Outline of the Basic Principles of Sentencing

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Outline of the Basic Principles of Sentencing

Legal system is one of the most important parts of the Government,

which directly affects the society and people in the society; as a

result, researchers and criticisers have always inspected it.

This essay will outline the basic principles of sentencing in United

Kingdom. There are five general aims or functions or justifications of

punishment in the UK’s legal system, which are:

1. RETRIBUTION

Retribution rests on the notion that if a person has knowingly done

wrong, he or she deserves to be punished.

This idea was at the heart of the previous Conservative Government’s

White Paper” Crime, Justice and Protecting the Public”. The Government

aims, repeated several times, were to ensure that convicted criminals

receive their ‘just desert’.

Punishing offenders satisfies the requirement that a rule imposes a

penalty for its own breach, that penalty must be imposed.

2. DETERRENCE

There is a belief that punishment for crime can deter people from

committing same offence and can stop criminals re-offending their

crimes.

There are two forms:

* Specific deterrence is concerned with punishing an individual

offender in the expectation that he will not offend again.

* General deterrence is related to the possibility that people in

general will be deterred from committing crime by the threat of

punishment if they are caught.

This aim is affected by:

· Prison sentence/long prison sentence

· Heavy fine.

3. REHABILITATION

Rehabilitation involves offering an offender help to overcome problems

which he faces, thereby attempti...

... middle of paper ...

... that the most severe

criminal sanction--execution--deters no one. However, if reason is

your guide and you remain unsure of deterrence, you are left with the

following consideration. If the death penalty does deter, halting

executions will cause more innocents to be slaughtered by giving

murderers an additional opportunity to harm and murder again.

In my opinion, the sentencing procedure and the punishments are not

really affective, as we cannot see too much different in the crime

rate after hundreds of years. If the legal system were completely

perfect, we would not see any more crime in the society now. In fact,

the sentencing system and the judgment system should be reformed and

new way of justice should be developed, because a lot of innocent are

being held incorrectly, because they cannot prove their innocence.

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