Should The Penal Code Regulates Too?

All societies have rules and regulations as well as penalties for those who violate them. There are numerous theories about the philosophy behind these laws and punishments, and the reasons we implement them. A short analysis of two of these perspectives can shed light on the differences between the various ideas while illustrating that, in reality, each theory carries some validity.

The criminal law system encourages compliance and reduces non-compliance through an array of mechanisms, including situational and social crime prevention along with increasing police powers under the Law Enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Amendment Act 2014 (LEPRA). The criminal law appears to be relatively effective in decreasing non-compliance, as the majority of people are law-abiding citizens as they enjoy the liberties and protection that a disciplined society provides. Criminal law may further encourage compliance by punishing violations of the law on behalf of society where individuals fail to comply. However, regardless of the criminal law’s efforts in reducing non-compliance, continuous defilements of the law occur frequently, causing the community to question the effectiveness of the criminal law in encouraging compliance and reducing non-compliance.

Within the past decades, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of heinous crimes committed, causing some of the laws to significantly change. During the 1970s, some dramatic changes occurred when laws shifted from one extreme to another: rehabilitation to retribution. Such circumstances created an additional emphasis on the offense rather than on the offender. During the 1980s, the “get-tough-on-crime” era began; thus, radical changes in laws continued up until the late 1990s. Throughout the period of the Industrial Society, the United States had two bipolar types of punishment: harsh and lenient. Today, the main focus of the Criminal Justice System is about retribution and punishment.

“How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction?”, asks Adam Gopnik, a writer for The New Yorker in “The Caging of America”. So how did we get here? What has it done to our society? Gopnik elaborates on these questions and many more as he explicates the history of prisons, the convolution of their systems, and the detrimental consequences that prisoners are left to face. Although Gopnik undeniably articulates, “we need to take more care,” he lacks a concrete solution to the epidemic that is mass-incarceration. But in order for us to unearth this solution, we must first retrace the history of mass incarceration and reevaluate the egregious effects it has on our society.

Criminal law is a construct of the government, enforced through tangible measures. In a democratic society, the government is elected by the citizens, and as such, laws are generally conceived with the aim to reflect whatever ethical or moral standards are presently acceptable. However, in order to be truly effective, some legislation must circumvent current sociological viewpoints in order to create laws that are genuinely in the best interests of society. This results in a delicate balancing act, as lawmakers attempt to weigh the views of the majority against the need for laws to be both reasoned and objective.

Mass incarceration has been a huge social problem since the 1980s; it came hand in hand with the war on drugs. Elliott Currie, a professor of criminology and law, suggests that building more prisons, imposing longer sentences, and applying harsh punishments will not lower the incarceration rate. In his chapter on “Assessing the Prison Experiment,” he explained that the increase of crime rate is not the sole reason that mass incarceration occurs, and it was also because courts

“Loosening up won’t mean there will be chaos, [b]ut the law must be seen to work,” (Reyes 183). A special case in Singapore brings up the widespread argument that causes this quote to come forward in “Rough Justice: A Canning in Singapore Stirs Up a Fierce Debate About Crime and Punishment” by Alejandro Reyes and the counter argument presented from a The New York Times article “Time to Assert American Values.” Both of these texts touch on the case of the canning of teenager Michael Fay, but reveal two different claims. After reading both texts and examining the types of evidence used, the article “Rough Justice: A Canning in Singapore Stirs Up a Fierce Debate About Crime and Punishment” uses the most reliable and dependable evidence to support the claim because the author found a way to use all three types of evidence and doesn’t call for an unlikely call to action.

It has been discovered from multiple sources that ever since ancient times, punishment was a necessary concept in order to prevent crime or wrongdoings. Ancient laws such as the Code of Hammurabi and the Mosaic Law (or Law given to Moses atop Mt. Sinai) use different methods to attempt to prevent or minimize the unavoidable occurrence of crime. Hammurabi’s Code using retribution (e.g. an eye for an eye), and the Mosaic Law using fear of God’s judgement. Neither of these have proven to be very effective. Since the dawn of human law, new laws have emerged. others have been forgotten, and many have been refined. Logically, it would be impossible to rid society of all actions that harm another person, which means the controllers of our societies (corrupt governments backed by mega-corporations) must concoct a way to keep society from descending into chaos, while still retaining their bloated wallets. The first prisons came about almost immediately after the first sets of laws. In Ancient Greece, “Imprisonment as a penalty was used initially for those who could not afford to pay their fines. Eventually, since impoverished Athenians could not pay their fines, leading to indefinite periods of imprisonment, time limits were set instead” (Allen). For some odd reason, society has still not evolved from using the Machiavellian method of instilling fear in order to prevent rebellious acts. Our supposedly ‘wise and responsible leaders’ actually believe that by using isolation and

According to Bohom, R. M. & Haley K. N (2011), Herbert Packer a legal scholar who authorized The Limits of Criminal Sanction in 1968, considers the Criminal justice process in the United States as an event of competition between two systems. One of the Packer's model is Crime Control, the principles, and policies of crime control dominate the operation of criminal justice for the past years as a result when politically conservative. Crime control model is less protective of individual's right. The over relevant theories is Due Process and Crime Control. The due process consists of individualization, quality, formality courts. Crime control would comprise standardization, quality, informality, and police. Although they are both different in our society the completion between them if one fails either way with

First of all, the capacity of some vested groups to assemble mass communications to impact the values of others through good campaigns focused toward specific behaviours, for example, homosexual relations, people suiciding, smoking in public places, illegal drug uses, etc., can easily influence the sorts of behaviours that are characterized as either criminal or accepted by the society (Henry, 2009: 2). This stands in correlation to the human attempt to make a moral social order in which some behaviour is characterized as deviant or unacceptable and other conduct is characterized as acceptable, through the making of rules that subject rule violators to sanctions and don 't allow some behaviours. Though deviance is taken to be an infringement of social standards, crime on the other hand is seen as an infringement of criminal law, and though deviance is behaviour seen as distinctive and also is contrarily evaluated as morally offensive and threatening, were crime on the other hand is seen as destructive financially, physically, mentally and socially bringing about people who have been victimized or who endure a loss, a constraint of what they were preceding the offence (Henry and Lanier, 2001).

These fluctuations in criminal justice policies are not just in local governing bodies; these changes are an effort to adapt to a new technologically based modern age, and that goal of adaptation radiates to all ends of the earth, thereby having a global reach. As all societies, and populations of people alter and change, and belief systems ebb and flow, the rules and laws that govern such people must change with them. It is imperative that a governing system stay current, for without an ever-changing system of behavioral structure then those societies race faster toward

“Classical Criminology was developed in the eighteenth century in opposition to the use of extreme and arbitrary punishments. Classical Criminology advocated a rational approach that punishment ought to be imposed only to the extent necessary to ensure a deterrent.” (Rowe, 2012: 191)

Source: Reprinted from The Limits of the Criminal Sanction by Herbert L. Packer, with the permission of the publishers, Stanford University Press. ( 1968 by Herbert L. Packer.

Law is a method of resolution involving several different types of law in a difficult process of attempting to regulate acts of crime. Failure to code and act as debauched and damaging by an elected representative, it is not viewed as a crime; however, any act can be coded or defined by the government and can be made an act of crime. If an act is committed, and there are no provisions of punishment for the specific act, the governing body can write a new law; furthermore, no act is erroneous unless the government says it is erroneous (Robinson, 2005, pp. 50-51). What problems has society experienced when an act has not yet been coded, or the governing body has repudiated coding?

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