Does the U.S. criminal justice system work?
 

In these enlightened times, separating the “bad” from the “mad” is a given. Far more complex is the rationale for imprisoning the lawbreaker. Of the five functions of imprisonment, how many do we do well?

• Retribution: to punish and to exact revenge.
• Specific deterrence: to discourage the criminal from repeat behavior.
• General deterrence: to discourage others from the same behavior.
• Prevention: to keep society safe while the criminal is behind bars.
• Rehabilitation: to reform the criminal and enable him to earn an honest living.

Taxpayers are covering room and board for a system that fails to perform its functions.

(Let's not get into the death penalty, which is a topic for a different thread.)

The use of imprisonment as a means to achieve those goals is a relatively recent phenomenon, as is the concept that rehabilitation being one of the "pillars of justice".

I'm going to be away for a couple of days, so I'd just like to throw out a couple of points now. The vast majority of research shows that justice systems per se don't have as much of an impact in criminality as a couple of other factors.

Age is one of those factors. Criminality declines with age and this is consistent across nations which keep statistics on crime.

Another factor which greatly influences criminality is the basic social philosophy of the society in which the crime takes place. It has been found to have a greater deterrent value against crime than any state sanctions - something which blew some theories of criminology pretty much to pieces. Japan is the most often quoted example of this. The so-called "index crimes" occur at extremely low rates in Japan compared to other Western nations (which kind of blows the "pressure cooker" theory of criminology out the window) and it is believed by many researchers that the Japanese cultural emphasis on honour is a major factor in this discrepancy among first world nations.

I suppose that one thing I took away from studying criminology is that despite there having been a wide range of criminal justice models applied - the pendulum swings from emphasis on rehabilitation, to emphasis on retribution, to emphasis on restraint and back again fairly often - crime rates (and the rates for individual index crimes) have stayed fairly stable over time.

The other thing I took away from it is that while most models of criminal justice are valid, none of them are valid across crime in general - there is no "grand unified theory" of criminology which can be successfully applied across the full range of behaviours which society deems unacceptable. In part, that's because the people who commit one class of crimes tend to have different criminogenic needs (ie, what it would take to discourage them from committing a crime) than the people who commit another class of crime. Which means that any single criminal justice model is doomed to substantial failure.

I would posit that one reason any Western criminal justice system is doomed to substantial failure is because their populations have a high tolerance for law-breaking. Pretty much everyone could name something they do not believe should be illegal. Pretty much everyone could name a "petty" crime which they or someone close to them has committed (there's some interesting Canadian research on this). As societies and as individuals we actually don't have respect for a lot of the laws on our books and we take little personal responsibility for the enforcement of those laws - which in and of itself weakens the capacity of the criminal justice system to perform its functions for the benefit of society overall.

Shortest thread I ever launched.

Thank you and goodnight.

I'll give you my take on it, having worked with the system for 30+ years:

• Retribution: to punish and to exact revenge. This they do pretty well. Incarceration all by itself is not "fun". You're cut off from family and most loved ones, your every move is controlled from what you have for breakfast to when you get up, to what detergent your clothes are washed in. Nothing to do and all the time in the world to do it.


• Specific deterrence: to discourage the criminal from repeat behavior. They do a piss poor job of this for the most part IMHO, for a number of reasons - For punhishment to be a deterence, it must be consistently applied. Think of trying to train your dog to pee outside but only correcting him once every 20 attempts.

• General deterrence: to discourage others from the same behavior. This they do an excellent job of for those who are not predisposed to a criminogenic lifestyle, and a piss poor job for those who are. See above. For the person who fears prison, it wouldn't matter how often you might get away w/crime, the punishment ever would be sufficient. For those who know how often you get away w/crime, and prison being a fact of life ("Uncle joey won't be here for Christmas 'cause he's doing a nickle up state"), eh, not so much.

• Prevention: to keep society safe while the criminal is behind bars. In that certain very dangerous people once identified are mostly kept behind bars, pretty good on this, otherwise, not so much.

• Rehabilitation: to reform the criminal and enable him to earn an honest living. IME, not so much. Some folks come out and have decided that whatever else, they don't want to go back in, and don't. Most come out thinking they don't want to go back in, however, their resisitence to frustration is limited and they end up doing same oh, or they simply think "I won't get caught next time".

People manage to forget that not all crime is even identified, let alone solved. PRisons and jails merely house the very small percentage of criminals whose crimes were reported, the crime solved, they were convicted and sent to a facility.

(don't believe me? check out the stats for solved crimes held by the FBI, and recognize that many crimes aren't even reported - many assaults aren't, for example, murder can go unnoticed if the person is merely 'missing', shoplifting is often written off as 'shortage', and my personal favorite: drug possession and drug dealing - it's only reported as a crime when it is solved - nobody calls up the cops and says "Hey, I'm dealing/using drugs right now!!!!)

I love the item that appears regularly in local court news: someone nailed for possessing a "usable amount of marijuana." Is there an amount so small as to be unusable?

As to rehab: I'm curious what the recidivism rate is on those who might have learned a useful trade inside. How difficult is it to get hired anywhere?

Wring, some of your points echo Nonny's, above. A universal one seems to be that no one expects to get caught, and your post tends to confirm that.

I've read that in some Islamic countries, punishment is meted out quickly and rather brutally, e.g. lopping off a hand, or flogging in public. We think of these measures as barbaric, and perhaps they are, but are they any worse than our prison environment of gangs, drugs, rape etc.? They do seem to be an effective deterrent, from what I'm told.

Not debating, just asking.

The brutality of the punishment isn't the key factor, the certainty is. I have no reason to believe taht nations that use the Islamic type punishment model has any better stats on solved crime (especially "correct person identified").

RE: REhab - drug treatment works, but it's not like penicillian, and too many folks think of it that way (witness gossip columnists reaction to Charlie Sheen going into rehab again - they wouldn't have the same reaction to some one getting cancer again, or having another heart attack or whatever, but drug treatment apparently is supposed to work forevah). Vocational rehab is an excellent idea, but you have to key it in to job prospects on the outside. Doesn't matter how well you've trained some one for janitorial services, if the outside job market excludes offenders, it won't happen.

Oh, and as for "how difficult is it..." I;ve seen studies where 2/3s of employers screen out ex offenders. That;s more than the ones that are my "duh" factor (no convicted drunk drivers should drive school buses for example). When I ran a prison release program where nearly all recently released prisoners came to us for assistance, we had 53% of them get jobs, 73% of our case closures were to employment. That was considered very successful, and decidedly better than the population of welfare recipients (they had, I think about 35% employed)

It does seem unfair that after a man (or woman) has "paid his debt to society" (apologies for the cliché), his chances of employment are only 53%. How can the system be expected to work if so many employers are unwilling to take the risk?

As an aside: when I ran a seasonal business, I worked with a local high school counselor for at-risk kids to send me a couple of the dodgiest ones for part-time work every spring. I got some applicants with about a pound of metal piercings, which was okay with me, and IIRC, over 12 years, I had only one who failed to complete the 60-day period.

About the certainty: I get the impression that in the states, no one really expects to get caught, and as you point out, that's true more often than not. I remember a student of mine who lived in one of the Middle Eastern countries where brutal and public punishment was the norm, and he seemed to think that the crime rate there was extraordinarily low, based on the fear that they might be caught. This is, of course, just hearsay. I haven't researched crime rates and of course, they do reflect only those who were caught.

Until fairly recent times, the British justice system worked the same way - prison was a place where you were held until your sentence was carried out. Imprisonment - in and of itself - was not the punishment. That was flogging, being branded, being executed, being transported. The concept of deprivation of liberty - in and of itself - being a form of punishment is relatively new historically speaking.

There are nations in this world today in which death is a fairly certain punishment if you're caught committing specific crimes. Forget our Western values, "justice" is both swift and certain. And while tourists may think that our governments will intercede on their behalf, the locals know that adultery, or trafficking drugs or whatever does mean swift and harsh retribution - and yet the locals do it anyway.

And in a way, perhaps "primitive" justice is more of a deterrent than "modern" justice (although the records kept in those countries aren't easily compared to those kept in Western nations), but I've yet to see any credible research which supports that theory. It may be the case, but those nations generally do not keep the kinds of records which would enable anyone to empirically measure stuff.

Western nations keep unbelievably complex records about index crimes - but I'd hate to even take a shot at predicting the probability of your average white collar criminal getting caught and serving significant prison time for their offence.

In order for the criminal justice system to do its work you need the legislature to declare certain actions criminal. You need police departments to have the resources to investigate them. You need prosecutors to take them to trial (off the top of my head my recollection is that 80% of serious crimes in the US are pleas bargained) - which means that they need to evidence to mount a sustainable case. You need judges and juries willing to convict without fear or favour. And you need a corrections system, with the capacity to hanle all of this.

Taxpayers want all of this done, but in reality neither the political will nor the financial resources exist to make this all happen. Could more crimes be solved if unlimited finances were available? Probably. But the average taxpayer is NOT willing to spend thousands of dollars to find out who stole a $40 DVD player. They aren't prepared to spend the money it would take to process every rape kit that comes in on the off chance that some day they'll get a match and there'll be no other supporting evidence - and that even if that money is spent, there will be no conviction.

People like myself who have worked within the system are very clear about one thing - we only see the criminals who in some way failed. The system literally cannot cope with those criminals, let alone have time and money to spare chasing those who've succeeded. Given an infinite amount of time and money, the criminal justice systems of most Western nations could probably get marginally better results. Given the very real constraints within which the criminal justice system operates, the reality is that perceptions are more important than reality. Those who work within it live for that occasional time when you really do get to make a difference - but most of the time you don't.

To address part of your question Islander. There is no magic bullet where drug addiction is concerned. The relapse rate is pretty constant no matter what the flavour of the month is in terms of detox and rehab - and it's extremely high.

My very personal opinion is that the majority of people who benefit from diversion programmes and get their shit together as a result of them would probably have done so on their own eventually. It's really popular here to make make anger management and substance abuse programmes part of just about everyone's sentence - custodial or not - but in my experience they make a difference in a tiny fraction of people's lives. I hope that at least some of the people who I've guided through those programmes have remembered the tools I've taught them and found them useful in later life, but when they're made mandatory you're pretty much undermining the very foundation on which they are based and my personal opinion is that perhaps we'd get better results in terms of rehabilitation if there was less of a scattergun approach applied to the concept.

Very interesting reading guys.


A quick factual question: ISTR that persons convicted to jail time in the U.S: lose the franchise to vote. True?

I'll preface this by reminding people that the US is not one homogenous legal system and that I'm not even in the US. I'm always kind of astonished when people state with absolute certainty on messageboards that if you have a felony conviction for anything at all ever within the US then you cannot do X. I'm equally astonished when people quote Australian laws at me and tell me that "2 + 2 = 5" - because the true answers are much more complex.

If you examined you "53%" number more closely you'd find that it isn't true of all people with a criminal history in all situations. In my experience, it's not even true of "criminals overall."

In Australia - and elsewhere throughout the world - there are certain types of convictions which will LEGALLY prohibit you from holding certain types of jobs (though here - at least - not nearly as many legal prohibitions as the average person believes). Then you have the cultural aspect. There are certain types of crime which are socially unacceptable and so a person who has been convicted of one of those crimes is going to find it extremely difficult to find employment.

The VAST majority of people I oversaw when I worked in probation and parole could have found an employer willing to "give them a chance" - but they didn't want to work for fuck all money or to have to "prove themselves". They'd "done their time" and really couldn't wrap their heads around the idea of having to earn trust and acceptance by degrees. I worked primarily with offenders who had committed multiple acts of violence over a very long period of time, and some of them really did think that going to prison was the real world equivalent of going to confession in the Catholic church.

Both wring and I have used the phrase "criminogenic needs". It's an extremely important term when dealing with people who have long criminal histories. And sometimes what it would take to address a particular individuals criminogenic needs is utterly beyond the resources available. Can I get you a job if you have an especially nasty criminal history? Probably. Can I get you a job which pays what you think you "deserve" to be paid and which is guaranteed for life? Not a chance. People who've never been caught doing anything wrong in their lives don't get those kind of guarantees.

WRT voting rights for felons― it varies from state to state. I can't speak with certainty for other states, but Ohio law states that felons serving a prison sentence lose the right to vote. Also felons on probation or parole are barred from voting. The loss is not permanent, it is only for the duration of their sentence.

That was my impression too - that there are a lot of "everyone knows this" things which are only kind of sort of correct about US law. It's hard enough here in my country where we only have a handful of state laws to keep track of - I now pretty much assume that whenever anyone says "in the US" that unless they can point me to a SCOTUS ruling on the issue then they are making assumptions based on their local laws (which is fine - why one earth would anyone not licensed to practise in all 50 states of the US even be expected to know of those regional variations).

Part of why I love the 'Raffe: there are experts here on every subject imaginable and they are willing to give thoughtful answers to your questions. Thanks, guys!

No it doesn't. It fails to adequately punish the patriarchal elite that rape Mother Earth again and again. Every man that drives a bulldozer or backhoe should be executed for his crimes.

Women, too?

Naah, men that drive women are okay.

It very much depends on which state. Some states have no restrictions, so they'll even allow for absentee ballots to be delivered to jails, prisons etc. (very few from memory does that). Many (and mine is one - Michigan) restrict voting to those who can get to the polls (ie they'll not send absentee ballots to the jails etc. so if you're on the street on voting day, you can vote, as long as you're registered etc.). The most restrictive I can recall was Florida (perhaps others, but a small number) where criminal conviction gets you disenfranchised for life, even if the offense occurred elsewhere (remember, that was one of the problems w/the Bush/Gore election , they'd tossed out registrations for folks if their name cropped up on a convicted felon list. Bad news if your name was common). You can, in Florida, though request to be reinstated and some panel somewhere will review it (so Dick Cheney and George W. Bush wouldn't necessarily be automatically disenfranchised should them move to Florida).

All I know is that I teach at least one class a semester at Colorado's largest prison, located right here in my home town. I do not do it to punish the guys in my classes, I do not do it to deter anyone from a life of crime. I do it because these guys fucked up over and over and over again and are finally where they were told all along they would be if they kept fucking up. I believe in them, and that's why I teach. My students dream of a day when they will leave prison and make a different life for themselves, and they constantly ask me about getting into college (it's so foreign a concept to them that they are actually frightened of the prospect.) I teach with the hope that one or two of them a year will actually end up in college classrooms and will know how it feels to wear a cap and gown as they walk across a stage somewhere. You guys tell me -- am I wasting my time?

"Does the system work" is an academic question to me.

Since I'm a great believer in second chances —in most cases, anyway — I say No, 'Puna, your time is not wasted.

What subject(s) do you teach?

I've taught college level English composition and freshman literature. This semester, if DOC gets all of its shit in one sock, I'll teach a speech class.

It was once explained to me that the United States does not have a "justice" system. We have a LEGAL system. Two different things with a little overlap. We can have justice and have it be legal, but just because it is legal does not make it just.