Argumentative Essay On Crime And Punishment

Introduction

Crime has been an inexorable social ill dating back to civilisation era. Still omnipresent today, modern offences come in various types and some has become more sophisticated. While there is no universal standard definition for crime, this paper will adopt the legal definition from Black’s Law Dictionary where crime is “an act committed or omitted, in violation of a public law, either forbidding or commanding it”. Illegal activity, crime and offences will be used interchangeably henceforth. Criminal will be used to describe an individual who has committed a crime regardless arrested or not.

Ideally, a crime-free society should be utopian but is a society really better off crime-free? From an economic point of view, reducing crime might incur a greater expenditure on criminal justice system at the expense of other social investments, hence deemed undesirable by governing authorities (Winter, 2008). Contrary to common belief, there are benefits of crime to society. To maintain criminal justice system in a nation, employment opportunities of police, lawyer, judge, correctional officer and so on are created, contributing to the economy (Maguire & Radosh, 1999). On individual level, rational choice theory in

The original work was aimed to minimize social loss of crime by allocating optimal expenditure and resources for law enforcement as well as to adopt an economic approach to analyse crime. In his basis analysis of supply of offences, he presented an expected utility function to model an individual’s decision to commit crime. The original model was relatively simple, but it served as a pioneering model of criminal behaviour. For the next two decades after publication of Becker’s paper, various scholars had been actively engaged in research in this area to propose different variations to model criminal