The phrase "a penal system" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing the legal and institutional framework for punishing individuals who have committed crimes.
Example: "The effectiveness of a penal system can significantly impact crime rates and rehabilitation efforts."
Alternatives: "correctional system" or "criminal justice system".
Let's admit that we support a penal system that eliminates poor people who commit heinous crimes.
SHUs were supposed to be a solution for a penal system constantly on the brink of mayhem.
Equally pragmatically, they realise that extinguishing all possibility of future release is no way to run a penal system.
Male-on-male rape within prisons is entirely a product of society that continues to brutalise men and women in a penal system no longer fit for purpose.
But we're kept safe from crime by a penal system that locks lawbreakers away in a self-enclosed world pervaded by hidden cruelties and unacknowledged forms of torture.
The question the coalition is forcing: does California, with a penal system larger than that of most countries, need a new prison?
It's surely the only circus in the city where beforehand kids can play a penal-system-theme game in which you try to throw darts at balloons that represent prisons.
His comments came as Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke and London Mayor Boris Johnson said the riots were a result of a "broken penal system" which fails to stop "a feral criminal underclass" from reoffending.
Author and Greenpeace campaigner Ben Stewart explores a world of hardship and insecurity in a brutal penal system controlled by mafia bosses, a Gestapo-admiring governor and rife with threats of indiscriminate violence.
Before the 10th century, the codes often merely presented lists of compositions money paid to an injured party or his family but by the 10th century a new penal system had evolved based on outlawry (declaring a criminal an outlaw), confiscation, and corporal and capital punishment.
The justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, has blamed the riots that swept across England last month on a "broken penal system" that has failed to rehabilitate a group of hardcore offenders he describes as the "criminal classes".
