Justice system overview and fundamental principles

Criminal Justice - Corrections Issues

CRIMINAL JUSTICE ISSUES: CORRECTIONS

What is the more important goal of the justice system, to control crime or to ensure justice?

No single purpose defines the appropriate role of the criminal justice system in modern American society. In that respect, both crime control and justice are fundamental goals of the criminal justice system. In fact, in the larger sense, crime control is merely one isolated component of the goal of ensuring justice rather than a competing interest.

However, to the extent crime control and ensuring justice are viewed as distinguishable objectives, the contemporary focus of American criminal justice is more focuses on crime prevention, despite the fact that controlling crime may also be one of the primary means of ensuring justice in many circumstances.

In part, contemporary societal expectations and social mores and values have emphasized the eradication of criminal activity of all types. In addition to addressing the social consequences of specific criminal conduct motivated by malice or personal gain, modern American criminal justice recognizes the role of so-called "petty crime" and "victimless crimes" in the deterioration of society. Similarly, modern trends in American criminal justice and policing recognize the degree of harm caused by so-called "benign" conduct at the lowest end of the spectrum of criminal law.

Finally, the modern trend in American criminal justice is to incorporate community values and concerns into the administration of criminal justice. Generally, community-lead (or community-inspired) criminal justice initiatives also emphasize crime control through detection, prosecution, and reduction more than ensuring justice, in principle.

2. Can we change the criminal justice system?

The American criminal justice system is a constantly-changing entity that gradually but continually evolves as a function of judicial decisions and legislative adjustments. Whereas judicial decisions are more likely to concern substantive matters of law and definitions of legal concepts, legislative adjustments generally reflect social consensus, particularly over large spans of time. Admittedly, political access and the relative ability of specific individuals, communities, and entities to generate legislative changes beneficial to them are not, in any sense, equal when viewed from the microcosmic perspective. Nevertheless, over time, changes in the American criminal justice are largely functions of widely-shared societal concerns and social values in the United States.

In recent years, the American criminal justice system has changed in several significant respects: it has become increasingly federalized; it seen a dramatic increase in the privatization of criminal justice facilities; and it has become ever-more effective by virtue of its technological evolution. Likewise, concepts and principles of criminal reform have continually undergone cyclical changes, due in part to unanticipated flaws in prior approaches or simply to changes in society and/or the nature of certain criminal activities and tendencies in society at particular times.