U.S. The Land of the Free? American Criminal Justice System Flaws
By Miguel Valencia, April 28, 2019
Some Americans still believe that our current criminal justice system is doing a great job handling the crime that occurs in our society. Yet the reality is that there are massive disadvantages for the majority of people. From the beginning, our criminal justice system was created to implement laws and to regulate social order. Nowadays our criminal justice system seems to be overstepping on some of the basic American core values and attempts from our government to make things better keep failing.
A nation based on people’s values
As in many other aspects of life, we do not tend to worry about any social issues, until we find ourselves involved in that problem. A friend of mine once asked me, “Do you feel free in the U.S.?” to what I responded “yes, as long as I don’t break the laws, I get to do whatever I want”, then he pointed out, “there is no such thing as the land of the free, in a country where the laws are strictly intended to target and regulate behaviors of specific groups”.
Looking at the issues that we face through our criminal justice system. Aspects like individual freedom, equality, and, the right to privacy, are some of the most important values for us as Americans. But, in the desire to protect those core values, the criminal justice system has overstepped and undermined people’s values. The same values that were initially supposed to be protecting our people. Now, police brutality, mass incarceration, and systematic racism have all contributed to some of the lowest rates of public support and acceptance towards the criminal justice system.
Power and Authority: ongoing cases of police brutality
While police officers are in charge of the well-being of the people, they also have created a sense of fear towards law enforcement because of the several cases of police brutality that we heard of every day. We live in a time where most people walking on the streets have the ability to record anything on their cellular devices, for that reason police confrontations have exposed the abuse in force and power that police officers use over regular citizens. Through law enforcement, our criminal justice system shows a lack of efficiency and it imposes fear on its people. A recent example of this is the killing of Jemel Robenson, a 26-year-old African-American security guard who was fatally shot by law enforcement on November of 2018 while he was doing his job at a local bar in the suburbs of Chicago.
In addition to the abuse of power, police brutality is also linked to systematic racism, numerous studies have shown that a disproportionate amount of members of society who encounter and suffer from excessive use of force from police tend to be African Americans, “According to FBI statistics, African-Americans represented 31 percent of all shooting victims by police while representing only 13 percent of all U.S. inhabitants” This statistics are strong evidence that highlight the racial injustices that some groups of our communities face every day.
The Land of the Free?
Another important aspect where our current criminal justice system is failing the American people involves the correctional system. Mass incarceration is a huge problem that we as a society are currently facing. It is a well-known fact that the United States of America has the highest rates of incarceration per capita in the world. This means that compared with any other nation on the planet, our system punishes people harsher than any other criminal justice system in the world.
Numerous articles highlight the fact that “…the US, with less than five percent of the world’s inhabitants, has twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners”. When it comes to our way of living and our core values it just seems to be extremely ironic that for a society that claims to be a free society, the number of people locked up is greater than any other society in the planet.
On the other hand, those who have been punished by our harsh system show little-to-none recovery. So not only is the correctional system incarcerating too many people for absurd reasons, but it is also failing to fulfill its purpose of helping criminals to reintegrate to society. Instead, individuals who go to prison tend to enter a never-ending cycle of imprisonment reentry.
The “war (not only) on drugs”
It’s clear that numerous strategies have been implemented to try to minimize the number of drugs that freely run in our streets. The enormous amounts of money and effort that the United States have put into the so-called “War on Drugs” highlight some evident flaws with our current criminal justice system. Suddenly the number of people going to jail for drug-related charges increased, “Between 1982 and 2007, the number of arrests for drug possession tripled, from approximately 500,000 to 1.5 million… …drug arrests now constitute the largest category of arrests in the United States”. Now that we have realized that the problem of mass incarceration may have its roots on the failed War on Drugs. We can also see that the effects of the war on drugs not only at taking drugs out of the streets but instead it brought major issues to our society.
As our society keeps growing and changing, new challenges come up at individual and social levels. For that reason, reforms to economic and political systems need to occur in order to successfully address the needs of our communities and the people in general. While Issues such as mass incarceration, war on drugs, and police brutality seem all to be interconnected and dependent on each other, is extremely important to keep in mind that no matter how important a social issue may seem to be, we should never undermine the basic rights that our constitution provides for all citizens.
