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Corrections refer to one of the components of the criminal justice system that serves to punish and in many instances rehabilitate criminal offenders. Sentences given to offenders range from probation to serving time in prison, with intermediate sanctions including sentences to a halfway house or community corrections program, home confinement, and electronic monitoring. Financial penalties may include fines, forfeiture, and restitution.

In some countries, as well as in Western countries in the past, this also included judicially-ordered corporal punishment. Corrections is the process of trying to correct an individual so that they do not engage in criminal behavior.

Depending on the level of psychological education of the Law Enforcement groups, some underage defendants (of varying ages around the world) can sometimes be tried "as an adult" because their character is considered adult, whatever the rationale is behind this. Historically, many young offenders were put into the corrections industries, both moral and/ or legal, for unscientific treatments. Before the arrival of psychologically effective corrections, the very predictable and expected results arrived: increase of all crimes, criminalization into habitual criminals and "The Eleventh Commandment": Thou Shalt Not Get Caught.

Legal and official names indicate that involuntary commitment is neither legally nor officially considered punishment. They are for no definite duration or severity and the indefinite severity can easily enter the extreme. Psychiatric prisoners, or "patients", often are watched over in an ordinary prison and by a combination of psychiatric and nonpsychiatric staff. Physically and organizationally, psychiatrically specialized prisons, or "mental hospitals", are integrated into the medical system in terms of executing the sentence. Similarly, one is sometimes not held responsible for actions that one was forced to accomplish by an external power.

Before scientific treatments of social deviances (from the Ruling Classes), moral and legal treatments were segregation of the ciminal from normal life, or from the environments of the ruling classes, into a gated community.

• Crime
• Criminal justice
• Death penalty
• Deterrence
• Individual rights
• Penology
• Prison
• Social control

• National Institute of Corrections
• Corrections.com
• Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA)
• Bureau of Justice Statistics
• Infectious Diseases in Corrections Report (IDCR)
• American Jail Association
• (http://www.westernmass.law)

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