Reconsidering the Criminal Justice System

Americans are losing faith in the American criminal justice system. In 2001 Lawrence W. Sherman, then Director of the Fels Center of Government at the University of Pennsylvania, reported that "The System Is More Fair and Effective Than Ever." However, by mid 2021, Gallup reported that only 20% of Americans had substantial faith in the criminal justice system -- and that the number of people with such confidence was falling. Are things objectively getting better or worse? And does the low esteem the criminal justice system is held in have an effect on crime rates, safety, and social unrest? 

There are certainly an abundance of reasons to distrust American criminal justice. We claim it to be the "best in the world," but it is hard to reconcile this with America's prison industry leviathan. America leads the world not just in the number of prisoners, but also in the incarceration rate itself. Louis Brandeis wrote in the October 15, 1912 Cleveland Plain Dealer that "[i]f we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable." Is a legal system that incarcerates nearly 1% of its adult citizenry, predominantly those who are either poor or belonging to a racial or ethnic minority. 

Moreover, we have known for many years that the police have been heavily -- and intentionally --  infiltrated by white supremacists. Is that respectable? We've seen numerous police officers killing or assaulting unarmed black men. Is that respectable?

More than a third of US prisoners are mentally ill. Prisons and jails are the largest mental health care providers in America. Is that respectable?

The entire argument about "defunding the police" has been used as a political cudgel by the right, but the real goal of the movement isn't about eliminating the existence of police but about shifting a portion of their budget to provide other, community based, supportive interventions such as emergency mental health care, crisis workers, etc. Not every emergency is best resolved by the use of force. One would shudder to think of sending police, instead of fireman, to put out fires through the use of force and authority. Why do we think it is rational to send police instead of mental health care professionals to assist those whose family members are having a psychiatric crisis? Do we expect the mentally ill to passively submit to authority? 

Policing in America suffers from excessive militarization and an "us v. them" mentality that causes police to use a "maximum force" approach instead of conflict resolution and de-escalation. Is this respectable? 

America has a long way to go before its criminal justice system is once again respectable. We must root out any hint of racism from our police departments. Police officers must feel free to turn in the corrupt, racist, and violent officers in their departments- instead of being punished for doing so. If they can not police their own, they should not be allowed to police the rest of us. We must admit that any cop that knows of another cop employing excess force and not reporting it is committing dereliction of duty, and thus is himself a bad cop. There is no neutral ground here.

Such large cultural changes in American policing are, at this point, pipe dreams - as the attacks on re-directing law enforcement budgets towards force-free alternatives demonstrates. Numerous reforms are necessary, yet too often we see half-hearted, symbolic reforms paraded as if they were some sort of solution to long-standing problems in police culture.

No reform is possible until American police are willing to admit that, too often, cops are in fact the "bad guys" themselves. Instead, when the excess, unnecessary, and often racist violence committed by law enforcement is exposed, police officials simply become defensive and try to change to subject. Arrogance is often accompanied by a lack of introspection. In this case, however, such bull-headedness is often fatal for members the very communities the officers are supposed to protect, and who pay their salaries. 

And that doesn't even begin to address the disaster that is our criminal court system, our sentencing systems, or in many cases even the laws themselves. Those are for another post.