Controlling Criminal Behavior

Society's desire to control criminal behavior has always been the basis for the establishment and perpetuation of carceral systems the world over. How those systems operate, and the extent to which they are successful, has been of much concern and debate for sociologists, psychologists, criminologists, and the general public, especially in the western world. In America, the establishment of the current penitentiary form of incarceration can be traced to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the fledgling country sought to separate itself from its historical and political ties to England and the European continent.

Indeed, the American penal reform movement is at least as old as the country. At the time of the Revolution, the main societal controls designed to control and punish criminal activities in use in the colonies were those that had historically been in use in England since at least the sixteenth century: the gallows, whipping post, stocks, and pillory. According to Pillsbury (1989), these structures "had stood at the center of American towns and villages throughout the colonial era [and] were massive structures, built in urban and rural areas, designed for the collective incarceration and reform of a region's criminals" (p. 729).

The establishment of the first penitentiaries paralleled the birth of the new nation in the period between 1790 and 1815, and resulted from a legislative shift away from mere corporal punishment to incarceration

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me is demonstrated by recidivism rates which have not fallen (Gendreau and Paparozzi, 1995, p. 28). Similarly, efforts to create new punishments and treatments as alternatives to confinement have not done much to alter criminal activity. One method employed in the 1980s designed to correct juvenile offenders was the establishment of so-called "boot camps" in which paramilitary humiliation was employed. Inmates were "compelled to rise at dawn, eat meals in silence, [and] speak only when spoken to," and the rest of the day was filled with "menial labor": swabbing floors, marching in formation, whacking weeds, painting walls (Kane, 1989, p. 17). Community release programs have not fared much better. Probation and parole officials find themselves inundated with individual case loads in the hundreds. While this is certainly cost effective, it results in offender supervision which is, at best, minimal. Left unsupervised and untreated, recidivism runs high. In the wake of the "reforms" of the 1960s and 1970s, the pendulum has swung back in the direction of lengthy prison terms. Pillsbury (1989) describes this focus as being almost entirely on criminal threats and has inspired an explicit crime control ideology which

Category: Psychology - C