A Discussion On Cost Control Of Punishment Execution

Within the modern countries, criminal law is accorded the duties of maintaining the dominance of the country, chasing and realizing fairness and impartiality, and correcting and educating offenders. However, as a universal truth, in order to realize such duties, during the governance of crime, unavoidable cost will incur. Although currently we have a relative patient attitude towards such cost, considering China’s political system, economic conditions and social foundation, it is still of great meanings from the theoretical and practice view to study on the topic of "how to realize the effectiveness of penalty execution in a most-economical way".In the recital of this paper, I give an overview of the current situation of China’s imprisonment so as to prove that the cost we spent on the imprisonment is a huge amount. Accordingly, I then raise two basic methods to solve such problem:1) decreasing the cost by improving the way of executing imprisonment and 2) decreasing the total amount of offenders who will be subject to imprisonment.Following the recital, in the first 2 chapters, I put analyses on two critical practices:privatization of prison and plea bargaining, both of which have been put into practice for decades in the western countries (America, among those countries, is a typical example). My discussion on these two practices will mainly focus on the theoretical foundations they rely on, their current practicing condition and appraisal on such practice.Based on the content of the first 2 chapters, then I start to discuss the practical significance of these two practices in China and finally I make my conclusion that even though there is no sufficient basis for China to directly introduce such two system, but still it will be helpful for us to put such into practice within a very limited scope to provide useful experience for the reform of China’s penalty execution. Furthermore, as both of the two systems, to some extent, breakthrough and develop the traditional opinion of "Power of punishment shall be exclusively owned by the State", it will be of great value to study such system from such aspect.