Does our criminal justice system punish offenders harshly enough or do convicted criminals deserve tougher penalties? Should civil society turn a blind eye to abuses and deprivation that people are subjected to in the prison system?
Or do people who commit crimes simply deserve any misfortune that befalls upon, Flinders University and Rutgers University experts ask in a new Australian-US study.
Criminology researchers warn that indifference to the fate of offenders, both among the public and people in the criminal justice system, could discourage a safe and gradual road to rehabilitation.
“The implication is that these types of hostile beliefs and attitudes stand in the way of efforts towards criminal justice reform,” says Flinders University forensic psychology researcher and criminology lecturer Dr Melissa de Vel-Palumbo.
While the US leads the world in incarceration, with individuals entering jails more than 10 million times in 2020, Australia’s prison population has almost doubled in the past 15 years, from about 25,000 to 43,000 people. In 2020, Australia’s criminal justice system handled about 65,000 prisoners.
