Victims and Prison Release: A Modest Proposal
O'Connor, Erin O'Hara, 1965-
:
2006
Abstract
The political right pushes for the strengthening of our criminal justice system by expanding victims' rights at the expense of defendant protections. The political left advocates the gradual replacement of the criminal justice system with restorative justice techniques. At the heart of both sets of proposals is a crime victim alienated by a system that has slowly eliminated her role in criminal prosecution and punishment. This Essay proposes to serve the claimed needs of the crime victim by giving her control over the execution of 10 percent of the convict's prison sentence. Although fraught with potential complications that would need to be addressed, if carefully managed, these victim control rights could serve the interests of victims, convicts, and society by enhancing psychological healing while reducing recidivism rates. At a minimum, however, victims could be made better off without jeopardizing the legitimate interests of either criminal defendants or society. The proposal seems worth at least a carefully constructed experiment
Files in this item
- Name:
- Victims_and_Prison_Release.pdf
- Size:
- 758.2Kb
- Format:
- Description:
- published article
This item appears in the following collection(s):
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Topham, Ralph; McMahan, Sandy (Vanderbilt University. Human Resources, 2010-07-16)Sandy McMahan, LMSW, Housing Consultant, has been assisting her colleagues at Vanderbilt who were left homeless by the Nashville flood. She describes what resources are available for those people who were impacted as well ...
-
McMillan, Jessica (Vanderbilt University, 2013-04-19)Our current study builds on Beck’s cognitive model of depression by testing whether peer victimization gives rise to depressive schemas in children and adolescents. Specifically, we created a model stating that chronic ...
-
Sherry, Suzanna (University of Colorado Law Review, 1992)The attention and hand-wringing lavished on race relations by Aleinikoff and many others obscures the fact that by every measurement of formal equality, and by many measures of substantive equality, white women are further ...