Crime & Punishment

Crime and Punishment

a: Racial and Social Realities affect on Crime and Punishment

Race and society have played a pivotal role in the history of the United States? and in our nation's struggle to realize the full promise of our society. This paper should assist the understanding of race in the United States and suggest ways in which the American citizen experience can have relevance for other nations and peoples.

The impact of bias crimes reaches beyond the harm done to the prompt victim or victims of the criminal behavior. There is a more widespread impact on the "objective society" that is? the society that shares the race? (Reiman 2007) religion or ethnicity of the victim and an even broader based harm to the general society. Members of the objective society of a bias crime experience that crime in a manner that has no equivalent in the public response to a parallel crime. Not only does the reaction of the objective society go beyond mere sympathy with the prompt bias crime victim? it exceeds empathy as well.

Members of the objective society of a bias crime perceive that crime as if it were an attack on them directly and individually. Consider the burning of a cross on the lawn of an African-American citizen family or the spray-painting of swastikas and hateful graffiti on the home of a Jewish family. Others might associate themselves with the injuries done to these families? having feelings of anger or hurt? and hence sympathize with the victims. Still others might discover that these crimes activated among them feelings like to the sense of victimization and approach felt by these families? and hence understand with the victims.

The reactions of members of the objective community? however? will transcend both empathy and sympathy (Reiman 2007). The cross combustion and the swastika scribbling will not just call up standardized feelings on the part of other blacks and Jews severally. Rather? members of these objective communities might experience reactions of actual threat and attack from this very event. Bias crimes might spread fear and intimidation beyond the prompt victims and their friends and families to those who share only racial characteristics with the victims (Terras 2005).

b: Future Inequalities

What this establishes is the inequalities of defense in the legal system. Those defendants that cannot provide their own council are at a disadvantage since the council they are appointed is often inadequate. The judicial ...