Boaz Sangero (Sapir Academic College, Western Galilee College) has published "From Beccaria to Negation of Incarceration for Non-Violent Property Offenses" on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The experience of the criminal justice system in the United States in recent decades shows that mass incarceration has not achieved its goals, especially the reduction of crime. At the same time, imprisonment of many people across the country has caused suffering to many prisoners and their families and resulted in the destruction of small minority communities. Whereas in the past it was thought that people could be educated in prisons and turned into better citizens, reports and studies have shown that the opposite is true: not only are prisoners not rehabilitated, but they undergo a process of “prisonization” that makes them more dangerous to society than they had been before imprisonment.
The main argument of this Article is that we use imprisonment excessively and that we must restrict its use mainly to offenses involving attacks on the victim’s body (whether violence, the threat of violence, or sexual assault) accompanied by mens rea, and to use other penalties for pure property offenses that do not involve violence. To substantiate this argument, the Article returns to Beccaria’s monumental book “On Crimes and Punishments,” where it finds significant support.
Part I develops Beccaria’s reasoning into the main argument of the Article: there should be no incarceration for non-violent property offenses.
Part II formulates a proposal for a drastic change in approach to imprisonment, touching on four milestones: the Martinson Report, the development of the Prison Abolition Movement abolitionist movement, the National Academy of Sciences report (2014), and the British Academy report (2014).
Part III describes discusses the instructive recent decision of the Israeli Supreme Court regarding the minimal living space for inmates, which forced the government to release thousands of prisoners and detainees, and quite likely, to change future policy and imprison fewer people, for shorter periods. Part III also goes back to Beccaria’s book for inspiration on how to achieve the abovementioned goal. Part IV Finally, Part III qualifies the sweeping proposal that entirely rules out incarceration for non-violent property offenses and proposes instead a rejection of imprisonment for pure property offenses that protect only the social value of property, without any other significant social value.
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