Introduction to Criminal Law: Basic Concepts and Functions
Thematic Unit 1 – Introduction
Lesson 1: Basic Concepts of Criminal Law
1. Criminal Law and Social Control: Concept and Forms
Criminal Law
The branch of legislation that regulates the state’s power to punish, determining punishable behavior (disvaliosas behavior) and its consequences.
Legal Consequences for Committing a Crime
- Tier System: The penalty is the only consequence of repression for committing a crime.
- Tier System: Incorporates security measures.
- Some authors support a third way: the repair of damage to replace or attenuate the punishment when it contributes to satisfying the sentence’s ends and the victim’s needs.
Meanings of the Term Criminal Law
- Dogmatic Science or Criminal Justice: The discipline that deals with the interpretation, organization, and development of legal and scientific opinions in criminal law.
- Subjective Sense: Refers to the state’s power to punish (the right to punish).
- Objective Sense: The set of positive law rules governing punitive power to protect human relationships in the community and mentor the most valuable legal rights.
Social Control
It is a basic condition of social life through which every community ensures the rules and behavioral expectations of its members, needed to continue existing. At the same time, it limits human freedom and leads to socialization as an integral group.
Covers: collective norms, social sanctions, and control processes that pressure behavior.
Forms of Social Control
- Informal: social customs or practices, the media, etc.
- Formal: legal rules in general, criminal rules in particular.
The penal system, as a highly formalized legal control means, comprises:
- Standards: defining deviant behavior as criminal.
- Penalties: reactions generated by these behaviors.
- Procedure and institutional apparatus for its implementation.
2. Functions of Criminal Law
They relate to the state model to which it belongs and the function and purpose of punishment. Regarding the latter, there are:
- Absolute Theories: The role of criminal law is merely retributive, so the sentence is an end in itself, a bad tax to achieve justice.
- Theories Concerning: The penalty has a preventive purpose, preventing future criminal acts. Prevention can be general (to society to create fear) or special (addressed to the offender, for example, creating reintegration).
- Mixed Theories: The essence of punishment is retributive but should aim for preventive purposes.
State Models
- Theocratic State: Identifies with the concept of retributive punishment, which finds its legitimacy in divine justice.
- Absolutist State: Prevention is identified with an unlimited general saying, the state as an end in itself.
- Classic Liberal State: The penalty is an instrument of repressive state power.
- Social Status: Criminal law’s mission is to protect society against crime and fight crime by incorporating special presence as instruments of security measures.
- Democratic State: Composed of three functions of DP:
- Protection of legal interests and motivation: protection of legal goods (goods that facilitate men’s participation in society) by preventing limited and citizens’ motivation to avoid offending, showing improper conduct in advance.
- Enforcing ethical and social values: the criminal law system should be directed to teleological purposes based on guiding values of a political nature.
- Supervision of the enforcement of the rule: through the pain used to exercise public confidence towards the norm, to have fidelity to the law and accept the consequences of the infringement of its precepts.
3. Anthropological Bases
Criminal law, to be a tool to recognize man as it is, provides a daily understanding and historical and cultural dynamics of man because the legal order is modified according to the changes experienced by man.
Criminal Law is understood teleologically, founded anthropologically, and therefore, it is recognized as a minimum:
- Be an order regulating human behaviors.
- Let there be no contradiction between their devalued human behavior.
- Regular features do not intend to ignore the laws of the physical world.
- Recognize the self of man.
The Fundamental Principles of Penal Control Regulators
The fundamental concepts of criminal law are crime, the kind of illegality that connects to the reactions, and punishment and security measures, the legal consequences that characterize criminal law.
4. Concepts of Criminal Law
In Fact
Binds the definition of crime to the commission of a fact, leaving aside the author’s characteristics that are only relevant during the judicial individualization of punishment. The offense injures or endangers protected rights.
Copyright
Binds the definition of crime to the dangerous character of its author.
Guilty
For a human being to be criticized for their behavior, they must have the choice of self-determination.
Hazard
Man only acts motivated by causes that determine it; therefore, it is impossible to distinguish human behavior from other facts of nature.
Liberal
Represents a system of legal certainty against the offense and plays a role in ensuring citizens’ rights against the rulers.
Authoritarian
Its object is the duty of citizens to the state.
Our criminal law is in fact guilty and liberal.