l human perspective is not a proper basis forsociety's response to the misbehavior of its laws. This human urge to punishshould be removed from the current system and replaced with methods ofrestrictions that utilize the offender's potential to benefit his victim andsociety at large. In other words, in a free society the end desired is thecorrection of behavior that utilizes the least force . This conforms to theprinciples of limited government, efficiency, reduced cost, and personal freedomas advocated by both liberals and conservatives alike. The basic underlyingconcept of this proposal is that incarceration should be reserved for those whoare violent and thus dangerous to the public. Violent crimes would be definedbroadly to include any act or attempt to injure the person of another except byaccident. This would therefore range from murder to driving under the influencewith current distinctions of misdemeanor and felony offenses remaining in place.The court sentencing procedures would also be modified to exclude incarcerationfor non-violent crimes with an emphasis on victim restitution and communityservice. The court would maybe rely on probation reports to provide thenecessary offender personal history including employment, job skills (or lackof), and personal resources, e.g. bank accounts, property ownership, etc. Basedon this information, the court would apply the appropriate sentence of victimrestitution and community service with close monitoring by probation officials.As with all human endeavors, compliance by offenders would most likely not be100%. The threat of incarceration would have to exist for those failing tosubmit to or comply with court ordered repayment and public service. Many willnot agree with this due to the complexity and in many cases there can be moreharm done then it could be beneficial. But for the most part there is no reasonto believe that the failure rate would be any higher under this type of syste...
