Crime and punishment

Crime and punishment

What is the purpose of punishment? One purpose is obviously to rehabilitate the offender, to correct the offender’s moral attitudes and anti-social behavior.

Punishment can also be seen as a deterrent because it warns other people of what will happen if they are tempted to break the law and prevents them from doing so.

The third purpose of punishment lies, perhaps, in society’s desire for retribution, which basically means revenge.

The problem of the effectiveness of punishment becomes especially acute in scientific disputes. The term "efficiency" means the ability to achieve maximum results at minimum cost. Now I will give examples of the ratio of crime and punishment:

• kidnapping is punishable by a long-term imprisonment and a fixed penalty fine;
• drinking and driving is punishable by a fine;
• killing a policeman during a robbery is punishable by death penalty or life imprisonment.

Since the appearance of the death penalty as a measure of capital punishment, there have been eternal disputes. Many people support her. Defenders of capital punishment claim that society has the right to kill in defense of its members, just as the individual may kill in self-defense. Also they insist that because taking an offender's life is a more severe punishment than any prison term. Defenders of the death penalty insist that, because none of the law of capital punishment causes sexist, racist, or class bias in its use, these kinds of discrimination are not a sufficient reason for abolishing the death penalty.

Supporters also argue that no adequate deterrent in life term who commit murder while being in prison, and for revolutionaries, terrorist, traitors, and spies.

In the U.S those who argue against the death penalty as a deterrent to crime cite the following:

1. Adjacent states, in which one has a death penalty and the other doesn’t show no significant differences in the murder rate;
2. States that use the death penalty seem to have a higher number of homicides than a state that don’t use it.

Opponents also believe that the death penalty can be result of a mistake in practice and that it’s impossible to administer fairly.