Development And Reform Of Community Correction System

In the era of Slave Society and Feudal Society, worldwide criminal laws alwayspunished the criminals with cruel penalties, such as the capital penalty、corporalpunishment and freedom penalty. Since the founding of capitalist society, humanbeings started to pay attention to prisoners’basic human rights, including right to life,privacy and liberty. They tried to explore an appropriate balance between punishmentand protection against prisoners. With the moderating and non-custodial trendof penalty system, more and more light punishments appeared. Under the influenceof this thought, the Community Correction arose at the right time and conditions. Thisarticle is aiming for promoting the renovation of our community correction system bycomparing it with that in other countries. And, with the improvement of thecommunity correction, it will place a significant positive effect on stabilizing thesociety and promoting the progress of our country.Fundamentally, Community Correction belongs to part of the national penalsystem, it is opposite to the traditional custodial measures, but at the same time, it isalso a complementary to traditional ones. Publics treat it as the direction for futuredevelopment of the system. Generally speaking, community correction includes twomodels. First of all, it helps to release some offenders from prison which get chargeswith less severe behavior and misdemeanor. The other one is promoting the successful re-integration of offenders into the community earlier. The most significant differencebetween community correction and imprisonment is that community correctionreserves offenders’ personal liberty and gives them a considerable freedom of action.Since this system connects closely with sociology, it does bring a positive effect onlowering the national crime rate. The author thinks that, even the fundamentals of thetheory had been questioned, and it did bring some side effects during the practicalexperiments, but the pros it brought are far better than expected. Throughoutdevelopment of community correction, it has been adopted more often thanincarceration in western countries such as Britain, Germany, America, Canada and soon. Even in conservative countries like Japan and Korea, the C.C. system has beenused nearly50%of the executions of the punishment. All of these prove that thissystem has indeed brought positive influence to our planet, and it has been acceptedby more and more publics.In the wake of Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China (97Revision),Chinese criminal circle began to come into contact with light punishment thought,which is the theoretical basis of Community Correction，but “notice about thedevelopment of the work of correction pilot of the community”,indicate that Chineseofficials began to promote the community correction system. However, during these10years, it has appeared huge contrast between academics and practitioners.:academic Theory research has been doing in full swing, but correction practice wastotally unfolded. Now that we have rich correction theory, why practice work stalled?This requires law workers to make appropriate improvements.For how to resolve somany practical difficulties faced correction work, the author puts forward someopinions. First of all,the country publish a mature “Chinese Community CorrectionAc”in which should include clearly defined the sentence of community service ofcorrection object, formulate concrete act norm and reward system,and protect thelegitimate interests of the correction object; secondly, divide the executor ofcommunity correction into three parts: correction officials,correctionvolunteers,correction supporter; also make explanation and concreterequirement;lastly,suggest the government to establish Classification treatment and respective treatment to form Chinese correction system,in order to manage criminals.Community correction,as a new Disciplinary measures,its forming anddevelopment is based on certain social and ideological. I think this represent theprogress of human penalty civilization and upgrade of penalty system. In summary,author takes the rise and reform of the community correction system as mainline,commerce from realistic level with vision of jurisprudence and criminal law, analyzeconfused thought and practice dilemma faced when using community correction as ahumane penalty measure, explore the developing trends and practical significance ofcommunity correction system in the future.