Discussion Board Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 2

Discussion Board - Essay Example Four issues have arisen regarding the criminal justice system and its relation to individual rights and social control – restorative justice, retributive justice, psychiatric imprisonment and transformative justice. Restorative justice assumes that the victims can be restored to a condition â€Å"just as good as† before the criminal incident and that penalties for wrongs include community service, restitution and other alternatives to imprisonment. Psychiatric imprisonment, on the other hand, treats crime nominally as illness and, therefore, could be treated by psychoanalysis, drugs and other techniques. Transformative justice, meanwhile, does not consider the life of the victim and the offender, nor make any comparison about it before or after the criminal incident. It assumes that all people can be transformed and not to re-offend nor avenge. (Criminal) It is in my opinion that the United States criminal justice process follows the retributive model. That is because our system uses punishment to â€Å"pay back† wrongful deeds. When we say pay back we do not necessarily mean primitive forms of vengeance, but imprisonment, capital punishment and other punishments that the law deemed proportionate to criminal acts done against other human beings and the society as a whole. Our retributive system does not advocate vengeance per se, but justice in response to the wrongs committed against the victims and innocents. (Maiese) There are three important features in the United States criminal justice system. First, the US criminal jurisprudence is designed to protect the rights of the accused. Second, it is an open system where the court responds and reflects to its environment and therefore, is inevitably connected to the political process. And finally the third feature is the interdependency of the agencies within it – the police, courts and correctional departments. Currently, the US criminal justice