Philosophies of punishment - Essay Example

Rehabilitation aims to bring the good if not the best in a person encouraging psychologists to study intensively the psychological effects of being good to a person. Incapacitation is simply getting a person out from things, persons or places that would enable him to commit criminal acts while retribution is punishing because one deserves the punishment. Having discussed these, it is the aim of this paper to make its readers have a general grasp of what these rationales could do and their limitations.

Having thus understood such, it should be the reader’s responsibility to act accordingly be it in the professional or personal application of this paper. Punishment, though obviously important has taken the attention of many debates on its implementations especially when it came to matters as the life sentence or more importantly, death sentence. Debates have been widely discussed and different angles have been considered on this issue but what complicates it is the fact that there are varied opinions on punishment and there are a lot of people involved and could be affected in the implementation or non-implementation of punishments.

This very nature of the complication led researchers to look for acceptable forms of punishment which in a way would justify the intensity of punishment compensating the crime committed, thus the definition of rationale for the punishments. The general agreements on the justification of punishment are deterrence, rehabilitation, incapacitation and retribution, looking forward to reducing crime rate with the exception of the latter (Jawkes & Letherby, 2002, p. 3