👉The table of contents so far is here.
Chapter 6: The System of Offences Law
6.2. The Essence of the offence
Under the communist offences law, an offence is not understood as an immoral act that goes against morality, but as an antisocial act that disrupts the order of the community. In that sense, the punishment given to the offender does not have the connotation of moral condemnation, and such condemnation and treatment are essentially separate.
Looking more closely at the essence of an offence, it is understood as a material-mind complex consisting of the physical result of the violation of a legal interest and the offender's intentional act. In this respect, the communist understanding of offences is not biased towards either materialistic act-consequentialism or idealistic actor-psychologism.
In this way, the basic type of offence is an intentional act that causes specific physical damage, and negligent acts are generally not considered to be offences, but gross negligence, which is a severe form of negligence, and professional negligence by professionals who are required to exercise a high degree of care, are perceived as offences because they are second only to intentional acts in their antisocial nature.
On the other hand, defensive counterattacks, such as those typified by self-defense, are natural biological reactions and therefore do not constitute illegal offences in the first place. The same can be said of invasive acts performed properly as legitimate professional acts, such as a doctor's surgical operation. Far from being anti-social, such legitimate professional acts are actually socially beneficial.
The illegal offences referred to here are to be distinguished from administrative violations. Administrative violations are acts that violate administrative regulatory regulations, and their legal effect is administrative penalties such as the revocation of certain qualifications/licenses or the suspension/revocation of civil rights, not corrective treatment. A typical example is a violation of road traffic laws.
Incidentally, traditional penal systems are embedded with the thesis of responsibility, symbolized by the slogan "No punishment without responsibility." In other words, punishment is considered to be a legal reaction imposed on the basis of the perpetrator's responsibility for past criminal acts.
As a result, those who are mentally incompetent at the time of the crime cannot be held responsible for their crimes, and are treated as legally innocent, which often causes social ripples.
Even in communist offences laws, "responsibility" is not denied, but it is not retrospective responsibility for past actions, but prospective responsibility in which the offender should improve and rehabilitate himself/herself for the future.
Therefore, there is no such thing as no corrective treatment due to incompetence, and even if the influence of mental illness, etc. is recognized as being strongly related to the offence at the time of it, they are not exempt from corrective treatment at all. As will be discussed later, in such cases, therapeutic treatment incorporating psychiatric treatment programs is given.
However, when it is determined that the mental or intellectual disability of an offender is severe and difficult to cure, and therefore that corrective treatment cannot be expected to have any real effect, the offender may be exempted from treatment due to the impossibility of treatment and may be subject to medical and welfare protection measures, but this would be a highly exceptional case.
👉The papers published on this blog are meant to expand upon my On Communism.
