Criminal Law: Crime and Punishment - Essay Example

Criminal Law: Crime and Punishment Social engineering can be seen as a society, sharing common values and goals but with different perspectives to achieve them. These perspectives escort them towards right and wrong ways of achieving their targets, thereby giving rise to crime. Crime as seen in the context of theories of social engineering caused by the individual exercise of free will. (Schmalleger, 2001, p. 143) Human beings are fundamentally rational, and most human behavior is the result of free will coupled with rational choice. However the rational choice is dependant upon ‘pain’ and ‘pleasure’, the two characteristics of human sociology. With reference to social engineering, the structure of society, and its relative degree of organization or disorganization are important factors contributing to the prevalence of criminal behavior. However, it depends upon the effectiveness of law and order as to what extent they are successful in organizing their society as a crime free rational embodiment of social engineering. The Miracles of “Punishment” in Law Punishment, although considered an evil in most of the societies today, but is necessarily required to deter law violators and to serve as an example to others who would also violate the law. Theoretically it is proven that crime prevention is only possible through swift and certain punishment, which offsets any gains to be had through criminal behavior. For example in Durkheim’s theory, outraged expressions, severe punishment and a rigid collective morality, represented today’s primitive premodern societies. The communicational conditions of late modernity departs radically from the mechanical solidarity linked by Durkheim to angry talk and severe punishment. (Valier, 2003, p. 91) The principle of punishment says that no crime can be said to occur where punishment has not been specified in the law. (Schmalleger, p. 146) Larceny, for example, would not be a crime if the law simply said, “It is illegal to steal.” Punishment needs to be specified so that if a person is found guilty of violating the law, sanctions can be lawfully imposed. (Schmalleger, p. 146) Whether the crime is radical or cyber in nature, cyberspatial technologies permit rapid communication over vast distances and across regional, national and continental boundaries. A theory of punishment and communication for today must go further still, addressing the shift from print to electronic culture. What happens when people meet each other in cyberspace to discuss and debate a murder? What happens when people outside the limits of a traditional face-to-face community, and beyond earlier borders of locality and nation, talk of a notorious crime? In today’s communicational context law can still be used as a tool for social engineering by reflecting penalties on the Internet as cyberspace as it provides an important medium for new forms of sociality and belonging. The kinds of intimacy, which is possible through cyberspatial communications, disrupt earlier notions of communities. It seems that a different ‘order of closeness’ arises through the complex connectivity brought by online communications. Penalty has conventionally been thought in terms of the bounded entities of local community and nation-state. (Schmalleger, 2001, p. 67) The penal practices of today however are shaped by the myriad ways in which global networks and flows, exemplified by the Internet, reconfigure the significance of the nation-state. Online communications move in a space of flows, hence the spatiality of the web be defined by connection rather than distance. In what ways do the connections and forms of belonging performed through online communications shape the punitive practices of today? The killings in North America have made us think in all the possible ways to implement severe punishment penalties. (Schmalleger, 2001, p. 67) Online communications about murders include email, campaigning, informational and memorial websites, newsgroups, chat rooms, petitions, polls, poems, cartoons and satirical commentary, photographs and games. To a certain extent these are ephemeral cultural forms, rapidly changing and widely dispersed across the net. Nevertheless, Internet communications about crimes and punishments performatively construct new collectivities of various kinds in a process, which begins to reconfigure the modern outlines of penalty. Cyber-communications are seen as practices through which various forms of national and transnational identities are both displayed and moulded, through images and ideas about belonging and being alien. Online talk about murders does not display the compassionate practices of ‘virtual community’. Some speculative links are postulated between the complex connectivity of Internet and the penal escalation seen in many western countries. If I were given a choice to adopt and implement social engineering policies, I would go for the Federal Laws to be implemented in strict milieu addressing Internet Crime. Although it is extremely difficult to identify alleged perpetrators and prosecute computer crimes, but still it is not impossible to seize cyber crime. The social engineering that I would undertake involve the following categories: 1. Pornography: Pornography that involves children or that is obscene, is a crime. This involves the transmission or sale of adultery images. So, I would implement policies that would ban the sale of such images to children under 18 years age, and if found unpractised would seize the IP address for a duration of 6 months or so. 2. Harassment: This would include communications of taunts or profanity. I would ban them on official level as it is seen that employees sent unwanted emails up to the extent of 50 emails a day to his employer. In such cases the offender would be charged with telecommunications harassment with some fine quite enough to keep him off for the rest of his life. 3. Murder and Death threats: Threats of death via email have been common to students, teachers, office employees and other online chatting communities since the advent of Internet. There are reports of murder suspects who say that the availability of Internet pornography led them to kill. (Ferrera et al, 2001, p. 304) I would utilize the social engineering tool to minimize death threats in various ways like creating chat rooms for those who received such threats or are feared to death via online threat, similarly I would create chat rooms for “future offenders”, offenders which are likely to offend in the future. Their future intentions or decisions would be highlighted in these chat rooms after which it would be easier to take any kind of action against these offenders. 4. Fraud: This includes fraud in the use of credit cards; e-commerce, auctions and other scams like ponzi schemes etc. These are usually found through the offer of spurious business opportunities or Internet sale and purchase. Inspired by the National Fraud Information Center Fraud Watch, I would open some “monitoring” sites, which would offer an open invitation for all Internet victims to visit and register on the site by stating their stories. 5. Spamming: For marketers of unsolicited ads, the Internet offers incredible efficiencies. For recipients of these ads, though they represent an unwelcome, but more importantly, a controllable event. States such as Virginia where AOL is headquartered are increasingly taking initiatives and outlawing spam, as there is no federal law on this issue. (Ferrera et al, 2001, p. 305) I would ban every email following spam by detecting and freezing the IP address of the user. Might be in this respect I would able to reduce online crime rates by implementing social engineering tools. References Ferrera Gerald, Lichtenstein Stephen, Reder Margo, August Ray & Schiano William, (2001) Cyber Law: Text and Cases Schmalleger Frank, (2001) Criminal Justice Today: Prentice Hall Valier Claire, (2003) Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture: Routledge: New York. Read More