Criminal law protects the expression of public morality, sets the boundaries within society, and provides punishment for those who violate society. Laws simultaneously constrain human behavior and empower individuals while contributing to public order. Laws also serve to ensure that the philosophical, moral, and economical perspectives of their creators are protected and made credible. Laws attempt to maintain values, uphold established patterns of social privilege, and sustain existing power of relationships for those who violate established societal morals and rules. Criminal laws address these areas of protection through maintenance of public order, deterrence of criminal activity, and punishment of its offenders.
Public Order
Public order crimes are known by a variety of names. Consensual crime, victimless vice, crimes without victims, or victimless crimes which involve acts that interfere with the operations of society and the ability of people to function efficiently. The major crimes that are analyzed in the public order category are typically separated by sex-related crimes and substance-related offenses. Prostitution, deviant sex, precocious sex, homosexuality, pornography, alcoholism, liquor law violations, driving while intoxicated, disorderly conduct, public drunkenness and drug offenses, such as opiates, heroin, marijuana, crack, cocaine and cigarette smoking are included.
Although these types of crimes do not typically involve physical aggression, they involve levels of dehumanization—when individuals are treated as objects, rather than as human beings. The psychological affects of these crimes causes extensive economic and emotional distress to the victims which are characterized by invasion of intimate space and an attack on identity, physically and symbolically, and can range from anger and depression, to fear and anxiety. In an effort to improve the quality of life, the term public order is often referred to as public “moral” order, mainly because these crimes do serious damage to the moral structure of society.
Deterrence
One of the main purposes of criminal law is to deter individuals from committing crime or engaging in behavior deemed unacceptable by society. The Classical School approach to crime causation and criminal responsibility grew out of this demand for recognition of rationality and the ability to exercise informed choices in human social life. Classical thinkers of that era believed that punishment, if it is to be an effective deterrent, has to outweigh the potential pleasure derived from criminal behavior. This type of classical thinking called for constants in behavior patterns that demonstrated value in pain and gain that could swing a decision to offend or not to offend.
However, not everyone demonstrated the same view of what constitutes a price worth paying. As such, statutory laws were written, referred to as “laws of the land” and were enacted by a government body or agency having the power to make laws. Common laws were also constructed, originating from usage and customs, rather than from written statutes, and refer to an unwritten body of judicial opinion, based on non-statutory customs, traditions, and precedents that guide judicial decision making. When individuals violate societal laws, statutory law and common law, the crime can be used to determine the legal actions to be taken against the individual based on the offense.
Punishment
Just as there is no single cause of crime, which is rooted in a diversity of causal factors and takes a variety of forms, depending on the situation in which it occurs, so is the punishment of criminal behavior. The ideology that punishment is often theorized by moral philosophers, social theorist and criminologists is based on the theory that some solutions are reasons having to do with preventing crime, whereas others are concerned with punishment being deserved by the offender. Under an organized system of criminal justice, sentencing is the imposition of a penalty on a person convicted of a crime—a sanction imposed for a criminal offense.
Sentencing is intended to be an impartial judicial proceeding during which criminal responsibility is determined. Most sentencing decisions are made by judges, although in some cases, especially where a death sentence is possible, juries may be involved in a special sentencing phase of courtroom proceedings. The way our contemporary American correctional system works, includes probation, parole, jails, prisons, capital punishment, and a variety of innovative alternatives to traditional sentences. Once a person has been arrested, tried, and sentenced, the correctional process begins.
The philosophy of criminal law protection is to establish rules and boundaries within society and punish those who violate these societal regulations. Without criminal law, which is also sometimes referred to as penal law, individuals would face no consequences for violating commonly held and accepted public morals or rules. Although the main purpose of any law is to deter individuals from committing or engaging in behavior deemed unacceptable by society, the vast range of behavior that criminal law protects and governs are everything from felonies to misdemeanors, from public nuisance, to public indecencies, to public immoralities, to controlled substances.
Based on the nature of the offense, criminal law can dictate whether the individual responsible for the violation should be imprisoned or rehabilitated. Without the protection of criminal law, society would not know what to expect from one another, nor be able to plan for the future with any degree of assurance. The less powerful would fall victim to the more powerful who could take what they wanted from them.
Sources:
- Bartol, R. and Bartol, M. (2011). Criminal behavior
- Pinter, H. (2011). Crimes against public order and morality
- Schmalleger, F. (2011). Criminal justice today
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