9780131137875

Organized around a "planned change" approach, this book provides a critical assessment of how well the American criminal justice system achieves its goals. Unlike most other criminal justice bookswhich cover the traditional topics from the perspective of how "things are supposed to be," this book compares these ideals with the realities of criminal justice today and provides a critical interpretation of the role of race, ethnicity, and gender in criminal justice. For law clerks and officers and criminal justice professionals.

List of Figures and Tables	p. xi
Preface	p. xiii
What Is the Purpose of the Criminal Justice System? Ideals and Realities	p. 1
Introduction	p. 1
What is the criminal justice system?	p. 2
Ideal goals of the criminal justice system	p. 12
What is justice?	p. 14
Alternative goals of the criminal justice system	p. 26
Functions versus purposes of criminal justice	p. 28
The role of politics and power in criminal justice	p. 30
Conclusion	p. 36
Issue in Depth: Justitia--The Lady Justice	p. 37
Discussion Questions	p. 40
The Law: Providing Equal Protection or Creating Bias?	p. 41
Introduction	p. 41
What is the law?	p. 42
Where does the law come from?	p. 44
Types of law	p. 45
What is the purpose of the criminal law?	p. 52
Who makes the law?	p. 55
Conclusion	p. 60
Issue in Depth: American Business--Downsizing for Profit	p. 60
Discussion Questions	p. 66
Crime: Which Is Worse, Crime on the Streets or Crime in the Suites?	p. 67
Introduction	p. 67
What is a crime?	p. 67
Types of crime in the United States	p. 71
Sources of crime information: Do we really know how much crime is out there?	p. 81
Conclusion	p. 91
Issue in Depth: Tobacco--The Greatest Crime in World History?	p. 92
Discussion Questions	p. 94
"Crime Is Out of Control!" Media Portrayals of Crime	p. 96
Introduction	p. 96
An introduction to the media	p. 96
Does it matter? Are people exposed to the media?	p. 102
Media coverage of crime and criminal justice	p. 103
Explanations of media inaccuracy	p. 113
Conclusion	p. 118
Issue in Depth: School Shootings in the Media	p. 119
Discussion Questions	p. 121
The War on Crime: Innocent Bias Against the Poor, People of Color, and Women	p. 123
Introduction	p. 123
Is the war on crime a war on the poor?	p. 124
What about race and ethnicity?	p. 131
Gender and criminal justice	p. 149
Conclusion	p. 151
Issue in Depth: Political Crime	p. 152
Discussion Questions	p. 159
Focusing on the Wrong Thing? The "War on Drugs"	p. 160
Introduction	p. 160
The war on drugs	p. 160
What is a drug?	p. 165
Types of drugs	p. 167
Extent of drug use in the United States	p. 170
Harms associated with drugs	p. 171
Legal status of each drug: Why are the most harmful drugs legal while some relatively harmless drugs are illegal?	p. 176
On legalization	p. 183
Conclusion	p. 187
Issue in Depth: Decriminalize It!	p. 188
Discussion Questions	p. 196
Law Enforcement: Innocent Bias in America	p. 197
Introduction	p. 197
Basic roles and responsibilities of police officers: What police do and how they do it	p. 197
How police serve crime victims	p. 201
The move to community policing	p. 202
Innocent bias: How policing is organized in the United States	p. 205
American stop rates and arrest rates	p. 215
Use of force	p. 219
Differential views of the police	p. 222
Corruption in American policing	p. 225
Conclusion	p. 228
Issue in Depth: Corruption in the Criminal Justice System	p. 228
Discussion Questions	p. 231
Right to Trial? Injustice in Pretrial and Trial Procedures	p. 233
Introduction	p. 233
The U.S. court structure	p. 233
What courts do	p. 236
The courtroom workgroup: An imbalance of power in the court	p. 237
Pretrial procedures and justice	p. 242
The unequal right to a defense in the United States: Public versus private attorneys	p. 249
The "exceptional case" of trial	p. 251
Conclusion	p. 256
Issue in Depth: Wrongful Convictions	p. 256
Discussion Questions	p. 263
Punishment: Does It Work and Is It Fair?	p. 265
Introduction	p. 265
An introduction to sentencing	p. 265
Why do we punish?	p. 271
Methods of punishment	p. 279
Is punishment effective?	p. 283
Bias in the sentencing process	p. 285
Conclusion	p. 291
Issue in Depth: What Works, What Doesn't	p. 292
Discussion Questions	p. 296
Imprisonment: Lock 'Em Up and Throw Away Your Money	p. 297
Introduction	p. 297
America's incarceration rate	p. 297
Who's in prison?	p. 304
What happens in prison? Pains of imprisonment	p. 307
Forgiving the offender: Why harass parolees?	p. 317
How and why corrections reflects criminal justice bias	p. 319
Conclusion	p. 322
Issue in Depth: The Failures of Prison	p. 323
Discussion Questions	p. 326
The Ultimate Sanction: Death As Justice?	p. 327
Introduction	p. 327
A brief history of capital punishment	p. 328
Death penalty facts	p. 333
Public support for capital punishment	p. 341
Justifications for capital punishment: Logical or not?	p. 344
What's wrong with the death penalty?	p. 352
Conclusion	p. 358
Issue in Depth: A Broken System	p. 358
Discussion Questions	p. 360
Summary, Conclusions, and Recommendations for the Future	p. 361
Introduction	p. 361
Summary: The criminal justice sysem fails to do justice and reduce crime	p. 361
Where to go from here: Alternatives to current criminal justice practice	p. 364
Likelihood of success	p. 377
Conclusion	p. 377
Issue in Depth: Toward Social Justice	p. 378
Discussion Questions	p. 382
References and Further Readings	p. 383
Index	p. 413
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Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. - MARTIN LUTHER KING, "A Letter from the Birmingham Jail" As eloquently written by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his letter from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, when an injustice occurs anywhere, justice everywhere is threatened. King wrote this letter on April 16, 1963, after being jailed for "civil disobedience," a peaceful, nonviolent form of resistance. The letter was his response to criticisms that, as an "outsider" from Atlanta, he had no Business in Birmingham. King countered: I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham .... We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds. S0, injustice anywhere in America is a threat to all persons living in the United States. And injustice in America is every American's business. The injustices of American criminal justice are the motivation for this book. As children, we grow up reciting Francis Bellamy's Pledge of Allegiance, written in 1892. It states, "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation (under God), indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." With liberty and justice for all--this is the ideal we all pledge to assure. But what are "liberty" and "justice"? And does "for all" really include all of us? When I began my college experience as a criminology and criminal justice major, I had some ideas in my head about what agencies of criminal justice were supposed to achieve. I thought that police, courts, and corrections were supposed to protect us from harmful acts committed intentionally by other people. In my first semester, however, I learned that these agencies of criminal justice in the United States are focused on only a small portion of all harmful acts. Many other behaviors that are committed intentionally, acts that kill and injure people and result in loss of property, nevertheless are not "crimes" or are not vigorously pursued by such agencies. Later, in graduate school, I learned about the massive criminal justice expansion of the last 30 years of the 20th century, an expansion driven not by facts about crime or increasing crime rates but by politics, fear, and the desire to be punitive--and at times downright hateful--toward certain segments of the population. To me, this incongruence between the ideals of American criminal justice and the realities of the American criminal justice didn't seem right. How can the United States spend so much money and direct so much effort toward punishing a relatively small portion of harmful behaviors while virtually ignoring so many others? Why would we disinvest in the nation's future by overrelying on methods of crime control that we know are ineffective, while failing even to try methods that seem more promising? None of this seemed "just" to me. If justice really meant what I had always thought it meant, how could criminal justice in the United States, of all places, be so unjust? That is the question addressed in this book.Justice Blind? Ideals and Realities of American Criminal Justiceattempts to demonstrate how and why American criminal justice agencies fail to live up to their ideals and, thus, are unjust. This book grew out of my experiences with teaching an introductory criminal justice course more than 30 times. Through my teaching, I realized that no introductory criminal justice text on the market exposed readers to the realities of criminal justice in the United States. This book strives to do that. THE MAIN A

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Justice Blind? : Ideals and Realities of American Criminal Justice

Justice Blind? : Ideals and Realities of American Criminal Justice

0131137875

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