Low social harmfulness of crime

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In Poland we have legal term "Niska szkodliwość społeczna czynu - Low social harmfulness of crime" which means that matter is not worth legal costs and usually dropped by court, and usually ended with fines or without penalty at alll.

It's about if you steal anything with combined value or sole value bellow 1000 polish zloty you are not fined. The same is if someone with loud behavior like arguing or listening music after 9 PM disturbs the silence of the night which lasts from 9 pm to 6 am, usually ended as penalty ticket.

Or as someone under the influence of alcohol carries a motor vehicle, which in Poland is a crime, generally for the first time ends in a fine and disqualification from driving. Because the court considers it to be "low social harm of the act"

Lighting the bonfire during the ban in the national park, littering, or throwing garbage into the woods instead of in a landfill, ordinary man doing so is low social harmfulness when is doing by ordinary man but when is doing so by business owner is ecological environmental crime fined in millions of zlotys finned by Polish ministry of environment,

and they say that the law is equal for all

I was a little joking, I'm not a businessman nor anything threw any trash on the wild dump.
But as the time I was in the woods with my older brother and my mom on mushroom picking. I saw an old washing machine and a TV and a few other things in the middle of the forest, but it 'low social harmfulness act "you can get at most a penalty if it can be caught in the act. Well unless the perpetrator is a company then the penalty can be much greater.

Similarly, when two teenagers having sex when one or both are under the age of 15 Because in Poland age of consent is 15 The court often refuses to even listen case because of the "The low social harm an act",

Why not punish them with the full force of the law, after all, is a crime, not to mention the fact that it is a mortal sin

I wonder why the courts in Poland and around the world say that if someone commits an act prohibited by law, says it's "low social harmfulness" crime is a crime, so why turn a blind eye on them. Would not you like that all perpetrators of offenses were severely punished.

Last edited by pawelk1986 on 13 Mar 2014, 7:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It's all about degrees. We have a similar system in the USA. We have misdemeanors and felonies. There are different degrees of charges for each. Not all offenses are equal. If I slapped you I shouldn't be punished to the same extent as if I beat the living crap out of you or used a ball bat and put you in the hospital. If we got into a shoving match and screamed at each other at a bar while drunk, those charges might even be dropped because it would be obvious that it was just a stupid drunken incident and nobody was hurt.

It actually depends on the municipality as to what is prosecuted. My youngest son who is 18 just went to court and had to pay a fine for possession of tobacco. The age to buy and smoke cigarettes here is 19. He will be 19 in two weeks. He was in our van with a friend of his and the friend got pulled over and was getting a ticket for a suspended license and my son picked up a cigarette that was in the console and then remembering that the particular cop that was standing there was an as*hole, didn't light it he just put it behind his ear. In most places, the cop wouldn't even say anything. This cop wrote him a ticket, he had to go to court and pay a fine. It's not about morality either because this cop smokes and my son has bummed cigarettes off the cops cousin who is also a cop before. It's about paying fines and getting that revenue. There is hardly any crime in my town, and so they prosecute everything they possibly can, to get the money.

As for the mortal sin part, we don't base our laws on mortal sin here in the USA. Some things which are mortal sins are illegal, like murder or theft, but others like disrespecting your parents, lying, or adultry are not illegal. If you want laws based on mortal sins then you are going to have to live with laws that put you in prison for missing mass on a Sunday or HDO without a valid reason. Plus, some things which are illegal aren't mortal sins. It's not a mortal sin for my 18 year old son to smoke a cigarette, let alone put one behind his ear. Yet it's illegal.

Where do you think the line should be drawn? Should common sense not be used? A mother stealing some baby formula because she has no money, a hungry baby and no way to get it otherwise should naturally be punished less severely than a guy stealing a 12 pack of beer because he's broke and wants to get drunk.

In the US its not like that, but it IS like that.

As I understand it we dont have that exact category of criminal case - in which the judge just throws the case out of court for being frivolous (though in civil court lawsuits do get thrown out of court for being 'frivolous'). But if you get a first time conviction for something minor you would probably get probation, or a suspended sentence.

And the law definitly is not applied uniformly.

Tens of millions of undocumented immigrants live in the USA. And tens of millions of native born Americans smoke pot.

If the pot and immingration laws in our country were actually enforced to the fullest our economy would collapse from all the undocumenteds being deported, and every fourth of your respectable neighbors on the street were you live would get carted off to the big house for pot smoking ( and we already have the biggest prison population in the industrialized world).

I really hope that isn't lost in translation.

The phrase used in the UK is "not in the public interest". Even though you did something illegal, the Crown Prosecution Service doesn't see any point prosecuting you. Sometimes this is because the circumstances surrounding your case are clearly not harmful, sometimes it is because the chances of you getting convicted are so low that the cost of prosecution is not worth it.

While it's hardly legally official in the United States, it's quite common for District Attorneys to pick and choose which cases are going to be prosecuted, especially for low level crimes in which small amounts of money are involved.

We also have the option when serving on a jury to nullify the law by finding a person not guilty. A juror can find a defendant not guilty if he/she believes the law is wrong even if they violated such law.

Ignore button activated.

Do you think kids can break the law and not be penalized, the age of consent has been established for a reason, as well as the age at which you can drink alcohol, maybe Americans go a little overboard in this respect, but luckily I live in Poland and I'm 27 years old: - )

As for sex is I think it's fun for adults, not for kids. But if the kids break the law, I do not consider that to allow them to get away with it, and of course the mandatory spanking

I have no issue with the age of consent in Poland. It is the same as in Denmark.

I have an issue with using religious arguments for enacting legal penalties... Are you familiar with the following?

This constitution was enacted in 1997 under the SLD (Democratic Left Alliance) right-wing parties wanted to have a stronger "invocatio Dei " in constitution but SLD is not agreed to these amendments.

I have a question for you, do not you think you law should punish teens for underage sex , the same as l adults who commit adultery?

Last time I checked, adultery is not a crime in Poland.

As for underage sex, several countries have "Romeo and Juliet" laws:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_ ... uliet_laws

This is to prevent that someone who is marginally over the age of consent gets slammed in court for having sex with someone marginally below the age of consent when - in reality - the difference in age and maturity is negligible. I am in favour of such laws.

And should be




But seriously I was a little joking. I am Catholic, my faith, I try to be taken seriously, but do not consider myself as a fundamentalist.

do you think "Rome and Juliet" laws are good, and, and that we should not legally punish kids for behaving naughty.
I once watched a program on TV about the upbringing of children in the nineteenth century Poland. While this may bad term because Poland did not exist as a sovereign state at that time. It was said that the lot young of girls have to wear chastity belts until get married, or sometimes up to 20 years of age. Girl who had sex with the boy, and God forbid she got pregnant, she was disinherited by the family and thrown out of the house.

The boys did not have the better, because there existed special chastity belts boys and men who were supposed to protect the boys, to not commit the sin of premarital sex and above all against masturbation.

So if you caught your kid son or daughter, did not want you to punish them severely

The problem about not prosecuting such crimes is that it creates a haven (and parameter) for criminals to operate.

In the USA, some criminals limit their activities on things that the cops would regard as "low priority" because of all the matters they have to handle. It lets them live a life of crime...creating victims...knowing the authorities won't make much effort to catch them.

Economically, it's the way it is. Socially, it's not doing anything to protect the victims.

I already answered that question in the affirmative, as highlighted above.

What good would punishing them severely over underage sex do?...the idea of chastity belts sounds rather humiliating and I don't see how masturbation or premartial sex are 'sins' but I am not religious if people want to believe those things are sins great, but they shouldn't push it on others or expect laws to reflect it.

In the USA I doubt that you could even get the religous right on your side.

In the USA evangelical Christians even have a word for what you're talking about:"dominion". Its almost a religous heresy to some.

Using the government to enforce the moral code of the Bible is "dominionism". Religious right voters may believe in the Bible. but many are strongly opposed to religous right politicians who want to use the government to enforce the moral code of the Bible, and brand such as "dominionists". The religous right seems to be quite divided about the issue of dominionism here.