Law Sample Questions

Question

. Where possible, you will be graded on the honesty and integrity of your answers, as well as a common sense assessment of how well you fully and completely answered each question. My suggestion to you is that you should write enough on the essay questions to leave no doubt in my mind that you deserve an “A” on the exam



1. Provide a definition that fully and completely describes the concept of corrections.

2. What could be done to make the current US / Texas correctional systems more functional, successful and/or efficient?

3. Provide an assessment for re instituting either the Pennsylvania or Auburn system into modern prison environments. How successful would it be? Do you think ‘modern’ offenders could benefit from such practices?

4. Which goal of punishment (deterrence, retribution, rehabilitation, incarceration) do you feel is most useful in our modern society and why?

5. Prisoners do (or do not) have enough legal rights and protections currently available to them. Write a short argumentative essay either in support of or in opposition to this statement.

6. Why is accurate inmate and offender classification so important in the modern correctional context? Provide at least three (3) examples in your answer.

7. Provide a brief summary of each of the prison / jail designs (telephone pole, campus, popular, radial, etc.) discussed by your textbook. Which design do you feel is most effective and why? Least effective and why?

Answer

Essay Questions

1. Corrections refers to the various functions that are carried out by government agencies in order to supervise, punish, and rehabilitate convicted individuals before their reentry into society.

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2. The U.S./Texas correctional systems can be made more functional, successful and efficient by developing a medical approach to drug and substance abuse in terms of treating offenders and coming up with programs that help with the transitioning of victims from prison life to community life.
3. The Pennsylvania system focuses on the idea of solitary confinement while the Auburn system entails complete isolation during the night and hard labor during the day with no communication allowed (O’Connor 18). If instituted, these systems would provoke the ‘modern’ offenders into deep self-reflection on their past crimes, leading to far-reaching behavior change.

4. I feel that rehabilitation as a goal of punishment is the most useful goal in the modern society because it not only seeks to punish the offender but also to prevent future recurrence of criminal behavior by the offender through focus on behavior change.
5. I believe that unlike in the past, prisoners of today have enough legal rights and protections currently available to them. For instance, they are protected by the United Nations’ provisions on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Thus, public outcry both locally and internationally would automatically in the event of any human rights violations surfaced in U.S. prisons.
6. Accurate inmate and offender classification is needed in order to assign the inmates and offenders to the appropriate security classification according to the risks they pose (Austin 15). For example, inmates who present elevated threat levels to national security need to be monitored more closely than those who merely pose average threat to law and order
7. The telephone pole prison design comprises a long central corridor for ease of movement with different wings positioned at right angles to the corridor. On the other hand, the campus design prison is the least effective design as it is not easy to tell apart the guards from the inmates and in some cases, fences may be missing (Austin 9). In terms of structure, it is very similar to a small college. The courtyard design is one in which all units of the institution lead to a central checkpoint and the central courtyard. It has the ability to house inmates of different classifications, thus, it is the most effective prison design (Mays, Winfree Jr and Winfree 59).

Works Cited

Austin, James. Objective jail classification systems: A guide for jail administrators. National Institute of Corrections, 1998. Web

Mays, Larry., Winfree Jr, Thomas and Winfree, Latham. Essentials of Corrections. New York: Cengage Learning, 2004. Print

O’connor, Rachel. The United States Prison System: A Comparative Analysis. 2014. Web.