The Shawshank Redemption 肖申克的救贖(精講之三) [ 2006-05-17 09:14 ]
影片對白 Brooks
is going to kill Heywood.
思想火花 制度化的悲哀
考考你 檢驗你的身手
文化面面觀
Parole in the United States
Parole is the early supervised release of a prison inmate. In
most states, mere good conduct while incarcerated in and of itself does not
necessarily guarantee that an inmate will be paroled; other factors may enter
into the decision to grant or deny parole, most commonly the establishment of a
permanent residence and immediate, gainful employment or some other clearly
visible means of self-support upon release (such as Social Security if the
prisoner is old enough to qualify). Many states now permit sentences of life
imprisonment without the possibility of parole (such as for murder), and any
prisoner not sentenced to either this or the death penalty will eventually have
the right to petition for release (one state - Alaska - maintains neither the
death penalty nor life imprisonment without parole as sentencing options).
Parole is a controversial political topic in the United States; during
elections, politicians whose administrations parole any large number of
prisoners (or, perhaps, one notorious criminal) are typically attacked by their
opponents as being "soft on crime". The US Department of Justice (DOJ) stated in
2004 that about 60% of parolees completed their sentences successfully, while
15% were returned to prison, and 4% absconded. These statistics, the DOJ says,
are relatively unchanged since 1995; even so, some states (including New York)
have abolished parole altogether for violent felons, and the federal government
abolished it in 1984 for all offenders convicted of a federal crime, whether
violent or not. Despite the decline in jurisdictions with a functioning parole
system, the average annual growth of parolees was an increase of about 1.5% per
year between 1995 and 2002.
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