Crime and Punishment in I srael

Abstract

The temporal context for understanding crime in Israel mostly relates to the intercorrelation between immigration and delinquency and revolves around the continuing effort of the Zionist movement to encourage Jewish immigration and settlement in Israel (“Aliyah”), as an attempt to establish the permanent Jewish character of the state. This effort resulted in several big waves of organized and private immigration of diaspora Jews from all across the globe since Israel's formation in 1948. Additionally, and in contrast to this state‐encouraged Jewish immigration, a relatively large and mostly illegal mass of non‐Jewish African immigrants has arrived in Israel from various African states since the beginning of the twenty‐first century. Confronting immigration, physical, cultural, and societal hardships, tackling the complexity of living in geographical and socioeconomical periphery, and facing suspicion, and sometimes hostility, these three immigration groups have presented a varied range and ratios of criminal activity patterns. With regard to Israel's punitive philosophy and policy – the state of Israel is characterized by a complex penal system that seeks to achieve punitive equity between offenders and combines retributive, desert, deterrence, compensatory, and rehabilitative objectives. Paradoxically, however, the Israeli penal eclectic philosophies barely affected the sanctioning policy. Specifically, the percentage of offenders sanctioned to a prison sentence rose significantly and the percentage of criminals sentenced to community‐based sanctions remained stable or slightly declined. Thus, although the concept of developing and improving a system of alternative sanctions was accepted by many Israeli scholars and policy makers as a rational method of assigning resources, reducing crime rates, and rehabilitating as well as deterring offenders in less intrusive settings, it has not been well elaborated and executed.