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The study of criminal justice traditionally revolves around three main components of the criminal justice system:
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 VollmerAugust Vollmer ( 1876 1955) was a former Berkeley, California police chief who, during the 1920s, persuaded the University of California to teach criminal justice. This is often seen as the start of criminal justice, as an academic field. See also: Willia. By 1950Events January January 5 US Senator Estes Kefauver introduces a resolution calling for examination of organized crime in the USA January 6 The United Kingdom recognizes the People's Republic of China. The Republic of China severs diplomatic relations with, ~1,000 students were in the field; by 1975Events January January 1 Watergate scandal: John N. Mitchell, H. Haldeman, John D. Ehrlichman are found guilty of the Watergate cover-up and are sentenced to 30 months to 8 years in jail on February 21 January 5 The Tasman Bridge in Tasmania, Australia, i, ~100,000 students were in the field; by 19981998 was a common year starting on Thursday (see link for calendar), and was designated the International Year of the Ocean''. Events January January 1998 A massive ice storm, caused by El Nino, strikes New England, southern Ontario and Quebec, resulting, ~350,000 students were in the field. A notable center for criminal justice studies is the John Jay College of Criminal JusticeThe John Jay College of Criminal Justice is a criminal justice college, in New York City, which has over 10,000 students. External link (official) City University of New York..
1 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 rightsIndividual rights is a legal term referring to what one is allowed to do and what can be done to an individual. Police states are generally considered to be oppressive because they offer their citizens few individual rights. Individual rights are consider are related to one another and to social controlSocial control refers to social mechanisms that regulate individual and group behaviour, in terms of greater sanctions and rewards. It may also designate the processes of informal social control such as custom and formal social control such as law of devi. It is generally argued that victim's and defendant's rights are inverseIn logic, if S is a statement of the form P implies Q then the inverse of S is a statement of the form not P) implies (not Q . S and its inverse are not logical equivalents. For example, let S be the true statement "If I am a human, then I am mortal.ly 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.
2 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.
