SOSC 2652 Lecture Notes - Restorative Justice, Anger Management, Incapacitation (Penology)
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Why punish?
- How we approach and understand sentencing has a lot to do with what we think of the
criminal justice system
- Whether we think or it as a funnel or net
- Over incarceration in Canada and the prison punishment nexus:
- Sentencing is an area that has the least support in popular opinion
- Most Canada believes sentences are too linent, this underestimates the severity of
sentences that are handed down by the Canadian court.
- Over reliance on prisons are punishment speaks to prison punishment nexus what means
there is a taken for granted thinking the prison are the primary sanctions for first resort
- Nexus is incredible resilient, people have questioned the high cost of prisons and the
ineffectiveness of prisons
- Yet we continue to have this connection
- When we think of punishment we think of prisons
- Canada remains top five nations for incarceration
- Canada really isn’t very linent, when it comes to incarceration
- Yet people still think we need to be tougher, one of the reasons why is because the
politics of crime control
- This is fuelled by offenders who reoffend on parole or bail
- The reason why those storys are news worthy are because they expections most people
not reoffend
- Sentencing is one of the more media friendly part of the criminal justice process
- Even trails are not interesting for journalist
- Sentencing aspect of the process is particularly media friendly
- Sentencing is a complex stage, Canadian may be correct in a sense that there is a lack of
consistency and complexicty in sentencing
- Judges have a huge amount of discretion
- Sentencing must be legal and done by a judge
- CCC sets max and min sentences
- In a great majority of cases judges rely on their own judgement
- They may draw from their expeoricne, converstion with other judges, their own beliefs
- It falls largely to their discreation
- Sentencing process
- Nature and duration of punishment is done at the sentencing stage
- 3 main questions
- In and out deicison- community base sentence of cusotidal
- Type of sanction-
- Quantum of sanction
- 2 ohaes
- Justifying punishment- why punish ?