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government and their roles in everyday
historical background of criminal law
historical background of criminal law
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In history, crimes have been dealt with by the justice system according to its severity as well as the offender: if the crime committed was not very serious and the offender was deemed “non-delinquent”, or “free of any real criminal disposition”, they would be cautioned or fined. However, were the crime a more serious one and the offender appeared to have a “criminal character”, they would receive more severe and more deterrent punishment (Garland, 2001: 42).
In more recent years, numbers of the UK prison population have been on the rise – less serious crimes have been more severely punished - whereas the number of financial penalties issued to offenders have been falling (Cavadino & Dignan, 2013). In 1975, approximately 40.000 people were imprisoned, that number has risen to 83.842 in 2013 (Berman & Dar, 2013). The prison population more than doubled in that time, whereas the overall population merely grew with 14% (World Bank, n.d.), thus, the relative growth of the prison population is significantly disproportional.
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In 2009, that number had declined to 71.9% (Sentencing Statistics, 2009). A probable cause for the increase in prison population and decline of the amount of fines issued could be the government’s increased strictness. Since the late ‘90s it has been their aim to be “tougher on crime, and tougher on the causes of crime”. Ever since, and particularly since the events of 9/11 and events such as the bombing of the London Underground in 2005, the British government has become increasingly punitive (Cavadino & Dignan,
The United States Judicial System is made up of several different courts, which includes the federal court system, the state court system, and the local court system. All three of those court systems handle different types of cases and have their internal structures and roles.
The major goal of the Australian prison at the beginning of the 20th century was the removal of lawbreakers from their activities in society (King, 2001). The Australian legal system relies on deterrence (Carl et al, 2011, p. 119), that is, a system that has two key assumptions: (i) specific punishments imposed on offenders will ‘deter’ or prevent them from committing further crimes (ii) the fear of punishment will prevent others from committing similar crimes (Carl et al, 2011, p. 119). However it is not always the case that deterrence is successful as people commit crime without concern for punishment, thinking that they will get away with the crime committed (Jacob, 2011). Economists argue that crime is a result of individuals making choices
In this essay, I will be examining how the court system can fail to deliver justice for particular cases and people’s circumstances, as well as looking at alternatives to court, like circle sentencing, restorative sentencing and alternatives for children to the formal court system, as outlined in the Young Offenders Act 1997 (NSW). Crime is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as an action or omission which constitutes an offence and is punishable by law. On the other side of this is justice; the quality of being fair and reasonable.
Since the early 20th century, the Scottish penal system has gone through numerous transformations as the society changes and grows, including the important period where Scotland struggled to create it’s own identity, separate from the rest of the UK. These developments have been pivotal in regards to the modernization of the Scottish Criminal Justice system, which is often described as being made up of a complex set of processes and involves many different bodies . Over the past decade, the main problem at hand is that Scotland, a relatively small country in the scheme of things, has a serious problem with imprisonment , meaning that we have a higher imprisonment rate than nearly anywhere else in Western Europe. Recent research has shown that it sends over twice as many people to prison than the similarly sized countries within Europe , but in a debate on penal policy in 2007, the Cabinet Secretary for Justice Kenny MacAskill, stated that “the Government refuses to believe that the Scottish people are inherently bad or that there is any genetic reason why we should be locking up twice as many offenders as Ireland or Norway.” The aim of this essay will be to look at the recent changes within Scotland’s penal system, and whether this ‘imprisonment crisis’ has been the outcome of penal developments in the past.
Throughout history, it has become very clear that the tough on crime model just does not work. As stated by Drago & Galbiati et al. In their article: Prison Conditions and Recidivism, although it is...
Today, half of state prisoners are serving time for nonviolent crimes. Over half of federal prisoners are serving time for drug crimes. Mass incarceration seems to be extremely expensive and a waste of money. It is believed to be a massive failure. Increased punishments and jailing have been declining in effectiveness for more than thirty years. Violent crime rates fell by more than fifty percent between 1991 and 2013, while property crime declined by forty-six percent, according to FBI statistics. Yet between 1990 and 2009, the prison population in the U.S. more than doubled, jumping from 771,243 to over 1.6 million (Nadia Prupis, 2015). While jailing may have at first had a positive result on the crime rate, it has reached a point of being less and less worth all the effort. Income growth and an aging population each had a greater effect on the decline in national crime rates than jailing. Mass incarceration and tough-on-crime policies have had huge social and money-related consequences--from its eighty billion dollars per-year price tag to its many societal costs, including an increased risk of recidivism due to barbarous conditions in prison and a lack of after-release reintegration opportunities. The government needs to rethink their strategy and their policies that are bad
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in the year 1980 we had approximately 501,900 persons incarcerated across the United States. By the year 2000, that figure has jumped to over 2,014,000 prisoners. The current level of incarceration represents the continuation of a 25-year escalation of the nation's prison and jail population beginning in 1973. Currently the U.S. rate of 672 per 100,000 is second only to Russia, and represents a level of incarceration that is 6-10 times that of most industrialized nations. The rise in prison population in recent years is particularly remarkable given that crime rates have been falling nationally since 1992. With less crime, one might assume that fewer people would be sentenced to prison. This trend has been overridden by the increasing impact of lengthy mandatory sentencing policies.
The saying, crime does not pay, probably held more significance a century ago when the judicial system and prison officials focused on the idea that severe punishment was the best deterrent to crime. Punishment in prisons was more than just loss of freedom, it involved chain gangs, hard-labor, the hole, and other inhumane treatment designed to ward off the would be criminals and beat the current criminals into submission. Today, Jeremy Bentham’s theory that punishment must outweigh the benefits of crime is addressed only through loss of freedoms. Prison...
The ideology of increased arrests rates and more likely incarceration has greatly contributed to the growing prison population. As some analysts argue that the billions spent by the federal, state, and local governments on the crime problem is “paying off” (American Corrections, 2016), some results may show otherwise. In the
Over the past couple of decades the UK’s prison population has exploded, causing an overcrowding crisis. Statistics show that intake has doubled since 1993 and the UK now has the largest population of prison inmates in Western Europe at 85,108. The Certified Normal Accommodation (CAN) for UK prisons is 75,440, so ‘the prison estate is currently holding just under 10,000 more people than it was designed to’ as reported by the Prison Reform Trust. Their research shows that ‘the 30 most overcrowded prisons in England and Wales are twice as likely to be rated as failing by the prison service’. Overcrowding is having a negative impact on the effectiveness and safety of the prisons which has been amplified by ‘cuts of more than 20% to the prison budget’ and ‘reformers argue that the best way to improve the system is to reduce both the number of people sent to prison and the amount of time they spend there’. According to The Howard League for Penal Reform, imposing community sentences on offenders rather than prison sentences, immediately diverts them away from ‘rivers of crime’, where ‘prisons are sinking under a tide of violence and rampant drug abuse’ and they argue that by simply putting people in prison they can be swept ‘deeper and
More aspects of the penal system are now privatized, and are set to increase. This includes the privatization of such services as prisons, electronic tags, catering companies, probation work or prison escort services. David Taylor-Smith, head of the world’s biggest security firm, G4S says he expects private companies will be running large parts of the UK’s police service within five years (Taylor and Travis, 2012). Nils Christie’s text (2000) “Crime Control as Industry” draws upon increasing prison populations in the US. However reflecting upon that the prison population in England and Wales has increased from 41,800 prisoners to over 86,000 in 14 years (Ministry of Justice, 2013, 1) Christie also looks upon other countries that face similar problems and how this and modern crime control represents a move 'towards gulags, western type’ (Christie, 2000, 15). He describes the criminal justice system today as a “Pain Delivery” service (Christie, 2000, 143) and argues that it is regulated by the amount of pain they choose to inflict on society and not by the actual number of crimes committed. Christie also identifies changes in capitalist societies and their social organisation, this he says is due to factors such as a larger readiness to report incidents to the police and social controls have declined producing a greater ‘supply’ of criminal acts (Jones & Newburn, 2002, 175)
The criminal justice system views any crime as a crime committed against the state and places much emphasis on retribution and paying back to the community, through time, fines or community work. Historically punishment has been a very public affair, which was once a key aspect of the punishment process, through the use of the stocks, dunking chair, pillory, and hangman’s noose, although in today’s society punishment has become a lot more private (Newburn, 2007). However it has been argued that although the debt against the state has been paid, the victim of the crime has been left with no legal input to seek adequate retribution from the offender, leaving the victim perhaps feeling unsatisfied with the criminal justice process.
Verkaik, R. (2006) The Big Question: What are the alternatives to prison, and do they work? The Independent [online] 10 October. Available from:
Punishing the unlawful, undesirable and deviant members of society is an aspect of criminal justice that has experienced a variety of transformations throughout history. Although the concept of retribution has remained a constant (the idea that the law breaker must somehow pay his/her debt to society), the methods used to enforce and achieve that retribution has changed a great deal. The growth and development of society along with an underlying, perpetual fear of crime are heavily linked to the use of vastly different forms of punishment that have ranged from public executions, forced labor, penal welfarism and popular punitivism over the course of only a few hundred years.
The Classical School of Criminology generally refers to the work of social contract and utilitarian philosophers Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham during the enlightenment in the 18th century. The contributions of these philosophers regarding punishment still influence modern corrections today. The Classical School of Criminology advocated for better methods of punishment and the reform of criminal behaviour. The belief was that for a criminal justice system to be effective, punishment must be certain, swift and in proportion to the crime committed. The focus was on the crime itself and not the individual criminal (Cullen & Wilcox, 2010). This essay will look at the key principles of the Classical School of Criminology, in particular