manner. Yet, this effort in itself also seems to point to the failure of the justice model, as does the high recidivism rate as more and more released felons commit more crimes and are returned to the prison that clearly did not teach them the lawful use of power as intended. The answer that seems to please the public the most is to get tougher on crime, with longer and stricter sentences. The result has been a prison system that is locked in a bind: Overcrowding will continue as long as sentencing laws are strict and more convicts spend time in prison. At the
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2022
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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