Prison Term Policy Recommendation

Here in Arizona, the State Legislature will be voting on a bill that could possibly double the maximum sentence for felons that are convicted for committing a crime involved with armed robbery. I am writing this paper to possibly give voters that might help him or her make up his or her mind to vote for this bill to pass. In my opinion I think that voters need to know about all the pros and cons of the possibility that this bill being passed into law. The big question is will this new sentence do more good than harm for the felon and for the community?

While reading the Uniform Crime Report the term armed robbery was described as an aggravated way to rob someone. While robbing this person the robber has a weapon on his or her body used to scare the person that he or she. The word "rob" is described as an action of taking another person's belongings by force or a threat to harm this person.

While researching the term armed robbery I found out that there are records that date back as far as the twentieth century. Robbery is one of the first crimes that were recorded into the English law and the crime was punishable by the decision by each state. Armed robbery did not become a capital felony until somewhere around the 1830's. Robbery in general became such a big offense that the punishment for committing this crime eventually was death. The last recorded execution for armed robbery was reported in 1836 in the country of England. Back then robbery was hard to prove beyond a doubt unless the robber was caught in the act. (Law. rank, 2007).

Here in the United States, robbery was also punished by death if the person was caught. This type of capital punishment stopped sometime in the 1960's. It was recorded that there were at least ten different states that carried out this punishment for armed robbery. From the recorded documents there were about 24 people that were put to death for armed robbery during 1930's till around 1960's. In the present constitution, it is against the law to put a person to death for armed robbery unless there is a person that dies during the armed robbery. Only f the person being robed gets killed during the robbery then and only then is death allowed to be the punishment for the felon that committed the robbery. (Law. rank, 2007).

While looking at the Bureau of Justice Statistics web site, I figured out that during the years 1973 and 2005 there was a constant change in the numbers but slowly went down in percentage. For example in the year 1973 the robbery percent was 6.7, in 1980 the percent went down by a tenth which was 6.6, in 1990 there was a slightly bigger decline to 5.7, and in 2005 there was a tremendous drop in the percentage, down to 2.6.

When attempting to make a decision on whether to vote for this bill of changing the maximum sentence to death for armed robbery, I think it is very important to know all the different percentages of how this particular crime has either grown or declined over the past years compared to the present day. By looking at the percentages that I stated earlier, it appears to me that without putting a death sentence into the maximum sentence for armed robbery the percentages have dropped a great deal. In my opinion, I think that the people in the higher courts that are trying to change this bill should look at this decline of numbers which are very positive before this bill is brought before the people to vote on. If these numbers were on a major incline I could understand why this bill would be in question.

A recommendation that I could offer is to figure out which