the spectrum equate the same consequence. I find this a little disturbing. However, to the peasants in Russia a horse was their livelihood. Certain crimes take on a need for more severe fines when the offense threatens anothers way of life.The three articles I am discussing in The Social Dimension are all about things that seem very taboo to a person in modern society. For example, in the United States even criminals have human rights; therefore some of the things that happened in the past could never happen today. Being burned at the stake for witchcraft, buried alive for adultery, or being beheaded for any number of other crimes seem outrageous to me, but in the past they were common punishments. Today in the United States, some prisoners have many comforts that a person who has not committed a crime do not have. This certainly differs from some of the horrendous criminal treatment of eras before.Killing a child for being deformed or sickly seems horrific for the average mother or father to even think about. However, infanticide was a widespread way of dealing with defective children in European history. Wrightson points out that only a small minority of single women murdered their children. To me even a small minority seems mad. For some reason the thought of infanticide seems more appalling to me than the modern day abortion. However as mentioned before, this is just another way that different cultures viewed different things; something that is taboo today was common practice many years ago.The sentence given to criminals was not only a way to get retribution for the criminal, but to make an example of the treatment of wrongdoers. Punishments were designed to create horror of the crime as well as to provide examples of the penalties for a crime. The punishment was inflicted both living and dead criminals. Obviously the aim was not only to kill the delinquent, but to exercise on him or her a punishment that corresponded to the o...
