It involves capital punishment, sending an offender to prison, or possibly restricting their freedom in the community, to protect society and prevent that person from committing further crimes.
Although parole and probation have long been justified as means of reintegrating offenders into the community, the trend has been for them to be increasingly perceived as cost-effective ways of imposing long-term management on the dangerous.
[7] MacKenzie found that incapacitating offenders who continue to commit crimes at high rates is effective, it works best as a part of a multi-tiered approach.
[8] In addition, the effects of incarceration on the families and children of the inmate may be increasing the likelihood of future criminal activities.
[10] The crime rate in the United States unexpectedly fell sharply in the 1990s, in almost all demographic and geographic areas, and a portion of the drop has been attributed to the incapacitation effect.
[12] The balance between the cost of incarceration and the reduction in crime due to the incapacitation effect remains difficult to make decisions on and problematic for politicians.
[13] In 2015, a similar problem was noted in North Carolina, where a court-ordered reduction in student suspensions appears to be linked in an increase in on-campus crime.
Cutting off a hand of a thief is also an example; this acts to prevent further thefts in a drastic manner, in addition to it having a perceived deterrent effect on others.
The legitimacy of detaining the accused pursuant to the Bail Reform Act of 1984 was upheld in United States v.
[16] Incapacitation theories have been criticized for punishing offenders more harshly than would be justified by their culpability and blameworthiness for the offense of conviction.
For example, Virginia's sentencing guidelines penalized offenders for being younger than twenty, unmarried, unemployed, or male, even though traditionally youth had been regarded as a mitigating rather than an aggravating circumstance.
Antisocial behaviour and the like display high levels of recidivism and hence are the kind of crimes most susceptible to incapacitative effects.
It is shown by life-course studies [20] that long sentences for burglaries amongst offenders in their late teens and early twenties fail to incapacitate when the natural reduction in offending due to ageing is taken into account: the longer the sentence, in these cases, the less the incapacitative effect.