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Purpose of criminal laws
The role of criminal law
Purpose of criminal laws
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Chloe, you are most definitely right about the importance of criminal law and how it sets the foundation of the criminal justice system. In a short and simple way, for the most part criminal law prevents crime; almost as if it is upholding values. All law, including the criminal law is designed as a mechanism for achieving social control (Clarkson, 2005, p. 253). Criminal law puts in place five functions that focus entirely on benefiting and stabilizing society. The first one is, ensuring our basic rights are intact, by defending and protecting our civil liberties. Second, making sure we have an established community that functions in a smooth way. For example, criminal law provides a major role in pollution control in which helps keep our
Stuntz discusses how there has been a big shift of power in the criminal justice system. When America was first getting started the judge had more power, but today that power has shifted and the judge has less power than the prosecutors. The federal government has big concerns in other areas, while the criminal justice is not its’ own, but works differently. The responsibility and the management of the criminal justice system belong to local elected officials, local law enforcement, and state law. Also the criminal justice system tends to focus more on the Bill of Rights, which four of them are specifically about crime in America (Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth). Stuntz also discusses substantive and procedural law and shows how they can be related, but are also very different. Substantive law defines what a crime and what punishments fit, meanwhile procedural law is about the process the of the criminal justice system, for example, procedural law will explain the steps a police officer must take in order to have a justifiable arrest. There’s also a lot of comparison between the nineteenth century criminal justice process , and the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, there was no elected officials the judge made all decisions, and prosecutors were only paid by cases and conviction, which caused to convict even the pettiest of crimes. Meanwhile, in the twentieth century the balance of power
Within the Federal Government there are three main branches; “the Legislative, the Judicial, and Executive” (Phaedra Trethan, 2013). They have the same basic shape and the same basic roles were written in the Constitution in 1787.
Saint Augustine once said, “In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery?” The criminal justice system in America has been documented time and time again as being a legal system that borders on the surreal. We as Americans live in a country where the Justice Department has failed to collect on $7 billion in fines and restitutions from thirty-seven thousand corporations and individuals convicted of white collar crime. That same Justice Department while instead spending more than 350% since 1980 on total incarceration expenditures totaling $80 billion dollars. America has become a place where a 71-year-old man will get 150 years in prison for stealing $68 billion dollars from nearly everyone in the country and a five-time petty offender in Dallas was sentenced to one thousand years in prison for stealing $73.
The social world has provided us with multiple perspectives when it comes to various topics. A theory is a system of ideas intended to explain something based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained. All three views of crime were created by theorists as an attempt to explain the causes of human behaviors. Each theory offers a variety of explanations for the multiple perspectives the world has.
Today our world is filled with crime. The people committing these crimes must have a consequence for their illegal actions. The system in place to keeping everything fair and safe is called the criminal justice system. This was put in place to ensure there is fairness and justice served to people who break the laws set up by the government.
In every society around the world, the law affects everyone since it shapes the behavior and sense of right and wrong for every citizen in society. Laws are meant to control a society’s behavior by outlining the accepted forms of conduct. The law is designed as a neutral aspect to solve society’s problems, a system specially designed to provide people with peace and order. The legal system runs more efficiently when people understand the laws they are intended to follow along with their legal rights and responsibilities. Within the legal system, there is the Canadian criminal justice system, which is meant to guarantee the safety of citizens within the country and is used to sustain social control and deliver justice for a society.
State-Based Justice systems and Community-based justice systems both work towards bettering our society. However, these two adjacent systems use different methods. The use of different methods means there will be different results. To be more specific State-based Justice results in over incarceration, a problem best said through Elizabeth M. Elliot (2011), “Imprisonment becomes mass imprisonment when it ceases to incarcerate the individual and becomes a systematic imprisonment of whole groups of the population” (Elliot, 2011, pg.10). For Community-Based Justice there seems to be a lack of structural control from the government, which gives way to biased decisions and inconsistent outcomes. These two justice systems are similar by the fact that they equally want to deter crime, reach mutual agreements, and reach a contested solution. There is no doubt that these two systems can learn from each other, to benefit the public 's best interest. This paper will discuss how State-Based systems need to be altered to form better rehabilitation of their offenders, and how the structure of Community-Based Justice can change to remove inconsistency and biased decisions.
By having the political sector involved we saw more and more struggle for which train of thought was going to be dominant, and who exactly was responsible for decreasing the crime and drug rate. The political sector used various techniques such as portraying to the media, attacking each party on their perspectives on the crime and drug issues, as well as blaming society for basically regenerating these “criminals” generation after generation, as well as noting that the criminal was the one at fault and no one else. We saw diverse opinions however; in looking back the developments mentioned above shaped the politicization, which I personally believe will never go away. We have now integrated numerous agencies into the criminal justice system and even in the twentieth century there was political pull in regards to the war on crime, and how tough the political sector thought the government should be (Beckett,
Justice can be interpreted in several different ways. Most people believe that justice is when someone commits a crime, they need to get what they deserve and should be sentenced to years in prison. The reason that people believe this comes from years ago when a person would have their hand cut off for stealing, or if a someone committed murder, they would be killed themselves. Times have changed over the years and several researches have been conducted throughout the years and according to Schmalleger (2012) justice is about fairness, “moral rightness” or “truth in action” (pg. 7). Justice is not only about fairness, rightness or truth, it is about trying to repair the wrongs that one has done and give guidance to prevent any wrongs from happening again. The criminal justice system tries to deter individuals from committing crimes and after some research was conducted it was noted that incarceration is not a deterrent from committing crimes (Vanenburgh, 2004). There still needs to be the fact that all individuals must be held accountable for their actions and they do need to have consequences for breaking the law and the punishment should fit the crime. Justice is about how to balance the crime, the punishment to fit the crime, be fair with the punishment as well as providing the victims with the relief that justice was served. When trying to seek justice it is apparent that everyone looks at the facts that are involved in the case to determine how justice should be done. Some facts that might be looked at could be the defendants childhood situation, what situations may have caused the crime to be committed, does the defendant suffer from any mental illness and the defendants criminal history are good facts to take into considera...
Crime has been around for continuous years and is affecting our world every second of the day. Consequences of committing crime can range from a small fine, jail time, community service or even imprisonment. A prisons purpose is to penalize the criminal for committing crime and to hopefully stop them from committing crime in the future. In the book “The Richer Get Rich and the Poor Get Prison,” criminologist Franklin Zimring stated that growth of imprisonment is responsible for the decline in crime. I do agree with Zimring, but I also have a few thoughts that don’t agree with Zimring. A decline in crime does correlate with imprisonment, but depending on the way the prison system runs. For example; the way imprisonment prepares the criminals for the world, how the families of the inmates are affected and reasons why Norway’s prison system is more successful than the U.S system all give evidence to the negative side of prisons.
The criminal justice system is composed of three parts – Police, Courts and Corrections – and all three work together to protect an individual’s rights and the rights of society to live without fear of being a victim of crime. According to merriam-webster.com, crime is defined as “an act that is forbidden or omission of a duty that is commanded by public law and that makes the offender liable to punishment by that law.” When all the three parts work together, it makes the criminal justice system function like a well tuned machine.
A study found that 73% of young criminals will reoffend within the first year back in society (Dugan, 2015). Honderich (2006; 77) suggested ‘capacitating effects’ will give rise to new wrongdoings once imprisoned. Collective incarceration is unlikely to have a long-term impact on society as crimes reportedly are generational, thus for incarceration to work the state must imprison large sections of society in every generation. Although the key goal of incapacitation is to protect the public, this sentencing rationale may not always be successful in serving the aims of the criminal court, as while it removes criminals from society for a certain amount of time, it does not ensure they will not commit crimes of a more severe nature in the future, thus it may fail in its aim to protect the
Criminal law has several purposes depending on how people view it. A few of the functions of criminal law are to divide criminals from society, rehabilitate the criminal and punish the offenders. However, the two main functions of criminal law are to create an understanding of right and wrong to the society and punishing those who break the law.
Criminal law is basically the foundation of the justice system. The law tells citizens what we can do and cannot do, help police officers to make an arrest, and it also involves taking criminals to prison. Crime is defined as, “whatever the law declares to be a criminal offense and punishes with penalty” (pg. 1). There are a few characteristics of criminal law; harm which threatens society or individual, warning so that
“In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same.” -Albert Einstein When individuals ask what Criminal Justice is most think about police catching bad guys, but it goes much deeper than that. Criminal Justice is a system of law enforcement that involves many different fields used for criminal punishment. Criminal Justice is made up of Law Enforcement, Court Systems, and Corrections Systems to help stop and punish immoral behavior. Criminal Justice works within these three systems to get the ultimate results. It starts with a crime being committed then law enforcement does their job causing the criminal to go to court. The court system decides