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Shawn D. Bushway and Raymond Paternoster The Impact of 4 Prison on Crime Sentencing policy in the United States is guided by two general philosophies of punishment: a crime-control or instrumental philosophy, and a retributive philosophy. A crime-control philosophy is predicated on the expectation that punishing offenders is justified only because it produces some greater good—a reduction in crime that would not have occurred without punishment. Under this philosophy, the act of punishing a criminal offender involves practices by the state that involve harsh treatment or cruelty (deprivation of liberty, for example), which under normal conditions (that is, without good cause) would not be tolerated or permitted. This harsh treatment of a subject on the part of an authority can only be justified if the act of punishment is instrumental in reducing crime. Punishment , therefore, cannot be an end in itself and must serve another purpose . This other purpose is the prevention of crime. There are several different mechanisms through which punishment can serve to reduce crime. Punishment can reduce crime by incapacitating the person who is being punished if the offender lacks the opportunity to commit crimes while being punished and other offenders do not substitute for the original offender. Punishment may also reduce crime by changing or reforming the offender through rehabilitation programs that reduce the criminal propensity of the person. Finally, punishment may reduce crime if it inhibits criminal conduct on the part of the one who was punished because she fears being punished again (specific deterrence) or if others for whom the punished person acts as an example refrain from committing crimes because they fear that they too would be punished (general deterrence). Although the precise mechanism by which punishment has its effect on subsequent crime differs, incapacitation, rehabilitation , and deterrence share the understanding that punishment is justified because it somehow produces more good (by reducing crime) than it creates evil (by punishment). A retributive philosophy, on the other hand, does not seek to justify punishment on some instrumental or utilitarian ground. The committing of a crime is both a necessary and sufficient justification in itself to justify punishment. Punishment is demanded by the commission of a crime because in a moral sense it nullifies the harm done by the crime. As such, punishment is hardly an evil that needs any further justification; morally responsible offenders demand their punishment, and the moral wrong created by the crime is negated by the punishment. The key concept in a retributive rationale for punishment is, therefore, the notion of one’s just desert. The notion of desert is that the amount of punishment an offender should receive is determined by how much she deserves. In determining what exactly is deserved by a criminal act, modern advocates of retribution are not of one mind as to whether or not desert is guided solely by the amount of harm produced by the criminal act by itself, or if desert should also consider the criminal history of the offender, with the understanding that an offender can be more culpable and blameworthy, and therefore deserving of more punishment, if they have committed criminal acts in the past (von Hirsch 1976, 1987; Singer 1979). Another one of the important differences between an instrumental and a retributive approach to punishment is that, unlike retribution, the instrumental justifications can be examined on empirical grounds. If imprisonment , for example, is justified on the grounds that it reduces crime by rehabilitating the offender, then that claim can and should be evaluated empirically. The same is true for deterrence and incapacitation— each makes empirically testable statements about what should happen to crime when punishment occurs (or changes). Retribution, however, makes no empirical claim other than there should be some symmetry between the harm produced by criminal offenses and the punishment visited upon the offender. Although relatively easy to distinguish conceptually, in practice instrumental and retributive justifications for punishment often become intertwined . From the inception of the penitentiary in eighteenth-century America, there has always been a concern both to inflict punishment for punishment’s sake (the retributive view), as well as have punishment provide a social benefit in reducing crime. For example, the “Pennsylvania or separate system” in operation at the Eastern Penitentiary of Pennsylvania was based on a two-pronged philosophy of depriving offenders of their liberty in an amount that was grossly commensurate with the seriousness of their crime and that was also calculated to induce an internal improvement of the offender’s character...

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