Utilitarian Reduction of Punishment: On the Boundaries of the Security Paradigm in Law

This article critically analyzes the utilitarian reduction of punishment in contemporary criminal law doctrine, exploring the transformation of justice from a model based on fairness and retribution to a risk management system, where security becomes an idea that subordinates all other legal institutions. It is demonstrated that subordinating punishment to the logic of prevention leads to the loss of its most important functions: retributive, expressive, and symbolic. The conceptual fallacy of identifying the essence of punishment with one of its functions crime prevention is demonstrated. In this context, attention is paid to the process of securitization of law, in which the fundamental legal principle of “Ius est ars boni et aequi” is replaced by an assessment of the danger posed by an individual and the prediction of future threats. Utilitarian reduction is viewed as a symptom of the possible degeneration of the legal system and the political and legal regime of the state, in which justice is transformed from an instrument of justice into a technology of oppression, and the paradigm of human rights is supplanted by the paradigm of state security. As an alternative, a model of functional intersection is proposed while maintaining the autonomous essential cores of punishment and security measures.