A Little Salvation

无受害者犯罪应该被合法化吗？

一样是大半小时打出来的蠢得要命的journal...不过一晚上憋出两篇我是尽力了...几个小时后还有presentation我还这么悠哉简直【再见

Drug offence is one of the major reasons of increasing imprisonment. Should victimless crime be legalized?

 贩卖毒品罪是收监人员大幅提升的原因之一。无受害者犯罪（贩毒，卖淫嫖娼，赌博等）应该被合法化吗？

    There are controversial opinions on the legalizationof drug use, prostitution, and gambling. These victimless crimes, as their title,involve no direct victim; they are created when the criminal law is used toattempt to prohibit the exchange of strongly desired goods and services between willing adults (1). Amounting people emphasize the uncontrollability of their appeal, acknowledging the prohibition of these inducements which may cause further crimes. In the mean time, beside considering the huge cost brought by imprisoning these new category of criminals, another group of people regard current victimless crimes as efforts to "legislate morality" (1), comparing it with temperance, holding the opinion that since there is consensus between "offender"and "victim" without any forced action. 

   "Legislating morality" is an intriguing concept to be discussed. In general opinion, moral, legal and political arethree different duties, although sometimes prescribe the same course ofactions. However, morality is more inclined to be a content-dependent duty,which people can decide to do it or not; sometimes people still feel these responsibilities when no authority to obligate them. By contrast, laws tend tobe a content-independent duty, people should obey them whatsoever. Like people would hesitate to jaywalk although no cars on the street at all. The law aimsat protecting individuals' right to preserve themselves from harm. The harm,defined by J. S. Mill, is physical or involving property. Otherwise, people "overhimself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."(2)Morality, according to numerous relativists, is ethical judgment that isnothing but the matter of local convention, such that communities have no basisfor criticizing one another. Such capricious creature is not sufficientlyrational to be used as coercive guideline to interfere individuals. Accordingto Mill's second principle of liberties, people have the freedom to pursuetastes even if they are deemed "immoral", the case of victimlesscrime seems not be a permissible interference.

    However, the problem becomes complicated when its social impact proved to be huge and negative. Historically, the introduction of opium into China immediately, to some extent, caused thenation's dramatic decline in both labor, intelligent force and army force. Contemporarily,drug offenders were 8 percent of the inmate population in 1980 and 26 percentby 1993 (P330); the scale of drug is enlarging, with its harmful side effectsrelated to severe violate crimes.

   After all, the debate on victimless crime isbased on the different opinion to the proper government's inference. Multifarious factors are considered, morality, social security, liberty, social economic, inorder to seek out a most beneficial equilibrium, but a lot of concrete statisticsare wanting, which I personally believe that the government and socialinstitutes should encourage experts to do more sociological researches tofulfill the knowledge gap.

Citation:

The Myth ofLeniencyby Elliott Currie

1.Sociology by Linda L. Lindsey &Stephen Beach

2.On Liberty by J.S.Mill

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