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Journal for Studies in Management and Planning

Available at

http://edupediapublications.org/journals/index.php/JSMaP/

ISSN: 2395-0463

Volume 03 Issue 13

December 2017

Available online: http://edupediapublications.org/journals/index.php/JSMaP/ P a g e | 494

Analytical Study On Over Criminalization

and the Impact on Criminal Law

Pranav Ranga

Assistant Professor Institute of Law Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra

Abstract

The criminal law is the most coercive institution of social control in the modern liberal state. It

criminalizes conduct, prosecutes individuals, and treats offenders in ways that under other

circumstance we would consider as serious violations of individuals’ rights. At a time when this

institution has been described as a lost cause serving immoral ends, it is all the more urgent to

provide a normative account of the criminal law’s limits and scope of action. A starting point of

this thesis is that any successful normative account of the criminal law must ground penal

principles and practices in an explicit, and sufficiently delimited, political philosophy. This thesis

does just that: it advances an account of the criminal law and criminalization that derive from

central premises of classical liberalism. An account shaped by such liberal values and premises

is capable of responding successfully to one of the most urgent predicaments of the criminal law

today; that is, the abuse of coercive power by the state through the enactment of criminal

statutes. This is the problem of over criminalization

Keywords: over criminalization, liberalism, Criminal Law

1. INTRODUCTION

At the turn of the 21 st century, Andrew

Ashworth, one of the most thoughtful

theorists of the criminal law, suggested that

the criminal law is a lost cause (Ashworth

2000). His claim is that it has become

unprincipled, chaotic, and subject to the

unreflective and populist practices of

politicians, practitioners and other social

actors. What is worse, within this

unpromising framework the criminal law

has been adopted as the “natural, or the only

appropriate response to a particular event or

series of events giving rise to social

concern” (Ashworth 2000, p.225). Thus, not

only are we experiencing an unprincipled,

chaotic and populist criminal law, we are

also using it as if it were the main way – or

perhaps the only way – by which the state

can put its policies into practice. 3 The

results of these developments are well- known: many institutions within society

have become bodies of control for the

prevention of crime, a mirror of the Brave

New World; the media have swamped the

public with alarmist stories about the

dangers of monstrous criminals walking

freely on the streets; people have been