Theories of Criminal Justice

CRIME

Criminal Justice System

Crime and the law

Crime, from the perspective of the criminal justice system, may be defined as violations of the law. What constitutes a criminal violation in one nation is not necessarily the case in all nations; also, an action may be unethical without actually being criminal. The social determinant of what constitutes crime requires a balancing of the rights of the individual to freedom with the need for society to maintain some sense of social order. Those who seek personal freedoms and civil rights are often at war within the criminal justice system with those who desire social order (Schmalleger 2015: 9). The goals of the criminal justice system are to create a sense of justice or fairness but this ideal must likewise be balanced with the need for order (Schmalleger 2015: 10). For example, it might be necessary to let an obviously guilty person go free because the evidence against him or her was extracted in an illegal fashion to uphold constitutional principles: this is not necessarily moral but it is required to preserve individual liberties.

The American justice system is made up of police, courts, and corrections components (Schmalleger 2015:14). The criminal justice process often involves canvassing the scene of the crime, gathering evidence, making an arrest, the grand jury and trial proceedings, the sentencing, parole hearing (or two), and other post-corrections activities (Silver 2014). The consensus model suggests that the justice system arrives at a consensus between these different interconnected authorities about what constitutes a crime and how to enforce it; the conflict model suggests that society determines what is a crime in a self-serving fashion (Schmalleger 2015: 14).

Consensus vs. conflict theories are based upon different assumptions as to what constitutes a 'choice' for an individual in terms of committing crime. Consensus theories suggest that all individuals in a society unconsciously or consciously make a contribution as to what is considered errant activities. There is the implication of a conscious 'choice' upon the individual's part to violate those norms, often for self-interested reasons. This is also much like the 'classic' rational actor theory of crime, which assumes that people will make a rationally calculated self-serving decision to commit a crime if it serves their interests and thus there must be legal consequences that are greater than the expected benefit from that crime: punishment must be proportional, sure, and swift (Schmalleger 2015: 76). Conflict theories suggest that people are often the victims of larger social systems and cannot make conscious choices to commit crime: someone from a poor background with few economic opportunities who steals to obtain basic necessities would not necessarily have done so, had he been born into more fortunate circumstances, although society tends to conveniently demonize criminals in a manner to suggest that criminal actions are solely the product of aberrant social psychologies.