Comparative Criminal Justice
Essay 1 The goal of comparative studies is to extend a person’s knowledge of people and cultures beyond his or her own groups. Some comparative scholars have a better understanding of their own society and of ways that society might be improved. When thinking about research in comparative justice, there are two questions that we should ask ourselves; what is it that we want to compare? What are the strategies of comparison or the perspectives of comparison? There are issues and problems that when comparing you have to deal with both internal and external to the system of criminal justice. There are multiple perspectives that are to be used: historical, systematic, relativistic, and cultural perspectives. First is the Historical perspective, which is the perspective of understanding the history and the evolution of criminal justice. Before the rise of the nation states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most of the world societies were ruled for centuries by different monarchies, kingdoms, and colonial powers. China, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, all had some kind of historical or traditional law. As for China they were under a traditional law that demanded that any offender must confess and voluntarily surrender. But this somewhat changed when the Qing law was reinforced, this caused the obligations to change by making provisions for alternative sentencing for those who surrendered and by lengthening the limitations of time to surrender. But a short time after the Qing dynasty disintegrated in 1912. By 1912 and 1949, China established a republican government, many Chinese urban intellectuals began to be exposed to western liberal values, and the government was aiming to borrow criminal justice from the West. There would be no comparative understanding of the issues and challenges of criminal