Purposes of criminal penalty An analytical study

Crime is a social phenomenon present in all human societies, involving an unlawful act that carries consequences. The criminal penalty is the most serious and most painful kind of punishment. It is either a punishment or a precautionary measure imposed by the public authority on those who commit a crime. Criminal punishment has certain characteristics that distinguish it from other forms of punishment, such as civil punishment and administrative punishment. The criminal penalty is no longer just a means of taking revenge on the offender and causing him pain. Rather, it has many purposes that it seeks to achieve, represented in achieving justice, public and private deterrence, and reforming and rehabilitating the offender. Reform and rehabilitation is the main objective that the criminal penalty seeks to achieve, but it cannot be achieved in isolation from other objectives. The purposes of the criminal penalty are linked to each other, so if the pain achieves justice, then it must be to the extent that achieves the reform of the offender. Reform cannot be achieved without achieving justice, just as achieving justice leads to achieving public deterrence. Likewise, special deterrence is associated with the purpose of reform and rehabilitation. It is not possible to achieve special deterrence by preventing the criminal from returning to committing the crime without being rehabilitated and reformed in the penal institution. The criminal penalty in its two forms, whether it is a punishment or a measure, aims to achieve many purposes in order to reach its final goal,