is the criminal justice system broken essay

Law and Crime

The criminal justice system is broken and can't be fixed, the best remedy for fighting the system just might be an ocean starfish..

Posted December 2, 2018 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

Crime permeates our social fabric. It always has because we are all deviant and deviance is an underpinning of criminality. Whether you believe people are born criminals or socialized to become so, we are afraid of being victimized by the criminal element. Even more disturbing exists the idea that any one of us (given the right circumstances) can cross the line and become "criminal." That self-awareness makes crime salient. In other words, if we can be the bad guy so easily, think of all the others who have and will despite our perceived control of our own moral and social consciousness.

Conflict criminal justice issues vacillate from sentencing, juvenile justice, and mental illness to the hiring, training, & retention of law enforcement and corrections officers. The inescapable paradox of prison and punishment as well as recidivism, probation, and parole all face today’s criminal justice students, practitioners and the general public.

If you’ve never been a victim of a true violation of law, the distant prospect of being victimized creates anxiety and fear . Everyone has an opinion on what should be done about crime and victimization. For those who don’t ride fences, you’re either tough on crime (and criminals) or you’re not. Our existential anxiety pushes the age-old concept of justice through vengeance, retribution, and punishment or, on the other hand, the perspective that criminals are “sick” and/or products of their social environment and that they are the true victims. From classrooms to courtrooms, both perspectives remain polarizing ideologies. For further explanations on a macro-sociological scale, check out my other Psychology Today articles Justice or Just Us , Finding a Phone Booth and Have We Sacrificed Security for Liberty?

A Broken System

The criminal justice system is broken and it can’t be fixed. A bold declaration that I make on the first day of "Introduction to Criminal Justice." Securing buy-in from students means that we understand that our contemporary problems with the system didn’t happen overnight, but, rather the system was built broken. A cursory examination of the word "broken" by The Merriam Webster Dictionary will yield results such as damaged, altered, fractured, irregular, interrupted, full of obstacles, weak, crushed, or disconnected.

Despite efforts to reduce or eliminate it, crime will never truly "go away." It is only displaced—moved from one part of the system to another based upon motivated offenders, suitable targets, and the absence of capable guardians. It’s a matter of risk management . The real test is understanding that we can all be victimized (or become criminal) and that apathy and denial are not our allies.

Many in society are conflicted by what is and what is “supposed to be” as well as how things have changed or how they have remained the same—both producing consequences rooted in disruption and disconnection. From the anecdotal to empirical, a survey of evidence suggests the system is broken and that there is no general consensus on how to fix it:

• The causes and correlates of crime started with God-given rational choice and free will . Punishment was to be swift, severe, and certain. It moved into a hedonistic calculus and the greater good theory to a bio-psycho-social school that proffers that our genes , heredity, the brain, and upbringing/class division/wealth and power influence crime more than individual choices, accountability, and responsibility;
• It started with punishment (centuries ago) and that issue sticks around. From mutilation, branding, stocks, and pillories to workhouses, exile, and finally, prisons, there is little agreement on the best methodology to deter crime;
• The Social Contract is an implicit agreement for which our society gives up some of our civil liberties in exchange for security. For that to happen, however, rights must be respected and authority must be respected;
• Criminal justice (as a system) is made up of cops, courts, and corrections—each with their own ideas and agendas of “justice.” They are political and arbitrary (even under the color of law) given elected and appointed officials and a dual system of government that seeks checks and balances. They operate as business silos and not cooperatively with each other;
• The long withstanding model of criminal justice is that of crime control and due process. Crime control seeks order as its most important value while due process values individual liberties and civil rights. Law enforcement systems are typically public order advocates while the courts and judicial process systems advocate for due process. The corrections system often vacillates between both based upon sentencing, custody, security and who manages those functions. This includes theories and applications of incapacitation, deterrence, punishment, rehabilitation, and reintegration;
• Lady Justice is depicted as blindfolded and holding balanced scales. Is justice blind? Are the scales balanced? If you place public order and due process in each scale, one is going to be heavier than the other and constantly tipping back and forth;
• The existing, fragmented criminal justice system sets atop sociological pillars which helped to create it. These are primary institutions inherent to our social and moral development that are considered to be similarly fragmented—rooted in years of what many consider to be moral relativity and secular humanism. These institutions are the family , school , and religion;
• Crime = violation of law, and those who violate laws are criminals. Justice = freedom, fairness and proportionality;
• Criminal justice is old, but the study of criminal justice is new. Unlike its parent discipline of sociology (and other, disciplinary pick-ups), it seeks to study a broader “system” that is predicated on a business model with sociopolitical and legal frameworks—all within the executive, judicial, and executive branches of government in a democracy and republic;
• Criminal justice studies the phenomenon of social control in organized societies where the rule of law is the primary social control mechanism. Operative words: social control , organized society , rule of law ;
• Crime and justice is propaganda. There is no true criminal justice, but only the idea of justice;
• The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are not grounded in the reality of contemporary times and should be a “living” document—designed to change with the times;
• Citizens of each state elect representatives and senators. Together, they are called the United States Congress. States make laws and their enforcement and sanctions are thus different;
• Criminal justice reform is a new phenomenon. Although issues on crime and justice administration have been tackled by presidential commissions, lobbyists and special interest groups, only in recent decades has such a push been made to “reform” the criminal justice system.

The Starfish Thrower (or Star Thrower)

The criminal justice system is broken and it can’t be fixed. That doesn’t mean that we stop working or throw up our hands. It also doesn’t mean that we quit moving toward a better system. It’s simply too big to tackle! It has to be broken down into manageable parts for us to handle while not losing sight of the larger whole. To do this means we all must find the little things that allow us to not only survive, but to thrive within a conflicting system.

A beautiful poem was translated by Loren Eiseley in 1969 that I use at the end of each semester to empower and qualify those (including myself) who choose to believe that there is something little we can do each day—whether taking a drunk driver off the street that night, removing a sexually abused child from the home, teaching many and reaching a few, or simply giving a reassuring hug, smile or handshake. It’s always been about the little things that give us affirmation and validation and can move us forward when we get overwhelmed by the toxicity of things we can’t change or have little control over. Find your starfish—and throw it!

A man was walking on the beach one day and noticed a boy who was reaching down, picking up starfish and throwing them into the ocean. As he approached, he called out, “Hello! What are you doing young man?” The boy looked up and said, “I’m throwing starfish into the ocean.” “Why are you doing that”? asked the man. “The tide stranded them. If I don’t throw them in the water before the sun comes up, they’ll die” came the answer. “Surely you realize that there are miles of beach, and thousands of starfish. You’ll never throw them all back, there are too many. You can’t possibly make a difference.” The boy listened politely, then picked up another starfish. As he threw it back into the sea, he said, “It did for that one.”

Copyright © 2018 by Brian A. Kinnaird. All rights reserved.

Eiseley, L. (1978). The Star Thrower . Sagebrush library/school binding: ISBN 1-4176-1867-1. Introduction by W. H. Auden.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary New Edition (2016). Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster Incorporated.

Schmalleger, F. (2019). Criminal Justice Today: An Introductory Text for the 21st Century, 15th Edition. Pearson: ISBN-13: 9780134749754.

Brian A. Kinnaird, Ph.D. , is an interdisciplinary social scientist specializing in police social systems and organizational behavior. He is a trauma support specialist, former law enforcement officer, and author of the book Life After Law Enforcement.

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Home Essay Samples Law Criminal Justice

Is the Criminal Justice System Broken: Analyzing Challenges

Table of contents, wrongful convictions and flaws, racial disparities and bias, rehabilitation vs. punishment, pathways for reform, references:.

• Alexander, M. (2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press.
• Starr, S. B. (2014). Creating Criminals: Prisons and People in a Market Society. University of Chicago Press.
• Lawrence, R. G., & Travis, J. (2013). The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America. NYU Press.
• Butler, P. M. (2017). Chokehold: Policing Black Men. The New Press.
• Cole, D. (2017). Engines of Liberty: How Citizen Movements Succeed. Basic Books.

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The New York Times

The learning network | how to fix the criminal justice system: a student-created debate and lesson plan.

How to Fix the Criminal Justice System: A Student-Created Debate and Lesson Plan

This piece, inspired by The Times’s Room for Debate feature , was written by three members of our spring Student Council .

Students might read the arguments and answer some of the discussion questions, and then, using the piece as a model and the related resources for additional ideas, create their own Room for Debate-style projects on issues that concern them.

What Aspect of the Criminal Justice System Should We Fix First?

There has been consensus among many that the United States’s criminal justice system — from the police force to the legal system to the prison system — is broken. However, overarching, significant reform of will take time and stretch limited resources. What aspect of criminal justice reform should the United States pursue first?

Below, three students from across the country take different perspectives on that question. What do you think?

A Trigger-Happy Task Force

To say law enforcement is a difficult job would undoubtedly be an understatement. Unexpected, sometimes life-threatening, encounters with dangerous individuals are the foundation of a career whose primary purpose is to serve and protect the public. As a result, the police are currently given considerable leeway in their judgment of response to potential threats. To quote the movie “Anchorman,” it’s a system that “60 percent of the time, it works every time.” Which means, in other words, that it frequently fails to deliver on its promise to the American people.

In 2001, police use of force was defined by the The International Association of Chiefs of Police as “the amount of effort required by police to compel compliance by an unwilling subject.” It’s an amount of effort that has grown alarmingly lethal in recent years, and increased media coverage of incidents in cities like Cleveland, Baltimore and Chicago has sent waves through the nation.

To make matters worse, these explosive confrontations occur unequally across all demographics, with questions of racial bias coloring most cases of force. The Washington Post found that from January to July of 2015, unarmed black men were seven times more likely to die from police gunfire than their white counterparts.

Changes have been proposed by numerous parties, and in some states, city police departments have already taken steps to curtail the use of excessive force. In 2014, a Federal District Court threw out a challenge filed by Seattle police officers to new guidelines on force that had been adopted after a Justice Department investigation. Other proposed changes, such as the adoption of a necessity rule , which would mandate lethal force only as a last resort, have seen considerable support from some states, while facing fierce opposition by others.

While a shift in regulations is necessary to reform police use of force, the maintenance of the status quo is heavily assisted by a general lack of accountability for situations where force is improperly used. Fortunately, improvements are slowly being made. The Inspector General of the New York Police Department, in a report on the use of force in the city last year, noted that while the department historically, “has frequently failed to discipline officers who use force without justification,” discipline rates for those confirmed to have used excessive force have increased in recent years.

Reform is happening — but not fast enough. With murky protocol for situations requiring use of force, an ineffective method of imposing disciplinary action for officers who overstep their bounds, and an apparent racial bias that plagues its officers every step of the way, law enforcement should be the primary center of attention. There is no doubt that our criminal justice system is broken. But if we can’t get the accused abusers to the courts in the first place, there will be no justice system to fix at all.

Let’s Fix the Legal System — Now

The principles of equality, fairness and justice have always been part of our national identity. Our legal system — the matrix of laws and courts that create and review decisions on right and wrong with the ultimate goal of protecting the rights of American citizens — is perhaps the most important tool with which to defend these principles.

However, our biggest obstacle in this defense might just be the institution itself. The legal part of the criminal justice system is plagued with faults that reduce its ability to fulfill its obligations to the American people, doing them major harm in the process.

One fault lies in one of the most fundamental aspects of the system: the evidence. Certain types of evidence we take as ironclad proof of guilt are far less accurate than they seem. Bite-mark matching was discredited by the National Academy of Sciences. The F.B.I. recently admitted that “nearly every examiner in an elite F.B.I. forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.” And “unassailable proof of guilt” like eyewitness testimony, confessions or forensic evidence can be inaccurate because of the unreliability of memory, police coercion, or the implicit biases of presiding forensic examiners.

These inconsistencies have consequences. One of the easiest to see is wrongful conviction, which leaves people languishing for years in prison because of a justice system that fails to protect them. Consider Hector Ayala , an inmate who is sitting on death row because of race-based jury selection (illegal under Supreme Court ruling), and who the courts have refused to retry or release. Read the story of Sandeep Bharadia , who was convicted to life without parole. When newfound DNA evidence seemed to prove his innocence, he was refused another trial because of mistakes made by his lawyer.

These cases are just the beginning. There is potential for mistreatment in every level of the system. There are judges who refuse to recuse themselves from cases where there are clear conflicts of interest, and there are abusive prosecutors who purposefully withhold evidence establishing a defendant’s innocence. The overfilled court systems of urban areas make cases drag on for years, becoming an expensive and emotion-filled burden for victims.

And to make things worse, our legal system inflicts major harm on those who can least afford it: minorities and the poor. The Justice Department ruled that St. Louis county in Missouri was biased against black juveniles, saying that “judges made no real effort to determine whether pleas were coerced, whether defendants had any criminal intent, or whether they understood the full consequences of admitting guilt.” The bail system holds people in jail based on whether they can afford to pay, disproportionately affecting the poor by forcing them to forego paychecks and subjecting them to dangerous prison conditions. Understaffed and underfunded public defender’s offices have started turning defendants away , leaving those who cannot pay for a private lawyer with few options.

Our current legal system is unjust. It allows systematic violations of ethics, accepts flawed or uncertain evidence as proof of crime and targets those who most need defending. It needs to be revamped immediately — or it will continue to threaten the intrinsic freedoms of American citizens.

A Failed System of Punishment — America’s Mass-Incarceration Problem

As a white woman in the United States, my odds of being sent to prison are 1 in 111 . For my younger brother, a white male, the odds are 1 in 17 . But for my male African-American friend, the odds have been reported to be 1 in 3 .

The United States’s criminal justice system is broken, and the way our nation manages crime and criminals is inefficient and ineffective. The system’s greatest shortcomings have been policies of punitive, not rehabilitative, punishment, which have resulted in mass-incarceration, incredible expenses, and soaring recidivism rates.

The United States holds the world’s highest rate of incarceration, about 750 people per 100,000 . This rate surpasses those in Rwanda, Russia, China and North Korea. Although Americans make up just under 5 percent of the world’s population , the country’s prisons hold 22 percent of the world’s prisoners.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with using prison to punish and separate dangerous individuals from society, America’s system is so overwhelmed it has forgone the possibility of redemption, handing down long sentences instead of looking for ways to reintegrate criminals into their communities. The average burglar in the United States receives a sentence of 16 months , while the same crime receives a five-month sentence in Canada.

Prisoners need education, skills and job training to help break cycles of poverty that put many of them behind bars in the first place. Educating prisoners saves the public almost $5 for every $1 spent on prison education, but the commitment to educational initiatives is inadequate and in decline. While 70 percent of prisons had education programs in the early ’90s, only 4 percent had them in 2004. Only 141 inmates earned degrees in 2011. The lack of focus on education and rehabilitation leads to rising recidivism rates, with 68 percent of released inmates returning to prison. This costs billions in taxpayer dollars as the United States spends $31,000 per inmate each year, or around $40 billion annually on its prisons.

Ultimately, the system puts entire communities in a state of perpetual hardship. By age 18, one in four African-American children will have had a parent incarcerated. For the 70 million Americans with criminal records, it’s harder to get an apartment, job, government assistance or to even vote. Such a system builds resentment and mistrust and creates a cycle of poverty.

America was founded as a nation of liberty and opportunity. As a young person, I don’t want to inherit a country characterized by barbed wire and the abject abandonment of broad swaths of society. Before dealing with other broken aspects of the criminal justice system, we must address the root causes of soaring incarceration rates, embracing restorative and rehabilitative justice. Trust between the police and communities can be rebuilt by ensuring that young people are no longer imprisoned en masse for interminable sentences. We must move aggressively toward a system that identifies value in all individuals, no matter their actions.

Questions for Writing or Discussion:

• Which aspect of our justice system should we fix first? Whose arguments convinced you the most? Why?
• What are some ways that individual states or other countries are working to reform their justice systems? What aspects seem to be working? Which aspects do not seem to be working? Should the United States adopt any of these policies?

Going Further:

• Is the application of lethal force when “reasonable” an appropriate guideline in today’s society? Or, is the adoption of a necessity rule essential to protect the public from abuse of power by the police?
• A police disciplinary system that blurs the line between punishment and reward is a main criticism of police departments in the United States. However, do police officers deserve to be punished to the same degree as criminals for doing their job?
• How should the United States legal system ensure that all citizens are getting a fair trial? What can we do to prevent the poor and minorities from being disproportionately burdened by the legal process?
• How can we make sure that people are not unfairly prosecuted because of biased or unreliable evidence? Should we make juries aware of the relative accuracy of each piece of evidence?
• How can the country use the more efficient prison systems in other countries as a model in reforming its own?
• How can and should the United States balance the use of prison as a crime deterrent and method of protection with the use of prison as a means of rehabilitation and renewal? To what extent are criminals worthy of our compassion?

Additional Resources

1. How to Use the Room for Debate Format

The Room for Debate format, where students offer different research-based perspectives on a single question, can make for an engaging, substantive project, and The Learning Network has done a number of lesson plans and other features using it. Here are some ideas:

• Constructing Arguments: ‘Room for Debate’ and the Common Core Standards
• Reader Idea | Using Room for Debate to Teach Argumentative Writing and Discussion Skills
• Winners of Our Student Contest Featured in a Special Room for Debate Post
• Reader Idea | Debates on Persuasive Language That Extend Outside of Class

2. Additional Resources for Students Doing Research on the Criminal Justice System

• Making Policing Safer for Everyone
• Report on New York Police Department’s Use of Force
• A Better Standard for the Use of Deadly Force
• Los Angeles Police Urged to Review Use of Force After ‘Alarming’ Rise in Shootings
• Chicago Police Dept. Plagued by Systemic Racism, Task Force Finds
• For Victims, an Overloaded Court System Brings Pain and Delays
• Flawed Humans, Flawed Justice
• When Innocence Is No Defense
• Justice Dept. Condemns Profit-Minded Court Policies Targeting the Poor
• Five Black Teenagers, Innocent, Face a Lifetime of Guilt
• The Law That Keeps People on Death Row Despite Flawed Trials

Mass-Incarceration

• The Bail Trap
• Room for Debate | Will Crime Rise if More People Are Kept Out of Prison?
• Average Prison Stay Grew 36 Percent in Two Decades
• Rell Reveals Plan to Improve Parole System
• The Radical Humaneness of Norway’s Halden Prison
• Inside America’s Toughest Federal Prison

Find more work by Student Council members.

This resource may be used to address the academic standards listed below.

Common Core E.L.A. Anchor Standards

1   Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.

4   Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.

5   Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach.

6   Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others.

7   Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation.

8   Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility and accuracy of each source, and integrate the information while avoiding plagiarism.

9   Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.

What's Next

Watch CBS News

What's wrong with America's criminal justice system? 6 questions for an expert

By Tyler Kendall

August 2, 2019 / 7:03 PM EDT / CBS News

With nearly  2.3 million prisoners behind bars, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Rachel Barkow, who served on the U.S. Sentencing Commission from 2013 to 2019, examines how we got to this point and what can be done to help reform the country's justice system. She currently serves as the vice dean and professor of regulatory law and policy at the NYU School of Law.

In her recent book, "Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration," Barkow argues that years of bad policies resulted in a vicious cycle. However, there is a path to undo some of the damage. 

This interview has been slightly edited for clarity. 

CBS News: Your book argues that longer sentences contribute to more crime. How do you convince people that less incarceration means higher public safety?

Rachel Barkow: I do think that people have a sense that, "I'm going to lock them up and throw away the key." But, we never throw away the key. Ninety-five percent of the time, the person comes back out, and you are just kicking the can down the road. Incarceration is buying you some time, but the underlying issues the person might have, or the underlying cause of the crime in the first place, you're just putting off.

I like to think about it like your credit card bill. If you're in financial difficulty, and you can't pay your bills, you put them all on your credit card. You might think, "Phew, that problem is taken care of." However, the next month your credit card bill comes and there's interest. It gets worse and worse and the longer you don't pay, the worse things get. Long sentences are like that. While you're incarcerating people, not only are you not making them better, you're often putting them in environments where they are likely to become worse. 

CBS News: We just passed the six month mark of President Trump signing the First Step Act into law. One aspect of the legislation helps alleviate certain mandatory minimum sentences , which are predetermined prison terms for certain crimes. What about arguments in favor of mandatory minimums, in that they create an equitable system of punishment?

Barkow : That was the thought, but I don't know why people assumed that would lessen disparities. Anyone who proposed that, forgot that prosecutors existed. A prosecutor does not have to charge you with the mandatory minimum. There is more than one drug crime in the federal code. 

So, if I'm a prosecutor and I want to charge you with selling drugs, I have my pick of what I'm going to charge you with. That means, a prosecutor can pick and choose who gets charged with the full mandatory minimum and who doesn't. Instead of having a judge decide what a sentence should be, they've effectively allowed prosecutors to make that decision. That is really problematic. While the judge is at least an objective third party with no stake in the outcome, the prosecutor can threaten people with mandatory minimums to get them to plead guilty. 

Mandatory minimums definitely made all the things it sought to solve worse. I fully recognize it was done with good intentions, but we are long past the point that anyone can claim to have a good intention for keeping it. 

CBS News: The First Step Act also establishes what's known as "earned time credits" for the first time at the federal level. This system allows an inmate to earn time off their sentencing if they participate in programming while incarcerated. What stands out to you about this component?

Barkow : The last remaining question mark of the First Step Act is what will this earned time credit regime look like? Will there be enough programming? Will it be sufficiently funded? Are they going to do a good job making sure it's working well?

The people who need programming the most are high risk people. Every criminologist will tell you that. It's the best investment that we could make as a society, but the legislation makes them ineligible. It's only available for lower risk people. It's just a way for the lower risk population to cut their sentences, I think, in a politically palatable way. As a society we'd be much better off if we offered programming to high risk people. 

So, an interesting wrinkle I think people might not know about, is Congress' decision to make whole groups ineligible for this, despite the fact that those are the very groups that need it the most. That was just pure politics, not based on evidence or what would be a good use of the resources. 

CBS News : Why do you think there isn't more programming in place? 

Barkow : There is a tendency in America to view everything as an individual decision: if a person comes out of prison and commits a crime, "That's on them." It's a little ridiculous though, because through interventions we can reduce the risk that it would happen. 

We should want, during the time that they're in custody, to invest in all the things that can make criminal behavior less likely when they're released. There are things that we can do that would change the odds of that happening. The only reason that we don't, and the reason why we don't hold prisons accountable, is this weird sense people have that it's completely up to the individual. Maybe there's a cynicism that they will all fail anyways so why bother? But none of that is true. 

It's good to remember there's a lot of things we can do that help people — and help us. You don't even have to be nice or empathetic, you could be truly selfish and say, "I'd like to be safer." I could be safer if instead of my tax dollars going to support facilities that do a terrible job when someone is incarcerated, they support facilities that offer the right kind of programming. That way, when someone gets out they're less likely to offend. 

CBS News : If this was the first step, what's the next step for criminal justice reform?

Barkow : The First Step Act didn't really address currently incarcerated people who are serving excessively long sentences. It changed some mandatory minimums, but only from the day the act passed onward. For people currently serving the time, they did nothing. My idea would be that you have provisions to deal with currently incarcerated people who have long sentences. That's what I would do next. 

We will not solve mass incarceration by relying on the federal government to do it. States need to take action. The federal government could create financial incentives, but we got where we are today from a lot of different political jurisdictions and actors making the same punitive decisions. To undo it, we're going to have to go back and have all those jurisdictions and individual actors make different decisions.

CBS News: Criminal justice reform is turning into a main issue for the 2020 election . We've already seen a few democratic contenders release plans or weigh in, including former Vice President Joe Biden , Senator Cory Booker and Senator Kamala Harris, to name a few recent high-profile unveilings. What do you look for in a candidate's platform on this issue? 

Barkow : If it were me, the key things would be eliminating mandatory minimums and providing a mechanism for anyone who is currently serving a mandatory minimum. That way they could petition a court for relief. I think that's the most important thing that should be done at the federal level legislatively. It would be nice if we had legislation that just said, "The mandatory minimum idea was a failure. We thought it was going to eliminate disparities, instead it exacerbated them." Mandatory minimums don't help public safety, all they've done is create additional racial disparities and a lot of human misery.  

If that can't be done, then I'd like to see a president who uses the clemency power to do the same thing. We have too many people serving sentences that are too long, and they have no mechanisms right now. The only place they can go is to the president of the United States. 

For presidential candidates in particular, there are things they can claim they're going to do, but that would require Congress. So, all they're really saying is, "I as a president will ask for this." But if Congress says no, that's it. Then, there's the things the president can do on their own. They have a lot of authority, especially with clemency power. 

Tyler is a producer for CBSN. She also covers criminal justice reform. Reach her at: [email protected].

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Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — Criminal Justice — Problems and Reforms Needed: How to Improve the Criminal Justice System

Problems and Reforms Needed: How to Improve The Criminal Justice System

• Categories: American Criminal Justice System Criminal Justice

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Published: Mar 19, 2020

Words: 499 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

How to Improve the Criminal Justice System in America?

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April 18, 2024

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Our ‘Broken System’ of Criminal Justice

November 10, 2011 issue

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The Collapse of American Criminal Justice

William Stuntz was the popular and well-respected Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law at Harvard University. He finished his manuscript of The Collapse of American Criminal Justice shortly before his untimely death earlier this year. The book is eminently readable and merits careful attention because it accurately describes the twin problems that pervade American criminal justice today—its overall severity and its disparate treatment of African-Americans.

The book contains a wealth of overlooked or forgotten historical data, perceptive commentary on the changes in our administration of criminal justice over the years, and suggestions for improvement. While virtually everything that Professor Stuntz has written is thought-provoking and constructive, I would not characterize the defects in American criminal justice that he describes as a “collapse,” and I found his chapter about “Earl Warren’s Errors” surprisingly unpersuasive.

Rather than focus on particular criminal laws, the book emphasizes the importance of the parts that different decision-makers play in the administration of criminal justice. Stuntz laments the fact that criminal statutes have limited the discretionary power of judges and juries to reach just decisions in individual cases, while the proliferation and breadth of criminal statutes have given prosecutors and the police so much enforcement discretion that they effectively define the law on the street.

Ironically, during an age of increasing protection for civil rights, discrimination against both black suspects and black victims of crime steadily increased. Stuntz attributes this development, in part, to the expansion of prosecutorial and police discretion—in his view, “discretion and discrimination travel together.” For example, the discretionary authority to enforce posted speed limits has enabled state troopers to be selectively severe in making arrests, and to use those arrests to justify searches for evidence of drug offenses. While Stuntz does not suggest that such discriminatory enforcement of traffic laws is itself a national crisis, it provides one illustration of the negative effects of excessive enforcement discretion.

The result, Stuntz writes, has been a serious disadvantage to African-Americans in their encounters with the American criminal justice system. While only 10 percent of the adult black population uses illegal drugs, as does a roughly equal percentage—9 percent—of the adult white population, blacks are nine times more likely than whites to serve prison sentences for drug crimes. “And the same system that discriminates against black drug defendants also discriminates against black victims of criminal violence.” As “suburban voters, for whom crime is usually a minor issue,” have come to “exercise more power over urban criminal justice than in the past,” police protection against violent felonies has disproportionately extended to suburban neighborhoods rather than the urban centers where more black individuals reside.

The “bottom line,” Stuntz explains, has been that “poor black neighborhoods see too little of the kinds of policing and criminal punishment that do the most good, and too much of the kinds that do the most harm.” In this sense and others, Stuntz concludes, our criminal justice system has “run off the rails.”

A major part of the book includes a historical narrative that identifies the sources of this discrimination against African-Americans and also explains the severity of our treatment of all offenders. The severity of the system is almost as disturbing as its discriminatory impact. In the years between 1972 and 2007, the nation’s imprisonment rate more than quintupled—increasing from 93 to 491 per 100,000 people. The rate at the end of that period vastly exceeded the analogous rate in other Western countries, which varied from 132 for England and Wales to a mere 74 in Germany and 72 in France. Moreover, during those years,

The number of prisoner-years per murder multiplied nine times. Prisons that had housed fewer than 200,000 inmates in Richard Nixon’s first years in the White House held more than 1.5 million as Barack Obama’s administration began. Local jails contain another 800,000.

Rather than a “collapse,” however, these figures suggest to me that the current system of criminal law and enforcement (like too many of our citizens) has grown obese.

Stuntz believes that two enormous migrations that led to crime waves largely define the history of crime and punishment in the United States. The first occurred during the seventy years preceding World War I when over 30 million Europeans came to America and settled primarily in cities in the industrial Northeast. The second occurred during the first two thirds of the twentieth century when seven million blacks left the rural South and moved into the same cities. To put simply Stuntz’s description of the central difference between those two migrations: during the European migration, urban politics soon produced local police forces made up of officers who were similar to and resided among the residents of the areas they were protecting—Irish-Americans trusted Irish cops from the neighborhood to treat them fairly—whereas during the black migration, the white majorities living in suburban areas selected the prosecutors and police officers who enforced the law in black urban neighborhoods.

During the Gilded Age, crime was not controlled chiefly through punishment, but rather through local democracy and the network of relationships that supported it:

Police officers sometimes lived in the neighborhoods they patrolled, and had political ties to those neighborhoods through the ward bosses who represented their cities’ political machines. Those patrols happened on foot: officers, those whom they targeted, and those whom they served knew one another. Cops, crime victims, criminals, and the jurors who judged them—these were not wholly distinct communities; they overlapped, and the overlaps could be large.

Stuntz is careful not to romanticize that justice system because he recognizes that while policing was then “more relational,” it was also “more brutal, more corrupt, and lazier,” as police officers licensed vice and merely regulated crime, rather than enforcing prohibition of it.

It is fair to infer, however, that the relationships between the police and the residents of high-crime neighborhoods have a significant impact on the amount of crime that prevails in those areas. The dramatic difference in the homicide rate in the area where I grew up and President Obama lived before moving to Washington—“Chicago’s upscale, racially integrated but mostly white Hyde Park”—and the “neighboring Washington Park, with a poor, 98 percent black population,” certainly suggests that there is a material difference in the quality of the police protection available in those neighboring areas. In Hyde Park, the homicide rate is 3 per 100,000; in Washington Park, it is 78 per 100,000.

One suggestion implicit in much of the book is that a more prompt and vigorous attempt to take affirmative steps to enlist black police officers to protect black neighborhoods with which they are locally connected might well have been wise. I am reminded of the powerful argument set forth in an amicus curiae brief filed eight or nine years ago in Grutter v. Bollinger , the University of Michigan affirmative action case.

The brief was filed by twenty-nine military leaders, including men like General Wesley Clark and General Norman Schwarzkopf and several others who had achieved four-star rank. Those amici were thoroughly familiar with the dramatic differences between the pre-1948 segregated armed forces and the modern integrated military, and their brief recounted the transition from the former to the latter. Within a few years after President Truman’s 1948 Executive Order abolishing segregation in the armed forces, the enlisted ranks were fully integrated. Yet during the 1960s and 1970s, those ranks were commanded by an overwhelmingly white officer corps.

The chasm between the racial composition of the officer corps and the enlisted ranks undermined military effectiveness in a number of ways set forth in the brief. Among these was the failure of enlisted service members to report maltreatment to their commanding officers. In time, the leaders of the military recognized the critical link between minority officers and military readiness, eventually concluding that “success with the challenge of diversity is critical to national security.” They met that challenge by adopting race-conscious recruiting, preparatory, and admissions policies at the service academies and in ROTC programs.

The historical discussion in that brief did not merely imply that a ruling outlawing comparable programs would jeopardize national security; it also implied that an approval of Michigan’s admission policies would provide significant educational benefits for civilian leaders. The reasons for taking positive steps to create a diverse officer corps in the military surely apply as well to the need for staffing urban police forces with officers who are capable of relating to the communities they are responsible for protecting. Officers who inspire the trust of members of those communities may more effectively encourage crime-reporting and other forms of cooperation by them.

Stuntz believed that our Constitution overprotects procedural rights and underprotects substantive rights. He begins his discussion on this point by criticizing James Madison’s emphasis on procedure in our Bill of Rights, which he compares unfavorably with the relatively contemporary provisions of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. Stuntz speculates that Thomas Jefferson, through conversations with the Marquis de Lafayette of the French National Assembly, may have influenced the drafting of the French Declaration. Notwithstanding those similar origins, Stuntz notes that the French document, unlike the American Bill of Rights, contained a definition of “liberty”—“the power to do anything that does not injure others”—and a substantive limitation on the power to criminalize conduct—“only such actions as are injurious to society.” While he recognizes that those French principles did not survive Napoleon’s rule, he implies that comparable provisions in our Bill of Rights might have restricted the virtually unlimited power of legislatures in America “to criminalize whatever they wish.”

Stuntz contrasts the pen of the great James Madison with the second-rate politicians of later times, who adopted “slapdash” institutional arrangements that too easily bend to the shifting winds of local politics:

America’s justice system suffers from a mismatch of individual rights and criminal justice machinery, between legal ideals and political institutions. When politicians both define crimes and prosecute criminal cases, one might reasonably fear that those two sets of elected officials—state legislators and local district attorneys—will work together to achieve their common political goals. Legislators will define crimes too broadly and sentences too severely in order to make it easy for prosecutors to extract guilty pleas, which in turn permits prosecutors to punish criminal defendants on the cheap, and thereby spares legislators the need to spend more tax dollars on criminal law enforcement.

In Stuntz’s view, constitutional law could reduce the risk of this “political collusion” by limiting legislators’ power to criminalize and punish. Madison’s text, by focusing on procedural instead of substantive limits, ignores “the core problem” posed by the strange design of our justice system.

According to Stuntz, the basic explanation for the mismatch is that the present institutions of American criminal justice did not develop until well after the drafting of the Bill of Rights, hence that document did not provide limits tailored to those institutions. The changes that occurred in the North between the Founding and the 1850s began the expansion of the power of local and elected officials in criminal law enforcement that later facilitated the excessive discretion and political collusion that Stuntz criticizes. Private tort-like enforcement of criminal laws gave way to full-time elected criminal prosecutors; elected state judiciaries wielded greater power than their appointed predecessors; politicized legislative codes began to substitute for common law crimes; urban police forces were organized, the first having been established in New York City in 1845; and the power of juries to determine whether given conduct merits punishment was narrowed.

Rue des Archives/Granger Collection

A member of the NAACP protesting against segregated hotels and a member of the Ku Klux Klan distributing leaflets, Atlanta, Georgia, 1962

As a predicate for his analysis of the “failed promise” of the Fourteenth Amendment, Stuntz describes differences between the administration of justice in the northeastern states and the antebellum South, as well as two different kinds of violence against African-Americans during the early years of Reconstruction.

The three criminal enforcement systems in the antebellum South were the justice of courts, the justice that masters enforced over their slaves, and the justice of the mob. The second came to an end when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, and it seems clear that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to end the all-too-common practice of lynching African-Americans and a surprisingly large number of their white sympathizers. Unfortunately, that practice survived the Civil War.

Stuntz provides us with brief descriptions of the two types of mob violence that illustrated the need for federal involvement in the protection of the new class of black citizens. In Memphis and New Orleans, white police officers played an active role in killing blacks, whereas in the tragic Colfax massacre on Easter Sunday in 1873, white Klansmen killed sixty-two black men—some of whom were unarmed and had attempted to surrender—without any active assistance from state officers. Broadly speaking, the Fourteenth Amendment might have been construed generously to authorize direct federal involvement in the prevention of mob violence in both types of cases, or more narrowly only to prevent state action, such as occurred in the Memphis and New Orleans mass murders.

In an Alabama case decided in 1871, then Circuit Judge William Woods interpreted the Equal Protection Clause to support the broader view: “Denying includes inaction as well as action, and denying the equal protection of the laws includes the omission to protect.” Judge Woods also reasoned that because “it would be unseemly for Congress to interfere directly with state enactments,” Congress’s power to enforce the amendment must have been intended to authorize legislation “which will operate directly on offenders and offenses.”

That broader view prevailed in a series of Klan cases, mostly in South Carolina and Alabama, which produced nearly six hundred convictions in federal courts in 1871 and 1872. It seems fairly clear that the large-scale enforcement effort by the Freedmen’s Bureau, federal prosecutors, and federal agents that produced those convictions was faithful to the intent of the Grant administration that had sponsored the Fourteenth Amendment and its implementing legislation.

The broad view, however, was rejected by the Supreme Court in the infamous case of US v. Cruikshank , decided in 1876, that arose out of the Colfax massacre. Stuntz argues that that decision is best understood as the product of political developments following the stock market collapse in 1873 that gave Democrats control of Congress. The opinion in Cruikshank emphasized the Fourteenth Amendment’s limits, concluding that it prohibited only state action and did not “add any thing to the rights which one citizen has under the Constitution against another.” Although I have reservations about accepting a political explanation for a judicial decision, there can be no doubt concerning Cruikshank ’s unfortunate effects. The Court not only set aside the conviction of one of the Colfax massacre’s leaders, who had made a sport out of lining up black men at the parish to see how many he could execute with a single bullet, but its decision also judicially constrained the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection principle in a manner that has not been undone.

Stuntz’s description of the Colfax massacre and the Cruikshank decision draws heavily on Charles Lane’s exhaustive research in his recent book, The Day Freedom Died . * Stuntz convincingly explains why the rationale adopted by the Supreme Court was neither necessary nor faithful to the promise of the Fourteenth Amendment, and how it put an end to Klan prosecutions:

The change in the nation’s political tilt wrought by the depression of 1873 was temporary, as such changes always are. The legal change was permanent. The ideal of equal protection—the notion that all Americans are entitled not only to freedom from government oppression, but to a measure of freedom from private violence as well, and the same measure their well-to-do neighbors received—was, for all practical purposes, dead. So were thousands of southern blacks who needed that protection, and needed it badly.

Whether the Cruikshank decision was faithful to the intent of the men who drafted and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment rather than to the Democratic majority that had been elected in 1874 may well be debatable. I have no doubt, however, that the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education , which put an end to segregated public schools, represented an application of the equal protection guarantee that the original authors and ratifiers of the provision did not anticipate. Unlike Cruikshank , Brown gave effect to a broad vision of the equal protection guarantee, although not the particular broad view that Cruikshank had obliterated.

In the US v. Reese case, decided on the same day that the Supreme Court announced Cruikshank , the Court set aside convictions of Kentucky election officials for conspiracy to deprive a black prospective voter of his right to vote. They had refused to register him when he offered to pay his poll tax, but the Court held the statute unconstitutional because it did not require proof that their conduct was racially motivated. After that decision, in Stuntz’s view, “even Klan-influenced government officials were nearly unconvictable, thanks to the requirement that the omnipresent but unprovable discriminatory motive be established in every case.” Stuntz’s criticism of that decision for its overly stringent requirement of proof of motive may be correct, although elsewhere in the book he identifies the requirement for mens rea criminal intent as a valuable limitation upon law enforcement, and its absence in later statutes as a significant contributor to overenforcement of criminal law.

Stuntz identifies three Supreme Court decisions from the last three decades that he perceives to exemplify the impact of the errors that infected Cruikshank and Reese . I found that discussion especially interesting because although I had written a dissenting opinion in each of those three cases, I had not cited Cruikshank or Reese in any of those dissents. In McCleskey v. Kemp , in 1987, the Court rejected convincing evidence that in Georgia a black killer of a white victim more often receives the death penalty than when the victim is black or the killer is white, because the defendant had failed to prove a discriminatory motive by any relevant decision-maker in his own case. In US v. Armstrong , decided in 1996, the Court found insufficient justification for allowing discovery procedures in a trial judge’s firsthand knowledge about drug prosecutions, where such discovery almost certainly would have confirmed that the government tended to federally prosecute drug defendants who were black but to permit more lenient state court prosecution of those who were white. In Castle Rock v. Gonzales , decided in 2005, the Court found no constitutional violation where police failed to enforce a restraining order obtained by a mother against her estranged husband, who ultimately killed their three children.

McCleskey and Armstrong do indeed support the thesis that the Court has tolerated law enforcement practices that are discriminatory against African-Americans, but I do not re- member discrimination to be at issue in the outrageous failure of the police to do their duty in Castle Rock . Perhaps Stuntz means to suggest—consistent with his thesis earlier in the book—that the discretion afforded to law enforcers by Castle Rock , which found no constitutional entitlement to police protection, facilitates the unequal offering of police protection to crime victims of different races.

After the Court’s decision in Cruikshank , the federal government was not a major participant in law enforcement for decades. Stuntz describes the expansion of federal criminal law through the culture wars of the early twentieth century concerning lotteries, polygamy, prostitution, opium, and alcohol. In his discussion of harmful addictive substances, he does not mention tobacco but does contrast Prohibition with today’s continuing war on drugs.

Stuntz explains, “The chief drug war of the early twentieth century concerned alcohol, not any of the range of narcotics that so obsessed the late twentieth-century legal system.” Prohibition, authorized by the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, is generally regarded as a “great disaster,” but was in fact more effective and a lesser cause of crime than often assumed. Among the benefits that Stuntz identifies were a decrease in alcohol consumption, caused in part by the significant increase in its price (a quart of gin, for example, rose from 95 cents to $5.90), and open discussion of the pros and cons of using alcohol.

While “the law of Prohibition may have been foolish,” it was also far less severe than the modern war against drugs. It did not prohibit the mere possession or consumption of alcoholic beverages, only their manufacture, sale, and transport; it exempted use in private homes and service to “bona fide guests”; and doctors were expressly permitted to prescribe the use of alcoholic drinks for therapeutic purposes. Today prison sentences are imposed for simple possession of marijuana and a long list of other controlled substances, and federal law (as upheld by the Court in a 2005 opinion that I wrote, Gonzales v. Raich ) even bars possession of home-grown marijuana prescribed to combat the nausea that attends most cancer treatments.

Stuntz describes some harms of alcohol consumption and criticizes Prohibition, but he does not address facts about Prohibition’s enforcement costs or the consequences of its repeal. Those consequences obviously included the replacement of significant litigation and imprisonment costs with generous tax revenues, and expansion of profitable commerce in the production and marketing of alcoholic beverages. On the other hand, as Stuntz’s own reasoning suggests, those consequences also likely included an increase in alcohol consumption, which continues to have serious adverse social effects today.

Such a discussion of the pluses and minuses of the repeal of Prohibition might have provided information relevant to a debate on the wisdom of current drug enforcement policies. As Stuntz mentions, the absence of developed debate among present-day political leaders about drug policies is striking in light of the openness of the debate among political leaders in the 1920s and early 1930s—such as Al Smith, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1928—about the wisdom of prohibiting alcohol. In short, while Stuntz’s discussion of Prohibition is interesting and informative, it omits a potentially valuable assessment of how the lessons from Prohibition’s repeal might bear upon, and inform political debate about, the current war on drugs.

Extending his criticism of our system’s focus upon criminal procedure rather than substance, Stuntz’s eighth chapter concerns “Earl Warren’s Errors.” That chapter title is both misleading and inaccurate. It is misleading because much of the chapter does not describe “errors,” but rather unintended consequences of decisions— Mapp v. Ohio (1961) and Miranda v. Arizona (1966)—that I think were clearly correct.

Stuntz argues that because those decisions were unpopular, they undoubtedly provided ammunition to politicians who campaigned on promises to be “tough on crime” if elected, and that the success of their campaigns in turn led to the enactment of more and harsher criminal laws, such as the exceptionally severe drug laws sponsored by men like Nelson Rockefeller. It is quite unfair to criticize Earl Warren for his “poor timing” just because the Court found it necessary to make unpopular decisions when the public was especially concerned about rising crime rates. Indeed, a paramount obligation of the impartial judge is to put popularity entirely to one side when administering justice.

As a descriptive matter, Stuntz’s discussion of those unintended consequences does help to explain the severity of today’s criminal law. (Unfortunately, however, he omits analysis of the unintended consequences of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, which, in part by curbing judicial discretion, led to a dramatic increase in the severity of federal sentences, as well as the severity of those imposed by states that adopted comparable “reforms.”)

Stuntz minimizes the importance of decisions like Miranda and Mapp , which prohibit the use of probative evidence in certain cases, because the Supreme Court has developed waiver rules that enable the police to avoid their requirements. Moreover, he argues that reliance on such rules has produced a system in which defense counsel give primary attention to the litigation of procedural issues rather than to factual investigation that seeks to come to a correct conclusion on the issue of guilt or innocence. While there is some merit to such criticism, I think it abundantly clear that the rules do far more good than harm.

With particular attention to Miranda , as Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in his opinion upholding Miranda against congressional abrogation a decade ago, the case “has become embedded in routine police practice to the point where the warnings have become part of our national culture.” Indeed, in my judgment, the decision played a major role in changing a police culture once riddled with incompetent, lazy, and brutal behavior into a law enforcement profession that is both more effective and also commands widespread public admiration for its dedicated public service.

Stuntz also comments in this chapter on the very live debate among the current members of the Supreme Court about the extent to which the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment—the right of the accused “to be confronted with the witnesses against him”—requires the exclusion of certain evidence obtained from witnesses who are unavailable at the time of trial. He is critical of two recent decisions that—like both Miranda and Mapp —require exclusion of probative evidence. I think Justice Anthony Kennedy, who dissented in both of those cases, might well have written the comments Stuntz offers. Stuntz argues that while “live witness testimony may have been the best possible means of proving guilt…when the confrontation clause was written and ratified,” “it hardly follows that it is the best possible means today” now that forensic and scientific analysis of physical evidence are more accurate. And he claims that “forcing crime laboratory technicians to double as courtroom witnesses raises the cost to the laboratories of performing the technical analysis,” which “mean[s] less analysis, and hence a less accurate adjudication system,” rather than one that reflects contemporary needs and capacities.

To the extent that Stuntz suggests that confrontation does not advance “any rational policy goal” because live witnesses are less important today than they once were, his argument is quite unpersuasive. Among other justifications, the Supreme Court majority in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts (2009), explained that “confrontation is one means of assuring accurate forensic analysis.” Cross-examination permits a criminal defendant to probe the analyst’s competence, training, judgment, and incentives or pressure for manipulation of the results. Such questioning can expose flaws in the forensic testing process that undercut the reliability of such evidence, the very reliability about which Stuntz expresses concern.

The final chapter in the book is entitled “Fixing a Broken System.” It includes an appraisal of the likelihood of achieving various reforms, their potential costs and benefits, and the political problems they present. While some of Stuntz’s suggestions invite changes in judicial doctrine, his primary focus is on the need for important legislative change. He stresses four themes that have been identified in earlier chapters.

First, he persuasively argues that putting more police officers on city streets is a policy move that should reduce both crime and the number of prisoners. By deterring crime with broader, more certain enforcement rather than heavy punishments for the few most easily caught, this policy would respond both to the problem of excessive penal severity and to the twin effects of systemic racial discrimination—excessive enforcement against black offenders and inadequate protection of black victims.

Second, Stuntz believes that judicial interpretation of the equal protection guarantee in the Fourteenth Amendment should endorse the broad view that prevailed in the early years of Reconstruction, and that was rejected by the Supreme Court in 1876 in Cruikshank and more recently in McCleskey , Armstrong , and Castle Rock . His fundamental point is that the duty to govern impartially requires the state to provide all of its citizens with equal protection against violations of the law: no class should receive less police protection than another or be punished more severely for its crimes than another. The Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against disproportionate punishments also applies that equality principle. The Court’s recent decision prohibiting Florida from imposing a sentence of life without parole on a juvenile for a non-homicide offense is a step in the right direction because such a penalty is almost never imposed in other jurisdictions. Stuntz suggests other means of avoiding disparate sentencing for similar crimes.

Third, he favors allowing judges greater discretion to rein in the political overexpansion of the criminal law. He supports judicial discretion to impose lighter sentences and therefore endorses the Court’s decision in US v. Booker (2005) that essentially changed the federal sentencing guidelines from mandatory rules to advisory recommendations. By the same logic, I believe Stuntz would have opposed legislation imposing mandatory minimum penalties.

Fourth, Stuntz clearly would limit the scope of prohibition and the severity of punishment for the possession or use of drugs. Such amendments would reduce discrimination against black defendants, diminish the severity of the entire system, and make it more difficult for prosecutors to obtain guilty pleas to serious crimes that they are not able to prove. Stuntz notes the same problem—guilty pleas to unprovable crimes—resulting from a prosecutorial practice of charging offenses that make the defendant eligible for the death penalty in order to bargain the defendant into accepting a life sentence. Because of the uniqueness of the fear of death, I find that prosecutorial bargaining chip particularly offensive since it seriously risks persuading an actually innocent defendant to plead guilty and to accept incarceration for his entire life. In my view, it should not be permissible.

For each of three reasons, Professor Stuntz’s account of the “collapse” of an overgrown system of criminal law enforcement is well worth reading. It is full of interesting historical discussion. It accurately describes the magnitude of the twin injustices in the administration of our criminal law. It should motivate voters and legislators to take action to minimize those injustices.

November 10, 2011

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The Effects of the Criminal Justice System Essay

Broken window policing, definition of broken window policing, how broken window produced racist results, why breaking the window theory is wrong.

Broken window policing is a policing concept that implies that visible signs of disorder and misbehavior in a community encourage further disorder and misbehavior, leading to violent crimes. This means that a sign of disorder in society that goes unattended can fuel such behaviors. The broken window policy has been used to target neighborhoods occupied by minority populations. With this policing, the majority of people arrested and victimized were people of color. Wilson and Kelling (2007) posit “But the police forces of America are losing, not gaining, members” (para 47). This means that the police are not successful in the use of excessive force against suspects. The quote presents the status quo in the current criminal justice system used by the police to maintain social order. Therefore, this essay will define the concept of the broken window policing, explain why it produces racists result, and describe why it is wrong using the concept of deterrence.

Wilson and Kelling (2007) say, “Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken” (para. 11). This means that a behavior that is not solved in a society can turn into something that cannot be controlled. For instance, if a person with a violent behavior is not tamed early enough, then there is a possibility that the behavior might become a habit that is difficult to control. In other words, an untended problem in society is likely to escalate to the point that it cannot be managed. Through this quote, one can understand the meaning of Broken Window Policy. Now, one can say that a broken window is a policy that majors on the importance of a disorder such as a broken window in creating and sustaining more serious crimes.

According to Wilson and Kelling (2007), “persons who broke the informal rules, especially those who bothered people waiting at bus stops, were arrested for vagrancy” (para. 8). It means that a person would not be spared even when they break unwritten rules but defines acceptable roles and activities in a community. Normally, most people who end up being serial criminals are believed to have started breaking informal rules such as disturbing people in public places, and nothing was being done. This quote is a good illustration of a broken window policy because it majors on taming all manner of crime, whether minor or major. Based on this quote, society understands broken window policy is all about maintaining the social order by attending to any form of unethical behavior.

Wilson and Kelling (2007) claim that, “Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because determined window-breakers inhabit some areas whereas others are populated by window-lovers” (para. 11). This means that some areas are occupied by individuals who must commit an offense, while some areas are occupied by people who love to obey the law. This quote groups people into two; people who are more likely to offend and the ones who are less likely to offend. As a result, law enforcers have always focused on areas with people who are prone to breaking the law. This quote presents a notion that people living in high crime rates are reported to love breaking the law. Therefore, window-breakers are likely to experience more arrests compared to areas with window-lovers.

Moreover, Wilson and Kelling (2007) suggest, “For some residents, this growing atomization will matter little because the neighborhood is not their home but the place where they live. Their interests are elsewhere; they are cosmopolitans” (para. 15). It means that some people will be unconcerned about the neighborhood’s growing level of social disorder because it is not their home but rather the place where they dwell. They come from other countries, and their interests are diverse. The quote tends to present a view that immigrants are less likely to be bothered by the security issues of the host country because the existing location is not their original home. This quote presents people of color and other immigrants as an enemy to social order. Based on this, the original inhabitants of the host country are more likely to perceive immigrants as the cause of insecurity in the country.

Wilson and Kelling (2007) state, “Second, at the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked in a kind of developmental sequence” (para. 11). Broken Windows is based on the assumption that crime and disorder are interrelated and that establishing order in areas through increased police presence will decrease crime and make residents feel safer. In principle, this technique would allow authorities to repair a neighborhood by enforcing minor infractions. According to CBC (n.d.), “Haworth, who was suspected of theft, was handcuffed at the time of the incident, which left him with a fractured skull and traumatic brain injury” (15 th minute). This means that people use excessive force to strike fear in people for breaking the law. Drawing from this quote, breaking the window theory is portrayed as a preventive technique to strike fear among offenders, just like deterrence theory. Breaking the window theory is wrong because it majors on driving fear in people as the main solution to reducing crime.

Breaking the window policy is also wrong because it fails to consider the main reason why people obey the law. The concept of deterrence means that people obey the law because they are afraid of being caught and punished. This indicates that when you create fear around committing an offense, more people are likely to obey the law. On the other, the breaking the window policy focuses on minor crimes committed as a means to prevent the occurrence of major crimes. According to Wilson and Kelling (2007), “But the police forces of America are losing, not gaining, members” (para 47). This means that arresting people with petty offenses is not going to make people obey the law. Therefore, the broken window argument is incorrect because the social disorders do not cause people to breach the law and commit more crimes.

The criminal justice system is supposed to keep everyone safe and make sure there is fair and equal justice. However, the current justice system is far from being fair and just because of introducing concepts such as the broken window policing. The current justice system is saddled with unfairness and ends up draining resources and disrupting communities. Broken window policing is a policing idea that suggests that apparent indicators of disorder and misbehavior in a community inspire further disorder and misbehavior, ultimately leading to violent crimes. This means that an unattended symptom of chaos in society has the potential to feed such acts. The broken window policy has been used to target minority-populated neighborhoods. People of color make up the majority of those detained and victimized as a result of this policing.

CBC. n.d. Above the Law . Web.

Wilson James, Q., and L. Kelling George. 2007 “Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety.” The Atlantic , retrieved (2007): 09-03.

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• The Broken Windows Theory by Wilson & Kelling
• Minor Disorders and Serious Crimes
• Crime Policies: Broken Windows Theory
• Juvenile Delinquency: Criminological Theories
• The Evolving Strategy of Policing Article Critique
• "Policing Terrorism" by Waddington
• The Causes of Students’ Misbehavior and Ways of Managing It
• Increasing the Severity of Punishments Imposed for Crime
• Handling Child Misbehavior
• Sexual Harassment as Organizational Misbehavior
• Researching of Criminal Law and Procedure
• Chesier v. On Q Financial Incorporated: Case Discussion
• The Nationalization and Constitutionalization of Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Justice System: Child Abuse
• “Estelle v Gamble”, “Lynce v. Mathis”: Law Case Studies

U.S. Criminal Justice System Essay Example

America does not have the most advanced justice system in the world. Depending on whom you ask it's debatable if America even has a functioning justice system. The philosophy of "innocent until proven guilty" was meant to provide an equal justice system for those who may be wrongfully accused, yet we often see a guilty verdict from the media long before a suspect has gotten their day in court. How does the system aim to provide protection when the media, police, or the victim's family has deemed a person guilty before a jury of their peers? The 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments were implemented to protect anyone who may be exposed to the system, however, that does not mean that it provides flawless protection. 

In the case of Mapp V. Ohio, we see police overstepping their bounds on the act of providing a false search warrant and illegally searching the Mapp home. The Mapps within their rights denied entry to search the home. For this reason, police decided to provide the Mapp family - mother and young daughter with a false search warrant. What's more, police got aggressive with Mapp upon their entry of the home. 

In this case, we see a group of police abusing their power to obtain evidence that is now no longer able to be upheld in court. Search warrants and their procedures are in place for a reason, police must obtain permission from a judge to achieve the search warrant. Most officers on the force do not have a four-year education in the law or criminal justice. In addition, they are not lawyers or judges who have studied law for some time before moving to the force. If the system allowed the police to make these decisions alone we would see an uptick of cases like Breonna Taylor one state over from Ohio, in Kentucky. 

In this case, police had a no-knock search warrant,  then allegedly went to the wrong location. Ultimately, Breonna's boyfriend thought they were being robbed he opened fire and police shot Breonna to death in her bed. Police then proceeded to arrest her boyfriend as she lay dying. It is increasingly important that we ensure law enforcement are following orders and are not making executive decisions that could put lives at risk. 

When we look into providing a fair system we are not looking into creating an equitable system the two aren't interchangeable. We can't know who's guilty and who is innocent without the right systems being put into place. We see this with the fifth amendment and two drastically different cases. I chose another popular one here for ease to the reader. Derek Chauvin the officer who killed George Floyd on camera in the Spring of 2020 plead the fifth instead of testifying at his trial. This prevented Chauvin from further incriminating himself despite the physical and video evidence. 

Whereas, we see in Ohio V. Reiner a babysitter who was called to testify who also leads the fifth. Here the evidence for guilt is not quite as strong for either party. The babysitter pleads the fifth to protect herself as being a possible scapegoat for the defense. Reasonable doubt is all that needs to be created for the defendant to be found guilty. In contrast to the video in the Chauvin case, this reasonable doubt in the babysitter's case was her presence with the children, during the window the attack occurred. Nonetheless, by presenting her side of the story the babysitter could become that reasonable doubt. While the science pointed to the father being the perpetrator the babysitter, in this case, did not want to incriminate herself in any way. 

To provide a fair trial bias must be removed from the trial and its investigations. Bias can come from anyone, anywhere at any time since we are humans it is not unlikely that we can inherently bring bias even when not intentional. What these amendments aim to do is protect those on trial from that bias. Whether it be racial, socio-economic, or personal bias. 

The ramifications of bias show heavily in the criminal justice system. There are drastic racial disparities in those convicted of crimes but also of those falsely accused of crimes. American society in itself was meant to uphold wealth, whiteness, intelligence, and socioeconomic status. This unfortunately does not stop within the criminal justice system if anything it worsens. How exactly does the 6th amendment protect those that fall outside of these categories? To know the law is to have a privilege many don't. For the longest time lawyers were straight, white, and men. Meaning they were the ones who not only invented the laws but were the ones who protected others when the law was broken. 

A person of color who was arrested or did not know the law could be coerced into a false confession, admitting information that may not necessarily proceed to their guilt, or unknowingly provide information that gives police enough circumstantial to make an arrest. The sixth amendment providing the right to counsel gave these groups a fair chance at a fair trial. When you have a defendant who is uneducated, possibly can't read or someone who is low-income and cannot afford an attorney the sixth amendment gives them some protection. This is not to say that all people are still provided equitable services through this avenue. It is inherently possible for attorneys to also exhibit bias. 

The right to counsel also provides the innocent and the guilty the right to a competent attorney allowing for appeals if it is deemed the attorney was biased or was not providing adequate legal aid for their client. This happens often in death row cases see Charles E. Strickland, Superintendent, Florida State Prison, et al., Petitioners. Mr. Strickland was sentenced to death in the original trial. Mr. Strickland was allowed to appeal on the basis the attorney failed in two areas and presented the defendant with counsel so unreliable it could change the basis of the trial. When we look at the history of the death penalty and the number of people who have been placed on death row who were then found to be innocent we can see that effective counsel is essential to providing a fair trial.

Even with these safeguards in place, the system is still abused every day. Innocent people are sentenced to die and guilty people are protected under the umbrella for the innocent. In a system designed to uphold fairness, the system has forgotten equity. Not all cases are created equal and not all people are exempt from bias no matter how hard they try. In a system that does not take preventative or often even post-active measures to prevent crime, we are forced to implement a system that protects the innocent from the pipeline that can so forcefully change the course of someone's history. 

The after-effects of the system on someone innocent or someone who has been/or is attempting to be rehabilitated can be disastrous. Children were removed from their parents and also children who were returned to their parents. The law and these amendments while vital do not take into consideration that there is much more to the criminal justice system than one defendant one victim. To reference again the Mapp V. Ohio case where we saw a mother and daughter who were legally within their rights to deny the search were then affected by the actions of the system or people like George Floyd or Breonna Taylor who committed no crime and were forced to leave behind grieving family and friends. 

While the amendments are crucial to protect the innocent they were implemented due to a system so broken it cannot keep up with the speed the world is changing. A country that is beginning to push the boundaries of what being a criminal means and what it will mean for future generations and a future criminal justice system.

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How Is Our Criminal Justice System Broken?

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What are the most critical ways our criminal justice system is broken? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by Jennifer Doleac , founder of the Justice Tech Lab and an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of Virginia, on Quora :

The criminal justice system involves a broad array of interactions and processes, including: policing and arrest, bail and pre-trial detention, legal representation, plea bargains and (sometimes) jury trials, sentencing, juvenile detention, incarceration (including any rehabilitation programs, mental health treatment, and so on), re-entry support (or lack thereof), court fees and fines, and probation and parole. You can probably think of others. Almost all of these aspects of the system could be improved, and it’s a bit overwhelming to think about how inefficiencies and injustices accumulate from one step to the next.

There is one theme connecting all of the problems in the criminal justice system: a lack of attention to research evidence in policy-making and practice.

Too often, the research we need to guide policy simply does not exist: the relevant data either aren’t collected or aren’t shared (even across departments within a city!), or programs are implemented in a way that makes rigorous evaluation impossible (for instance, cherry-picking participants based on their likelihood of success, or implementing a program city-wide all at once instead of rolling it out more gradually). Other policy areas, such as education, are years ahead of the criminal justice system in this regard.

Most practitioners are doing the best they can with limited resources and don’t see evaluation as a priority for their day-to-day work. But some actively choose not to evaluate their programs because they worry that negative results would make them look bad. There are lots of theories and “best practices” developed by academics and practitioners over the years, but relatively few have been rigorously tested. Advocates and funders tend to perpetuate this status quo, pushing to do something (anything!) to demonstrate momentum and relevance. But we won’t know if we’re moving in the right direction unless we evaluate the programs we’re implementing and measure their impacts.

In this policy area more than most, we need leaders who are humble, and who want to figure out what’s working and what isn’t as quickly as possible. That’s the only way we’ll make the system work better.

This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter , Facebook , and Google+ . More questions:

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Essay on Criminal Justice System

Students are often asked to write an essay on Criminal Justice System in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Criminal Justice System

Introduction to criminal justice system.

The criminal justice system is a set of legal and social institutions for enforcing the criminal law. It has three main parts: the police, courts, and corrections. These parts work together to prevent and punish criminal activities.

The Role of Police

The police are the first step in the criminal justice system. They keep us safe by preventing crime and catching people who break the law. When they find evidence, they give it to the courts.

The Court System

The courts are where judges decide if someone broke the law. They look at the evidence given by the police. If they find the person guilty, they decide the punishment.

Corrections and Punishment

The last part is corrections. This includes prisons, probation, and parole. Prisons are where people go if they’re found guilty. Probation and parole are ways for people to serve their punishment outside of prison.

Importance of the Criminal Justice System

The criminal justice system is important because it helps keep order in society. It makes sure that people who break the law are punished, which helps prevent more crime.

250 Words Essay on Criminal Justice System

What is the criminal justice system.

The criminal justice system is a set of legal and social institutions for enforcing the criminal law. These institutions include the police, the courts, and the correctional facilities. They work together to maintain social control, deter and control crime, and sanction those who violate laws.

The Role of the Police

The police are the first point of contact in the criminal justice system. Their job is to enforce laws, maintain peace, and protect the community. When a crime happens, the police investigate, gather evidence, and arrest the suspect.

The Courts and Their Function

After the police make an arrest, the case moves to the court. The court’s role is to judge if the person is guilty or not. This is done through a trial where both sides present their arguments. If the person is found guilty, the court decides the punishment.

Correctional Facilities

The last part of the criminal justice system is the correctional facilities. These are places like jails and prisons. If a person is found guilty, they might be sent here. The goal is to punish them but also to help them become better citizens.

The Importance of the Criminal Justice System

The criminal justice system is very important. It helps keep our society safe and orderly. It makes sure that people who break the law are punished. But it also tries to help these people change their ways so they can live better lives.

In conclusion, the criminal justice system plays a key role in maintaining law and order in society. It ensures that justice is served for both the victims and the offenders. It’s a system that is designed to protect the rights of everyone involved.

500 Words Essay on Criminal Justice System

The criminal justice system is a set of legal and social institutions for enforcing the criminal law in line with a defined set of procedural rules and limitations. In simple words, it’s a system that makes sure people follow the law. If someone breaks the law, this system steps in.

Parts of the Criminal Justice System

The criminal justice system is made up of three main parts. These are the police, the courts, and corrections.

The police are responsible for enforcing the law. They are the ones who catch people who break the law. After catching these people, the police hand them over to the courts.

The courts then decide if the person is guilty or not. They do this by listening to both sides of the story. If the person is found guilty, the court gives a punishment. This punishment is meant to make the person understand that breaking the law is wrong.

The corrections part of the system is where the punishment happens. This could be in a jail or prison, or the person might be allowed to stay in their own home but with some rules they must follow.

Why is the Criminal Justice System Important?

The criminal justice system plays a big role in keeping our society safe. It makes sure that everyone follows the law. If there were no system to punish people who break the law, then more people might decide to do bad things.

The system also tries to help people who have broken the law to change their ways. This is done through programs that teach them new skills or help them to understand why what they did was wrong.

Challenges in the Criminal Justice System

Even though the criminal justice system is very important, it also has some problems. Sometimes, people are treated unfairly because of their race or how much money they have. Some people might get a harsher punishment than others for the same crime. This is not fair, and many people are working to make the system better.

In conclusion, the criminal justice system is a key part of our society. It helps to make sure that people follow the law and punishes those who don’t. It also tries to help people change their ways so they don’t break the law again. But, like any system, it has problems that need to be fixed. By understanding how it works, we can all help to make it better.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Criminal Justice

Criminal Justice System

Is the Criminal Justice System Broken

Our criminal justice system is violating our values as a people. A nation that savors liberty now incarcerates more human beings than any other nation on the planet. Like in any other system, it always needs adjustments. We need to have a Criminal Justice System that is effective and that prosecutes individuals in a fair way to ensure that we as a society are able to maintain peace, order, and security. The outcome of a case I read about a Chicago police officer who shot seventeen-year-old shows a broken criminal justice system not just an injustice by a single police officer and it was all based on racism. Too often arrest is not being applied in a way that reflects our belief in equality under the law. As a society, we have to acknowledge when we are locking up these many people with this kind of frequency. Our criminal justice system isn’t broken. The glaring racial inequity is actually a result of how the justice system was designed to work, a system with an undeniable historic connection to slavery that was outlawed a century ago. During the 1960’s, the criminal justice system faced serious challenges regarding racism. Today many fear that racism is becoming a serious issue in our criminal justice system. CBS News poll reported that about three-fourths of blacks said they thought that the criminal justice system was biased against African-Americans and that police were more likely to use a deadly force against a black person than a white person.

There are many ways law enforcement can improve by giving better training to help officers deal with situations that escalate too quick so that incidents don’t happen. It is extremely difficult to prove if an officer is being racist because the supreme court requires that you offer a conscious racial bias or some kind of admission in order to even get in the courthouse door. The single most important thing we can do to eliminate racial bias in the criminal justice system is to end the war on drugs. The drug war is responsible for the arrest, incarceration, and branding of millions of people of color as felons. Drug use, abuse, as well as drug dealing, is just as prevalent in white communities as it is in poor communities of color but the drug war has been waged almost exclusively in ghetto communities resulting in what I believe is racial undercast.

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In a speech, President Obama proposed an overhaul of the criminal justice system. He mentioned how in too many cases the criminal justice system is a pipeline from underfunded schools to overcrowded jails. He said we needed to minimize the sentencing of non-violent drug crimes. He also mentioned prison conditions and how we should not be tolerating overcrowding, gang activity, and rape in prison. He talked about how we should give formal prisoners who have done their time and are now trying to do the right thing, a decent shot in job interviews and ban the question on job applications that asks if they have ever been convicted of a felony. We should also restore voting rights for those who have served their sentences.

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The broken criminal justice system.

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            Police officers are supposed to protect people. Lawyers are supposed to reveal the truth. Our criminal justice system is supposed to uphold justice and peace in our society. However, in reality, we often see the opposite--police interrogations so aggressive that the truly innocent believe they are guilty and lawyers so corrupt that they weave lies out of the truth. We must not let a system made up of imperfect and corrupt human beings decide who lives and who dies. Therefore, we must abolish the death penalty.              We see aspects of our broken "justice" system in the documentary play The Exonerated by Eric Jensen and Jessica Blank. Robert, a poor black man from the South, was accused and convicted of raping and killing his ex-girlfriend, a young white woman. When the cops found the victim, she had a piece of long red hair in her hand, the hair of the true criminal. However, in court the prosecutor insisted that the murderer was Robert, a black man with short black hair. The prosecutor misrepresented the evidence by saying that the victim pulled her own hair in her distress, which is utterly illogical. When she is being attacked, why would the victim pull her own hair? Robert posed this question to the prosecutor, and, not surprisingly, the prosecutor conveniently ignored it. Unfortunately, the jury did too, and Robert was sentenced to death. Seven years later, another lawyer takes on Robert's case and proves his innocence by matching the red hair with the true murderer.              Even though the justice system and the world ignored the truth, at least Robert had peace of mind knowing he was innocent. Gary, on the other hand, did not. After he found his parents murdered, the police brainwashed Gary into believing he killed them. Instead of allowing Gary the time to grieve the loss of his parents, the police immediately called Gary in for questioning and interrogated him all night long. They lied to him saying they had all the evidence they needed to convict him.

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Essays Related to The Broken Criminal Justice System

1. injustice in the criminal justice system.

In many instances, the criminal justice system is said to favor some racial groups over others. ... In recent years, it seems as though the criminal justice system has reneged on its purpose. ... His statement helps to prove that the criminal justice system is specious. ... The term hate crime is relatively new to the criminal justice system. ... African-Americans have been mistreated by the criminal justice system for many years. ...

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3. San Francisco's Restorative Justice System

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• Approx Pages: 4

6. Juveniles Shouldn't Be In The Adulty System

ONE JAIL DOES NOT FIT ALL The Juvenile justice system was originally developed to protect children from the appalling atrocities that they faced in adult jails. ... That is why the juvenile justice system was developed. ... Obviously that's not what the Congress thinks because 15 states have now made it possible to allow prosecutors (not a judge) to decide whether children arrested for crimes ranging from rape, to shoplifting, to drug charges should be dealt with in the juvenile or criminal justice system. While 45 states have changed their laws making it far easier for judges to sen...

• Word Count: 630
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: High School

7. America's Broken Prison System

North American societies are more focused on justice and punishment, rather than rehabilitation. ... In other words, without a strong community, potential criminals are created. ... To put a halt to this increasing number, these criminals must be extracted from society, and instead of placing them in close quarters with fierce big time criminals (which in turn lights desire for criminal acts), society must educate them. ... This entire fiasco dates back to the year 1980, where many of the mentally ill who left mental institutions began entering the criminal justice system. ... This attribution...

• Word Count: 1471

8. Interview

Interview Paper The Juvenile Justice system allows juveniles to somewhat receive a lesser disposition, and more of a second chance with the actions that they have done. ... But what do people working inside the system believe about the Juvenile Justice system? ... Broken families tend to allow their children to get involved with criminal actions more frequently or at an earlier age. ... Considering the fact that these juveniles that come from a broken home tend to have more criminal actions it isn't always the case. ... That's why I got into the justice system, I wanted to wo...

• Word Count: 861

9. Thoughts of the Criminal Mind

Criminal minds are complex. ... Another theory is the Eysenck's Theory of Personality and Crimes, which suggests that "criminal behavior is the result of an interaction between certain environmental conditions and features of the nervous system" (Bartol & Bartol, 2005). ... There is a definite link between behavior patterns and chemical changes in the brain and nervous system. ... In a disorganized area, families and schools are usually broken down and aren't able to function properly or as they are expected to. ... Social Conflict theorists are worried about the role of th...

• Word Count: 1551

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Our criminal justice system is broken. But Donald Trump isn't a victim.

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No one is above the rule of law.

That’s the promise of the American justice system – a promise that is tested by former President Donald Trump .

Trump is facing dozens of criminal charges related to election interference and business dealings.

Like clockwork, what follows Trump news is Trump noise. He hurls insults at judges, prosecutors, investigators and their agencies as he pushes back in an ugly, unprecedented fashion to pump up his already angry-at-America base of supporters.

If we faced criminal charges, we know it would not help our defense if we insulted or threatened that very same criminal justice system.

Trump isn't entirely wrong

Yet Trump says that he is the victim of a witch hunt by Democrats and his enemies, that he is suffering like Alexei Navalny , just like Jesus , just like Black people .

It’s a ludicrous assertion.

But he’s not entirely wrong. The legal system is sometimes unfair, but not in the ways Trump suggests – and not to Trump and people like him.

'You are going to pay the price': DeSantis sends state troopers to halt Florida spring break crime. What about Trump's Mar-a-Lago?

Consider that Trump has bought and will continue to buy the best available defense – with $50 million in legal fees – and what that says about the stark contrast between Trump and those who are struggling and must accept whatever the justice system throws at them.

With money and influence, the usual lawful process can be delayed, compromised or crushed along the way.

Without money and influence, Americans facing criminal charges crimes often lose the game they are forced to play. They're walking into a meat grinder, almost always represented by struggling, inexperienced court-appointed lawyers without the finances to support a good defense.

There is plenty of evidence that more often than we’d like to think, the truly innocent have gone to prison for crimes they didn’t commit, and not because of politics.

Since 1989, nearly 3,500 Americans have been exonerated, according to the National Registry of Exonerations , after serving more than 31,000 years for crimes they did not commit. Those numbers clearly indicate, and I think most of us would agree, that we have a broken criminal justice system in need of reform.

To understand true legal persecution, look no further than less-privileged Michigan citizens like Temujin Kensu , formerly known as Fredrick Freeman, and Detroit native Ray Gray .

Estimated 25,000 to 30,000 people wrongfully imprisoned

Kensu and Gray are among the estimated 25,000 to 30,000 people condemned to lengthy U.S. prison sentences for crimes there is ample reason to believe they did not commit. The Innocence Project says at least 4% to 6% of the nation’s prison population is factually innocent.

Kensu was convicted in 1987 of murder in Port Huron for the broad-daylight shotgun slaying of 20-year-old Scott Macklem, cut down as he walked away from a classroom building on the campus of St. Clair County Community College.

Several witnesses testified that on the morning of the murder, Kensu was hundreds of miles away. But he was convicted by a jury when the prosecutor, Robert Cleland, presented without any proof a theory that the man with no money, a pregnant girlfriend, no job and living on food stamps chartered a plane to travel 450 miles to commit the murder and return undetected.

When Kensu convinced the federal court that mistakes and harmful acts by the prosecutor, his drug-addicted lawyer and corrupt cops meant he should be released or be granted a new trial, an appeals court decided federal Judge Denise Page Hood’s ruling didn’t count. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 time-limited his innocence claim.

At age 60, Kensu remains in prison, very ill and unable to get the governor to commute his sentence.

Criminal justice: Laken Riley's death made the news, but here's the real story on undocumented migrants

Released after 48 years in state prison

Raymond Gray spent more than 48 years in state prison in the robbery and murder of a drug dealer, convicted in a bench trial of the 1973 crime based on witness testimony – even though his family and one of the robbery suspects testified that Gray was at home when the crime was committed, styling the hair of one of his barber customers.

Despite police reports of two male perpetrators, one armed with a pistol at the time of the robbery, only Gray was charged and convicted when a judge chose not to believe the testimony of Gray’s relatives.

The Wayne County prosecutor’s office agreed to release Gray only if he pleaded to some element of the crime.

Wrongfully convicted deserve protection and help

The wrongfully convicted and their families have been awarded billions in compensation for their suffering through judgments or state-mandated payouts. Imagine what the cost to communities would be if the nation recognized and paid damages to all the known victims of the justice system's shortcomings.

Unjust actions in the criminal justice system have left many wondering why the Constitution didn’t fulfill its promise to them.

Last year, the right-wing majority of Trump's Supreme Court, led by Justice Clarence Thomas, stacked with a right-wing majority, again slammed the door on innocence claims. Trump is counting on this same Supreme Court to save him from criminal prosecution.

Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store .

The rule of law claims to grant equal rights and protections to everyone. It’s up to us to make that promise a reality.

Maybe now, as we face the madness of Trump's bogus claim of unfair treatment, we should consider the real unfairness in our criminal justice system – and enact long-needed reforms and improvements to better protect those of us who aren't rich and famous from punishment we truly don’t deserve.

Bill Proctor is a private investigator specializing in investigating wrongful convictions with his own firm, which he started after a four-decade career in broadcasting including 33 years as a reporter, producer and anchor in metro Detroit. This column first published in the Detroit Free Press .

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page , on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter .

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Trump's crimes show the justice system is working. For him

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Accused Subway Shover Found Little Help in New York’s Chaotic Shelters

Carlton McPherson had been placed by New York City in a specialized homeless shelter for people with serious mental illness. It was not enough.

By Amy Julia Harris ,  Jan Ransom ,  Wesley Parnell and Andy Newman

Before Carlton McPherson was accused of fatally shoving a stranger in front of a subway train last week, he was placed by New York City into specialized homeless shelters meant to help people with severe mental illness.

But at one shelter, in Brooklyn, he became erratic and attacked a security guard. At another, he jumped on tables and would cycle between anger and ecstasy. At a third, his fellow residents said it was clear his psychological issues were not being addressed.

“That man needed help,” said Roe Dewayne, who stayed with Mr. McPherson at a mental health shelter in the Bronx. “If they were monitoring him like they were supposed to, this wouldn’t be going on.”

As New York has struggled to provide services for homeless mentally ill people across the city, its mental health shelters were supposed to help fill a crucial need, with on-call psychiatrists and social workers on staff to ensure that the thousands of people like Mr. McPherson were connected to treatment, and did not harm themselves or someone else.

The reality has been different, a New York Times examination of the shelters has found. Based on city records and interviews with shelter workers, residents and their family members, the review showed that mental health services have been offered only sporadically across the 38 specialized facilities, which were operated by city contractors at a cost of about $260 million a year. Episodes of violence, disorder and preventable harm, meanwhile, have become commonplace.

Fifty people died in the mental health shelters during a recent four-year period, records show. About half of those deaths occurred after suspected drug overdoses, when staff members found the bodies of men and women slumped on bathroom floors, next to empty pill bottles or in bed with foam coming out of their mouths. Eight people staying in the shelters killed themselves.

More than 1,400 fights broke out during the same span, with more than half of those resulting in “serious injury.” At a shelter in Queens, a woman threatened her roommate with a Swiss Army knife before hurling a nail-studded two-by-four at a facility glass front door, records show. Another woman at the shelter tried to suffocate her roommate with a plastic bag.

The mental health shelters were also the scene of more than 40 fires — half of which appeared to have been set deliberately. On at least 344 occasions, the facilities lost heat, water or power for four hours or longer, The Times found.

Although the first mental health shelters opened decades ago, the city has dramatically expanded their reach in recent years, steadily adding funding and creating beds for about 5,500 people.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeless Services, which oversees the city’s shelters, said the agency is required to provide shelter to all those who need it. She said it does its best to connect people to mental health services but added that it is primarily focused on providing emergency housing, not psychiatric care.

“Ensuring the health and safety of our clients is a top priority,” said the spokeswoman, Neha Sharma.

She said that the psychiatric services at the shelters are strictly voluntary, and that the agency cannot force people in the shelters to attend appointments or take medication. But the city has worked to improve safety at the shelters by training staff on how to reverse overdoses, prevent suicide and link the neediest clients to more intensive psychiatric services.

The city homeless shelter system is just one part of a broader safety net that has often given way in recent years while straining to meet a soaring need. Hospitals across New York have often discharged people in the midst of mental health crises while they were still unstable. Specialized treatment teams, which cater to some of the most volatile and difficult to treat patients, have long waiting lists, and they rely on underpaid, undertrained and overwhelmed workers who have sometimes failed to respond to signs that a person was unraveling.

The shelters have often become a place of last resort for thousands of profoundly ill people. Still, their failures help explain how people like Mr. McPherson can become dangerously unstable despite being flagged for extra care.

In operating the shelters, the city too often “kicks the proverbial can down the road,” said Mary Brosnahan, who spent 30 years leading the Coalition for the Homeless, a New York advocacy and service organization.

“It’s all about just trying to not have these catastrophic incidents,” Ms. Brosnahan said. “They are investing our tax dollars in a model that you just know is not going to give people what they need at the end of that day, and we all pay the price for that.”

On Monday evening, Mr. McPherson was on a subway platform in Manhattan at East 125th Street and Lexington Avenue when he approached another man and shoved him in front of an oncoming train, the police said.

The man, Jason Volz, 54, was crushed to death. Mr. McPherson, 24, was charged with murder.

Afterward, Mayor Eric Adams announced that the city would soon begin hiring clinicians to deploy teams of mental health workers in the subway system in an effort to keep riders safe. Mr. Adams has made addressing the city’s mental health crisis a priority since the second week of his administration, when a mentally ill homeless man shoved Michelle Go, a financial consultant, in front of a subway train in Times Square, killing her.

“People need the help that they deserve, and we are focused on doing that with the entire team that we have in place,” Mr. Adams said on Thursday. “It plays on the psyche of New Yorkers when someone is pushed to the tracks or someone shoots a gun in the subway system.”

Adrift in the system

Mr. McPherson had long struggled with mental illness, said his mother, Octavia Scouras. She tried her best to help him, but once he became an adult, she said, “no one was willing to continue to invest in him.” He spiraled out of control.

He moved in with his grandmother in the Bronx for a time, but a neighbor described seeing him sleeping in a hallway closet in the building after his grandmother began refusing to let him into her apartment. He became homeless and was sent to a mental health shelter in a rundown brick building in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn in 2023, according to court records and interviews with shelter staff members.

At the shelter, Mr. McPherson often greeted staff members with a smile and small talk. But one day in October, he grew agitated in the cafeteria and hurled a drink at the kitchen workers. When a security guard tried to calm him, Mr. McPherson, who had recently suffered a leg injury, used a cane he was walking with to strike the guard several times in the face, bloodying his eye.

Mr. McPherson was arrested and charged with assault and menacing, but the guard, Stephen Olowogboye, said he declined to cooperate with prosecutors because he knew that Mr. McPherson was struggling with mental health issues. He thought the younger man needed support, not jail.

“He wasn’t in his right state of mind,” Mr. Olowogboye said. “I thought, what if that was my younger brother, what would I do? I felt pity for him.”

After the assault, Mr. McPherson was transferred from the Brooklyn shelter and eventually landed at a mental health shelter in the Bronx, according to interviews with residents and his family.

The shelter, housed in an imposing brick building on Jerome Avenue and operated by a nonprofit group called BronxWorks, has been the scene of violence and disorder in recent years, records and interviews show. At least nine residents of the shelter have died since 2018, and there were reports of more than 60 fights and 62 life-threatening injuries and hospitalizations.

One man staying at the shelter followed a staffer onto a nearby subway train and masturbated in the seat across from her, records show. In another instance, a man clutching a large kitchen knife walked into the lobby and tried to lure a shelter officer outside to fight.

“Being in places like here, they really don’t help out,” said Mr. Dewayne, 60, the Jerome Avenue resident who said he met Mr. McPherson there. “Everyone in this building is suffering and hurting.”

At the Jerome Avenue shelter, Mr. McPherson mostly kept to himself and did not act out, but it was clear he was struggling, according to two residents who remembered him. He confided in his mother that he was scared and did not know what to do, she said.

“That shelter was the last place a person like Carlton needed to be,” said Ms. Scouras, who said she had worked at the Jerome Avenue site years before her son was sent there — and had witnessed the rampant drug abuse and violence.

“It’s extremely dangerous and deadly,” she said. “You would be terrified to go to sleep, let alone use the restroom.”

Residents were crammed into communal dormitories — as many as 20 to a room — and often had little privacy, current and former employees said. By midmorning, they were expected to leave the building, with instructions to return at a set time each evening. Those who missed the curfew risked losing their bed for the night and were often transferred to another shelter.

The workers there tried their best to support the residents, but resources were limited, said Andrea Kepler, who joined BronxWorks in 2016 and briefly served as the program director at the Jerome Avenue shelter. Psychiatrists were on call to do telehealth appointments, she said, but often the residents needed more intensive care than the shelter could provide. She described frequently sending people in the throes of crisis to nearby hospitals only to see them be released hours later with few supports.

“It was heartbreaking to see people struggling,” Ms. Kepler said. “It was a very challenging environment.”

Scott Auwarter, the assistant executive director at BronxWorks, said the shelter was doing as best it could to service a population with complex needs.

“We get some of the toughest cases in the system,” he said, adding that staff had connected more than 100 residents to permanent supportive housing. “We try to go above and try to be as sensible as possible. But we are on the record as saying the system really needs lots of thought and change.”

Widespread problems

In many ways, the Jerome Avenue site was typical of mental health shelters across the city.

Every year, the city collects data on how many deaths, injuries, assaults and other so-called “priority 1” incidents occur inside its homeless shelters. The Times obtained and analyzed those records for mental health shelters from 2018 to 2021 and found that more than 7,400 serious incidents were reported during that time.

There were at least 604 accidents “leading to life-threatening injury” among shelter residents, the records show.

More than 40 rapes, attempted rapes or sexual assaults were reported to have occurred inside the shelters, along with 140 thefts and 283 instances of “criminal activity in or around the facility by residents that threatens the safety of the community as a whole.”

Behind the numbers were searing snapshots of individual suffering.

One man living in a Brooklyn shelter hanged himself with a bedsheet. Another leaped off the Brooklyn Bridge. A woman at a Bronx mental health shelter told staff she was hearing voices in the days before she jumped to her death in front of a subway train in 2020, records show.

At a mental health shelter along Ralph Avenue in Brooklyn in 2022, a man with bipolar disorder made a noose with a bedsheet and tried to hang himself from a toilet stall, declaring that he was “Jesus Christ, and I have to die for y’all.” When the shelter’s workers tried to help him, he ran out of the bathroom, threw a garbage bin at the workers and was eventually taken to a hospital.

At the same facility a few weeks later, a man smashed some windows, took up a piece of broken glass and threatened to use it to slit his throat.

In interviews, five people who have worked at the shelters said the city’s system was ill-equipped to handle the complex needs of the mentally ill. Rather than recognizing the violent outbursts as untreated symptoms of a psychiatric problem, and connecting these people to more intensive care and supportive housing, some officials take an easier path, the people said.

They simply move the sickest patients from one shelter to the next — further destabilizing those who need stability and increasing the likelihood of a breakdown.

Liset Cruz and Hurubie Meko contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Amy Julia Harris has been an investigative reporter for more than a decade and joined The Times in 2019. Her coverage focuses on New York. More about Amy Julia Harris

Jan Ransom is an investigative reporter on the Metro desk focusing on criminal justice issues, law enforcement and incarceration in New York. More about Jan Ransom

Andy Newman  writes about New Yorkers facing difficult situations, including homelessness, poverty and mental illness. He has been a journalist for more than three decades. More about Andy Newman

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Robert Jenrick calls for nationality data scheme to prevent UK ‘importing crime’

Ex-immigration minister proposes bill amendment to collate visa and asylum status of people convicted in England and Wales

The nationality, visa and asylum status of people convicted of a criminal offence should be recorded to ensure the UK is not “importing crime”, the former immigration minister Robert Jenrick has said.

In an amendment to the government’s criminal justice bill, Jenrick proposed that recording this data could help strengthen immigration and visa policies.

Ministers would present a report to parliament each year detailing the nationality, visa status and asylum status of every person convicted in English and Welsh courts in the previous 12 months under the amendment.

Jenrick said this greater transparency would aid debates about legal and illegal immigration, which are “hindered by a lack of data”.

“We cannot hope to fix our immigration system without understanding the problem. The national debate on legal and illegal migration is hindered by a lack of data on the fiscal, economic and societal impacts of migration,” Jenrick told the Telegraph .

“There is mounting concern that the UK is importing crime, particularly violent crime, sexual assaults and drug production. We need to have transparency so the public knows what’s happening and policy can be formulated accordingly.”

Rishi Sunak has been facing mounting pressure to cut immigration figures in the UK and over his Rwanda bill.

On Friday, Jenrick told GB News that the prime minister “didn’t want to talk about” curbing legal immigration when he and the former home secretary Suella Braverman repeatedly tried to raise the issue – a claim contested by Downing Street sources. The Conservative MP for Newark continued: “I think that the prime minister, like others, took the view that legal migration didn’t matter and that Brexit, if it was anything, was about taking back control but not bringing down the numbers.”

Sunak has previously promised to “do what is necessary” to bring net immigration down.

The government is introducing a range of restrictions in an effort to cut the number of people legally arriving in Britain, including a ban on overseas care workers bringing family dependants to the UK and increasing the salary threshold for skilled workers to £38,700.

Last year Jenrick resigned over the Rwanda bill after it was revealed the legislation did not allow the government to override the international laws that have stopped the government sending asylum seekers to central Africa.

He said it would not work and needed to go further in setting aside human rights law if it was to have a chance of getting the Rwanda scheme to work.

Jenrick’s new proposal has been backed by 25 MPs, including Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg and Robert Buckland.

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He said the US and Denmark had a similar approach to tackling immigration as both countries had developed proposals to process asylum claims offshore.

“An open immigration system is creating serious problems in communities, but without data, we can’t have an informed debate,” he said.

“The Danes think similarly to us. They were the ones looking at third-country processing agreements. I don’t think anyone can suggest they are not compliant with international laws, yet they are rightly adopting a robust and fair approach.

“Anything that makes us more efficient in the way we process claims to sift out people whose presence would be a detriment to our country should be considered.”

Among MPs backing the plan are the Conservative former ministers Andrea Jenkyns, Sir Simon Clarke, Neil O’Brien, Jonathan Djanogly, Sir Desmond Swayne, Sarah Dines, Sir James Duddridge, Heather Wheeler and Caroline Johnson.

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