RETRIBUTIVE TREND IN CURRENT PENAL POLICY OF THE USA

Norbert Elias's theory of a "civilizing process" and decivilization was used to explain punishment enhancement in the USA which resulted in increased number of the convicted, populist penal declamation and expressive violence of penalty in terms of significant and stable decrease in violent crime. The author tried to analyze the abovementioned decivilization theory and factors that lead to this tendency development. "Decivilization" is considered as growing satisfaction with offenders' suffers (both physical and psychological) or growing indifference to such suffers. Moral panic that raises feeling of risk and people's retributive sentiment is one of significant factors of decivilization process. Police, Government Attorney and Court's dependence on people's retributive sentiment is considered as a determinative factor of decivilization process. This dependence emerges in most judges, sheriffs and attorneys' electivity both regionally and federally. This leads to Police and Courts' inability to counteract people's retributive sentiment which often has "decivilizafional" inclination due to moral panic. Moral panic and retributive sentiment generally grow after cruel violent crimes that don't affect overall criminal statistics but seriously affect people psychologically. Since these crimes cannot be completely prevented, the author assumes that retributive sentiment will still influence USA penal policy.