Written exercise 2 - Research Paper Example

The idea is that while an offender is in prison, they cannot continue committing crimes and it deters others from committing crimes because of the threat of incarceration. It is therefore apparent that incapacitation is a crime prevention strategy that dominated mid 70s because of the effectiveness of rehabilitation. According to Weisberg (2013), many people justify imprisonment as the best way of preventing crime through incapacitation and that some offenders should even be incapacitated for long because the nature of the crime they commit is serious.

However, the effectiveness in preventing crime and cost efficiency of the strategy has been very controversial especially its ability in curbing or reducing crime. Whereas some argue that the prison space should be left for dangerous offenders who are actually very few, other people think that generalizing incapacitation strategy may be significant in incarcerating a substantial number of criminals. Overall, the ability of the strategy in minimizing rate of crime in the society is highly controversial and no clear reason has ever come out of it.

However, in some jurisdictions, use of incapacitation strategy has significantly seen a reduction in crime rates and this prompted the justification of the policy (Mackey & Levan, 2013). The correlation has also been disputed because a third party may have influenced the outcome because a close scientific analysis has not revealed any form of consistency between incarceration rates and crime or arrest rates. While considering the issue of incapacitation in terms of developing models that may estimate the impact of incarceration, it is really challenging to estimate the crime prevention benefits that can be obtained through the process because of the sophistication nature of incarceration.

Weisberg (2013) argues that it is a huge task for researchers to determine the frequency in which offenders commit crimes and the duration of active crime