Incarceration In The Criminal Justice System

Today, our country’s correctional facilities are filled with many people, ranging from juveniles, teenagers, adults and the elderly. To get to where they are, these people committed a crime, if not several crimes and are now incarcerated. Incarceration is a process which is meant to “treat” and to “punish” those who have exhibited criminal behavior. However, in order for a criminal to fully recovery, a behavior modification program may be implemented. Ranging from operant techniques to systematic desensitization, individuals who are incarcerated can shape their criminal behavior into law-abiding and socially accepted behaviors. Before we go into behavior modification programs and their implementations in the correctional system, it is first important to understand the structure of correctional institutions. Typically, the criminal justice system regards to punishment as something that is defined by an amount of time. Time does not decrease undesirable behavior. One of the problems within the criminal justice system is prisonization. Prisonization is a process through which inmates become assimilated in the prison community; therefore, prison becomes a “society for he inmates.” Because of this, it has often been noted that more and more offenders are coming out of prison worse than when they came in. Instead of prison being a place for punishment and

Correctional facilities are increasingly adopting behavior modification techniques, such as operant conditioning, social learning techniques, classical conditioning and system desensitization in order to promote pro-social behavior in offenders. With the use of these techniques, antisocial and criminal behavior will become extinction. Instead, offenders will manifest pro-social behaviors that are in the proximity of society’s social norms. This will not only decrease there ate of recidivism, but make society a safer