CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

Criminal Justice System

Criminal Justice System

Introduction

Criminal law has been designed to make sure that no person commits an act that is not accepted by the society and is illegal. Such acts are not allowed by law; therefore, should not be committed. There are various reasons why a person is not allowed to commit such acts. Every country has its own criminal law and has different sets of rules and regulations. It is not necessary that every country has the same criminal act. There are instances where one act is deemed as unlawful in one country and are legal in another country. This paper will discuss four research articles on criminal law/justice.

Article 1 - Personal and Vicarious Experience with the Criminal Justice System as a Predictor of Punitive Sentencing Attitudes

This article has examined the effect on the sentencing attitudes of the personal or second hand experience with the criminal justice system. In this research, the researchers have used factors such as gender, race, income, education and political affiliation and have compared them to the criminal justice system. This has paved way for the research to be carried out in such a way that the general factors are used and linked to the criminal justice. The method of data collection for this research was secondary research and gained data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. Random telephonic surveys were conducted by the Princeton Survey Research Associates International. 1,502 surveys were conducted in which the majority was females i.e. 804 and 698 males. Data was also collected according to the race and ethnicity which means that there were 895 whites, 267 Hispanics, 254 African- American and 86 belonged to other communities. The age of the respondents ranged from eighteen years to ninety seven years. The dependent variables used in the survey were the choices of responses that were given to the responders. These variables were Too Lenient, Too Harsh and About Right. The results were concluded as a percentage of the responses. The independent variables included race, gender, education level, income level, political affiliation, as well as, religiosity. The analysis of the logistic regression models were established to get the result of this survey. Personal as well as vicarious experiences were also operationalized to obtain the results of the survey. Four hypotheses were created and tested to obtain the result of the main research question. According to the results of the survey and according to the responses of the participants, it was found that the male respondents were less vulnerable to view the criminal act than the females for a criminal punishment as too lenient. According to the race and ethnicity, the African-Americans and the Hispanics were less likely to view a sentenced punishment as too lenient. While examining people on the basis of their political affiliation, it was found out that the Republicans, as well as, the Democratic respondents were more likely to perceive the same punishment as too lenient. It was also found that as the level ...