The Republican Theory

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"The Republican Theory":

As proposed by John Braithwaite and Phillip Pettit

Jonathan Brown

Regent University

There are many theories that have been posed on how the criminal justice system should be modeled and subsequently how the criminal justice system should handle offenses and the like. These would be theories include but are not limited to: Utilitarianism, Liberalism, Hedonism, Retributivism, and Preventionism. The theory that will be focused on in this paper will be the Republican theory. We will discuss four general presumptions that the Republican theory supports and what they mean to criminal justice.

The Republican theory of criminal justice as proposed by John Braithwaite and Phillip Pettit outlines four general presumptions that are brought about by the Republican theory. The first and most important of these presumptions being parsimony. Everything costs money. The old saying "nothing is free" comes to mind.

"Put simply, parsimony is the attempt to identify the smallest number of the most important influences on a dependent variable... criminology uses Occam's Razor theory, which holds that the simplest of competing theories is usually the best... It is important to remember that the principle of parsimony does not mean that the most simple model should always be accepted, only that if two models are equal and competing, the simplest should be chosen or that if a variable can be removed without seriously affecting the model, it should be removed and the model made simpler" (Walker & Maddan, 2013, p.338).

Certain costs are inevitable with ever criminal justice intervention. The Republican theory poses that the presumption of parsimony should "be in favour of less rather than more criminal justice activity" (Braithwaite & Pettit, 1990, p.87) to reduce costs.

The second presumption is the checking of power. "The presumption is that the power enjoyed by the criminal justice authorities will always be subject to such...