The criminal justice system in America has not yet shown efficiency in decreasing the crime rates and on making the people feel safer in their homes and in the streets. Rather than preserving peace and tranquility, the criminal justice system contributes to social instability. What is the criminal justice system doing wrong with its policy and how can it resolve the issues of violence, crime and safety?
In the United States, criminals are punished for harsher and longer sentences than any other industrialized country. Therefore its rates of incarceration are much higher than those industrial countries, although the crime rates are approximately the same to them and remain stable. Crime prevention in the United States is not doing better, even with its current criminal justice system, because it deemphasizes on that mater as well as rehabilitation. Criminals have to pay for their acts against the law by being incarcerated with the ‘get tough’ policy towards crime that has sentences such as the “three strikes and you’re out” or the “truth in sentencing”. According to Donziger’s book: The Real on Crime, there are over 5 million citizens under the supervision of the criminal justice system. Furthermore, the increase on prison population was mostly due to nonviolent offenders. In Texas, for example, a study found that 77 percent of all the prisons admissions were for nonviolent crimes. In California, people who committed lesser offences were the ones that went to prisons at a higher rate than then the ones that committed serious crimes. Nevertheless, not only do these rates show a low effect on the falling of crime rates, they confirm that the criminal justice system provokes bad consequences to society that weren’t thought of. These are called: Unanticipated Consequences. Indeed, by sending as many people to prison and jail with its current policy, it has come that people are more likely to undermine the respect of the law and change their behaviors in the streets. Moreover, it reduces “the likelihood that young people will create and be able to sustain a family” as Donziger argues in his chapter on ‘race and criminal justice’. This consequence explains the disruption in family life and the loss of another help towards violence avoidance. Not only do the incarceration rates affect family life and people’s behavior, it also affects offenders’ chances on getting jobs when they finish their sentences because of their criminal records that make employers look pass their applications, even with the slightest arrest. This leads to an increasing number of unemployment in the city that aggravates the chances on lowering crime rates. In addition, bad results have sprung out of this policy towards the government and political matters. “Widespread arrests in minority communities have had negative affect upon the ethic and attitude of the wider community toward the law and its representatives”. Minorities are more likely to be imprisoned and to get harsher sentences than white people. Half of prison and jail population include African-American males while they only make up less than 7 percent of the entire U.S. population. There is also evidence, still according to Donziger, that African-Americans and whites are treated differently at sentencing. In Florida, they received longer sentences for the same criminal demeanor as whites. This is the reason why minorities feel that they are treaded unjustly and therefore feel some sort of resentment towards the government. Also it has to be said that offenders tend to lose their right to vote because of criminal convictions. This has a great impact on the political power of the country. However, many of the laws first passed to take the right to vote away from criminals were passed in the beginning of last century to purposely weaken the political power of African-Americans.
Unanticipated consequences are not the only matter that draws to our attention. The costs that interfere with the policy should be an important issue concerning taxpayers. Most of the money spent on taxes turn into money spent on prison construction and operations instead on funding for education and other “quality-of-life programs”. In 1994, the federal crime bill allocated $23 billion for law enforcement and $6.1 billion for crime prevention programs. Every year an inmate spends in prison costs taxpayers at least $22,000 per year, without counting the hidden costs. The older they get, the higher the costs. For the ones over the age of fifty, annual costs can reach up to $69,000. Also, juveniles can cost over between $35,000 and $100,000 per year depending on where they are detained (state-run facilities or secure institutions) because they need more services such as education and more supervision. Spending on corrections at a national level has increased faster than any other spending category. In Virginia, the state estimated that the new prisons would cost them about $500 million per year to operate. The average cost of building a new cell is $54,000. The real cost of a new cell is actually over $100,000 because of interest on debt the states owes by borrowing the money. This shows that many prisons are built without a “full understanding of the actual costs involved”. As said earlier, the average cost to keep an inmate in prison each year costs approximately $22,000, without the hidden costs. These costs are ‘hidden’ because they do not turn up on the criminal justice budgets. In these we can count the “Off-Budget Items” such as cafeterias, and medical care. These “Off-Budget Items” increase the costs by about $8 billion dollars a year. Also included are “Construction Overruns”, the actual costs being higher than expected those overruns are about 40 percent more the original costs, and “Child Care”, because many of the inmates have children to look after, they are placed in foster homes or are taken care of in another way. “Public Health Costs” are as well very high. The inmates are at a high risk of getting infected with transmittable diseases, they are fourteen times likely to be infected with AIDS than the rest of the population. With those costs, have to be added the costs spent on the police. In 1990, “the national outlay for police was about $32 billion”. Some cities even incarcerated more offenders for the simple fact that when they did, they would receive more money for their institutions.
In a whole, from 1991 to 1996, the United States have spent more than $400 billion on law enforcement to build new prisons. By viewing these costs, it is shown that taxpayers, who are mislead because the criminal justice believes its policy is the way to prevent crime, put all their money on law enforcement instead of funding services such as education and other programs useful for the people. The money could be spent on youth programs that would help more the prevention of violence rather than incarcerating a high amount of people that is a result of more violence in society and consequently increases the feeling of not being safe in ones home.
Donziger’s argument on reforming the criminal justice system is on my opinion an argument that I support. As seen previously, the high rate of incarceration does more bad than good. How is it useful to punish criminals with longer sentences and harsher ones without any form of rehabilitation? Punishment can’t help crime prevention if it does not show and explain criminals what they have done wrong and why it is not acceptable. As written in his book, young men see prison as a normal passage in life they have to go through. How can locking them up help in any way if they think that way? By incarcerating as many offenders, and mostly nonviolent ones, it only brings consequences that are harmful to society. For Donziger, the criminal justice system should be reformed in way that it reduces harm in the society. It should not be reformed I a way to improve it but to reduce harm. Incarceration consequences turn to bring violence into the society which is exactly the opposite of what it should do. Instead of preventing violence, it increases violence. How can such a system work? Imprisoning nonviolent criminals is useless because they do not present any harm to they society. Therefore the system should focus more on the violent ones and give them sentences they deserve. The industrialized countries have the same crime rate as the United States, yet their rate of incarceration is much lower. Why? Their criminal justice system focuses more on preventing crime. They provide safety against child poverty, there is a restriction on guns in their countries, they have shorter sentences for non-violent crimes, and they have a great emphasis on rehabilitation in prisons. That is exactly what Donziger ends his book on: 11 recommendations to reform the criminal justice system.
For an end to the discussion, The Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels has a similar idea to Donziger’s book. For them there was a class conflict between the capitalists and the working-class, also known as the proletariat. Capitalists were the wealthy ones, owning the means of production. They had privileges and were the ones in favor of the laws. The working-class, in contrast were exploited by the capitalists and were obviously the poor ones. They were more likely to become criminals, where as capitalists could turn the law to their advantage. In Donziger’s study, people from working class and minorities are the ones more likely to be incarcerated. White-collar crimes are mostly hidden. In conclusion, it is fair to say that Marx and Engels would agree that white-collar crimes, the ones done by the capitalist, are less likely to be noticed than the blue-collar ones that are made by working-class people.
According to Hampshire in his Justice is Conflict, as the title says, to have justice in society it means having conflict. Perfect equality is not a good sign and it does not exist. Therefore, agreement is not good. He wants to know the meaning of the word justice. For him if someone is not motivated to do something against injustice than something is wrong. To be committed to justice means to be committed to being vigilant against injustice. Justice requires fairness and that requires hearing all sides. Hearing all sides is the process of listening and accepting ones argument to a subject. All points of view are to be expressed effectively. This sort of justice is known as ‘procedural justice’. Hampshire abandoned the thought of a ‘substantive justice’ that meant the fair distribution of values, goods, money… in society, where advantages or misdistribution means unfairness. Conflict is inevitable. There is no possible way to dissolve conflict. In one sense it is true to say that lives would be better if there were no conflicts. However, as long as we are human beings and raised in different circumstances, there will always be different matters of opinion and therefore there will always be conflict between people. Some differences are not negotiable in which compromise is difficult to achieve. We must consequently embrace conflict so that we can reduce the chance that differences will commit harm. Hampshire wants to go against common sense but he also wants to show that this leads to his argument: that conflict is inevitable and means justice. He wants people to imagine a society without conflict, which means a society without differences in opinions. It is impossible to imagine such a society because it means that we would not be able to live together given that we live to share our differences. There is conflict on something we can agree on in its basis but disagree on its interpretation we each make of it. Two people could agree on the matter that abortion, for example is an important issue nowadays but they could disagree on whether they each think it is acceptable or not. However, to obtain justice out of the discussion, they should each listen to the others argument and accept it. They may not agree on it but they should accept it for this is the whole basis of justice. Hearing both sides of a specific matter. To allow each side to be heard, we have to allow the conflict to be heard. Society should accept the social institutions that support all sides to be heard, the institutions that allow us to have rights, the rights of speech and expressing freely our own opinions and to be heard. It is important to maintain certain institutions that give us rights so that we can maintain justice. Everybody has different moral issues, it is impossible to enforce agreement among people about those institutions. To be fair is to let all sides to be heard. For that to happen there has to be a disagreement on something. Disagreement means conflict, therefore justice means conflict.
Contrary to what Hampshire tries to prove, there is absolutism. An absolutist does not want to hear others and above all, he/she does not want to say that he/she is wrong. This goes against Hampshire’s argument. How can he then convince everybody, as well as absolutists what he is arguing about? He also tries to convince them, that absolutists should accept justice for their own interest as well. The main focus on this is to know how he can defend his position when absolutists do not want to hear others opinions. How can he argue reason and fairness? The idea is not to win the argument but to think in a better way. Before having one opinion or another, one has to choose first. Therefore if absolutists want to show their opinion and convince others about it, they should show others by using the procedural justice. How else are they to be heard? As a result, absolutists need justice to show their positions on certain matters. It is only through reason that one can achieve something. Hampshire does not tell people not to be absolutists but he does say that those who are absolutists should agree with the institutions that let people agree with them or not. Then, he tries to prove to them that by weighing alternatives in life, it brings reason. Why should some things in life have alternatives and others not? At that point, he has convinced them, not only that justice is also for their own interest but also that they cannot deny the fact that conflict is inevitable because it is everywhere in every decision we make.
Finally, the one problem of conflict is that it sometimes leads to violence. I f violence is to be avoided and if it sometimes comes from conflict, then how do we avoid it when conflict is unavoidable? Conflict must then be converted to productive and peaceful conflict, that way conflict can be avoided. We have to find something to resolve conflict before it leads to violence. That is how we come back to the fact that to avoid violence, conflict should be embraced but it does not mean that violence should be embraced. Conflict should be turned into a way of proceeding. It should be institutionalized. This institution is based on procedural justice. People have rights that cannot be violated by the court. What is involved in procedural justice? That all sides should be heard. If you protect this, you must support the institutions that protect the rights. Justice can therefore be possible because provides rights and prevents crime.
I agree with Hampshire, that conflict is justice and that all sides should be heard. To have the right to be heard is the right to express freely our opinions. That is what justice is all about: all sides are equally able to express themselves. However what I do not agree on is the fact that he wants everybody to agree with him on that when he says that perfect agreement does not exist. For everybody to agree with him, means that there is total agreement and therefore there is no more conflict on that matter. How can this be possible?
The above essay was written by a college student and merely states opinions of a college student. However, if you feel strong about responding to the opinions stated, please write to articles@directorym.com and express your concerns.