Do sentences deter criminals?

The purpose of this paper is to review, contrast and to give our opinion on the effectiveness of criminal sentencing and sending a criminal to jail as a deterrent to future crime. Each jurisdiction has a uniqueness not shared by the others, Great Britain has a no gun law, Minnesota uses sentencing guidelines, California aggressively sentences repeat offenders and the Federal Government still uses capital punishment, in our opinion some of the unique methods do deter crime, and some of the most controversial do not.

There is a mode of thinking out there; in articles, journals and conversations, that rehabilitation does not work. A personal interview with LaRaye Osborne, a lawyer at Cargill who worked extensively on the Minnesota sentencing guidelines system, revealed there is an underlying philosophy that rehabilitation does not work well (May 30, 2003). Certainly, rehabilitation provides no measure of when a prisoner should be freed from prison. Osborne notes there are rehabilit...