What are the primary purposes of criminal law? answer using the following reading. write your own thoughts
Question:
What are the primary purposes of criminal law? answer using the following reading. write your own thoughts as well. do not use AI.
The Purpose and Function of Criminal Law Denunciation and Retribution The most frequently cited justifications for criminal penalties are deterrence, denunciation, and retribution. The last two, denunciation and retribution, are almost redundant in a system dedicated to imposing penalties for activities deemed objectionable by society. What benefits do denunciation and retribution offer beyond their deterrent effects? Denunciation and retribution could be considered as social goods in themselves. Participating in denunciation and retribution-whether verbal or physical-against those who violate social norms probably increases humans' sense of positive well-being. 2019 Emond Montgomery Publications. All Rights Reserved. Punishing is, as countless psychological experiments have shown, often pleasurable. But this pleasure can be achieved whether the target of social ire is guilty or innocent ( consider the crowds taunting Jesus on his walk to crucifixion or the Puritans of the Salem witch trials). Presumably, we evolved (biologically and culturally) to gain satisfaction from punishing transgressors because doing so provided positive benefits to the group and, consequently, to its individual members through the elimination of groupdiminishing behaviour. The fact that our criminal law system goes to great lengths to ensure that its targets have actually transgressed suggests that denunciation and retribution must be directed at actual wrongdoing; in this sense, their main value seems to lie in their ability to guide behaviour and prevent crime. Deterrence Whether the prospect of criminal punishment actually modifies behaviour in convicted individuals (specific deterrence) or in others who learn of it (general deterrence) has been repeatedly called into question. Some go so far as to say that the criminal law by and large simply codifies what people would do anyway, and so little or no deterrence actually occurs. A good account of the deterrence debate can be found in Paternoster (2010). By contrast, deterrence advocates argue that most people comply with the law as they understand it and respond to its changes. So, for instance, when the Canadian government introduced a criminal prohibition on the possession of an unregistered firearm, coupled with significant penalties for non-compliance, most gun owners registered their weapons or disposed of them through gift, sale, or surrender. Thus, the targeted activity (possession of an unregistered firearm) was undeniably-and, in the unique circumstances, measurably-deterred. Those who contemplate engaging in criminal activities are rarely "rational actors" -that is, they are not people who make subtle cost-benefit assessments and govern themselves accordingly. Certainly, people who are only occasionally tempted to commit a crime are likely deterred by the threat of exposure, arrest, and prosecution. However, habitual criminals are a fairly distinct population-generally poor, often sick with drug addiction or underlying ( often undiagnosed) mental illness, and almost always suffering from deficiencies in impulse control. They are also overwhelmingly young and male, a cohort that is, perhaps for evolutionary reasons, disproportionately driven to taking risks and inclined to violent acts as a means of improving social status. General deterrence has been shown to have little effect on habitual criminals: The path of criminality of teenaged boys, for instance, does not appear to change on the birthday they become subject to greater penalties as "adult offenders:' Some have concluded that changes to the law have no deterrent effect, but surely this is going too far, for the reasons discussed earlier. Nevertheless, we might concede that for habitual criminals, the penal justice system behaves more as a regulator of opportunity to commit crime than a moral force; it acts mainly to disrupt criminal behaviour (because a prisoner is temporarily prevented from committing most crimes, and the activities of organized crime or conspiratorial criminal networks are impaired through the rotating arrest and prosecution of even a minority of its members). In this view, members of the "criminal class" are managed through the period of their greatest anti-social tendencies, and the public absorbs the associated expenses as a significant 2019 Emond Montgomery Publications. All Rights Reserved. 56 PartO ne FoundatioonfC s riminology but acceptable social cost. These issues and related themes will be explored in greater detail in Part Two, Theories of Crime.
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ISBN: 978-0132163644
9th Edition
Authors: Sandra Moriarty, Nancy Mitchell, William Wells