In a nutshell, criminal justice is a law-based system that keeps order in society by punishing wrongdoers and protecting the innocent. The principles behind our current criminal justice system are based on the same laws of ancient society. These laws have been altered to be more humane, because the correctional methods of the ancient society’s criminal justice system are much too cruel for today’s standards. However, they work on the same principle of defining and identifying the crime, and setting the boundaries of how these crimes should be punished.

Law enforcement

If we look closely at most criminal justice systems, they can be split into three basic operational stages. The first and simplest stage is called law enforcement or policing. The term police comes from the Latin word “politia” which means state or government. Today, it refers to the first criminal justice unit which takes care of criminals and criminal deeds. The law enforcer’s role is to catch the person who committed the crime, define the crime, and carry out the initial stages of correcting the crime. The police’s efforts are meant to maintain order in society, and protect the innocent subjects of the government.

Court System

When the crime committed by the suspect is too grave, and no initial guilt plea has been made, the criminal case could go up to the second stage of a criminal justice system which is called the court. The court makes use of an adversarial scheme which puts two opposite sides of the case against each other. Each party of the case is allowed to have a legal representative or a lawyer to present his/her case to the jury and or judge who will decide on how the criminal case should be concluded. If the suspect is found “not guilty”, s/he will be set free without any punishment or criminal record. If s/he is found “guilty”, then s/he will have to go onto the third stage of a criminal justice system called the correctional phase.

Correctional Methods

Depending on the gravity given of the crime according to law, a criminal may be made to spend a period of time in a prison cell, or be terminated. Most correctional methods work two-fold; firstly, they keep society safe by isolating these dangerous individual in prison cells; and secondly, they discipline the criminals by making them realize what they’ve done wrong. During ancient times, they hanged criminals, cut off their heads, beat them with a whip, and/or kept them chained in prison without any nourishment.

Today’s more humane society abhors these kinds of torture. No matter how grave the crime was, the most severe the crime is, the highest form of punishment given will is the lethal injection. This devise terminated the life of the criminal, but it does so relatively painlessly compared to the guillotine, the electric chair, hanging, and burning at the stake.

Education

Theories and methods about justice systems are continuously being studied. Criminology, which is the study of crime in relation to society, used to be taken separately from criminal justice, which is the study of carrying out methods to correct and control crimes. Now, crime studies in general are linked with other disciplines, like sociology, psychology, history and ethics.

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