hieved their intended goal of controlling crime in society: to instill values of civic peace and stability through explicit and implicit appeals to retribution. Punishment of infractions against the norms of society, as delineated in its laws, "inspires a desire for harsher as well as more effective punishment" (Pillsbury, 1989, p. 727). The prisons of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were places of misery, horrible brutality, and little rehabilitation. Humanitarian proponents of reform envisioned prisons as "monasteries for wayward souls" . . . a place where punishment for criminal behavior "could be benevolent, which could save the sinner instead of damn him" (Pillsbury, 1989, p. 733).
Over the course of the past two centuries, penal reform has vacillated between perpetuation of a system based on vengeance and retribution as a deterrent to criminal behavior, to that of the last two decades which seeks to impose determinate sentencing mandates on judges who are regarded as being "soft" on criminals. The idea is that a criminal knows he or she is facing a specific period of time behind bars as the consequence of a criminal act, and that alone should be sufficient to deter him or her from it.
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