What is a Consensus perspective of law?
The legal term for this view is the agreement among citizens on what should and shouldnt be illegal. In other words, it allows groups to come together (i.e. regardless of race age, gender, and characteristics like that) to discuss what should be illegal in that time. While doing some deeper research, something that I found interesting is that this view also sometimes suggests that criminal law and criminology is a function of beliefs, mortality, and rules that apply equally to all members of society.
In an article that I found written by Shannel Sanchez she provides and example of the consensus view approach of law. She used the example of one child per family policy in China. She explained that us (The United States of America) have a consensus the people in the U.S. cannot kill their baby at birth because they wanted the opposite gender. If this was to happen in the U.S. it would be considered murder and would be charged. However, in China when their government introduced the one child policy there was a surge of female infanticide because families in China wanted male baby for what they stand for. I chose this example because I feel like its a great insight about how consensus views of law are different depending on location.
What is Conflict perspective of law?
Conflict perspective of law tends to be views that the law is used as a tool by dominant groups (i.e. people with social, political, economic power, basically anyone with an ounce of privilege) to maintain their position above subordinate groups. With records showing, usually these dominant groups are the white race, people with connections, and of course the wealthy.
An example of this perspective of law is actually something that we talked about in class. This example would be the crack cocaine epidemic. In this article, it describes that a person convicted of possessing five hundred grams of powder cocaine received the same mandatory minimum prison sentence of five years as someone possessing five grams of crack cocaine. The author then describes that more the 90% of persons sentenced in federal courts for crack cocaine violations are African American. Something I found really interesting in this article is the fact that this law, imposed by dominant groups, results in the arrest, conviction, and imprisonment of thousand African Americans every year. This is a great illustration of how the law used and controlled expecially when suppressing certain races.
So what makes them different?
In one of the articles I was looking at, the author described the main difference between conflict theory and the consensus approach and I believed it to be the most fitting. The author described ” Conflict theory rejects the consensus approach and contends that different groups do not necessarily share the same values ,agree on what behaviors should be criminalized, and believe in the same penalty structures” (Race and Crime: Conflict Theory).
What do I think?
In my Opinion, I feel as though are law system is composed of both aspects ; Conflict and Consensus. I feel like we use an equal amount of both and that both can be used improperly but also used for good in a sense. For example, we used a consensus approach when we adopted Occupational Health and Safety Act (OSHA). On the other hand , we can see the conflict theory when it comes to Global capitalisms such a pay inequalities between gender and races.
The list could go on.
