Sentencing in the criminal justice system

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Sentencing in the Criminal Justice System

Lea Allen

Lasell University

Research Methods

Sentencing in the Criminal Justice System

If I had the time and the necessary resources, I would study sentencing in the criminal justice system. The punishing systems have fragmented since the 1970s, and major punitive philosophies of retribution have become outdated. Unspecified sentencing was everywhere; however, when it lost its reliability, no method replaced it. There are no commonly held beliefs on what punishment may or may not do or what justice concepts it can provide or represent. The criminal justice system's most public phase is where a court imposes a penalty on a convicted prisoner. The sentence levied is the outcome of the judge's well-considered decision. Although many people, both the media and scholarly critics, have criticized these rulings, punishment's actual decision-making procedure is incompletely defined. According to O' Malley (2011), sentencing should be arbitrary to meet the needs of justice, and penalty determination in particular circumstances should remain solely a judicial activity. It would be argued, using Isaiah Berlin's doctrine of meaning inclusiveness and the Aristotelian principle of moral virtue, which legislative officers' familiarity with the law and with the community is such that adjudicators will be given a considerable amount of latitude in carrying out the penalty task.

My hypothesis is that in the past decades, the literature on the impact of penalty severity on crime rates has been reviewed several times. The majority of studies argue that there is hardly any proof that tougher penalties decrease Western societies' crime rates. Nonetheless, several critics have been unable to say that penalty intensity differences do not even have significant adverse effects. According to recent evidence, the length of penalties has little impact on the incidence of violence in society, emphasizing studies undertaken in the last century. The lack of longitudinal studies on judge's ruling mechanisms is a pervasive characteristic of sentencing as a social norm. Since judges are occasional participants in academic debates on incarceration, it is unclear what they think of it or how they go about the process. This decreases the criminal justice process's integrity, which is an unacceptable consequence in sentencing processes in which the judicial holds considerable discretion. Consequently, what prosecutors think of punishment and how they handle it to remains mostly unexplored territory in sentencing studies.

My dependent variable is the decision-making process in the criminal justice system. Most people believe sentencing to be the most critical step of the criminal justice system. Nevertheless, analyses that rely only on sentencing outcomes and neglect pre-sentence ruling phases have been questioned. For instance, a convicted defendant who confesses in return for a charge reduction can obtain a lesser punishment than someone who does not confess but is found guilty at trial and convicted accordingly. Therefore, research that does not look at whether a conviction or a plea agreement settled a crime could miss the impact of this initial decision on the final sentence duration. Also, the initial prosecution charge is a dependent variable as it is an essential deciding point for a convicted party. In most situations, the original accusation's gravity would be a significant factor in the actual sentence obtained.

Most offenses are explicitly identified in constitutions or laws, and the clause that defines the offense also describes the necessary sentence. In the criminal justice system, before judges have to make a ruling and decide on the sentence, they have to consider if it is the first time the offender has committed the crime, if the suspect was an accessory or the main or the main criminal, and if the suspect was cruel in their acts. Additionally, the defendant's words can be considered when sentencing. The court may address the defendant and ask them to make a statement, and they can recommend leniency or harsh punishments for the offenders. The aim is to build a sentencing framework that is equal, reliable while simultaneously taking into account strategic control priorities and optimizing credibility, public validation, and public trust.

The research will be a qualitative study as it will help me explore and contemplate what determines an individual's verdicts, opinions, and purposes. The study will offer evidence about the issue of benefits in improving notions or principles for quantitative exploration. Additionally, it will enable me to determine forms in rational and views and explore more into the issues surrounding sentencing in the criminal justice system. The study will be through observation, and the data collected will be reported in participants' views and descriptions. Through observation, I will understand how judges make their decisions and what influences the final ruling. The theory that can apply to my research is the theory of rational choice. This theory stresses deterrence as the most powerful method of deterring people from breaking the law. If the risk of crime outweighs the profit, people will conclude that it is not necessary. However, this theory's research is weak because Critics argue that the high recidivism (return to crime) rates of those who have been returned to jail demonstrate the ineffectiveness of crime prevention. Critics also point out that general deterrence has its limitations. Offenses such as crimes of violence and offenses conducted when intoxicated cannot be prevented because the criminals do not consider the rewards against the consequences (including prison sentence) when violating the law.

References

O'MALLEY, P. (2011). Volatile and Contradictory Punishment. Theoretical Criminology, 3(2), 175-196.

THE PRESENT STUDY - Dependent variables: Decision-making stages in the criminal process - Criminal Justice Outcomes in Intimate and Non-intimate Partner Homicide Cases. Retrieved from https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/crime/rr04_6/p3_4.html