Doing Justice: The Choice of Punishments

By Andrew Von Hirsch

Report of the Committee for the Study of Incarceration. Preface by Charles E. Goodell, Chairman. Introduction by Willard Gaylin And David J. Rothman.

From the preface: “In early 1971, the Field Foundation asked me to chair this study. There was growing disenchantment with prisons, and with the disparities and irrationalities of the sentencing process. Yet reformers lacked a rationale to guide them in their quest for alternatives, save for the more-than-century- old notion of rehabilitation that had nurtured the rise of the penitentiary. The purpose of our study was to consider afresh the fundamental concepts concerning what is to be done with the offender after conviction. The members of the Committee were chosen from a wide variety of disciplines, extending well beyond traditional correctional specialties. The project was staffed and organized during the spring and summer of 1971, and began its deliberations that fall…..What emerges from our study is a conceptual model that differs considerably from the dominant thinking about punishment during this century. The conventional wisdom has been that theT sentence should be fashioned so as to rehabilitate the offender and isolate him from society if he is dangerous. To accomplish that, the sentencer was to be given the widest discretion to suit the disposition to the particular criminal. For reasons which this book explains, we reject these notions as unworkable and unjust. ..”

NY. Hill And Wang •A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1976. 200p.