An Empirical Study On The Effectiveness Of Prison Correction

Prison correction is still a core measure of the anti crime system worldwide. The crimerate and the rate of recidivism in our country show a rising trend, which means scientificevaluation of the prison correction against crime and the correct understanding ofeffectiveness are in urgent need. By using empirical research method, this paper firstlysummarized evaluation efficiency of the imprisonment for China’s overall anti crime system.Then, through a sample survey of217criminals and two prisons in China’s H Province aswell as questionnaire survey and interview analysis of106basic level police officers andcitizens, it comprehensively evaluated the correction effectiveness and preliminarily analyzedChina’s prison correction performance problems and differences on an empirical basis.The definition of prison correction effectiveness is that during the process ofimprisonment penalty execution, the correction of subject uses corrective measures onto thecorrection object so as to realize the crime prevention and criminal quality improvementpurpose. Correction efficiency is different from deterrence effectiveness and transformsquality. Imprisonment punishment in our country has criminal correction effectiveness, butits effectiveness is limited and a minority of criminals cannot reach criminal correction effect.The correction efficiency has deep theoretical roots. Education theory of punishment,correction theory criminals’ labor theory, and criminal personality transformation theory andbehavior are the theoretical basis to realize the correction efficiency. Prison correctionefficiency is affected by body elements such as police, criminal correction, system and time;but also by the technical elements such as impact management correction, educationcorrection, psychology correction, labor correction and other aspects; and also is restricted bymany factors such as social external.Evaluation of prison correction effectiveness has different standards. Practical standardsare mainly re crime rate and improving the quality standard of criminals. This study alsoadopted those standards. Through analyzing the statistics of our criminal justice data and questionnaire, it used the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method and AHP method tocomprehensively assess China’s prison correction effectiveness.As for our country’s prison pressure situation, our incarceration rate is still high. Thepressure over criminals is considerably heavy, and incarceration violation rate is very low.This shows that the prison correction can play a better performance. The comprehensiveevaluation for prison correction effectiveness shows that in our country, the crime rate isrising year by year, and the reliance degree of crime penalty has been decreasing. Theanalysis on the influence of detection rate, incarceration rate, heavy penalty rate and otherfactors to the crime rate of the multiple regression shows that the influence of detection rate islarger than that of incarceration rate. Re crime rate in our country is relatively low. Multipleregression analysis on the rate of re crime by factors such as detection rate, detection rate ofsevere sentence applicable only shows significantly positive correlation between them. Andalso, it illustrates the applicability of the severe punishment can not significantly reduce therate of re crime. Prison correction effectiveness has mainly six aspects including promotingcriminals to repent, cultivating behavior, culture promotion, mental improvement, skillacquisition and social adaptation. The comprehensive evaluation which is based on statisticscan draw a conclusion that our prison correction comprehensive efficiency gets a mark of63.796points, which is a better type.There is a big difference between the crime and penalty types and corrective measures ofthe prison correction effectiveness. First of all, the correction effectiveness has individualdifferences in the crime types. The imprisonment effectiveness does not have significantdifferences in the specific provisions of the criminal law of all kinds of crime performance.And when correcting typical crimes, the efficiency of psychological correction measures ismore obvious, and the correction effectiveness is better especially for kidnapping and thecrime of fraud. Punishment of imprisonment has significant difference in correcting violentcrime, property crime and sexual crime performance. The punishment of imprisonment forthe type of property crime and sexual delinquency correction is more effective, and correctionof violent crime is relatively weak. Correction efficiency in prison for first offenders andrecidivism was not significantly different. Prison correction measures are not particularlyeffective for recidivism. Secondly, according to different types of criminal penalty, correction effectiveness also has some differences. In the structure of penalty in our country, there aren’tdifferences between the severe punishment and light punishment on the criminal correctionefficiency. The stress on felony shows a downward trend in China. Especially in2012itreached a historical low. The efficiency of heavy punishment, especially longer terms (tenyears), in the correction of the crime aspect is relatively lower, and does not realize thesituation that the longer term the correction has, the better effectiveness it gets. But lightpunishment also has criminal correction effectiveness to a certain degree. Commutation andparole has different correction efficiencies. The commutation system has an irreplaceablestatus and effectiveness of the correction in China in the process of execution of penalty. Theimportance of the corrective measures in the commutation is on the top, and the prevention ofrecidivism efficiency is also good. Parole is at the last place in the crime prevention becausethe application of parole rate in China is low. Therefore, at present China still can not replacecommutation with parole directly. Finally, prison correction efficiency is different incorrective measures. China’s current four corrective measures-management correctionmeasures, education correction measures, psychological correction measures and laborcorrection measures have large differences in the effectiveness, and the following correctivemeasures have larger differences. The education correction measures and labor correctionmeasures have good efficiency, and the management measures are relatively weak. Becausethe popularity of psychological correction effectiveness is not high, the evaluation results arenot very ideal. Correction performance of psychological counseling is better. Especiallythrough the cognitive behavior modification projects which were locally tested in practicalapplication of our country’s prison correction, it is proved to have better performance.Overall, China’s prison correction has better correction performance, but efficiencydifferences of corrective measures are great. Although in our criminal law punishment ofimprisonment has the tendency of becoming heavier, the efficacy of severe punishment is notbetter than the light punishment. Therefore, severe penalty is limited to serious crimes andlight punishment to the parts of crime, which can be used as selection of reasonable diversionroute of punishment. In the correction approach, we should further explore evidence-basedcorrection and project correction mode. In order to achieve the correction efficiency better,we should adhere to the following principles：the principle of correction necessity; principle of correction scientificalness, the principle of professional,etc.. The improving of theefficiency of correction is system engineering, and it will be parallel with the penalty reformof our country.