Criminal justice essays examples

Question 1

Cesare Beccaria was native to an Noble household in Italy. He later became a jurist, criminologist, and a politician. However, he was recognized by most as a talented Jurist of Italy. He is well recognized for his works On Crime Punishment, which in high degree condemned torture and of convicted people. He is well remembered for his work on penology and the book on criminology. During his time, he ensured that that criminal justice and other forms of justice were promoted and adhered to. Beccaria was of the notion that cruel and arbitrary punishments should be condemned and done away with. His On Crime and Punishment touches more on the aspect of law and justice. Criminal Law seems to state unequivocally what is right and wrong, and the penalties for any wrong doing.
Cesare Lombroso was an Italian criminologist, a general practitioner, and known to be the originator of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology. Lombroso was popularly known for refuting the school of thought which suggested that crime is a general character of all human beings. Instead, using the notions of Social Darwinians, physiognomy, and psychiatry, his philosophy on anthropological criminology stated that crime was inherited from the ancestors. He continued to state that somebody criminal can be recognized by physical flaws and this confirmed criminal people as savage and primitive. Although Lombroso’s anthropogenic measurements were deemed accurate, his connection between the physical traits of human and criminality was misleading.
Jeremy Bentham was a famous British philosopher, jurist, and a reformer. He is well recognized as the founder of utilitarianism. Bentham was a prominent theorist in Britain and other parts of the world. He developed massive interest in Anglo-American philosophy of law. His ideas and thoughts became a guiding factor in the aspect of welfarism. He advocated for freedom of persons, including that of homosexuals. The action of him advocating for homosexuality made him a controversial figure. Like DeBeccaria, he encouraged abolition of slavery, the ending of death penalties in the judicial system, and the doing away with of physical punishment. In the later years, be popularly became one of the advocates of animal rights. He is strongly remembered for opposing the idea of natural law and rights and rather favored the individual legal rights. Some of the great minds that Bentham mentored include John Stuart Mill, the legal theorist John Austin, and Robert Owen, the founder of utopian socialism.
Howard Robinson is a British Philosopher who specializes in aspects of metaphysics. This area of study is commonly referred to as the philosophy of the mind. In his philosophy, he attempted to solve the question of perception, an area that is difficult to handle in the metaphysics and epistemology. He explores the aspect of perception, what is commonly referred to as the sense-datum theory. He researches the theories and history of the arguments of perception from Descartes to Husserl. He reveals the fact that the objection of the theory, especially the privacy attack by Wittgenstein and other physicalists, was unsuccessful. He continues to argue that in order to understand the issue of perception, people should return to the theory of sense-data. In so doing, he aimed to overturn the consensus that had dominated the subject of perception in philosophy for a long period of time.

Question 2

In 1787, John Bentham, the pioneer of Utilitarianism, suggested that laws be evaluated to ensure that they are useful to the system. He also designed a prison which was to be called “ panopticon”. In 1800, parole happened, which oversaw the release of many inmates in good favor. In 1822, the Eastern State Penitentiary was erected in the peripheries of Philadelphia. The prison was to become an isolate system; the isolate system led to rehabilitation of prisoners. In 1873, the first female prison was build. Initially, women were put in the same prison with men and received the same treatment and punishment. In the early women prisons, women were housed in small cottages of five people each. In 1945, America was economically safe, thus the need to reform prisons. After a thorough research it was established that a medical model is applied in the prison system. If a prisoner fell ill, the method of rehabilitation was their treatment. The above were some of the reforms that took place in the corrections between the 17th century and the 19th century.