Exploring The Offender In The Section 142 Of The Criminal Justice Act 2003

There are many reasons why society chooses to punish its offenders, the section 142 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 defines the main aims and purposes of punishing offenders. The following paragraphs will provide a deeper explanation to why offender must be punished. The most important aim is to punish the offender which is also described as retribution, this is a concept that demonstrates how society should function, if one individual causes harm to others he must be punished on the behalf of the victim and the society. Punishment serves as a deterrent in order to maintain peace within the society. However, the problem with this aim is that there are other factors that interfere with this aim for example; offenders from wealthy backgrounds

Deterrence is focused on preventing the crime from occurring in the future. The main idea behind it is to scare people from the unpleasant punishment which thus would result in crime reduction. The problem with this is that some crimes cannot be caught easily and thus people will not be scared of the consequences of those crimes, for example; drug dealing is a crime that cannot be caught very easily. This is normally due to how drug dealer operates; several networks and people are connected to this crime, making it hard for the police to track down or find the main source of supply.

Placing offenders into custody, prevents them from committing any crimes and thus results in protecting the public from dangerous individuals. This my serve as one of the common methods of public protection. However, this method of protection is very expensive and is not much effective, because most criminals tend to learn new techniques and

This is normally done to prevent them from committing any future crimes. Rehabilitation may not be easy, because it is very hard to change one’s upbringing or opinion about a subject. Many study show that most criminals come from poor backgrounds and thus hold this as their main reason for committing crime. The difference of social class which is divided by the poor and the rich creates a problem, because rich individuals are more likely to get less judged by the society and are also able to afford good lawyers, whereas the poor may feel targeted because of their financial class. This concept makes it very hard for one to change. Studies however, show the opposite a report of the Parliamentary Penal Affairs Group, (changing offender’s behaviours- some things work 1999) shows that behavioural programmes showed a positive change and that they actually work. The reason for the success is to find the solution to why people commit crime.

There are numbers of factors that play a role in determining the sentence in criminal cases. The Sentencing Act 1991, Section 5(2) sets out a number of factors that must be taken into consideration. These factors can be both of aggravating and mitigating natures, which means that some factors might help reduce the sentence whereas some factors might increase the