The Possession Paradigm: The Special Part and the Police Model of the Criminal Process
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Possession crimes have become common features in the special parts of modern criminal codes. Defying traditional categories and principles of criminal law, they are paradigmatic of the Police Model of the criminal process, which regards criminal law not as an institution for the regulation of interpersonal conflict but as an administrative mechanism for the enforcement of state authority. Possession offenses appear both in the general part (as a variety of inchoate liability) and the special part (attached to particular offense categories), as a single broad offense (such as possession of criminal instruments) and as several specific offenses (such as possession of drugs, guns, stolen property, and so on). They collapse the distinctions between offense and defense (more specifically, between offense definition and justification) by including, within their definition, the concept of unlawfulness, illegality, or criminality, along with separate exemptions. Possession offenses also do away with traditional notions of imputed (and group) liability, through the doctrine of constructive possession, which makes room for vicarious liability (through dominion over a person) and spatial liability (through dominion over an area). They resist categorization according to the traditional distinction between conduct and status offenses. They challenge the traditional distinction between voluntariness and mens rea, particularly in varieties that do away with mens rea. Perhaps most important, possession offenses straddle traditional distinctions among various aspects of the criminal process, definition, imposition, and infliction. Through the use of presumptions they incorporate procedural elements into substantive criminal law, thus breaking down the distinction between definition and imposition. More fundamentally they are specifically designed for ease of enforcement and imposition, reflecting an approach to criminal law that emphasizes crime control over just punishment, application over definition, and results over rules.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".