In criminal justice, particularly in North America, correction, corrections, and correctional, are umbrella terms describing a variety of functions typically carried out by government agencies, and involving the punishment, treatment, and supervision of persons who have been convicted of crimes. These functions commonly include imprisonment, parole and probation. A typical correctional institution is a prison. A correctional system, also known as a penal system, thus refers to a network of agencies that administer a jurisdiction's prisons and community-based programs like parole and probation boards;. This system is part of the larger criminal justice system, which additionally includes police, prosecution and courts. Jurisdictions throughout Canada and the US have ministries or departments, respectively, of corrections, correctional services, or similarly-named agencies.
Criminal justice is the delivery of justice to those who have committed crimes. The criminal justice system is a series of government agencies and institutions whose goals are to identify and catch unlawful individuals to inflict a form of punishment on them. Other goals include the rehabilitation of offenders, preventing other crimes, and moral support for victims. The primary institutions of the criminal justice system are the police, prosecution and defense lawyers, the courts and prisons.
Penology is a sub-component of criminology that deals with the philosophy and practice of various societies in their attempts to repress criminal activities, and satisfy public opinion via an appropriate treatment regime for persons convicted of criminal offences.
Penal transportation or transportation was the relocation of convicted criminals, or other persons regarded as undesirable, to a distant place, often a colony for a specified term; later, specifically established penal colonies became their destination. While the prisoners may have been released once the sentence was served, they generally did not have the resources to get themselves back home.
A borstal was a type of youth detention centre in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. In India, it is known as a borstal school.
In the United States, habitual offender laws were first implemented on March 7, 1994 and are part of the United States Justice Department's Anti-Violence Strategy. These laws require a person guilty of committing both a severe violent felony and two other previous convictions to serve a mandatory life sentence in prison. The purpose of the laws is to drastically increase the punishment of those convicted of more than two serious crimes.
Prison and Asylums Reform is the attempt to improve conditions inside prisons, establish a much more effective penal system, or implement alternatives to incarceration.
The "Bloody Code" was the system of crimes and punishments in England in the 18th and early 19th centuries. It was not referred to as such in its own time, but the name was given later owing to the sharply increased number of people given the death penalty, even for crimes considered minor by today's society.
Community sentence or alternative sentencing or non-custodial sentence is a collective name in criminal justice for all the different ways in which courts can punish a defendant who has been convicted of committing an offence, other than through a custodial sentence or capital punishment (death).
Sanhedrin (סנהדרין) is one of ten tractates of Seder Nezikin. It originally formed one tractate with Makkot, which also deals with criminal law. The Gemara of the tractate is noteworthy as precursors to the development of common law principles, for example the presumption of innocence and the rule that a criminal conviction requires the concurrence of twelve.
Section 12 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as part of the Constitution of Canada, is a legal rights section that protects an individual's freedom from cruel and unusual punishments in Canada. The section has generated some case law, including the essential case R. v. Smith (1987), in which it was partially defined, and R. v. Latimer (2001), a famous case in which Saskatchewan farmer Robert Latimer protested that his long, mandatory minimum sentence for the murder of his disabled daughter was cruel and unusual.
Left realism, in criminology, emerged from critical criminology as a reaction against what was perceived to be the Left's failure to take a practical interest in everyday crime, allowing right realism to monopolize the political agenda on law and order. Left realism argues that crime disproportionately affects working class people, but that solutions that only increase repression serve to make the crime problem worse. Instead they argue that the root causes of crime lie in relative deprivation, although preventative measures and policing are necessary, but these should be democratically controlled.
Deterrence is the use of punishment as a threat which is considered as a means to prevent people from offending or to reduce the probability and/or level of offending.
Criminal investigation is an applied science that involves the study of facts, used to identify, locate and prove the guilt of an accused criminal. A complete criminal investigation can include searching, interviews, interrogations, evidence collection and preservation and various methods of investigation. Modern-day criminal investigations commonly employ many modern scientific techniques known collectively as forensic science.
The sociology of punishment seeks to understand why and how we punish; the general justifying aim of punishment and the principle of distribution. Punishment involves the intentional infliction of pain and/or the deprivation of rights and liberties. Sociologists of punishment usually examine state-sanctioned acts in relation to law-breaking; why, for instance, citizens give consent to the legitimation of acts of violence.
Hard labor still was the most common form of punishment in China in the 1980s. The penal system stressed reform rather than retribution, and it was expected that productive labor would reduce the penal institutions' cost to society. Even death sentences could be stayed by two-year reprieve. If a prisoner was judged to have reformed during that period, his or her sentence could be commuted to life or a fixed term at labor. The Prison Law of the People's Republic of China was enacted December 20, 1994. Since then the Chinese prison system has operated under supervision of the Bureau of Prison Administration which falls under the Ministry of Justice. All these divisions of government are controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. The head of the prison administration is Liu Zhenyu, his official title is Director-General. The prisons in the provinces are then further managed by local offices of justice. The Ministry of Justice states that it holds prisoners in over 700 establishments across the country. There are also thirty extra penitentiaries for juveniles. The corrections system in China has an official population of 1,649,804 inmates (mid-2015), including pre-trial detainees. The prison population rate is 118 per 100,000 people. Female offenders make up 6.5% of the total prison population and 0.4% of prisoners in China are of foreign nationality. In general, the prison population rate is going down in China. In 2008, the prison population rate in China peaked with a rate of 121. There was a plateau created in 2010 as the prison population rate remained the same. Some issues against human rights that prisoners experience are, “…executions without due process, illegal detentions at unofficial holding facilities known as “black jails,” torture and coerced confessions of prisoners…”. There is a laundry list of issues presented on the U.S State Department’s Humanities report for 2016. These include but are not limited to failure to protect refugees, extrajudicial disappearances of citizens, and discrimination against women and minorities.
A prison, also known as a correctional facility, jail, gaol, penitentiary, detention center, remand center, or internment facility is a facility in which inmates are forcibly confined and denied a variety of freedoms under the authority of the state. Prisons are most commonly used within a criminal justice system: people charged with crimes may be imprisoned until their trial; those pleading or being found guilty of crimes at trial may be sentenced to a specified period of imprisonment.
The Catholic Church's position on capital punishment has varied through the centuries following the Church's establishment, evolving from somewhat supportive to largely apathetic to anti-capital punishment.
Crime in New Zealand encompasses criminal law, crime statistics, the nature and characteristics of crime, sentencing, punishment, and public perceptions of crime. New Zealand criminal law has its origins in English criminal law, which was codified into statute by the New Zealand parliament in 1893. Although New Zealand remains a common law jurisdiction, all criminal offences and their penalties are codified in New Zealand statutes.
Criminal justice reform in the United States is aimed at fixing perceived errors in the criminal justice system. Goals of organizations spearheading the movement for criminal justice reform include decreasing the United States' prison population, reducing prison sentences that are perceived to be too harsh and long, altering drug sentencing policy, policing reform, reducing overcriminalization, and juvenile justice reform. Criminal justice reform also targets reforming policies for those with criminal convictions that are receiving other consequences from food assistance programs, outside of serving their time in prison.
