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In Criminology , criminalization or '''criminalisation''' is "the process by which behaviors and individuals are transformed into Crime and criminals" (Michalowski p.6). Previously legal acts may be transformed into crimes by Legislation or judicial decision. However, there is usually a formal presumption in the rules of Statutory Interpretation against the Retrospective Application Of Laws and only the use of express words by the Legislature may rebut this presumption. The power of judges to make new law and retrospectively criminalise behaviour is also discouraged. In a less overt way, where laws have not been strictly enforced, the acts prohibited by those laws may also undergo ''de facto'' criminalisation through more effective or committed legal enforcement. THE PROBLEMS All Feminist might seek consistency of treatment for women as victims and, therefore, demand the decriminalisation of abortion, adultery, and seduction ( Zina is a Hudud offence in Syariah Law ), and the criminalisation of Domestic Violence and Sexual Harassment . In theory, society reaches a consensus view on whether certain acts or behaviour are harmful. In cases where there is agreement, the criminal justice system may be extended to treat those matters as crimes. Conversely, when society has evidence that it is no longer at risk from such acts or behaviour, they may be decriminalised. For example, Recommendation No. R (95) 12 adopted by the (Leiper 1994). DISCUSSION People experience a range of physical and social injuries in different contexts which will vary according to the level of economic and political development of their country. Some will be injured out of Poverty and Malnutrition , others by Violence which might stem from a major conflict such as War or from the personal violence in a Robbery . The Environment may be damaged by Pollution , there may be hazards at work. Many of these sources of injury will be ignored while the state may delegate powers of control to a number of different agencies within an international framework where Supranational agencies and Human Rights organisations may offer assistance in responding to the causes of those injuries. When a state debates whether to respond to a source of injury by criminalising the behaviour that produces it, there are no pre-set criteria to apply in formulating social policy. There is no Ontological l reality to crime. The criminal justice system responds to a substantial number of events that do not produce significant hardship to individual citizens. Moreover, events which do cause serious injuries and perhaps should be dealt with as crimes, e.g. situations of Corporate Manslaughter , are either ignored or dealt with as civil matters. The criminalisation process defines and classifies behaviour. It broadcasts the laws so that no-one may have the Excuse of Ignorance , and disposes of those who will not obey. There are now more criminal laws and they are penetrating deeper into the social structures of modern societies. Crime control has become an industry, yet it remains ineffective in providing protection to all its citizens from harm. Such as it is, the process is made up of three components: #Creation of a social order. This is both a socio-economic process, a "...fundamental ordering of social relations so that those things necessary for social survival can be produced and distributed in some predictable fashion" and an ideological process so that there can be a "...development of values, beliefs, and ideas related to the concrete tasks of production and distribution."(p. 6). Thus, society must develop the apparatus of law creation, law enforcement and Punishment and the system must be acceptable to the majority of those who live in the community. If the laws do not match the general Mores , their enforcement will be a source of friction and disharmony. Conformity to the social order must, for the most part, be self-enforced. #For the times when self-enforcement fails, society must create a legal order. This part of the process sees the centralisation of power within the institutions of the political state. Weber's Thesis argued that the State had a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its borders. Some states justified the criminalisation process as demonstrating their concerns about safety and security, the policy of control, policing, criminal justice, and penal practice. The modern state is Decentralising and Privatising its functions. This is changing the character and content of the remaining institutions of the state which must now work co-operatively with other for-profit agencies. #The political order must realign so that the remaining political entities such as Legislature s and Judge s set agreed targets for state control and then produce actual outputs of the legal order, i.e. of people defined as criminal and processed through that system. Ontological basis of crime Put in the most simple terms, ontology deals with or establishes the clear grounds for being. (Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, introduction, referencing Plato's Parmenides.) In some of the traditional schools, such as those of the post-1688 English or Americans (many of the writings of the American Founding Fathers, but especially The Federalist) and their Dutch predecessors (see Kossmann, E. H. Political Thought in the Dutch Republic, 2004) ontology proper is deemed beyond the scope of legal thought, in accord with the modern distinction between society and state (which some consider based in the distinction the Romans made between themselves and their Italian allies, the socii, but not given the theoretical articulation we recognize today until emphasized by Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. See State .) However, some classical theorists, such as Aristotle, in his Politics and Metaphysics, and to a lesser degree in his Topics, needed suggest that the distinction is at least problematic. One need consider no further than the claim that man is a political animal to see this is so. As a political animal, man has come to see himself as possessed of rights (UN Human Rights Council, http://www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/) -- whether these are the Rights of Englishmen of old, or the universal human rights advocated vigorously toward establishment today through the matrix of commercialism (International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/a_cescr.htm). At least in the today dominant American model, deprivation of right amounts to injury (consider especially Justice Stevens dissenting opinion in . SEE ALSO REFERENCES
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