Resolved: Rehabilitation ought to be valued above retribution in the United States criminal
justice system.
I affirm: Resolved: Rehabilitation ought to be valued above retribution in the United States
criminal justice system.
Rehabilitation is defined as: the restoration of someone to a useful place in society.
Princeton WordNet
Retribution is defined as:
punishing a person [because] she committed an offense that deserves the punishment. On
this view, it is morally appropriate that a person who has committed a wrongful act should
suffer in proportion to the magnitude of her wrongdoing.
Justifications for punishment typically take five forms: (1) retributive; (2) deterrence; (3) preventive; (4) rehabilitative; and (5) restitutionary. According to the retributive justification, what justifies
is that
This means that the resolutional action is a question of justifications. Retribution is only justified
because the punishment is deserved, not because it deters future crime or prevents recidivism.
And, retribution cannot be overly harsh, because definitionally it must be proportional to the
crime.
And prefer these definitions because of precision a) My interpretation is closest to the linguistic
meaning of rehabilitation so there is no need to equivocate retribution and what the NC is
defending, since their advocacy can be expressed as “restitution” or “deterrence”. And b) if all
punishment systems are retributive regardless of whether they seek to punish the offender, the
definitions of words become useless since there is no way to distinguish between completely
different ideas. Instead, we must interpret words to communicate meaning as that is the purpose
of language. Finally, c) this distinction is core to the topical debate.
Dubber and Kelman:
Dubber, Markus, and Mark Kelman. "Punishment and Its Rationale." American Criminal Law (2005): n. pag. Print.
The current debate about how, and whether, criminal punishment can be [is] justified is at least as old
as the Enlightenment. The question has been around for centires, if not millennia, and so have the answers. Thinking, and
writing, about rationales for punishment today remanes within the same conceptual
framework of deontological (or, specifically, retributive) and consequntialist (or, more specially, utilitarian)
theories. While one side (the retributivists) insists that punishment is- and must be- justifiable for its own
sake, the other side (the utilitarians, or consequentialists) contends just as vociferously that punishment is- and can bejustifiable only for the sake of some ulterior benefit, or consequence, such as an increase in utility or happiness or some other social
good.
I value morality but we must differentiate between the morality of an individual and the morality
of a state. Kennan explains,
the functions, commitments and moral obligations of governments are not the
same as those of the individual. Government is an agent, not a principal. Its primary
obligation is to the interests of the national society it represents, not to the moral impulses
that individual elements of that society may experience.
Second, let us recognize that
No more than the attorney vis a-vis the client, nor the doctor vis-a-vis the patient, can govern meant attempt to
insert it represents.
So in determining what constitutes the morality of a state action, we cannot look to individually
based moral systems. Instead, we should use a system of morality specific to the state and the
Resolved: Rehabilitation ought to be valued above retribution in the United States criminal
justice system.
policy makers who make decisions within the state. In every instance policy makers must choose
to save the more numerous group. Rackowski:
On one side, it presses toward the consequentialist view that
alive be maximized.
of persons;
individuals' status as moral equals requires the number of people
in this way,
can we give weight to the fundamental equality
that
Only
the thought runs,
kept
due
to allow more deaths when we can ensure fewer is to treat some people as less valuable than others. Further, killing some to save others, or letting some die for that purpose, does not entail that those who are killed or left to their fate are being used merely
Those who die are
an impartial decision-maker
as means to the well-being of others, as would be true if they were slain or left to drown merely to please people who would live anyway. They do, of course, in some cases serve as means. But they do not act merely as means.
no less ends than those who live.
must choose to save the more numerous group,
It is because they are also no more ends than others whose lives are in the balance that
even if she must kill to do so.
So the standard is minimizing suffering to US citizens. Further, prefer this standard because
utilitarianism is key to any conception of human rights in relation to each other.
Brandt, professor of philosophy @ U Mich. 1992vRichard.
Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights. Cambridge University Press. Pg 199.
the utilitarian view, tells us,
how to find out what are a
person's rights, and how stringent they are, relative to each other, which is much more than
can be said of most other theories,
we
have to determine whether it would maximize long-range expectable utility to include
recognition of certain rights in the moral code of a society,
(For instance,
Before turning to possible " deeper" difficulties, let me make just one point favorable to
that it
in principle,
unless reliance on intuitions is supposed to be a definite way of telling what a person's rights are. How does one do this, on the utilitarian theory? The idea, of course, is that
or to include a certain right with a certain degree of stringency as compared with other rights.
it might be optimistic to include a right to life with more stringency than a right to liberty and this with more stringency than the right to pursue happiness.) Suppose, for instance, one wants to know what should be the scope of the " right to life."
Then it would be proper to inquire whether the utility-maximizing moral system would require people to retrain from taking the life of other adults, more positively to support life by providing adequate medical care, to abstain from life-termination for seriously defective infants or to refrain
If one
wants to know whether the right to life is stronger than the right of free speech on political
subjects, it is proper to inquire whether the utility maximizing moral code would prefer
free speech to the cost of lives
from abortion, to require abstaining from assisting a person with terminal illness in ending his own life if he requests it, to refrain from assisting in the discharge of a sentence of capital punishment, or to refrain from killing combatants in war time and so on.
(and in what circumstances).
Contention 1: The current federal rehabilitation system succeeds. Cadigan furthers:
The BOP
provide[s] substance abuse treatment to defendants and offenders in need of
such services.
Through close
supervision of offenders and quick intervention in response to drug and alcohol abuse
and AOUSC
The basic goals of the AOUSC Federal Substance Abuse Treatment Program are the identification of substance abusing offenders and the provision of treatment for those identified.
, the Substance
Abuse Treatment Program is designed as a tool for the probation officer to use to protect the community. The program is considered an effective and economical community corrections alternative for the courts, although there is little hard evidence to support that contention beyond the
anecdotal.
This program has unrivaled comprehensive treatment. Cadigan 2:
Drug treatment, as defined at 18 U.S.C. § 4251, "... includes but is not limited to medical, educational, social, psychological and vocational services, corrective and preventive guidance and training, and other rehabilitative services designed to protect the public and benefit the addict by
Authorized services for substance abusing Federal
offenders include
urinalysis, counseling, vocational testing, training, placement,
physical examinations, psychological and psychiatric evaluations and treatment, outpatient
and inpatient detoxification, short and long term residential treatment, temporary housing,
emergency transportation and financial assistance, and travel by contract staff to visit
clients. Treatment services are provided by probation staff, through available community
programs that provide services at no additional cost to the government, and by over 2,800
treatment programs under contract to the United States Courts.
eliminating his dependency on addicting drugs or by controlling his dependence and susceptibility 4 to addiction."
, but are not limited to
and
Contracts are awarded through a competitive process The Federal Bureau of Prisons
has provided drug abuse treatment in various forms for decades. Since the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988, both of which included an increased emphasis on and resources for drug abuse treatment, the Bureau has redesigned its treatment programs. With the help of the
Resolved: Rehabilitation ought to be valued above retribution in the United States criminal
justice system.
The
Bureau's strategy addresses inmate drug disorders by attempting to identify, confront, and
alter the attitudes, values, and thinking patterns that lead to criminal and drug-using
behavior. The primary BOP treatment programs are residential drug abuse treatment and
transitional drug abuse treatment. There are 50 residential programs which provide
intensive treatment five days a week and last typically about nine months. During that time
the inmate receives a minimum of 500 hours of treatment.
National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and after careful review of drug abuse treatment programs around the country, the Bureau has developed a drug abuse treatment strategy that incorporates those "proven effective" elements found through this review.
Prefer my empirics. My sample size and quality of data are incomparable. Cadigan 3:
The team successfully matched the records of 27,386 offenders released from the BOP
creating the largest and most complete picture of offenders who have passed through both
subsystems that has ever been assembled. Specifically, this dataset contains detailed
substance abuse treatment information that has not previously been assembled across
agencies. Given the interaction and interdependence of the two subsystems on each other,
to look at outcomes or performance measures for only one of them without considering or
controlling for the impact of the other subsystem seems myopic at best.
The importance of data quality cannot be overstated.
during 1999
Hopefully, in the future any research performed by either
organization will now routinely consider and account for these issues.
And, Cadigan 4 outlines the results of the program:
Of the 3,039 offenders matched who received the BOP program prior to their release
1,349 received no
treatment paid for by the government while on supervision and 1,690 received treatment paid for by the government. Breaking it out by district, 17 districts provided no paid treatment to 65% or more of the offenders, while 30 provided paid treatment to 65% or more and 46 districts were
split relatively evenly. The research should enable us to provide clearer policy guidance to districts on how to handle these cases in the future. Two populations which emerge from the initial results as warranting further study are the groups which emerged from the 500 hour treatment
473 offenders emerged as “failures” and AOUSC
subsequently provided paid treatment to 329
program and the transitional services treatment program labeled as “failures” by the BOP. For the 500 hour program,
while providing no paid treatment to 144. For the transitional services program, 231 were labeled as “failures” and the courts paid to treat 143
while 88 received no paid treatment.
This represents a success rate of 84%. Further, of those 16% who failed, 11% were given
additional treatment.
And, these programs are cheaper than incarceration. Cadigan 5:
With the availability of specialized services and the additional supervision and urine
surveillance provided by the program, courts can consider restricted release in the
community as opposed to a more costly incarceration alternative.
And, even if drug rehabilitation is not indicative of the entire prison population, it represents
over half of federal inmates, compared to violent offenders who constituted only 8%. Suede
2011:
http://www.libertariannews.org/2011/09/29/victimless-crime-constitutes-86-of-the-american-prison-population/ Victimless Crime Constitutes 86% of The Federal Prison Population September 29, 2011
The 2009 federal prison population consisted of [50.7% incarcerated for drugs]: Drugs
50.7%
Violent 7.9%
This is at least sufficient to prove that rehab ought to be valued over retribution on balance.
Public-order 35.0%,
Property 5.8% Other .7%
Contention 2: Retributive policies have failed. Warren furthers:
Roger K. Warren 2007 [Evidence-Based Practice to Reduce Recidivism: Implications for State Judiciaries, National Center for State Courts, for the Crime and Justice Institute and the National Institute of Corrections, August 2007]
Starting in the 70s, the federal government turned to offense-based theories of
sentencing reflected in retributive sentencing models. The new models emphasized
punishment
and favored incarceration not only for punishment but also for general
mid-19
and many state
s
and determinate
rather than rehabilitation
incapacitation and
Resolved: Rehabilitation ought to be valued above retribution in the United States criminal
justice system.
deterrence. sentencing provisions limited judicial discretion in individual cases through
passage of mandatory sentencing requirements and sentencing guidelines that also
increased the penalties for many crimes.
Use of rehabilitation
programs
dried up. Thus, the goals of retribution and general deterrence came to
supersede the goals of rehabilitation and specific deterrence in federal and state sentencing
policy.
The consequences of our more retributive
sentencing policies have been dramatic. Between 1974 and 2005, the number of inmates in
federal and state prisons increased
more than sixfold.
The likelihood of an American going to prison sometime in his or her lifetime more than
tripled between 1974 and 2001
Determinate
Other provisions eliminated or limited parole and early release discretion, requiring all offenders to serve a longer portion of judicially imposed prison sentences.
, custodial and noncustodial,
and treatment
, incapacitation,
The new sentencing policies sought to reduce crime not by changing the behaviors of criminal offenders but by removing more offenders from the community for longer periods of time through harsher punishment and incapacitation.
from 216,000 to 1,525,924, an increase of
America‘s rate of imprisonment had remained steady until the 1970s at about 110 per 100,000. Since that time the U.S. imprisonment rate has increased more than fourfold to 491.
to 6.6%.
Contention 3: The massive increases in the prison population have made criminals more violent
and created social conditions that increase crime.
John
Tierney 2012 [“For Lesser Crimes, Rethinking Life Behind Bars” NY Times. December 11, 2012.]
Many researchers agree that
as sentences lengthened and the prison
population kept growing, it included more and more
people over 55, long past the peak age for violent crime.
many scholars
have begun suggesting alternatives for other
criminals. James Q. Wilson
recommended diverting more offenders
from prisons to treatment programs.
current policies “have the unintended consequence of hardening nonviolent, low-risk
offenders” so that they become “a greater risk to the public than when they entered.
In the mid-1990s the social benefits approximately
equaled the costs of incarceration. Today, the costs outweigh the benefits, and
we
should be shrinking the prison population by at least one-third.”
the incarceration rate
is now so high that the net effect is “crimogenic”: creating more crime over the long term
by harming the social fabric in communities and permanently damaging the economic
prospects of prisoners as well as their families. Nationally, about one in 40 children have a
parent in prison.
the rise in imprisonment produced some initial benefits, particularly in urban neighborhoods, where violence decreased significantly in the 1990s. But
nonviolent criminals like Ms. George. Half a million people are now in prison or jail for drug offenses, about 10 times the number in 1980, and there have been especially sharp increases in incarceration rates for women and for
In all, about 1.3 million people, more than half of those behind bars, are in prison or jail for nonviolent offenses. Researchers note that the policies have done little to stem the flow of illegal drugs. And they say goals like keeping
street violence in check could be achieved without the expense of locking up so many criminals for so long. While
still favor tough treatment for violent offenders, they
, the conservative social scientist whose work in the 1970s helped inspire tougher policies on prison, several years ago
nonviolent drug
Two of his collaborators, George L. Kelling of the Manhattan Institute and John J. DiIulio Jr. of the University of Pennsylvania, have joined with prominent scholars and politicians, including Jeb Bush and Newt Gingrich, in a group called Right on Crime. It advocates more selective incarceration and warns that
” These views are hardly universal, particularly
among elected officials worried about a surge in crime if the prison population shrinks. Prosecutors have resisted attempts to change the system, contending that the strict sentences deter crime and induce suspects to cooperate because the penalties provide the police and prosecutors with so much leverage. Some of the strongest evidence for the benefit of incarceration came from studies by a University of Chicago economist, Steven D. Levitt, who found that penal policies were a major factor in reducing crime during the 1990s. But as crime continued declining and the prison
population kept growing, the returns diminished. “We know that harsher punishments lead to less crime, but we also know that the millionth prisoner we lock up is a lot less dangerous to society than the first guy we lock up,” Dr. Levitt said. “
I concluded that
my guess is that
at the margins. I think
Some social scientists argue that
Among black children, one in 15 have a parent in prison.
Prison serves as a finishing school for inmates. Vedantam furthers:
When Crime Pays: Prison Can Teach Some To Be Better Criminals by SHANKAR VEDANTAM January 30, 2013 http://www.npr.org/2013/01/30/169732840/when-crime-pays-prison-can-teach-some-to-be-better-criminals
In popular lore — movies, books and blogs —
criminals who go to prison don't come out reformed. They come out worse.
Scientists who have attempted to empirically analyze this theory have reached mixed conclusions, with analyses suggesting that activities like drug addiction or gangs are what determines whether the correctional system actually gets criminals to correct their ways.
What else could be at work? Donald T. Hutcherson II, a sociology professor at Ohio University in Lancaster, recently decided to tackle the question by mining the vast data in the U.S. government's National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The survey conducts incredibly detailed and
confidential interviews, and then repeats those interviews with the same people year after year — often going to extraordinary lengths to track down those who may have moved overseas or ended up in prison. Included in the survey are questions about how much money individuals make
Hutcherson pored through data from tens of thousands of
queries to a large number of young people to establish
Spending time in prison leads to
increased criminal earnings
On average, a person can make roughly $11,000 more
[illegally] from spending time in prison versus a person who does not spend time in
prison."
legally and illegally. Because the survey also ascertains whether people have spent time in prison,
whether illegal earnings went up or down after individuals served time. If prison reformed criminals, illegal earnings
once people were released ought to have gone down. But if prison was a "finishing school" for criminals, illegal earnings after serving time should have increased. "
," Hutcherson says. "
Prefer the AC evidence for three reasons: first, it provides analysis of the effects of prison
throughout time, rather than focusing on just a few points of data. This avoids myopic
Resolved: Rehabilitation ought to be valued above retribution in the United States criminal
justice system.
conclusions about the effectiveness of either program. Second, it reveals the underlying cause of
trends in crime, instead of providing correlating values. You prefer causational data over
correlational data because it gives the greatest probability that one system actually had the effect
that the data claims. Third, it traces multiple effects of rehab versus retribution, such as number
of prisoners and likelihood of going to jail. You look to evidence that analyzes numerous effects
because it shows that a trend in one area is not unexplained or a simply a fluke, but instead
accounts for the data in other areas.
So, the system of retribution manufactures more violent criminals. This increases suffering by
increasing crime.