Criminal justice in the United States is an expensive business. It
             is the only country in the west that routinely sentences offenders to
             prison terms longer than two years: 39 percent of state prisoners in 1991
             had been sentenced to ten years or longer. It is also the only country in
             the west that, on an average day, holds more than 125 per 100,000 of its
             residents in jail or prison: on a typical day in 1998, nearly 700 per
             100,000 Americans were behind bars. (Hallett & Polumbo, xiii) Yet
             according to many, the US criminal justice system is doing far less than
             enough; according to the US National Commission on the Causes and
             Prevention of Violence, "There is a criminal justice process through which
             each offender passes from the police, to the courts, and back unto the
             streets. The inefficiency, fall-out, and failure of purpose during this
             process is notorious." (Hallett & Polumbo, xiii)
             Contemporary policies concerning crime and punishment are not only
             among the most draconian among wealthy nations, they are also the harshest
             in American history. No other Western country continues use the death
             penalty except the United States: 3300 prisoners were on death row in 1997
             and more people were executed--76--than in any year since 1955. Capital
             punishment has been abolished by all the big democracies except the United
             States, Japan and India. Additionally, many emerging democracies in Eastern
             Europe, Africa and Latin America have also abandoned it. Capital
             punishment in the United States is derided by critics in Europe for being
             antediluvian and barbaric. (Economist, 5/15/99)
             Cesare Beccaria, an Italian philosopher and reformer, is considered
             the father of modern criminal justice; he famously decried older, more
             severe punishments in Europe in 1764 when he published his seminal work "On
             Crimes and Punishments.'' Beccaria was the first to believe in the
             reformati...