Social Control and Criminal Policy. Issues Reffering to a Changing Paradigm. The Tricky Challenge of Social Security and the Danger of Overprotection

The reaction of our society against any harmful acts is a necessity dictated by the need to safeguard the social order, the fundamental values protected by the Rule of Law. New social phenomena such as massive migration, refugee crisis, terrorist attacks or organized crime request proportional reactions of the State authorities, reactions which aim to protect in the first place the security of innocent population, and on the second place, that aim to ensure the proportional sanctioning for the harms against social values protected by criminal means. In this complex social context, we can observe an increased preoccupation for new techniques and instruments to provide social control, and a dramatic trend that leads to the modification of the current criminal and criminal procedure legislation. The criminal policy of the states, both legal and judicial, is shaped by the legislator in order to provide social security and to minimize the risk of criminality of a specific nature (terrorism, organized crime etc.) The concrete way to provide such organized reactions by the special bodies with specific features in the field of criminal repression generates fierce controversy both in the doctrine, society and public perception. In this complex and scary social context, the criminal law needs to adapt to the new forms of crime, needs to find new proper ways to react to specific criminal deeds and needs to intervene from the very beginning of iter criminis, even in the phase of preparatory acts. We need new principles -such as the principle of prevention and the principle of precaution-and rules that can create the specific frame in order to achieve the desideratum of security because the old ones proved to be insufficient or outdated. Thus, if a certain human activity is risky or potentially harmful, and there is no certainty about the magnitude of its effects or causality, then a proactive action is needed in order to avoid injury. In the same time, in the field of criminal procedure law, the vast majority of special methods of surveillance or investigation is ordered by the judge of rights and freedoms as a guarantee of the rights of the person under investigation but the conditions in which such measures may be imposed are likely to raise serious questions about the role of criminal law as a whole and about the limits of interference of the state bodies who may slightly commit abuses under the cosy umbrella of fighting against crime desiderate. Is it worth it to sacrifice personal freedoms and rights for a higher purpose of general security? Or is just another failure of the human thoughts which will lead to a bigger problem? Is overprotection of the society a safe solution for our future?