by Norman Munro

Created on: September 03, 2009   Last Updated: September 05, 2009

Crime and Punishment in American Society.

There can be few Americans who are not concerned by, or have been personally affected by the crime rates in our country. Our politicians have a remit to protect us, and we shall examine whether or not the punishments they have put in place are effective in achieving this aim.

Retribution - an eye for an eye - is perhaps society's oldest response to crime. Superficially, it has many attractions - the perpetrator certainly suffers, and the victim and society at large have their natural urge for revenge satisfied. In its primitive form, it may have been literal in the Biblical sense of an eye for an eye, but such a literal approach is no longer morally acceptable.

Retribution now consists of causing the perpetrator financial pain or removing his liberty - and our prison population continues to rise. America has by far the highest incarceration rate in the developed world by a factor of five. The prison system is overcrowded, incredibly ineffective, and incredibly expensive.

America's hunger for retribution is the main driver in this scenario, and has resulted in some extreme absurdities. In one particular case, a criminal received a fifty year to life sentence for stealing $150 worth of video tapes. (Lockyer v. Andrade, 123 S. Ct. 1166 (2003).)

Financial retribution in the form of fines can be effective, but the peculiarities of the justice system are such that the fines levied are often disproportionate (in either direction) to the gravity of the offense. According to Martin "In the case of fines, the financial position of an offender is not taken into account, leading to situations where an unemployed man and a millionaire could be forced to pay the same fine, creating an unjust situation; either the fine would be too punitive for the unemployed offender, or not large enough to punish the millionaire." (2)

Societal retribution insofar as it is incorporated into the prison system, is clearly designed to cause the offender to suffer - by removing some of his civil rights, taking away his liberty, giving him relatively harsh (and in the case of the so-called Supermax prisons), extremely harsh living conditions.

It also, for the medium to long term prisoner, takes away hope. People are resilient, they adapt well, in the prison population this means that they quickly adapt to a new social grouping, a new sub-culture and mindset that makes it much easier for them to tolerate their imprisonment.

They are, however, exposed

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