Criminal Sanction
Identify 3 criminal sanctions that may be applied in lieu of incarceration and that fall under community corrections. Provide an example of each criminal sanction.
Does this meet the mission statement of public safety and victim restoration in the United States? Explain your answer.
Criminal Sanction
There are nearly seven million people on correctional supervision in the US. Thirty percent of these people are incarcerated in prisons or jails, and the rest are supervised within the community after being involved or crossed paths with the criminal justice system. The reason why there are community corrections is that most of the people who have collided with the law are not violent people. In most cases, offenders on community corrections may have violated the law in a way that requires a form of sanction. For this type of offender, it is good for them to be around their families and maintain their jobs. It is viewed to be an effective way of correcting the harm caused by the offender. The government may also see it as a way of minimizing the number of people in prisons.
Community corrections
Paroles and probations
There are two types of community corrections, which are paroles and probations. Paroles and probations go in hand with other forms of non-prison sanctions. At the period, these offenders are at community corrections; they reside in the community and not in prison or jail. Paroles and probation aim at reintroducing the offender into the community as a productive human being. The second aim of probations and paroles is to keep society safe from predators. There is a particular population that most needs such kind of services. These are women, sex offenders, substance abusers, and offenders who need mental health treatment, among others (Caruana, 2018). The community corrections help is providing a space where these people can serve their punishment while still under treatment or seclusion.
In the united states, releasing offenders on parole before they have completed their sentences has become almost like the norm. The goal of parole is to Help people to reintegrate into the meaningful people in the society without full confinement by the court. It is the alternative to imprisonment. In making paroles useful, the offenders are subjected to specified conditions during the period they are on parole. Probation is similar to parole because the legal issues involved in both are identical. The only difference is that those on parole have served a particular time in prison while those on probation are sentenced to community sanctions.
Criminal sanctions
Community service
Several criminal sanctions are part of community corrections. Three of them include community service, electronic monitoring, and day reporting (Brown, 2019). The offenders are given specific hours of working. The work or service they deliver is unpaid and not supported by tax agencies. Community service is under a sentencing option of probation. It has several advantages, which include a reduced caseload in probation supervision. The offenders are exposed to the work environment. It is a symbolic way of compensating the community, and some effects are therapeutic to the probationer.
Electronic monitoring
This system involves the use of electronic signals. A device supplies the messages to a centralized computer through a telephone. It is worn by an offender to help in tracking his or her movements. Offenders that use this device are usually put under house arrest, curfews, a limited permit to attend work or school, or banned from being in specific locations. The machine is generally cost-free to the public. In the previous years, those offenders that have used this method have been arrested for new felonies. Very few percents have tried to escape.
Day reporting
Those offenders that are mentally ill, either on probation or parole, are expected to report daily to different stations. These stations include job training, mental health counseling center, and substance abuse treatment center. Depending on the local funding, regimens may vary from the most complex supervision to the simplest. The daily cost is based on the number of services that community agencies provide. An example of these services is community mental health. For essential services, the minimum amount for day reporting may cost about four dollars.
There are some assumptions made regarding community corrections and the whole idea of criminal sanctions. Most of the people that break the law are not violent or dangerous. The majority of these offenders make offenses that are punishable through some injunctions (Hanser, 2013). In most cases, they don’t need to be put away from the community. Keeping them in the community as a way of helping them maintain family relationships as a way of repairing the harm they cause the city is advisable. Treatment programs are more accessible to more people in community corrections than in jails and prisons. With these kinds of offenders being in paroles and probation, the public is more than safe. The system also works, therefore, restoring victims in the united states.
In conclusion, the purpose of sanctions is to punish the offender by inflicting a type of loss and expressing how the behavior of the offender is unacceptable to the community. It is meant to undermine the number of times offenders commit further crime. It deters an offender from committing crimes further by imposing a penalty. It rehabilitates offenders by putting measures that help in making offenders desist from future offenses and to separate offenders by imposing sanctions that involve direct or indirect compensation for the harm caused when a crime is committed.
References
Brown, D. (2019). Community Sanctions as Pervasive Punishment: A Review Essay. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 8(4), 140.
Caruana, R. (2018). Community Corrections’ service delivery model: An evidence-based approach to reduce reoffending. Judicial Officers Bulletin, 30(6), 57.
Hanser, R. D. (2013). Community corrections. Sage Publications.
