In this day and age, many people argue whether there should be fixed punishments for each type of crime. In this essay, I shall look at the arguments for and against the topic.
To begin with, fixing punishments would help shorten the time of judging and thus save resources and time. Every lawbreaker would be sentenced to the same punishment if they commit the same crime. For example, thief A, who stole $1000 and thief B, who stole $2000, would also be sentenced to, say, 10 years in jail.

Besides that, every criminal could receive same judgment under the legal system. Frankly, equality among the lawbreakers could be created indirectly.

Despite the advantages of fixing punishments, there are also other concerns.

The motivation for committing a crime and the circumstances of an individual crime would be ignored providing that every case is greatly different from one another. For instance, the situation of killing for self-defense should not be compared to killing for fun. Self-defense is to be considered a reasonable motivation and consequently, the individual of doing such action should not receive same judgment when compared to a twisted-minded killer. As a result, other important factors, such as the motivation and circumstances, should also be taken into consideration for making judgments that fixing punishments is inappropriate.

On top of that, there would be no sentence bargaining, which is essential for persuading criminals to plead guilty. Nowadays, when prosecutors do not have enough evidence for providing a lawbreaker is guilty, they would use sentence bargain to provide an incentive for factually guilty people to plead guilty. In addition, the practice of sentence bargaining saves even more time than fixed punishments mechanism. If fixed punishment is to be implemented, there would be no sentence bargaining, which will lead to a lot of drawbacks.

To conclude, fixing punishments could be good but it could also create extra burden. All things considered, it is more sensible not to carry out fixed punishments as other vital factors of a crime such as the motivation of committing a crime should be taken into account and the mechanism of sentence bargaining could not be eliminated.