Los delitos de produccion. adquisicion y tenencia maliciosa de material pornografico como figuras expansivas del derecho penal

Abstract

This article discusses the expansion of the criminal law as one of the typical issues of modern criminal policies. The author identifies some of the risks coupled with such a phenomenon and makes a distinction between a rational and functional in-crease in the penal response and another which is neither rational nor functional. From another perspective, he stresses the figures of production, possession, and acquisition of pornographic matter as materializations of the criminal dogma influenced by such a reality. After putting emphasis on intra-systemic incoherence, linguistic imprecision, technical faults, penal deficiencies and incongruence and, finally, risks of making sex criminals innocuous in the new legal system, he labels the recent growing expansion in this area as dysfunctional. The above implies the risk of not only producing a hypertrophied and inefficient criminal law but also making it into a tool for social control and unacceptable interference with individual freedom.