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Incapacitation: Penal Confinement and the Restraint of Crime

NCJ Number
176105
Author(s)
F E Zimring; G Hawkins
Date Published
1995
Length
197 pages
Annotation
This book provides a comprehensive survey of the conceptual, methodological, and policy dimensions of incapacitation.
Abstract
Part I deals with the principal conceptual issues; part II is concerned with research; and part III discusses the links between incapacitation and criminal justice policy. The first of four chapters in part I provides a history of how the incapacitation of offenders became the dominant official justification for imprisonment in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. The second chapter summarizes the literature on incapacitation from its first analytic discussion by Jeremy Bentham in 1802 through to the studies and commentaries of the mid-1980s; and the third chapter discusses the key components of any acceptable theory of incapacitation. The concluding chapter of part I addresses the jurisprudence of incapacitation, contrasting the extensive analysis of the problems of special incapacitation with the lack of analysis of collective incapacitation. The chapters in part II, which focuses on incapacitation research, is evenly divided between critical and constructive segments. One chapter examines the most important research strategies available for incapacitation research, and another chapter recounts the authors' analysis of the effects on California's crime rate of an increase of more than 100,000 in prison and jail populations. Part III presents two chapters that focus on the relationship between knowledge regarding incapacitation and the formulation of penal policy. The authors argue that the amount of crime prevented by incapacitation is both variable and contingent, varying in relation to different social circumstances and under different criminal justice policies. No prospect exists for discovering a unitary level or pattern of crime prevention that might be achieved by penal restraint. The balance of desert and proportionality with preventive potential, as well as approximate calculations of cost and benefit, are the inescapable elements of decisions about the scope of preventive confinement in modern criminal justice. Appended estimated offenses avoided per additional year of confinement, California, 1981-90; 105 references; and a subject index