The origins of criminal law go back the Code of Hammurabi, 4,000 years ago (Ellis & Walsh, 23). Hammurabi was the king who reigned over Babylon in that period and who likely formulated the codes of conduct. Even in societies that did not have written laws, however, there were still understood rules of acceptable behavior. Criminal laws were not instituted from the beginning in most early civilization but grew out of laws called ôtorts,ö that permit a citizen to bring charges of wrongdoing against another citizen so that he can be compensated or so that the state can impose punishment.
The spread of criminal statutes has been attributed to different things based on five different perspectives. The supernatural/religious perspective proposes that crime statutes come directly from God or from religious teachings, a view evidenced by the fact that in many parts of the world, religious teachings and laws are similar. The Ten Commandments, for example, contain dictates that reflect similar criminal statutes, as in ôThou shalt not kill,ö and ôThou shalt not steal.ö For many people, crime, sin, and evil are virtually indistinguishable concepts.
The final arbitrator perspective suggests that many criminally victimized people engage in feuding or vendettas to try to take the law into their own hands and exact revenge for what they have suffered. In this perspective, political authorities take the role of final arbitrator to adjudicate disputes between people and exact retribution for crimes.
The class conflict perspective sees crimes as being committed between classes and criminal laws as an attempt to preserve the social and economic advantages of the most powerful class. In America, for example, the criminal laws exempt most profit-making from being classified as theft.
The consensus, or social contract, perspective asserts that criminal statutes are ôfundamental to living in civilized societiesö (Ellis & Walsh, 25)...