The study of criminal
justice traditionally revolves around three main components of
the criminal justice system:
- police
- courts
- corrections
Nowadays, it is sometimes argued that psychiatry is also a central part
of the criminal justice system.
The pursuit of criminal justice is, like all forms of
"justice" or "fairness" or "process", essentially
the pursuit of an ideal. Thus this field has many relations to anthropology,
economics, history, law, political science, psychology, sociology, and
theology. The establishment of criminal justice as an academic field during
the 1920s is generally credited to August Vollmer. By 1950, ~1,000 students
were in the field; by 1975, ~100,000 students were in the field; by 1998,
~350,000 students were in the field. A notable center for criminal justice
studies is the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Rights
One question which is presented by the idea of creating justice involves
the rights of victims and the rights of accused criminals, and how these
individual rights are related to one another and to social control. It
is generally argued that victim's and defendant's rights are inversely
related, and individual rights, as a whole, are likewise viewed as inversely
related to social control.
Rights, of course,
imply responsibilities or duties, and this in turn requires a great deal
of consensus in the community regarding the appropriate definitions for
many of these legal terms.
Theories
There are several basic theories regarding criminal justice and its relation
to individual rights and social control:
- Restorative justice
assumes that the victim or their heirs or neighbors can be in some way
restored to a condition "just as good as" before the criminal
incident. Substantially it builds on traditions in common law and tort
law that requires all who commit wrong to be penalized. In recent time
these penalties that restorative justice advocates have included community
service, restitution, and alternatives to imprisonment that keep the
offender active in the community, and re-socialized him into society.
Some suggest that it is a weak way to punish criminal who must be deterred,
these critics are often proponents of
- Retributive justice
or the "eye for an eye" approach. Assuming that the victim
or their heirs or neighbors have the right to do to the offender what
was done to the victim. These ideas fuel support for capital punishment
for murder, amputation for theft (as in some versions of the sharia).
- Psychiatric imprisonment
treats crime nominally as illness, and assumes that it can be treated
by psychoanalysis, drugs, and other techniques associated with psychiatry
and medicine, but in forcible confinement. It is more commonly associated
with crime that does not appear to have animal emotion or human economic
motives, nor even any clear benefit to the offender, but has idiosyncratic
characteristics that make it hard for society to comprehend, thus hard
to trust the individual if released into society.
- Transformative
justice does not assume that there is any reasonable comparison between
the lives of victims nor offenders before and after the incident. It
discourages such comparisons and measurements, and emphasizes the trust
of the society in each member, including trust in the offender not to
re-offend, and of the victim (or heirs) not to avenge.
In addition, there
are models of criminal justice systems which try to explain how these
institutions achieve justice.
- The Consensus Model
argues that the organizations of a criminal justice system do, or should,
cooperate.
- The Conflict Model
assumes that the organizations of a criminal justice system do, or should,
compete.
The US Criminal
Justice system
"There is a criminal justice process through which each offender passes
from the police, to the courts, and back unto the streets. The inefficiency,
fall-out, and failure of purpose during this process is notorious."
-- US National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence
"Three strikes you're out" is claimed to be
cruel and unusual punishment by its opponents, who argue that the U.S.
system is too dependent on retributive justice, and is failing socially
as well as criminally.
A society
should not be judged on how it treats its outstanding citizens but by
how it treats its criminals.....Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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