Criminal justice professionals' insufficient emphasis on victim welfare and protection

Victimology -- Voices of Victims: Criminal Justice Professionals

Theme #1 -- Insufficient Emphasis on Victims

The first theme is the insufficient emphasis on the welfare of victims by law enforcement agencies. Many victims expressed frustration and resentment that the law enforcement community had little apparent interest in victims except in connection with exploiting them for the purposes of establishing their criminal cases at trial. Victims often feel used by prosecutors and abandoned by the law enforcement community once their contribution within their roles as sources of information and as witnesses for the prosecution of offenders is no longer needed. In that regard, optimal criminal justice functioning would be easier to achieve if law enforcement agents and prosecutors learned to better step into the shoes of victims and if they received more training to respond to the needs and sensibilities of victims as aggrieved individuals rather than viewed primarily as sources of intelligence and evidence.

Theme #3 -- Penal Institutional Culture that Promotes Recidivism

The third theme is the insufficient emphasis on the welfare of offenders within penal institutions. Specifically, penal institutions are environments where the strong and ruthless prey on the weak and comparatively innocent. As a result, the penal institutional culture demands that offenders maintain gang-like affiliations, typically based strictly on race and on neighborhood identity on the streets. That mentality fuels violence instead of rehabilitation and also promotes the intensification of criminal inclinations, particularly among first-time offenders and others who arrive as non-career criminals. More often than not, incarceration increases the criminal mindset of offenders instead of decreasing it, thereby perpetuating criminality after release back into the community.

In that regard, optimal criminal justice functioning would be easier to achieve if penal institutions emphasized the protection of inmates from exploitation by other offenders, by separating career offenders from non-career offenders, and by devoting more resources to meaningful rehabilitation within penal institutions. Ultimately, that would reduce recidivism by allowing penal incarceration to provide opportunities for inmates to change negative habits and associations and to develop skills and mindsets conducive to successful reintroduction to society upon their release.