ADMJ 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Work Release, Aust
Document Summary
Prison populations began increasing only after crime rates had already stabilized or, according to the crime victimization surveys, had already began to decline. ". What drives imprisonment rate, is not just crime rates (they have aneffect on imprisonment rate, but they aren"t correlated) ^ reminds us that decisions around how to punish and how harsh the punishment is, is a political decision. A legislature sets a framework which our judges and courts have to work from. There is also enormous discretion around how punishment plays out. The amount of punishment, the amount of people in prison, and the duration of time for which they are there, is not a neat fit with the crime rate. Prison more criminogenic than preventative > higher recidivism rates. The resurgence of prisons and other punitive sanctions in the late c20th and early c21st has been happening however. This was not forseen as prisons had been seen largely as obsolete or marginal by the 1970s.
