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Bad Acts, Worse Responses: Reconsidering The Moral Foundations Of The Us Criminal Justice System, Christian N. Futch

Honors College Theses

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the contemporary criminal justice system in the United States, offering moral and pragmatic critiques to its current construction, and proposing an alternative construction that is both more successful pragmatically and morally. In this paper, I first establish the connection between morality and the law through the consideration of jurisprudential theories of law. After arguing for this connection, I then offer critiques of the current criminal justice system in the United States. After this, I evaluate the four general theories of punishment using the scholarship of Thom Brooks, finding that retributive and deterrent …