Alternative Sentencing

Alternative sentencing is a type of sentencing designed to alleviate the problem of prison overcrowding and to provide a different way of monitoring convicted felons during a period of punishment. Alternative sentencing for women has been instituted as a way of reducing the costs of imprisonment and also because women offenders are seen as less violent and so less of a risk than male offenders.

There have always been women in prison in the United States, but they have never been given the attention or the concern that men have. They have been ignored because of their small numbers and because female inmates tended to complain and not riot, which made it even easier for institutions to overlook their unique needs. This may be one reason why the United States never developed a correctional system for women to replace the reformatory system that fell into disuse shortly before World War II. By the mid1970s, in face, only about half the states and territories had separate prisons for women, and many jurisdictions housed women inmates in male facilities or in women's facilities in other states. This began to change in the 1980s because the nature of criminal justice changed so that the number of women in U.S. prisons jumped dramatically. In 1980, there were just over 12,000 women in U.S. state and federal prisons; by 1997, there were almost 80,000:

In about a decade and a half, the number of women incarcerated in the nation's prisons had increased sixfold. This aston

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eings 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 it (Packer 3). An examination of the issue of punishment shows that there are many different occasions which may bring about punishment and many different definitions offered as to what punishment may be. Packer differentiates between common usage and a legal and moral definition of punishment. There are five elements in the definition he offers (though he shows that there can be alterations in the first three as needed): 1) it involves pain or other normally unpleasant consequences; 2) it is for an offense against legal rules; 3) it must be imposed on an actual or supposed offender for his offense; 4) it must be intentionally administered by human beings other th

Category: Government - A