Empirical Research on the Balance between Crime and Punishment

Author: Bai Jianzhu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-01-01
Features: This study is a large-scale (legislative full sample, judicial large sample) empirical research in the field of criminal law and criminology in China, based on the fundamental concept of criminal integration. It assumes that the relationship between crime and punishment is balanced and attempts to test this assumption with objective facts from legislation and judicial practice. The theoretical hypothesis is derived from the principle of crime-punishment balance in criminal law, with samples including all legally defined crimes and all robbery cases in the "Legal Intent Case Database." The analysis focuses on 422 crime-punishment relationships in the criminal law division and 1,107 crime-punishment relationships in criminal justice. The research method adopted a strategy of integrating speculation and empirical analysis, as well as qualitative and quantitative approaches.
In the introduction, the significance, history, and position of crime-punishment balance in criminal law are discussed, along with the logical framework of the entire text. It is argued that while crime and punishment should be balanced, the actual state of this balance still needs to be discovered, verified, and explained.
The section on "Crime Theory" discusses the meaning of crime that should be balanced with punishment. It posits that crime is a unified concept dominated by retributive crime and coexisting with utilitarian crime, an interactive crime where the act of crime is the main focus and the criminal is the secondary subject, and a concrete crime that is integrated and elevated from multiple and multi-dimensional abstract crimes. After addressing methodological issues in the quantitative analysis of crime, the sections on "Crime Quantity" and "Punishment Quantity" focus on the quantitative characteristics of the severity of crime and the severity of punishment. Through the constructed quantitative evaluation system for crime and punishment, all crimes in the sample are quantitatively described as both theoretically and practically multiple, allowing any pair of crime-punishment relationships to find their appropriate and actual positions in the overall crime-punishment ranking.
Building on this foundation, the section on "Balance" analyzes eight different meanings of balance in terms of attributes, hierarchy, basing, value, science, fact, norms, and sentencing. It then statistically tests the degree of balance for 422 legislative crime-punishment relationships and 1,107 judicial crime-punishment relationships. The results show that neither complete balance nor complete imbalance exists between crime and punishment.
Finally, the paper discusses the causes and countermeasures of the global, age-old problem of crime-punishment imbalance, as well as the three derivative concepts of crime-punishment balance.