The Pros And Cons Of The Criminal Justice System

In 1972 the FBI was annually producing two reports which were then eventually combined in 1982 which ultimately created LEOKA (FBI, 2011). Since then, it has been used effectively each year to report the law enforcement officers. The information is broken down by state and region and it maps out which regions have more of a problem with law enforcement officers either feloniously or accidently killed and also non-fatal assaults. There are many reasons as to why LEOKA is something that should be studied. Through this information you are able to come up with explanations as to why the statistics are the way they are and can even come up with ways to prevent officers being killed or assaulted in the line of duty. I am going to discuss the different ways law enforcement officers are killed on duty and how prevalent it is and use statistics and articles to justify my

Police shootings

The Albuquerque police department explains that the recent increases of officer involved shootings are due to the increase of police assaults (Galvan A1). Police Chief Ray Schultz said another common factor that the recent shootings had in common is that “The propensity for the person involved to have some type of mental health history or issue” (qtd. in Tomlin par. 21). In no way do the Albuquerque police think that shooting people is the right thing to do, rather, sometimes necessary when you believe your own life and the lives of others are in danger.

David Klenger, a former police officer says, “These are their official source of information about police shootings, all of these are imperfect: FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigations) Supplemental Homicide, Center for Disease Control, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.”

The justice system is just but the procedures within are somewhat flawed. Human nature is to have greed and power, that's what crumbles the system. People use the system for what it isn't intended for and get away with it whether it's good or bad. Such as the Tarina Garnet case. Trina Garnett, was a mentally disabled teenage girl who was charged with murder, after setting a fire that killed two people and was sentenced to life in prison.

This year so far (2017), 891 people have been shot and killed by police officers. Surprisingly, only 86 of those incidents were recorded by body-worn police cameras. Due to this, many important questions remain unknown in many of these incidents. Was the suspect armed? Did the suspect show signs of a mental illness?

The population for the study of excessive use of force will be of correctional officers with the most use of force as well as correctional officers that don’t have many uses of force. The proposed study would be of use of force reports as well as any other maintained records of correctional officers within the department. The use of forces reports to include records would be placed in categories to identify the officers that used excessive force then from officers that did not use excessive force in situations. These categories would require the sampling strategy method because the probability sampling strategy is the method that would identify which officers that have the most documented use of force compared to the officers that have the least documented use of force ("Use of force," 2017).

The United States is home to five percent of the world population, but 25 percent of the world’s prisoner. There must be a change to the current prison system which is doing more harm than good in American society and must be reformed. Reasons for this claim are that American prisons are too overcrowded with inmates, which creates a dangerous and unhuman environment. The cost to run a prison has gotten too expensive for tax payer pockets, and lastly the prison system is more as a punishment instead of rehabilitation with about sixteen percent of inmates most serious offence being drug charges. Prisons fall short of reforming criminals and the government is obligated to completely reform the prison systems in the United States.

The scope of this definition leads to inconsistencies and between SRCs. Variability also appears between sources used to identify deaths and circumstances surrounding it. While some SRCs use official records, others use unofficial resources. As a result of the lack of standardization, discrepancies exist within and among states. During an ARD and SHR assessment a coverage error was found. The capture-recapture method is used to estimate the total number of law enforcement homicides by comparing records of the ARD and SHR. The estimator used (Lincoln-Peterson estimator) infers that data not recorded had zero law enforcement homicides. In assuming so, a low count of officer-involved homicides is estimated and a high total of coverage is delivered. An improvement was made to the method, showing that some agencies data goes unrecorded. However, with this development, still between 31% and 41% of law enforcement homicides are unaccounted for in the ARD. (Planty & Burch, 2015.) (Bialik,

The criminal justice system has been proven to play a very important role in society. The criminal justice system is used to keep the citizens in check and to make sure that the laws that are made are being followed. It also is there to penalize anyone who disobeys the laws. In the criminal justice system, there are 3 main parts, law enforcement, adjudication, and corrections. Law enforcement is self-explainable. It consists of the law enforcers such as police officers and sheriffs. Adjudication is made up of people in the court house such as judges and lawyers. Corrections is made up of jailhouse matters such as prison officials. In these many components of the criminal justice system, there are all put in place to help correct people to do the right thing. There are punitive efforts and rehabilitative efforts. At time, the system may lean towards one category or more, which can be dangerous in terms of disciplinary action. The criminal justice system is more punitive than rehabilitative which makes the system ineffective.

Utilizing multiple systems estimation (MSE) techniques, the NGO Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) estimated that there are 1,500 officerinvolved lethal shootings yearly (Gershman & Cohen, 2014). This number represents about 8%–10% of all homicides in the United States during the period analyzed. When including only homicides committed by strangers, the proportion of homicides committed by the police jumps to 30% of homicides each year (Ball, 2016). The collaborative research team Mapping Police Violence (2015) aggregated data from three websites to create a geographic information system (GIS) map that visually displays where police fatal force incidents have occurred in the United States.

However, getting statistics for shootings is quite difficult as the FBI director James Comey stated in a testification at the House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing: “...we don’t have data. People have data about who went to a movie last weekend, or how many books were sold, or how many cases of flu walked into an emergency room, and I cannot tell you how many people were shot by police in the U.S last month or last year”. This causes the acquisition of statistics to be difficult, and many organizations take it into their own hands such as Philip Stinson who is a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Stinson decided in 2005 to set up 48 Google alerts to track police misconduct and has collected over a decades worth of data on police misconduct. From his findings it has been determined that out of the thousands of people shot by police since 2005 only 77 were charged with manslaughter, and only 26 were convicted. Although many police shooting are justified, 26 convictions seems too

The Criminal Justice System Policy has changed over the past years whether that has been for good or for worse; depending in what point of view one’s sees it. This can be seen in the tough on crime approach by legislators and the criminal justice system. Policies were made to deter crime and implement tougher approaches towards punishment. For example, truth in sentencing law that

The fact that I found interested was that in the 60’s, the U.S. had 3.3 police officers for every violent crime reported per year and that number changed to having 3.47 violent crimes reported for every police officer in 1993.

It is through the Criminal Justice System’s close collaborations with like-minded agencies such as the Police, Prison and Courts Services, that the public’s concerns and worries are resolved, in order to bring about justice in our communities (Cavadino and Dignan, 2007 as cited in Fox, 2014). With that in mind and out of the way, this essay will aim to explore some of the strengths and weaknesses, which are prominent within the Criminal Justice System. To do this successfully, the Police and the Courts Service will be the key agencies that will be explored in relation to the key Models that shape the whole Criminal Justice System. These Models were founded by Herbert L. Packer (1968) and Michael King (1981).