The Crime Of The Criminal Justice System

This paper discusses three critical issues in the criminal justice system. It touches on the general issues of punishment philosophies, sentence decision making, and prison overcrowding and focused more specifically on the negative effects of each. Highlighted in this informational paper is the interrelated nature of the issues; each issue affects and is affected by the others. Data and information has been gathered from the FBI Uniform Crime Report, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Amnesty International, the NAACP Legal Defense

The criminal justice system plays an important role in this society, it is meant to protect and serve. This “system” is also meant to maintain the peace and enforce the laws set by the government. However, the criminal justice system is not even close to perfect. It has many flaws, some of which are: police brutality, death penalty, mass incarceration, gun violence, and especially wrongful convictions. A majority of the flaws that the system has can be easily fixed and can be set straight. For example, the issue of wrongful convictions has been relevant for quite some time and has the potential to decrease its probability of occurring by focusing on the importance of scientific evidence, rid of faulty witness testimonies, and make sure that the lack of evidence and/or government misconduct, if applicable, does not determine the outcome of the case.

Nationally, every 7 minutes, another person enters prison. And every 14 minutes, someone returns to the streets, beaten down and, more often than not, having suffered a great amount of violence during his or her incarceration. Professionals will tell you that incarceration really does very little to stop crime, but we go on spending billions of dollars in order to lock up more and more people. We have become the country with the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world. (National Criminal Justice Commission)

In short the United States judicial system sends criminal offenders into the largest prison system in the world, where the increasing population forces overcrowding, widens the gap between state spending and revenue and fails to prevent recidivism; we must re-evaluate and reduce our current prison system in order to reduce state debt as well as provide inmates with livable conditions and keep them from returning to prison.

The 13th Amendment to the American Constitution is celebrated and known as the amendment to end slavery. The amendment provides that, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction” (U.S. Constitution, Amendment 13). What is often overlooked is that this amendment abolishes slavery, unless you are a criminal. After the Civil War, this loophole was wildly used by slave owners, as they would convict African Americans of minor crimes to then use them as slaves again. This exception to the amendment is continually used today in the American prison system. The Criminal Justice System in America contains significant flaws that are detrimental to society. A few of these flaws lie within the actions and ideals of the prison system, the policies and laws surrounding the criminal justice system, and the American Legislative Exchange Council.

People in The United States have been affected by the prison system, it has saved many lives, but on the other hand, people have prosecuted for minor crimes, to end up spending a lot of time in jail, which breaks apart families for far too long, it also creates a big rift between the people of this fine nation and their distrust of the law. Back in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan has issued a law that has cut funding for the mental institutions in the United states as called the deinstitutionalization of mental health, and to show ways of how we can bring our mental health system into place. Also in the same era laws have been put in place to put harsher laws on drug offenders called mandatory minimum sentencing, some people like non-violent, first-time drug offender are being treated the same way as a drug lord, and a way that we can fix that is push laws in congress to loosen minimum sentencing. Not to forget to mention the death penalty, how tax payers are wasting our money on keep prisoners on death row. Having a poor mental health system, strict mandatory minimum sentencing, racial bias in our prisons, and death penalty laws has led people to enter our prison system wrongfully. By fixing those rules we can help our society grow, and achieve greatness by doing right to our prison system.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a massive amount of inmates began fillin up the United States prison systems. This huge rate of growth in this short amount of time, has greatly contributed to the prison overcrowding that the United States faces today. In fact, the prisons are still filled to the seams. This enormous flood of inmates has made it practically impossible for prison officials to keep up with their facilities and supervise their inmates. One of the main reasons why many prisons have become overcrowded is because of states’ harsh criminal laws and parole practices (Cohen). “One in every 100 American adults is behind bars, the highest incarceration rate in the world” (Cohen). The amount of inmates in corrections systems, throughout the

In a perfect world, there would not be prisons due to the lack of crime. This is not a perfect world, and many of the prisons are overcrowded. The penitentiaries are full with a mixture of violent and nonviolent prisoners. By putting nonviolent offenders in prisons with violent offender increases the likelihood of them being associated with gangs and decrease their availability of getting rehabilitation (Smith-Heisters, 2008). The majority of the offenders are nonviolent and is in prison for drug usage. The federal system was unable to produce the rights given in the 6th and 14th Amendments and medical help to the prisoners getting out on parole because of overcrowding (Smith-Heisters, 2008). “77% of the growth in intake to America’s state and federal prisons between 1978

Mass incarceration has been a huge social problem since the 1980s; it came hand in hand with the war on drugs. Elliott Currie, a professor of criminology and law, suggests that building more prisons, imposing longer sentences, and applying harsh punishments will not lower the incarceration rate. In his chapter on “Assessing the Prison Experiment,” he explained that the increase of crime rate is not the sole reason that mass incarceration occurs, and it was also because courts

The criminal justice system has many flaws that many people believe It is broken. The first step of fixing the system is by acknowledging that the system is broken. According to the documentary Fixing the System, the increase of incarceration is due to nonviolent drug offenses. There are more drug offenses than for homicide, aggravated assault, kidnapping, immigration, sex offenses, etc., combined. The cost for incarceration has dramatically increased as people kept getting incarceration due to the nonviolent drug offenses. President George W. Bush decided that building more prisons and jails was the best way to teach the lesson of war on drugs. Although incarcerating individuals’ due drugs wasn’t helping get rid of the problem because they

The United States of America has an estimated population of 324,456,005, making the U.S. the third most populated country in the world. Yet, the United States has the largest criminal justice corrections system in the world. As the crime rates and social problems continue to rise, so do the incarceration rates in the already overcrowded correctional facilities. As the incarceration numbers continue to rise, so do the problems within the facilities themselves. Alternative sentencing methods are growing in popularity despite some of the pros and cons.

According to Mears and Cochran (2015), counting both the prisons and the county jails in America the incarceration rate is at 716 per 100,000 residents of the states. Mass incarceration was something that existed centuries ago, but did not take off until about 1973 with the “War on Drugs,” expanding consequent decades under Regan, Clinton, and both Bushes’ administration, (Liberty Equality Fraternity and Trees , 2014). Looking back into the era before the war, 1945-1973, being all the way until 2012, the prison population is about ten times the average, (Liberty Equality Fraternity and Trees , 2014). However, there are a few different ways to be proactive instead of reactive and having to result back to mass incarceration. Although, to reduce the correctional population it would be both timely and

To suggest that changing prison sentences or building more jails to accommodate more prisoners would be the best course of action is, at best, simply putting a band-aid on an exponentially increasing problem. In our reading, Mr. Gopnik explains that African-Americans are incarcerated at a rate of seven times the rate of white Americans (575). However, the problem is not a matter of one race being inherently prone to crime. As Mrs. Edelman explains, "these factors include ... underperforming schools, broken child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and a toxic youth culture that praises pimps and glorifies violence" (588). Essentially, the way to fix this problem is not to dump more money into an already enormous prison system. By expanding our capacity to "treat" or cage more prisoners, we will only be able to keep up until population growth outpaces us.

The mass incarceration of part of the U.S population is propelled mainly by the practices of politicians with regards to business. This is justified as legal by politicians stating they are trying to do what is best for the people by being “tough on crime”. By making the statement that they are being tough on crime, politicians typically earn public support while supporting private companies in terms of detention. Another justification that is used is the statement of leading the war on drugs by creating harsh punishments for drug offenders. One fact that shows how irrational harsh punishment for everyone is that only 10 percent percent of federal drug offenders are classified as high-level offenders, but all face the same harsh minimum punishments (Battaglia, drugpolicy.org). The problem with this policy is that most drug offenders are nonviolent, and end up getting sucked into a cycle of violent behavior due to the long terms they are being forced to serve due to laws. By shifting towards private contracting the focus is truly on profits, so corners are cut and the focus on rehabilitation is lost, punishing both the imprisoned and the public which could be benefitting from individuals saved through the justice

In America’s tough economic society, over population has become an exceedingly hot topic issue. However, overcrowding in America’s prison system has been a severe problem since the 1970's. The majority of the changes have come from different policies on what demographic to imprison and for what reason. The perspective of locking up criminals because they are "evil" is what spawned this (Allen, 2008). Because of this perspective the prison system in America is in need of serious reorganization. Since 1980, most states have one or more of their prisons or the entire system under orders from the federal courts to maintain minimum constitutional standards (Stewart, 2006).