Puritans Role In The Criminal Justice System

The first set of people that came to the New World had decided to embark on that journey for many reasons. One of the groups that came to the New World were the Puritans who settled in Massachusetts. They had left England because they believed their king had not done enough when he had separated from the Church. They wanted to purify everything and when this did not happen, they decided to head to the New World. Massachusetts was one of the leading states to decide how the laws were to be in place. The Puritans form of discipline for crime and punishment is strict and the United States criminal justice system has used the Puritan form of discipline for the system. Puritans origin still plays a role in our current criminal justice system, which

Allowing “spectral evidence” to be used during trials is not how due process is supposed to work. The criminal justice system during this time was a tool that Puritans used in means of social control (H, 69), by using different forms of punishment. By controlling social means, it allows placing individuals into the criminal justice system and the use of harsh punishments to try and get them to follow the puritanical laws we have set in place. Puritan’s set up a system where the other would be the ones who are sent into the criminal system because of all the stereotypes that are placed on their groups, since the

Due to the small size of the communities, public shaming allowed Puritans to control the social means. Once communities began to get bigger and neighbors did not know one another like before, people did not care about public shaming since they did not care what their neighbors thought about them. This allowed a change in the criminal procedure and allows a puritanical way of punishing those that commit an offense to society. Now a day’s people in our society do not know one another, making it easier for the criminal justice system to work and have harsher punishments for those within the

“Crime and punishment meant to shame, and beyond that, reform. The codes and their enforcers never abandoned this aim; and the goal of enforcing moral laws. The Most commonly punished crimes in the seventeenth century Massachusetts were fornification and drunkenness… Taverns (inns, or “ordinance”) had to be licensed; and the colonies, at least in theory, insisted that owners of taverns had to be sober, respectable men and women. As to fornification… continued to be the most common crime.” By forcing business to have certifications makes this issue a property one. It is not about the moral issue because if it was it would have been about the health and safety of the people the businesses are catering to. However, the law tries to make the business responsible for what individuals are doing inside their establishments. By making them the ones responsible, instead of holding accountable those performing the actions, it makes the issue about property. They are not the ones committing the immoral action, but they are the ones that are getting in trouble for others and will be paying fines for others. Which that money will then go back to the government, thus making it a property issue instead of a moral