According to Edmund Amarkwei Foley, director of programmes at the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa, criminal laws throughout the world are shifting from a punitive to a corrective perspective.
He asserts that the retributive nature of criminal law stems from its foundation in religious law, which promoted the "eye for an eye" system.
"In criminal law, for instance, we would discuss punishment as being an eye for an eye, which for the Christian brotherhood comes from the book of Leviticus. Lawyers will refer to this as payback or lex talionis, or the Latin term for the concept of an eye for an eye.
So, if you're speaking in a Christian setting, you may say that the criminal law that derives from the Ten Commandments looks like this: he remarked. "You had to be punished because of who you had insulted.
He claims that a number of causes, such as the separation of religion and state and the understanding that crime is not necessarily motivated by malice but rather by needs and behavioural patterns, have contributed to the progressive change from punishment to correction.
"Even though we now live in a society where the state protects us all, certain systems still adhere to this idea of criminal law. Therefore, under Ghana's common law system, there is still a feeling of punishing people for their past transgressions.
And when I say "punish," I mean to make sure they experience some sort of discomfort, whether it be pain or limitation. need to be sure they would have the mental capacity to refrain from repeating what they had done, he added.
"But also in our modern times, I mean, from the 1990s onward, we have started to have a better knowledge of crime and the reasons why individuals commit crime," he said. And one of the main outcomes of this new understanding is that criminal behaviour is not just motivated by malice or evil intent, but also by necessity.
"Poverty and vulnerability encourage people to commit minor crimes like stealing food. Indeed, as a culture, we do not support theft in any way, yet certain individuals are driven to the breaking point. In our modern environment, we are starting to comprehend mental health better.
Suicides, schizophrenia, despair driving individuals to use drugs, and other crimes are all examples of persons with various mental illnesses committing crimes. You start to see that crime is now a societal phenomena that has to be addressed rather than something unpleasant for us.
Edmund Foley asserts that in order to effectively handle the problem of crime, "we now need to create a difference between those who actually commit crime for bad goals and those who are 'pushed' into crime.
And for that reason, we are currently balancing the need for retaliation with the need for rectification. And community sentencing strategies, often known as alternative sentencing, are introduced to provide those who have not committed really significant crimes a chance.