Criminal Policy-making: a Problem-Oriented Perspective

States use criminal policymaking to solve various public issues. Criminal policymaking without problem identification will end up in failure. If a solution is designed before conducting problem analysis, considerable waste of financial and human resources can incur for solving a nonsignificant problem or a non-problem. Regardless of the criminal policy system model, by using some criteria we can analyze the criminal policy-making system’s condition in terms of problem-oriented consideration to understand the system’s weaknesses for policy change. Problem-oriented criminal policymaking requires a commitment to substantive and procedural essentials. In this article, through a descriptive-prescriptive approach and based on library resources a general framework for a criminal policy-making system is proposed. Substantively, the type of evidence used in the policy process based on the “hierarchy of evidence”, and procedurally, the separation between policy analysis and drafting stages in the policy cycle are considered essential for a problem-oriented criminal policymaking, used here to present a framework for criminal policy analysis from a problem-oriented perspective.