The Powerful, Just, and Insensitive Government

The society generally has established customs and moral imperative to guide the conduct of each member of that particular society. These norms designating certain ways in which people ought to live in the society exist in societal laws and moral prescription. The justifications for the ideal practices in the society have been found in the desire to maintain peaceful coexistence in the society. The extent of freedom of an individual is therefore often curtailed for the greater good of the society. These utilitarian considerations have been discussed amidst the concept and rationale of punishment. John Stuart Mill, Michel Foucault and Kantian ethics have been used to justify or refute the notion and rationale of punishment in our society. These ethical perspectives provide useful insight into understanding punishment and its justifications or otherwise. Punishment is necessary as a social control tool and must be exerted with reasonableness and with due regard for the aim for which it is exerted.

Around the time of 1792 to 1750 B.C.E., a man by the name of Hammurabi was the ambitious ruler of Babylon. During his reign, he established a compilation of laws that assigned penalties based on retribution, thus creating a list of socially structured regulations centered around the idea that a person who commits a crime must be punished proportionally. Hammurabi’s code is proof of the division amongst the nobles, commoners and slaves in the time period, as well as evidence of the power that the men had over the women.

Every civilized society makes laws that protect its values, and society expects from every single person to obey to these laws. Whenever a person from this society breaks one of those laws, the rulers of the society punish him or her either by putting the person behind bars, whipping him or her, or exiling the person. A great debate has been raging since human society started. Some say that depriving a wrongdoer from his or her freedom is the best way to deter him or her from breaking the law again; some prefer corporal punishment. In this essay "Bring Back Flogging," the author Jeff Jacoby argues effectively that flogging can be a successful alternative to the prison that the U.S. uses for every offensive. The

Society has a need for quality and equal justice along with protection for everyone and the process of how to effectively implement such a thing has been an issue for many years. Focusing on the problems of society incorporates methods of trying to fix it from political measures to law enforcement measures. The combined effort of the two brings out the issue of what method should be used to dominate the problems. Looking at

Hammurabi was a ruler in Babylon around 40 centuries ago. He ruled for approximately 42 years. During the time he was a ruler, there were about a million citizens in Babylon who were divided into the following three social classes: land owners, free people who didn’t own land, and slaves. To control the people and protect the weak, Hammurabi created a set of laws called Hammurabi’s Code. Hammurabi himself and the citizens believed the god of justice, Shamash sent Hammurabi these laws and that they must obey them. While the idea of creating laws was good, it still had its downsides. These laws weren’t all fair or equal and some of the punishments were too harsh.

Our current ideology on crime and justice dates back to thousands of years back. This paper will compare and contrast our system and sense of crime and justice with the society Malinowski describes in “The Law in Breach and the Restoration of Order”. In our modern era, it is acceptable to think Hammurabi code is ideal to pursue crime and justice or Cesare Beccaria’s approach towards the pursue of justice is best for the society. To each to its own when it comes to this based on their own values. But regardless of how extreme, or mild our societies thought can be to sought after justice for crimes, the ultimate purpose of all of it to teach a lesson to the individual who committed the crime and to others.

The United States government was created by the founding fathers to allow men to be free, but to also have a governmental system that protects that freedom as well. The United States government is problematic. It goes above and beyond the necessity and, because of this, is dysfunctional at best. The government today has gone beyond protecting the rights of American citizens. It has become a large entity that is wholly useless. The government of the United States is too large, therefore, this creates many problems with things like governmental overreach and extreme inefficiency. A smaller government would be more functional and could return to a more efficient, and likely constitutional basis of existence. It may be difficult to move to a smaller government if the United States cannot figure out a good way to do this.

Crime and shame punishments date as far back to biblical times and becomes increasingly accepted by the populace during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although shame punishments have decreased in popularity in today’s modern era, it has taken different forms. Instead of focusing on what or who influences the effectiveness of a public punishment the most, by tying all roles (criminals, communities, and authorities) together, it provides insight and understanding of a sometimes hard concept to grasp. Amitai Etzioni argues that he has no inclination in bringing such harsh punishments back to our modern day, but, it wouldn’t make sense to reject shaming without at least giving it an unprejudiced trial (Etzioni).

Since the inception of human civilization, punishment for wrongdoings have been ubiquitous in every single culture in our history. Take, for instance, the code of Hammurabi, one of the oldest historical documents archaeologists have ever discovered. It’s a code of law enacted by the 6th Babylonian king, Hammurabi, and establishes its system of justice based on the concept of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” (Hammurabi, 196). Despite ancient Babylon being unquestionably barbaric in the very essence of the word, the current system of law and punishment employed in the US shares quite a few similarities with the Code of Hammurabi- namely the focus on punishment and “justice” for crimes.

Throughout time, the use of punishment has changed drastically. Not only has the actual infliction of punishment changed, the reasoning behind this punishment has also changed. There have been numerous scholars, educators, and researchers that have presented various theories on the reasoning behind societal punishment. Some of these theories are closely similar, however some are drastically different. It is important to note that these theorists have broad perceptions that can be rooted back to specific time periods throughout history. Societal punishment is defined as, “punishment being a complex social institution, shaped by the ensemble of social and historical forces and having a range of effects that reach well beyond the population of offenders” (Garland, 1991).

The death penalty has always been a part of the criminal justice system since the code of Hammurabi. Since the existence of criminal law there has always been a form of punishment for those who break it. The modern-day. The death penalty has become an anachronism and has also become a defective form of punishment for its contradicting model; a discriminatory system; the execution of innocent people; the cost; and the inhumane methods of execution —therefore, it should be outlawed nationwide.

Imagine living in a society without a set of laws to live by; there would be no order, and people would be free to act as they wish. Although, initially, this does not sound unappealing, disorder in society inevitably leads to the stratification of social classes and mistreatment of minorities, among others. The establishment of Hammurabi’s code helped bring order and equality into society through the attempt to implement a moral standard. An eye for an eye is a fair punishment for the committed crime. But not all of Hammurabi’s codes follow suit. The codes enforced the social stratification that was already in place in Babylonia, intensifying the division between the various social groups. Although Hammurabi’s codes constituted social order through structure, Hammurabi’s codes also promoted further social stratification, specifically gender and socioeconomic inequality, through the bias in severity of punishment in many of the laws.

The purpose of this essay is to describe the death penalty as a outdated and inefficient means of governance that demonstrates the barbaric nature of organized government that still exists today. This essay will discuss key elements of this subject as the more controversial and ignored facts about state-sanctioned death squads act to eliminate human life in the name of truth and justice. The essay will provide counter arguments that will help contextualize the argument and bring a new understanding to the subject that will help human evolution grow in new ways the eliminates the brutal and unnecessary treatment of prisoners.

The uptick of capital punishment in the United States keeps on being a conspicuous issue is the domain of the criminal justice system. Capital punishment is a matter in which numerous people contradict and challenge as it a contemporary type of the death penalty. There have been numerous studies attempting to demonstrate or object a point in regards to capital punishment. Some have viewed capital punishment as a deterrent, which is the utilization of discipline as a danger to deflect individuals from offending. Capital punishment has been credited to social orders for many years. More recently, capital punishment has been addressed to be the right stride toward equity. Over the span of this paper I will review if capital punishment is the ultimate irreversible denial for human rights, the history, the profile of the types of person put to death or sentenced, the means and methods of putting to death or sentenced to death, the issues associated with those methods, the success and failures of the death penalty, and a few historical cases.

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