How Does Society View Punishment

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Inside the Mind of Criminals and Society How does society view society view punishment when a convicted felon, or someone accused of committing a crime in the United States? The punishment that I am talking about is such as jail time, capital punishment, parole, and many other types of punishment that are given out in the United States. With this being said I will also be constructing how crimes like this has an effect on ones society. Many people are always complaining that when someone is convicted of a crime they do not feel that that person is subjected to enough time in prison. Many people believe that the punishment we are giving our criminals in the United States seems to be unfair. The reasons in which we tend to think this is because, …show more content…

The reason of doing this is so that we can send a message to society. This message is that if you commit A, your repercussion is going to be B. Such as if you go and commit murder chances are society want to give you the death penalty because, this will send a message that do not kill human beings as for it is not going to be tolerated. As a society we try to do everything with in our power to reduce crime rates with giving punishment. Yet as a society we want the harshest punishment given to those that we look down upon that are outright disgusting such as rape, pedophilia, and even murder. This conception would relate to Emile Durkheim’s theory because, we can see that by giving some type of punishment we as a society are serving as a positive function. As we serve as a positive function we are looking out for the best of what the society needs or wants. In this case the society wants to lower the crime rate in hopes that showing that their will be punishment for their actions that it will try to make the streets or environment safer. While stating this we can see that Durkheim is stating that when we give out punishment to the society we can see that the punishment is reinforcing social solidarity. We are reinforcing social solidarity by showing an example out of the one that ended up breaking the law and or even rule for this

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