Criminal Justice - Goals

Goals

In the United States, criminal justice policy has been guided by the 1967 President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, which issued a ground-breaking report "The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society". This report made more than 200 recommendations as part of a comprehensive approach toward the prevention and fighting of crime. Some of those recommendations found their way into the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. The Commission advocated a "systems" approach to criminal justice, with improved coordination among law enforcement, courts, and correctional agencies. The President's Commission defined the criminal justice system as the means for society to "enforce the standards of conduct necessary to protect individuals and the community."

The criminal justice system in England and Wales aims to "reduce crime by bringing more offences to justice, and to raise public confidence that the system is fair and will deliver for the law-abiding citizen." In Canada, the criminal justice system aims to balance the goals of crime control and prevention, and justice (equity, fairness, protection of individual rights). In Sweden, the overarching goal for the criminal justice system is to reduce crime and increase the security of the people. Overall, criminal justice plays a huge role throughout society as a whole in any place.

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Famous quotes containing the word goals:

    If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
    Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923)

    We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.
    Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)

    Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that “all of our problems” come from such goals, is left to eat, drink, sleep, or, when he gets sick of that, to run up to a chest and smash his forehead on its corner.
    Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)