Trends in Criminal Justice Corrections

Trends in Criminal Justice (Corrections)
Name
Institution
Trends in Criminal Justice (Corrections)
The criminal justice system has three primary components such as law enforcement, courts, and correction system. The court ensures that people’s rights are not violated and fairness is achieved during the trial. However, the law enforcement apprehends individuals who are responsible for a crime, uphold the law, and investigate crimes. Finally, the corrections ensure that those who have been convicted serve their sentences. Therefore, the work focuses on the corrections system as a component of the criminal justice, including its past, current, and future trends and how managerial and budgetary impact all the three components.
The past trend indicates that there were harsh and dangerous punishments before the introduction of jails and prisons. The offenders were given sentences such as public humiliation, flogging, branding, exile, or mutilation (Russo et al., 2017). Further, jails existed as places where the criminals were held while waiting for their sentencing. The system was considered to be socially unfair as it involved bloodshed and brutal punishment which was rejected based on the humanitarian ground.
However, a new trend developed which involved imprisoning the criminals with the time that the offenders spend while housing depending on the intensity of their crimes. The system included adopting solitary confinement to total abstinence and hard labor to the convicted persons. The prisoners would be held in the confinements at night and allowed to work during the day under strict rules of silence as a way of punishment (Flynn, 1977). The current trend serves the goals of punishment and retribution. Although it is considered effective in meeting its objective, there is an increasing concern about the costs of holding the inmates. The sizes of people who are housed have been seen to be high, and this leads to overcrowding at the jails which skyrocket the costs of housing the inmates.
As a result, there has been a concern about a future trend which is aimed at rehabilitating the inmates so that they become more productive to society. The cost of housing inmates is considered to be high, and there is a future trend to use community-based corrections to rehabilitate the criminals. The community-based approach acts as an alternative to being locked up in prisons or jails, which seems to be expensive regarding food bills. The community-based corrections system has also been termed as probation, electronic monitoring, parole, or house arrest. The community corrections system is considered a privilege and has several conditions attached to it which, when disobeyed, then the offender may be taken back to jail.
There is a current bill, which has been passed in California that intends to reduce the number of inmates and decrease the cost of housing the criminals (Caffiero, 2013). In the US, the number of prisoners who were jailed was estimated to have reduced by almost 14,000 people between the years 20011 to 2012. Moreover, the program was expected to continue reducing the size of inmates by almost 40,000 upon its full implementation in the years 2014 to 2015. The use of the program was also approximated to save t...