Communitarianism's Role In The Criminal Justice System

There are three philosophies about regarding policy, and each one in itself is harmful. Each of these functions is equally bad, but when you bring all three together it can be catastrophic. When all are put together you can create laws that are extremely disparate. The Political function aims to prevent violent interpersonal crimes from happening, to remove the predators before they actually commit a crime and once they commit the crime put them away from a longer period of time. This function aims to intervene early and put away all the threats before they do anything. The rationalization is that the person may commit the crime so lets put them away so that doesn’t happen or put them away for longer because they might commit the crime again.
The laws within this function are made to protect the community. The mentality of this function is, Us vs. them and that we need to control the outsiders. An idea was to put alcoholics, people with disabilities, victims of rape, promiscuous women into a sterilization program because this would prevent those people from bearing children and having children who would become dangerous to society. These laws weren’t based on what is best for you, but what is better for the community. Since there was this irrational fear, there was a need to put policies into place to protect the community from any possible crime. The focus is not on why or how it happened but how we can prevent people from engaging in
This function aims to remove predators and to intervene at the earliest possible moment. While the death penalty isn’t extremely common and the process itself can be very long it can be rationalized. The death penalty can be seen as deterrence for future criminals and is a way to get rid of the threats that those criminals put to society, however it is only favored for crimes such was a murder conviction. However there is a lot of racial animus involved with the death penalty, if an African American murders a white person the chances of that person sentenced to death significantly increase. An offender has a greater chance of being sentenced to death if the person they killed is white, while there is a lesser chance the offender will receive a death sentence if the person they murdered was an African American. In the supplementary Guidelines within case law and in state and federal capital sentencing statutes state that mitigation evidence includes: compassionate factors stemming from diverse frailties of humankind, the ability to make a positive adjustment to incarceration, the realities of incarceration and the actual meaning of a life sentence, capacity for redemption, remorse, execution impact, vulnerabilities related to mental health, explanations of pat- terns of behavior, negation o f aggravating evi- dence regardless o f its designation as a n aggravating