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The aspiration principle means that when a perpetrator is sentenced for many crimes at once, only the most serious crime is judged at a and the rest are reduced in a falling scale. The system is applied in the Swedish legal system.

Motives of the principle: The first motive is humanitarian as the suffering of the perpetrator is judged to increase in intensity as the punishment goes on.

Another motivation is that the perpetrator might not have seen the crime as blame worthy and therefore it would be unreasonable to punish him/her extra for that.

A third motivation is that longer sentencing not necessarily is proportional to the perpetrator's ability to stop doing crime. Longer sentences could even affect the perpetrators social ability and therefore be ineffective in a crime prevention point of view.

A fourth motivation was that many smaller crimes could in effect lead to a life sentence due to them being added up. Thus crimes that never would lead to life imprisonment would do so in practice. The rebate would also stop prisons from overfilling.

The fifth motivation is that the legal system wants to be able to compare different sentences. It could be seen as unreasonable that assault gives a longer sentence than murder just because there were many instances of it.

Critics mean that the principle de facto means that some crimes are rebated and therefore the victims lose out on justice. Another criticism would be that crime perhaps would fall if repeat offenders were locked up longer. The perpetrator being unable to do crime while locked up. The opposite of this system is the culmination principle where the sentences are added up. This system is practiced in the United States.