Who made you in charge?

In early history, and by that I mean before the 12th century, generally there were small units or groups of families and communities. Because these family units were so small there was not a real need for formal police.  However the world started to change and these small units grew. Because of this the Frankpledge System was created. The Frankpledge system was an informal police group that was assigned to a group of twenty families or so. If there happened to be a dispute within that group then the Frankpledge System would take effect and the leaders would deal with the issue. However in the 12th century the members of this group were not enforcing the laws and failed to do their job. This caused the need for public policing. By the late 13th and 14th century a new system emerged. It was called the "Watch System". It was one of the first formal police forces. In the early development of the United States Europe's criminal justice system highly influenced the United States policing system. In the 19th century, laws were different from state to state. The growth of population (Think Urbanization: crime rates went up, riots, etc) caused the need for a formal police system. Besides the formal police, vigilantism, was and still exists today. Vigilantism is a person who decides to "police" themselves. They take the law into their own hands and do what they deem necessary. The dangers of vigilantism are valid because the fact that most of these people are not professionally trained and do not follow regular procedure. They also may interpret the law in different ways and take punishment into their own hands. Modern day vigilantism is for example the minutemen who police the United States-Mexico border. Some are regular people with no training and others are war veterans with a different type of training for the job. Many of these people carry licenses to carry guns, pepper spray, a baton, or other equipment. How would society be without formal policing?  What do you think of vigilantism? Are there any dangers to this practice?

Just starting out....

Hey everyone! My English teacher gave my class an assignment to start a blog on a topic that we wanted to learn more about, so here I am and my topic I chose is Criminal Justice. I think my initial interest in criminal justice stems from my father's jobs hes had in the past. He wanted to be a police officer and was in training to become one, but when my sister and I were born he had to quit training and accept other jobs. He was a reserve police officer for five years and has been working as a security guard for the past twenty years at different prisons and facilities. I'm fascinated with the whole legal system. My favorite show is Law and Order! Throughout this blog I will research degrees of crime, different types of punishments and the severity of a punishment in correlation with a crime, the prison system, prisoner's rights, etc. Overall, I'm excited to expand my knowledge about this topic.
- Gina