NCJ Number
94007
Journal
Contemporary Crises Volume: 8 Issue: 2 Dated: (April 1984) Pages: 167-173
Date Published
1984
Length
7 pages
Annotation
Although some radical criminologists, such as Paternoster, Bynum, Clarke, and Norrie, criticize the justice model and determinate sentencing in model in formulating a practical justice reform agenda.
Abstract
The justice model is a philosophy of fairness that combines the theory of just deserts with the principle of formal equality. According to the model, punishment is fair when it is proportional to the crime and when everyone convicted of that crime receives the same punishment. Paternoster and Bynum base their critique of the justice model on the failing of the present fixed sentencing legislation to eliminate racial and class discrimination in sentencing. Clarke indicates the philosophical inconsistencies in the justice model, and Norrie criticizes it as being a policy that serves the interests of the bourgeois. Determinate sentencing as part of a positive program for reform bears some relation to the justice model. The program called for criminalizing capitalist offenses to make the listing of crimes broad enough so that principles of proportionality made sense. Legislatures failed to criminalize capitalist offenses or reduce the number of punishable offenses, and discretion was not addressed in areas other than sentencing. Fixed sentencing as now implemented neither tests the merits of the justice model nor justifies the conclusion that the model represents the state's increased willingness to rely on repressive techniques of social control. Surely, fixed sentencing is less repressive than the indeterminate sentence, and the justice model is less discretionary than the treatment model. If discrimination is one of the central problems in criminal justice, then it is reasonable to advance justice model proposals that hold decisionmakers to formal standards of justice. Nine references are listed.