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Critically consider the extent to which public opinion should be taken into account in relation to decisions about the type and amount of punishment offenders receive.$9.71
Critically consider the extent to which public opinion should be taken into account in relation to decisions about the type and amount of punishment offenders receive.
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Course
Punishment And Penal Policy (LAW217)
Institution
The University Of Sheffield (TUOS)
Comprehensive summary of arguments for and against utilising public opinion in sentencing offenders.
Content:
- introduction to public opinion in the court room
- nature of the criminal justice system
- what knowledge do the public have and where do they get it
- how accurate is media repr...
Critically consider the extent to which public opinion should be taken into account in relation to
decisions about the type and amount of punishment offenders receive .
Introduction
Public opinion in the UK undoubtedly influences public sector services, with law
enforcement and the Criminal Justice System being no exception.
Academic Mick Ryan has identified an important recent change in the manner of making
penal policy in the UK from an elitist to a more populist style.
Ryan identifies this elite is often attributed with defending and promoting liberal, human
and welfarist policies against the demands of a more punitive public culture.
This punitive public influence can be observed in the trends of uptariffing in the 1990’s,
and the push towards more punitive sentencing despite being a time where non-custodial
sentences were attempted to be encouraged.
Crime has been deeply politicised in the UK, with both the media and politicians
attempting to inform the public as to how best to deal with crime.
The question remains however, should the purpose of penal policy be to appease the
public, or should it be to achieve other preconceived goals?
Paragraph 1 – most of the CJS invisible
Prisons are secluded, closed institutions which the public do not have access to.
The Criminal Justice System is not transparent. Outside of jury duty perhaps, the public do
not see the reality of the systems day to day operation or the consequences of the
decisions that occur within it.
The public may see prison building and court rooms from the outside, but they do not
have a first hand understanding of how these places operate on the inside.
This raises the question of why should individuals with so little knowledge of punishment
and penal policy have an influential say in how it should or should not operate?
Paragraph 2 – what knowledge do the public have and where do they get it?
The public does have some means of learning about penal policy and prisons.
Academic research and insider accounts can give valuable insight to life in prison.
This however, is not the information the public usually become exposed to; with the
majority of them being informed by the media.
We must be careful when defining media as it is in fact plural. There is no one media and
different forms of media will come with different agendas.
News media do still attempt to entertain and grab viewers’ attention, but also attempt to
inform. Entertainment media however is used purely to entertain not to inform.
McLuhan wrote an influential paper which usefully dissects the limitations of the media.
McLuhan wrote ‘the medium is the message.’
By this he meant, all mediums will have limitations. For example, visual television media
may be able to show pictures of prisons, but they can’t translate the experiences of
prisoners, the smells or feelings of the institution and so on.
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