Opinions about my homework

4-1.Should certain non-violent crimes be punishable by fines rather that jail time?

Fines are an enhanced option than jail time; they aren’t expensive and mean revenue for the State. However, it does not mean retribution or compensation to the victim. The State, in that criminals commit their wrongdoing, has been damaged as well, but direct victims should be the prime beneficiaries of the State action.

It is better, for the state government, to promote community service as a form of punishment or as an additional form of compensation for the victim. In this way, such regulations also have some retribution, to such state, and a form of reintegrating the offender to society.



6-2.Should children who commit certain crimes be treated as adults?If so, is there a lower age limit to this policy?
Why should children who commit certain crimes not be treated as an adult? It’s the real question everybody should ask. In most cases, children, supposedly, are careless of their actions but nowadays TV, internet, and video games twist children’s mind into a, smart, silent and innocent weapon, dangerous to society. Because they are children, it isn’t an excellent excuse to let free a kid who just murdered someone.
Next, they, by law in many states, are all given a psychological battery of testing, to see if they are mentally competent. Many children today have a warped sense of life. For example, they play video games that the star is killed, but comes back to life or its given extra lives, so their perception of life is not realistic when there is the equation of DEATH.
Regarding the minimum age of this policy, children should be treated as adult at any age, when they commit any offense like murder; however, the right age they should be taken to court when they commit any felony is 12 years-old because they, somehow, are fully competent of their actions.

Should terrorists be tried in a military or civil court?

Under recognized bases of when a state may exercise its jurisdiction, a state certainly has the power to try alleged terrorists in its national courts when that state was the object of the terrorist act or threat. This is simply an application of the "Territorial theory" of jurisdiction to prescribe in international law. In addition, under a theory of "Passive Personality," also called "Passive Nationality," a state may apply its laws to address those terrorist acts directed against its nationals, even where the terrorist acts were to occur off its soil. That is, extraterritorially. In both cases, the state must also possess what we call "jurisdiction to enforce" which means it has custody over the alleged terrorist, or has the lawful ability to acquire custody of the alleged terrorist, usually by the process of extradition.

On the other hand, the use of military tribunals to try accused terrorists is somewhat controversial in that it does not provide the full safeguards a defendant enjoys in the civilian criminal courts and is somewhat limited by important obligation of the Geneva Conventions on the rules of warfare. On the other hand, many people would agree that trials of terrorists carry with them special security concerns such as the confidentially of sensitive intelligence information and the safety of juries and witnesses that justify the use of such restrictive tribunals.
Finally, terrorist should be tried in civil courts because they should be judge by the state law where they commit such crimes. Military tried should only be used when the terrorist commits any misdeed in a corrupted country where the justice system is not managed rightfully.

What conditions of incarceration are fair?

It is simple to suppose that prisoners are not human beings. In some way once an individual is found guilty of a crime and incarcerated, they become, in the sense of the law, almost more like an object than a person. Many prisoners suffer the loss of not only their independence, but their right to vote, their ability to settle with victims of their crimes, their right to personal safety, their right to parent, their right to be assumed innocent until proven guilty and indeed their right to dignity.

A requirement for punishment and retribution is the compelling philosophy behind the penal system. But is incarceration always necessary for those who have committed a crime and, moreover, what of those defendants who will not repeat the crime? For example, in many cases, criminals who have committed mayor misdeeds are incarcerated for longer periods regularly; however, there are always criminals whose action were recognized as bad by themselves and now seek a way to clean their name with society and with those offended by them. Finally, this is one of the central problems facing contemporary penal policy and another reason why our government should seek alternatives to incarceration.

what kind of rights should criminals have?

Theories of punishment have been devised, in part, to make criminals "pay for their crimes." According to most theories of retribution, after a criminal has been appropriately punished for his crimes, the slate is wiped clean and he regains his rights. This avoids the problem of people losing their rights forever by setting limits to the number of rights and the kind of rights lost by criminals and by providing a means (punishment) whereby criminals can regain their rights. The general right that underlies punishment can be stated as follows:

Everyone has the right to his own body and other legitimate property unless he has deliberately violated someone's rights without having been appropriately punished.

This right allows us to defend our rights against criminals, and it provides a means for criminals to regain their rights, but it lacks clarity. Before we can use this right as a guide to moral action, we must know what punishment is appropriate for each crime, and we must know the history of each person that we deal with, so we can determine what rights he has now and what punishments, if any, are due him. If we don't know these things, we can't know how to deal justly with people in many crucial situations.

For example, suppose we witness an apparent mugging or rape. We cannot be sure whether we are witnessing a crime or a punishment. If it is a crime, then we can come to the defense of the victim. But if it is a legitimate punishment, it would be wrong to stop it.

If individuals have the right to punish criminals as they see fit, without having to follow easily recognizable procedures, then we cannot distinguish between crimes and punishments when other people do them, and we cannot know when we have the right to intervene. We would have the same problems that we would have if criminals lost all their rights forever: No one would dare risk losing his rights by being a security guard. Only criminals could unite. Criminal gangs would take over, and noncriminals would lose their freedom to be moral agents.

The usual way to solve this problem is by making the punishment of criminals an exclusive right of the state. The agents of the state can wear distinctive uniforms and follow recognizable procedures when they punish people. This allows everyone to tell the difference between crimes and punishments, which, in turn, allows us to know our rights and duties and allows us to cooperate in fighting crime and preventing criminals from taking over society. The general right that underlies state punishment is as follows:

Everyone has the right to his own body and other legitimate property except when he is being punished by the state according to its procedures, after having been found guilty of a crime.

A state is an organization of individuals. It is not a moral agent, so it has no rights of its own. The only rights that a state can have are the rights delegated to it by its individual members who are moral agents. Therefore, the state cannot have the right to punish criminals unless its individual members had this right before they created the state and then delegated this right to the state.

If individual moral agents have the right to punish criminals, but they can only exercise this right by proxy after delegating it to an organization that uses distinctive procedures, how can we guarantee that they will all agree to delegate this right to the same organization and follow the same procedures in exercising their right? We can't.

What actually happens around the world is that people are forced to submit to the punishment procedures of many different states, depending on where they happen to live. The different states have different rules for punishing criminals. The kinds of punishments, and, therefore, the rights of criminals, vary from state to state and from time to time. This is not compatible with basic rights, which must be independent of place and time. No theory of punishment that relies on variable state-defined punishments can be compatible with basic rights. Therefore, we must reject the right that underlies state punishment.

Because state-defined punishment is not universal, consistent, and unchanging, any hypothetical right that depends on it cannot be a basic right. And because enforcing punishment privately makes it virtually impossible to distinguish between crimes and punishments, prevents moral people from cooperating to defend each other, and dooms them to live in a society controlled by criminals, we must reject all theories of punishment and look for another solution to the crime problem