Essay on U.S. Criminal Justice System

The speaker argues that the criminal justice system in America treats you better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. Do you agree? Why or why not?

There are three significant issues concerning law enforcement, namely enacting the law, police discretion, and assessment of criminal behavior. Different entities create and enact laws that are specific for the societies those laws represent.

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.

The problems surrounding the criminal justice system range from a variety of issues in different areas of the system. But i believe they are all connected back to a societal problem, that has to do with a outdated philosophical notion “redemptive violence”. I will break down each aspect, which i find most troubling. I will cover problems between policing and peacekeeping, corrections options, and the issue of redemptive violence which is a major issue in the philosophy of the criminal justice system. These issues represent problems that have always been key topics when discussing problems of ethics in criminal justice. Policing and Peacekeeping are roles that have long been debated in usefulness to stopping crime. Corrections comes with the reality of incarceration having little chance of success but more likely a higher rate of recidivism. I well also touch on briefly the issues of attorney discretion. While the issue of redemptive violence ties them all in, As i well show this philosophy is the “root of all evil” in the issues facing the criminal justice system.

The criminal justice system is composed of three parts – Police, Courts and Corrections – and all three work together to protect an individual’s rights and the rights of society to live without fear of being a victim of crime. According to merriam-webster.com, crime is defined as “an act that is forbidden or omission of a duty that is commanded by public law and that makes the offender liable to punishment by that law.” When all the three parts work together, it makes the criminal justice system function like a well tuned machine.

Whenever you imagine prison, you think up ideas and violent images that you have seen in the movies or on TV.   Outdated clichés consisting of men eating stale bread and drinking dirty water are only a small fraction of the number of horrible, yet “just” occurrences which are stereotypical of everyday life in prison.   Perhaps it could be a combination of your upbringing, horrific ideas about the punishment which our nation inflicts on those who violate its’ more serious laws that keeps people frightened just enough to lead a law-abiding life. Despite it’s success in keeping dangerous offenders off the streets, the American prison system fails in fulfilling its original design of restoring criminals to being productive members of society, it is also extremely expensive and wastes our precious tax dollars.

In order to keep a safe society, it is important to establish a nation with

Believe it or not, every prison has a set schedule that has to be followed by inmates. A wake up time, a time their allowed to make phone calls, breakfast and lunch time, furthermore a time where they have attend school and work. Young prisoners have to do at least fifteen hours of education a week. A prisoner that’s older is given an opportunity to study as well. It’s required that inmates are working in prison because this helps reduce the cost of the prison system. The type of jobs inmates have varies from state to state. Every state is different depending on the location of the prison.

The penal system in the United States is often portrayed as being tough on crime, but to many other western nations the penal system in the United States is viewed as a broken system (Mallory, 2006). While this is a tough critique, the American incarceration rate is the highest in the world at over 714 per 100,000 U.S. citizens (Walmsley, 2008). This rate is much higher than many of other western European countries, whose average incarceration rate is only 95 per 100,000 citizens (Stern, 2002; Walmsley, 2008). America’s higher rate of incarceration might be more acceptable if it resulted in a safer society. Consequently, one could reasonably conclude that the United States’ political agenda for increasing punishment to decrease crime yields an ineffective result. Therefore, in the

Across the United States, city and county governments seek to gain revenue through the illegitimate jailing of indigent defendants who cannot afford to pay the large and cumbersome fines that accompany committing (seemingly petty) crimes— such as missing court dates, a requirement for classes such as anger management, the list goes on. Indeed, the practice of debtor’s prison has long been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court within the United States, yet a contemporary form of debtor’s prison has begun to take form which targets vulnerable populations. When an individual commits a crime, they are to be justly punished. If this punishment consists of a fine, that fine is expected to be paid accordingly; if the fined individual simply does not have the time or money to pay these steep fines, however, they are sent to jail indefinitely. This rise of financial burden imposed upon the liberty of low income citizens through the fining, issuing of fees, and jail time sanctioned by the criminal justice system has resulted in new, illegitimate, and ostensibly unconstitutional forms of debtor’s prisons that permeate contemporary U.S. society. Jeopardizing the liberty of vulnerable populations, based upon material inequality and extraction of necessary resources, only does one thing within a society: continue the cycle of poverty and increase the poor’s dependence upon the rich for their liberty, equality and most importantly, survival.

This research paper discusses the issues of people who suffer from mental illness being placed in jails instead of receiving the necessary treatment they need. The number of inmates serving time in jail or prison who suffer from mental illness continues to rise. In 2015 the Bureau of Justice reported that sixty five percent of state prisoners and fourth five percent of federal prisoners suffered from mental conditions such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Individuals who suffer from these problems require special mental health treatment for their needs to be met. Many of our prisons and jails lack the necessary resources to care for these inmates and because of that inmates who do not receive the treatment they need are at a higher risk of becoming a repeat offender. Despite the research and findings that show that the criminal justice system is unable to deal with issues dealing with the mentally ill there has been limited solutions put in place. Given the challenges the criminal justice system faces it is important to address the problem and come up with better solutions. This research paper will discuss the various techniques and solutions that scholars have propped and their effect on the issue of mentally ill criminals and how the criminal justice system should approach the problem.

With the exception of probation, imprisonment has been the main form of punishment for serious offenders in the United States for over 200 years. Americans can be said to have invented modern incarceration as a means of criminal punishment. Although Europe provided precedents, theoretical justifications, and even architectural plans for imprisoning offenders, Americans developed the blueprints for the typical prisons of today and devised the disciplinary routines, types of sentences, and programs that prison systems of other countries subsequently adopted or modified (Rafter & Stanley 1999).

The US has high recidivism rates, and the percentage of the population involved with the country’s criminal justice system is supreme to other developed countries. This paper is therefore made in order to find which methods have emerged in low recidivism rates. In order to go through with the study, different internet sources have been carefully selected to make the result as credible as possible. Under these circumstances this research displays how the US has too harsh prison conditions for the convicts to have a willingness to change. As well as the need to separate politics from the prison service in addition to do rehabilitation a part of the penalty instead of

The Criminal Justice System in the United States of America was established with noble intentions. The basis of the system can be traced back from the first book of the Bible Genesis, and the story of Cain and Able. The criminal justice system was established to be morally suitable for a growing diverse society. Moral dilemmas within the system arise from concerns related to principles of officials’ right and wrong behavior. These principles are often embedded into a culture of the human character, in other words, viewed as essential to the criminal justice system. This biblical story mentioned above has defined the way justice has been administered for thousands of years. The quote "Eye for an eye" continues to be the standard

Components of the criminal justice system include the police, the court system and correctional agencies. The definition, the function and examples of each component of the American criminal justice system will be described. The criminal procedure and the processing of offenders will also be described in details.