The Purpose of Criminal Law

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Laws serve several purposes in the criminal justice system. The main purpose of criminal law is to protect, serve, and limit human actions and to help guide human conduct. Also, laws provide penalties and punishment against those who are guilty of committing crimes against property or persons. In the modern world, there are three choices in dealing with criminals’ namely criminal punishment, private action and executive control. Although both private action and executive control are advantageous in terms of costs and speed, they present big dangers that discourage their use unless in exceptional situations. The second purpose of criminal law is to punish the offender. Punishing the offender is the most important purpose of criminal law since by doing so; it discourages him from committing crime again while making him or her pay for their crimes. Retribution does not mean inflicting physical punishment by incarceration only, but it also may include things like rehabilitation and financial retribution among other things. The last purpose of criminal law is to protect the community from criminals. Criminal law acts as the means through which the society protects itself from those who are harmful or dangerous to it. This is achieved through sentences meant to act as a way of deterring the offender from repeating the same crime in the future. 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. Properties of criminal law include natural law... ... middle of paper ... ...mmunity. There simply is no alternate system of laws that can maintain the calm and peaceful environment for people of the world besides “law”. One can easily see the need for each and every nation to enforce its own set of rules. While all of the countries of the world have their own individuality – they all have one considerable feature which is a system of law. It has no significance what type of government is the command, the rules are all appropriate to the people in their community. Works Cited http://www.hg.org/crime.html. (2012). Criminal Law-Guide to Penal Law. Retrieved February 18, 2012, from HG.Org. Legal Information Institute. (2010, August 9). Retrieved February 17, 2012, from Cornell University Law School: http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/criminal_law Schmalleger, F. (2012). Criminal Justice. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

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