Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
10/24/08
Opening Statement
Why should prisoners have it easy and just go to rehab and not pay for their
crimes by staying locked up in a cell? Not only is Rehab a waste of time for
criminal that will never change its a waste of money taken away from our taxes.
The purpose of punishment is to show disapproval for the offender’s wrongdoing,
and to clearly condemn his criminal actions. The government punish to censure
(retribution), we do not punish merely to help a person change for the better
(rehabilitation). The law still have to punish a criminal, even if he is truly sorry and
never offend again and even if we could somehow tell that for certain. This is
because justice, and not rehabilitation, makes sense as the justification for
punishment.
Criminal justice system responds to persons who have violated society’s rules by
communicating, through punishment, the censure of that offending conduct, the
system will fail to show society that it takes its own rules (and the breach of them)
seriously. Punishment, in other words, may be justified by the aim of achieving
‘justice’ and ‘desert’, and not by the aim of rehabilitation.
In jail alone best recognizes the offender’s status as a moral agent, by asking
that he take responsibility for what he has done, rather than to make excuses for
it. It appeals to an inherent sense of right and wrong, and in this way is the most
respectful to humanity because it recognizes that persons are indeed
fundamentally capable of moral deliberation, no matter what their personal
circumstances are.
Punishment advocates that more serious crimes should be punished more
seriously, because the more severe the violation of our rules, the greater the
censure that is needed. What matters is that more serious crimes are treated
proportionately more seriously. By contrast, under a rehabilitative model where
the goal is to change the offender. When it comes to deciding the quantum of
punishment, proportionality (retributive) is the only consistent and fair approach.
While some rehab programmers work with some offenders most do not. Many
programs cannot overcome, or change the tendency on the criminals to break the
law.
The goal of “rehab” is to change the criminal’s behavior towards crime, actually
carrying out the punishment of imprisonment, when it is used as criteria for
release decisions. Evidence has shown that such vast discretion given to
treatment staff, guided only by the grand ideal of “rehab”, has shown to produce
unfair, incorrect and even racially discriminatory results. Rehab has also lead to
what is sometimes called “backend sentencing” were the offender is sentenced
once in court, but in reality he is sentenced again outofcourt because the final
date of his release depends entirely on parole officers or prison staff.