Ethics in Criminal Justice

Business Ethics

Dictionary defines ethics as a system of accepted beliefs which control behavior, especially such a system based on morals. In addition, literally ethics is the study of what is morally right and what is not. Ethics involves the study of those standards and judgments which people create. Ethics assumes that the standards exist and seeks to describe them, evaluate them, or evaluate the premises upon which those standards exist. This is where the field of ethics is broken down into Descriptive Ethics, Normative Ethics and Analytic Ethics. (Whitbeck) Ethics are:

Learned

Culturally relative and mutable

Personal

Not necessarily consistent

Guides for behavior

We all have ethics. When we are thoughtful and reflective, we tend to behave in ways consistent with our ethics. Ethics, like any human principles, can be violated. When we are thoughtless and reckless, we may behave in ways inconsistent with our ethics. (Chilton, 1998)Whereas a recognized definition of criminal justice includes a concern for the study of the etiology of crime and its control, the decision network devoted to crime control, and the administration of the many public and private agencies involved in the processing of criminal offenders. In fact, Criminal justice can only be distinguished from crime, if criminal justice is moral while crime is immoral.  This is what led the great thinker and teacher, Saint Augustine, to ask rhetorically: Without justice, what are kingdoms but great robberies?  In short, only morality can distinguish the state's force as right from the criminal's force as wrong.  Only by being moral can criminal justice be distinguished from the very crime that it condemns! The morality that will make the difference between criminal justice and crime, between right and mere might, must be in some sense a morality which is rationally justifiable.  That is, it must be a morality whose credentials lie not simply in that is accepted, but rather a morality that can be shown worthy of acceptance on the basis of rational arguments. (Criminal Justice Ethics)

Professionally, the definition of ethics may be a touch different thus ethics in criminal justice has its own exclusive explanation that makes it different with rest of the other professions. The study of whether and how criminal justice is moral is rightly called criminal justice ethics:  It is a philosophical undertaking, and it seeks to understand and justify those moral standards that are appropriate to the occupations that comprise the criminal ...