Mandatory Sentence In Prisons

The application of sanctions by the legal system has been at the forefront of society’s efforts to control criminal behaviour. The most recent trend, especially in the U.S., has been to use prison sentences, particularly what are known as mandatory sentences, to achieve this goal. Mandatory sentences are grid-like sentencing prescriptions that attempt to make the

"punishment" fit the crime. Judicial discretion is severely limited as regards weighting of individual circumstances in sentencing. Almost all U.S. states and the federal government have some sort of mandatory laws, wherein drug crimes have figured prominently.

California has been a leader in this area as the proponent of one of the broadest, toughest and most rigorously applied mandatory minimum policies, commonly known as the "three strikes and out" law (Stolzenberg & D’Alessio, 1997).
The earliest writings on crime by scholars such as Bentham, De Beaumont and de Tocqueville, Lombroso and Shaw, suggested that prisons were breeding grounds for crime (see Lilly, Cullen, & Ball, 1995). Jaman, Dickover, and Bennett (1972) put the matter succinctly by stating that "the inmate who has served a longer amount of time, becoming more prisonised in the process, has had his tendencies toward criminality strengthened and is therefore more likely to recidivate than the inmate who has served a lesser amount of time" (p. 7). This viewpoint is widely held today by many criminal justice professionals and policy makers (see Cayley, 1998; Latessa & Allen, 1999; J. Miller, 1998; Schlosser, 1998; Walker, 1987), some politicians (e.g., Clark, 1970; Rangel, 1999, who said that prisons granted Ph.D.s in criminality), and segments of the public (Cullen, Fisher, & Applegate, in press). Aspects of our popular culture (e.g., cinema) also reinforce the notion that prisons are mechanistic, brutal environments that likely increase criminality (Mason,