Synthèse Location And Form Of Power

Synthèse d'anglais

Locations and form of power

In politics and social science, power is the ability to influence people's behaviour. In order to live together members of a community accept rules, regulations, laws. This helps to create social cohesion but can also lead to conflicts and tensions.

Several subject were possible with the notion "Location and form of power" but I chose to speak about power of peolple ads more precisely of the question "Is a powerfull person obligatory violent?"

To answer to these question, initially I will speak about death penalty , Then I will speak about shame punishmentand to finish I will speak about Wikileaks.

I will start with, which is for me, one of the most violent power which is the capital punishment. We studied this phenomenon with a Webquest which had as a subject “The Death Penalty in the US".

So the death punishment is a legal process where a person is put to death by the state as a punishment for a crime. It is a violence made in answer to another violence.

The application of the capital punishment in the world is present on all the continents, but since decades, many countries abolished the capital punishmen.

But this phenomenon generates many debates between the people who are for and which are against.

The people against the capital punishment think that it is a violation of the basic rights human being, that she refutes the possibility of rehabilitation and second chance and certain person on the death row were cleared after their execution like the case of Cameron Willingham, he was sentenced to death after being suspected of committing arson. He was execucted in 2004(thousand), after his death, new evidences appeared and it was proven that it was not him who had committed the crime.

The arguments of the people who are for the capital punishment are that it is dissuasive, that it definitively draws aside the dangerous criminals of the society and that it clearly displays the security of the population against the crimes, it thus shows the violent power of the country.

But there are other less violent means to impose the power. We studied in class the phenomenon of "shame punishment" that exists in the United States.

It is a way for the state to impose its power through the humiliation and not through violence. Although we can say that it is a psychological violence.

Here too there are people for and against. The supporters of the shame punishment say that it's cheaper and there are less offenders in jail and the critics say that it's a mokery of the justice system.

The shame punishment remainds us of the pillory. When criminals were killed in public place. It also remainds us of the scarlett letter for the puritanism.

There are several types of shame punishment, like the yellow licence plates which means that the driverhas been caught drunk.

But judges have different opinions regarding the shame punishment. We saw that the Judge Michael Cicconetti was in faver of the shame punishment beacause it's successfull because he doesn't see repeat offenders.

But we saw that an other judge said that it was illegal because it doesn't

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