Pursuing Public Safety.A Loose Fish in the Sea of Criminal Justice - Term Paper Example

The states have enforced or applied the principles of incapacitation and rehabilitation as ways to ensure public safety. Recidivism is defined as “a tendency to slip back into a previous criminal behavior pattern” such as the return to prison or a new sentence for a new offense (Beck, n.d.) The principle behind incapacitation follows that a person who is imprisoned will not perpetrate a crime. Imprisonment and capital punishment are the major ways to compel incapacitation which will prevent a person to commit a crime.

Rehabilitation, on the other hand, is non-punitive and believes that a person can be prohibited to commit a crime by helping him to solve his issues that led him to commit a crime. This principle considers that each person is defective and commission of a crime is not the person’s purpose but may be a result of other physical, emotional, sociological factors (Renter, 2008). The paper talks about how the government should focus on determining the strategies that will actually lessen the recidivism.

According to Gomez (2008), although there are lots of theories on how to reduce recidivism and ensure public safety, resorting to incapacitation has not been very helpful to achieve these goals. This is because the government and the criminal justice system has devoted its resources and focus on isolating the lawbreakers and not on how to treat the criminal behaviour of the offenders. The treating of behaviour of the criminal offenders is more important than just merely imprisoning them. Thus, according to the Gomez (2008), it is better to make sure those who are capable of earning an honest living be allowed and encourage doing so.

During the time the study of Gomez (2008) was still ongoing, Minnesota is suffering the highest unemployment rate in seventeen years thus the government thought that it should be the time to address the reality and let this offender work without sacrificing the public safety of the people. Aside from being able to give a chance for the offenders to earn and support their family and earn an honest living, they can help Minnesota on solving issues on impaired bridges, highways, dams, plants and water systems (Gomez, 2008).

This is something like “hitting two birds with one stone.” The offenders are more likely not going to commit crime again because of the employment opportunity given to them. If this is the case, recidivism issue is addressed and community problems are solved without sacrificing public safety. Another Look at That Loose Fish But certainly, this approach will not always be giving us the positive effects. If there should be a reason why we should not try to reduce recidivism among the state and federal prisoners by teaching them to build houses and highways that would not otherwise be built is because of the fact that there will be a number of prisoners that will just run-off and leave the responsibilities.

Another reason is that it is going to be unfair for the public because as we know, there is a high unemployment rate, meaning there are still a lot of people in the community who are unemployed and are not given an opportunity to get a job because these jobs are given to the offenders or felons. Billions of dollars are spent by the government to incarcerate felons to train and at least some of them so they can re-enter the free world more capable of