LESSON 1

INTRODUCTION TO PHILIPPINE CORRECTIONAL ADMINISTRATION

INTRODUCTION

This lesson starts with the introduction general knowledge about the nature and
definition of Correctional Administration, all around the world and in the Philippines. The
general idea and concept of criminology, the criminal justice, the corrections, the
imprisonment, and the purpose of punishments.

OBJECTIVES

By the end of the lesson, you should be able to:

1. Understand the cycle of action, a criminal action;
2. Discuss the process of criminal law; and,
3. Distinguish the old institution from modern penal institution.

READINGS

Every citizen is, in a sense, a victim of crime. Violence and theft have not only inured,
often reparably, hundreds of thousands of citizens, but have directly affected everyone. Some
have been afraid to use public streets and parks. Some have come to doubt the worth of a
society in which so many people behave badly. Some have become distrustful of the
Government’s ability, or even desire, to protect them. Some have lapsed into the attitude that
criminal behavior is normal human behavior, and consequently have become indifferent to it,
or have adopted it as a good way to get ahead in life. Some have become suspicious of those
they conceive to bed responsible for crime; adolescents or drug addicts or college students or
demonstrators; policemen; who fail to solve crimes’ judges who pass lenient sentences or write
decisions restricting the activities of the police; parole boards that release prisoners who
resume their criminal activities.

Criminal law reflects the fundamental values of a given society, and violations of that
law are systematic of the society’s socio-cultural organization. Thus, criminology, in the course
of confronting the riddle of criminal behavior, also provides a means of studying society and
qualifies as a particularly useful survey course in the societal sciences. As a higher education
attempts to improve the relevancy of teaching and research to public issues, criminology is
taking its place as an academic specialization that combines theory and application.

The first use of the term “criminology” is credited to Paul Topinard, an Anthropologist,
in 1879. The suffix “ology” refers to “a science” or “branch of learning”. And the term implies a
scientific study of crime or criminals. In the 18th and the early 19th centuries, however, writers in
the field were less concerned with scientific analysis that with such humanitarians’ aspects as
the application of punishment. Their writings, as Hermann Mannheim notes, were closer to the
tradition of humane letters than to science. They are devoted to penology rather than the
broader range of topics represented by the criminology which emerged later.

Policemen, correctional officers and other criminological workers have laid claim to the
title of criminologists because they have direct experience in coping with criminals in action.
Criminals usually in the status of prisoner or former criminal may even claim to be
criminologists because they have directly experienced both the development of their own
“criminal personality” and the personal significance of being excused to the workings of the
system of criminal justice.

Direct experience of course, is a valuable ingredient in the expert knowledge of any filed
of practice, but the interpretation of events distinguishes the expert from others who also
undergo relevant experience. The student is likely to have great interest in the dynamics of
personality which are inaccessible to direct observation by the researcher but underlie the
development and expression criminality. The feelings of those exposed to the procedures and
sanctions of criminal justice are important data for criminological research; at the very least,
they provide a means of measuring the efficacy of penal policies in preventing or correcting
criminality. Nevertheless, emotions are not sufficient for reliable understanding of criminal
behavior.

With approval of Edwin M. Schur cites a gradual shift of criminological studies away
from individual approaches that view crime in terms of hereditary, physical characteristics, and
so on. The trend is toward analysis of the ways in which an individual’s position in society – his
socioeconomic status, place of neighborhood residence, family situation, and primary group
affiliations – contribute to his involvement in crime. This represents increasing recognition that
efforts to identify distinct individual characteristics marking “the criminal” have been neither
productive of significant findings nor useful criminological policy making. The trend is to earn
recognition that crime is patterned behavior, and its patterns intersect in many ways the
institutional partners of the overall society.

Applied criminology is carried on by a loose confederation of practitioners in law

enforcement agencies, criminal courts, probation and parole programs, prisons, juvenile
training schools, private and public welfare agencies, and various crime prevention programs.
The broad organization with which this confederation of practitioners operates has been
described as “the criminal system” because ideally the work of each agency would be
effectively coordinated with the work of the other agencies. Recent developments, at any rate,
have produced an unprecedented demand that agents of criminal justice coordinate their
activities within the total “people work activities” of the community.

The increasing complexity of society that has been brought by industrialization and
urbanization necessitates greater coordination of criminological work with that of agencies not
concerned solely with criminal justice. Unprecedented efficiency in carrying out the hosts of
responsibilities of police courts, and correctional agencies is called for.

Coordination of these activities can be promoted by appropriate design of agency

structures, but ultimately it depends on the personnel who man these agencies. It is especially
important because of the unusual degree of discretion called for in decision making by those in
the lower levels of the organizational hierarchy of law enforcement, probation, prison and
parole agencies. Some of the practitioners in these positions are distributed over a wide
geographical area difficult to supervise from a central headquarters and all have intimate and
persistent contacts with those they proceeds. Unit decisions must from comprehensible
partners if the activities of the criminal justice system are to make sense.

Criminal justice often is justified on the grounds that it contributes to the social order of
the community and the well-being of its citizens. In the community, men related to one another
in work, religion, education of children, recreation, buying and selling of goods, and services,
maintenance of roads and sewer systems, and provision of safeguards against fire, disease and
crime. These are community activities in that individuals enter into relationship with one
another in an organized fashion to carry them out. The community functions as a social system
to the extent that it contains both the structure for maintaining social organization and a
workable consensus which binds it residents together through the sharing of collective
sentiments and common interest.

As part of the structure of the community, the police, courts, and correctional agencies
have a place in the overall organization of government that ought to enable them to contribute
to the social order through interrelationships with other social institution, such as the family,
school, business enterprises, and social science agencies. Achievement of this purpose,
however, is difficult in the face of the far-reaching changes underway in contemporary cites.
The rise of an urban-industrial society has had revolutionary effects on the work of criminal
justice. Both the greater size and heterogeneity of the urban population and the increased rate
of mobility have made theory more difficult. At the same time, there has been an expansion of
duties in areas other than the suppression of crimes. Increasingly complex and varied activities
have aggravated the problem of organizational weaknesses.

President’s Crime Commission defined any criminal justice system as the apparatus
society uses to enforce the standards of conduct necessary to protect individuals and the
community. It operates by apprehending, prosecuting, convicting and sentencing those
members of the community who violate the basic rules of group existence. The action taken
against lawbreaker is designed to serve three: purposes beyond the immediate punitive one. It
removes dangerous people from the community; it deters others from criminal behavior; and, it
gives society an opportunity to attempt to transform lawbreakers into law-abiding citizens.
What most significantly distinguishes the system of one country from that of another is the
extent in the form of the protection in offers individuals in the process of determining guilt and
imposing punishment. Our system of justice deliberately sacrifices much in efficiency and even
in effectiveness in order to preserved local autonomy and to protect the individual.

The administrative apparatus of criminal justice suffers from serious organizational

defects. Some law enforcement agencies have utilized personnel inefficiently, tolerated
inadequate performance, or provided erratic leadership the organization of courts has been
described as archaic and wasteful, as demonstrated by clogged calendars, excessive delay, and
concurrent jurisdictions. Correctional agencies are burdened with obsolete facilities and
excessive orientation to safekeeping in staffing and organizational ideology. App parts of the
system demonstrate a resistance to the changes that are required by contemporary conditions.

No matter how efficient the agencies may be, their personnel will encounter evidence of
dissatisfaction with tier work. The law and its implementation will lag behind public
expectations on how it should be employed. There will be disagreements among various
interest groups about the objectives and functions of criminal law. People are particularly
impatient when the force of the law is directed toward them.

Our own traditions impose inconsistent expectations on our Anglo-American based legal
system. The roots of our common law are derived from an individualism which is inappropriate
in an age of large-scale organizations. The irony of white-collar crime is that petty offenders are
prosecuted while the social crimes of great organizations receive little attention. The traditional
emphasis on crimes against person that colors the criminal law lends persistence to this
paradox. Individualism also in expected in our reliance on the adversary system in which trials
become a kind of combat between the prosecution and the defense, and the poverty of
defendants undermines equality before the courts. Nevertheless, the passing of laws is seen as
the shortcut to social reform without the necessity of changing individual behavior or the social
structure.

One consequence is that heavier work loads are places on the administrative apparatus
of criminal justice agencies. The criminal law is pressed into the enforcement of morals, so that
personnel of law enforcement bodies, courts and correctional agencies are burdened with a
large volume of persons accused of excessive drinking, drug abuse, sexual misconduct and so
on. The jails and prisons are clogged with people caught up in efforts to apply criminal
punishments for personal disorganization behavior of such magnitude that it has been defined
as constituting a social problem.

Imprisonment as a form of punishment is a comparatively recent idea. When the court

resorts to imprisonment, its only explicit purpose is the deprivation of liberty. It has other
purposes in mind; these usually are not communicated to prison officials in specific terms.
Furthermore, the authority and responsibility of the judge do not extend to the situation the
convicted offender will encounter. His keepers may be subjected to statutory regulation of the
manner in which they treat the inmate, but the specifics of the regime and of the forms of
treatment imposed upon the inmate are determined by the prison administration in
accordance with prison policies.

Most sentences are longer practiced in other countries. Few men are sent to prison for
more than 5 years. One inevitable result of long sentences is that, by increasing the average
stay in prison, they add to the size of prison population. Excessively long sentences contribute
to prison discontent and hostility, even desperations and hopelessness. This aggravates the
already difficult tasks of the warden possibly leading to riots and escape attempts. The
possibility of discrepancies in length of sentences for similar crimes is increased, encouraging a
conception among certain prisoners that they are victims of injustice. The loss of a sense of
purpose by inmates negates rehabilitative efforts. The prisoner dependent upon commutation
and parole is subjected to the tensions created by uncertainty of his release date.

The purpose of jails in society is to protect innocent citizens, to protect the innocent, to
make sure people who break the law have a punishment and at the same time set an
example so people don’t break the law again. Many observers see this negligence as having
far-reaching consequences for criminal justice. Jail is often the first contact that citizens have
the corrections system. It is at this point that treatment and counselling have the best chance
to deter future criminal behavior. Until the 18th century, all penal institutions existed primarily
to hold those charged with a crime until their trials. Although jails still serve this purpose, they
have evolved to play a number of different roles in the corrections system.

It is often said that the true course of history does not run smooth. This is certainly true
about the development of the modern penal system. Attempts have been made for the better
part of the last 200 years to develop prisons as agencies of moral instruction, as educational
institutions, and finally as industrial centers. In each instance, the attempt failed for a variety of
reasons.

The pattern of what would be seem to be repeated failures in the penal system should
not give rise to defeatism. Nor should temporary setbacks, to include patterns of riot and
disorder, cause us to write off the penal system as an utter failure and prompt a great outcry
for a return to something. Just as crime is a complex problem with a variety of root causes and
manifestations, so too is penology a complex field.

Many of the concepts covered are embodied in Army regulations and doctrine, which
promote the uniform application of procedures and methods.