Criminal justice may be defined as the art of ensuring that human rights are respected and credited accordingly. Contrary to this, action in form of justice is in return employed. Criminal justice is an extremely critical in development of public policies. There are various issues that are associated to justice with vehemently many questions being raised. However, the main question is on the ability of criminal justice to exist without values. The answer is that criminal justice cannot exist without values.
The first element that may be used to defend this answer is concerned with the fact that human beings live under definition of given human rights. These are legal fundamental rights which an individual should automatically inherit because he or she is a human being. This means that even at the perspective of criminal justice needs to be executed accordingly. The individual must be subjected to all respect that he or she is due to, regardless of the wrong he or she has done. Respect is an extremely critical value in relationship among people (Mays & Ruddell, 2008). This proves that criminal justice cannot exist without values.
Moreover, once an individual is perceived a criminal he or she remains innocent until proven guilty. This means that the case that one is involved in must undergo all necessary stages of evaluation that will be used to verify whether the individual who is being perceived as a criminal is guilty of the offence or is innocent. There are various ways through which may be verified but the main one is by sending honest investigators to the field to investigate on the probability of the individual having committed the alleged crime. For proper livelihood among people, honest is paramount. It is a value that should be respected even at the point of criminal investigation.
Therefore, it can be further affirmed that criminal justice policies will never lack values.
During the hearing of a case, the plaintiff should be subjected to the due process that will verify whether he or she is wrong over the allegations put across on his behalf or not. Therefore, the judge or any law practitioner entrusted the judgment must treat the individual with all the keenness that he or she deserves. Being keen dictates the aspect of critical concern of the challenges that an individual is likely to undergo if the case was wrongly decided. The concern for human welfare is a representation of human values that the society should possess (Zedner, 2012). This is further affirmation that justice cannot exist without values.
Also, when a ruling is being announced by the judge, he or she needs to be considerate enough that the person being judged deserves all decency. Therefore, there is need to mind the language that they use during the communication. The individual must not be subjected to shock in the name of passing judgment. The criminal would remain a human being even after being proven guilty of an offence (Morash, 1982). Therefore, it sticks to the fact that criminal justice policies can never exist without values.
After a sentence has been passed and the individual is to be jailed of an offence he or she needs to be treated with all due human dignity. There are no inhuman punishments such as torture that the individuals should be exposed into in the name of punishment (Skoll, 2008). This is also definition of relevance of values in criminal justice.
Criminal justice is defined by various policies. These policies are inclined to investigations, prosecution, sentencing as well as execution of a sentence. However, each of these elements describe critical manner through which they should be handled. Each of them is an art of criminal justice and needs to be handled with all due respect to human livelihood. This is the definition of how values can never be separated from criminal justice policies.
References
Mays, G. L., & Ruddell, R. (2008). Making sense of criminal justice: policies and practices. New York: Oxford University Press.
Morash, M. (1982). Implementing criminal justice policies. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Published in cooperation with the American Society of Criminology [by] Sage Publications.
Skoll, G. R. (2008). Torture And The Fifth Amendment: Torture, The Global War On Terror, And Constitutional Values.Criminal Justice Review, 33(1), 29-47.
Zedner, L. (2012). Principles and values in criminal law and criminal justice: essays in honour of Andrew Ashworth. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.
