The Historical Trend Of Reform Of The Penal System

With the continuous development of human society and progress of civilization, the methods of penalty are constantly changing. The penal system of early human society dates from the simple concepts of retribution and punishment. As a result, corporal punishment has been characterized by barbarism and inhumanity, which dues to its barbaric and inhuman attributes what have long been abandoned in the history. As to the death penalty, though having been improved for a long time, and its implementation ways have been becoming more and more civilized, its effects on preventing and reducing crime yet has been increasingly questioned since the first criticism by Beccaria during the Enlightenment movement because of the extreme severity of its consequences. According to the statistics in June 2009, among 197 countries in the world,139 countries have abolished the death penalty substantially, accounting for 70% of all. Among these countries,94 countries have completely abolished the death penalty and 10 countries abolished the common death penalty but only adopt it under certain conditions (military crime or war crime). Moreover, there are 35 countries retaining the death penalty, but they haven't used it for the recent 10 years. That is to say, only 58 countries and regions still retain the death penalty. From the above discussion, it can be inferred that the abolition of the death penalty is the historical trend.Since the Enlightenment movement, definite punishment against freedom, with an air of progress and civilization, had become the major penalty method of the penal system worldwide. But soon, influenced by two bourgeois revolutions, punishment against freedom shifted to be powerless towards crime. When people started thinking and research, they found the main reason for this phenomenon was that the object we needed to punish had change. Before the Industrial Revolution, as to criminal, the mail object was natural criminal, which infringed the fundamental interests of life, such as people's body, life, property and so on. These crimes have existed since ancient times. With the development of the industrial revolution as well as the growth of social productive forces, social structure became diversified instead of being unified. The state used administrative means to constitute a lot of fictional legal interests for administrative purposes. Relative to natural criminal, people who infringe this kind of fictional legal interests were called prisoners condemned by man or administrative detainees. For example, after setting the tariffs for the management of trade followed the arising of smuggling, crimes similar to gambling, prostitution, etc. Confronting with new objects of crime, punishment against freedom will develop and improve as the social progress. In fact, since the development of the industrial revolution, the rate of social crime spread out all over the world. When the crime rate rose, punishment against freedom produced a side effect, namely increasing cost of execution, which took up a great deal of social resources and that condition became increasingly prominent. We have to reform. From the existing historical experience, there are mainly four penalty methods for the reformations worldwide towards punishment. They are decriminalized penalties, non-penalization, light penalties and the socialization in implementing penalty.This paper attempts to analyze the feasibility of reformation road of these four penalties in China and comes to the conclusion that in the current view of Chinese society, the first three penalties face formidable difficulties so that only socialization in implementing penalty have possibility to have a try. Specifically, socialization in implementing penalty mainly has these ways, namely community rectification, criminal reconciliation system, civil substitution.