American Justice

We have become a society in which we are judged guilty until proven innocent, and the cost to civility of wrongful and unreasonable prosecution has become tolerable. Why aren't we talking about it?

We talk a lot in this country about human rights and the fairness of our awesome system of justice. We piously condemn other governments for their abuse of their own citizens. And yet, we have by far the most imprisoned citizens per capita than any, that's right ANY, country in the world. More than Russia. More than China. More than Iran and North Korea. More than every other country in the world. We represent only 5% of the world's population, while we hold 25% of the worlds incarcerated population. We spend $68 billion on prisons each year. When you throw in the costs of the court system and law enforcement, we spend over $200 billion a year to put people in jail. With a growth rate of over 500% since the early 80's, our "corrections system" is the fastest growing sector of our economy...even faster than the cost of health care. And yet, the waste, corruption, and efficacy of this taxpayer funded industry goes unchallenged.

Over the Holidays I read Grisham's latest novel, "The Confession", about a young man wrongly accused of murder who was put to death in Texas. It observed a system of justice that was anything but judicial. While this was, indeed, fiction, there have been 138 death row inmates who have been exonerated since 1973. About 3% of all death sentences in that time span. It got me to thinking: If we are this inaccurate with our prosecution of the most serious of punishments, how many people are languishing in prison wrongly convicted of less serious crimes?

I would assume that a jury does not easily arrive at a sentence of death. A death sentence is given an incredible amount of scrutiny both before sentencing and after. And yet we know that at least 3% of the time these sentences were levied upon innocent people. When we speak of ending a person's life, being right 97% of the time is not tolerable. We must be sure. We must know beyond any possible doubt. We cannot be wrong. If we cannot be right 100% of the time we must stop.

Lesser offenses are not afforded the same resources as capital offenses, so it would only make sense that a far greater number of mistakes are made. However, for the sake of argument, let's say that only 3% of our prison population is wrongly convicted. This would mean that there are at least 75,000 innocent people of the 2.5 million currently locked away in our "corrections" system. Putting aside the toll on human rights, the direct financial burden of incarcerating these people is over $1.6 billion each year.

The true waste, however, may not be wrongful conviction. The extraordinary growth is not due to an increase in violent crime. Violent crime has actually gone down slightly. Due in large part to the "war on drugs", the vast increase in prison population is non-violent drug offenders. This nation's failed drug policy is a completely different topic worthy of another post at another time. For now, it's important to note that the only demonstrable result of the increase in the prosecution of drug crimes is the enormous cost to our criminal justice system. Over 500,000 prisoners doing time in our prison system are non-violent drug offenders at a cost to us of over $11 billion per year without including court and law enforcement costs.

I believe that penal and judicial reform is the most overlooked issue of our time. Conservatives and liberals alike are unwilling to even mention this issue for fear of looking soft on crime, but this reluctance is costing taxpayers billions and tears away at our social fabric. This is a subject which we should all agree needs a strong, public and post-partisan debate.

I think we need to start this conversation.