Injustice in the Criminal Justice System

(Note, to see pictures in better detail since they get cut off in the post, click on them)

This picture is not pretty. What does the criminal justice system look like in America today?

The first figure the incarceration rate.




Now, how does the United States compare with other countries? We have 5% of the global population and have 25% of the world's prison population.
( data from UN Human Development Report 2007/2008)





Much of this is due to our own War on Drugs and all the tough on crime rhetoric that has been sold to the public with Nixon, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and George W Bush. Clinton offered a 3 strikes law to prove just how tough on crime he was to his Republican opponents back in 1994.

How many arrests are there for marijuana every year? From NORML.


I think this is part of the reason why 14 states have decided to stand up and enact some sort of medical marijuana legislation, while 11 states have decriminalized small amounts of marijuana. Also, it is a reason why there is a ballot proposal in California to legalize marijuana come this November and possible ballot measures in Oregon and Nevada (for 2012) to do the same.

By the way, Obama has decided to increase spending for the drug war despite noting in 2004 that the war on drugs is an "utter failure".


Finally, how does race factor into the criminal justice system? I think that these are some interesting quotes.

(1999) "Our research shows that blacks comprise 62.7 percent and whites 36.7 percent of all drug offenders admitted to state prison, even though federal surveys and other data detailed in this report show clearly that this racial disparity bears scant relation to racial differences in drug offending. There are, for example, five times more white drug users than black. Relative to population, black men are admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is 13.4 times greater than that of white men. In large part because of the extraordinary racial disparities in incarceration for drug offenses, blacks are incarcerated for all offenses at 8.2 times the rate of whites. One in every 20 black men over the age of 18 in the United States is in state or federal prison, compared to one in 180 white men."

Source:

Human Rights Watch, "Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs" (Washington, DC: Human Rights Watch, 2000).

"In 1986, before mandatory minimums for crack offenses became effective, the average federal drug offense sentence for blacks was 11% higher than for whites. Four years later following the implementation of harsher drug sentencing laws, the average federal drug offense sentence was 49% higher for blacks."

Source:

Meierhoefer, B. S., The General Effect of Mandatory Minimum Prison Terms: A Longitudinal Study of Federal Sentences Imposed (Washington DC: Federal Judicial Center, 1992), p. 20.

Due to harsh new sentencing guidelines, such as 'three-strikes, you're out,' "a disproportionate number of young Black and Hispanic men are likely to be imprisoned for life under scenarios in which they are guilty of little more than a history of untreated addiction and several prior drug-related offenses... States will absorb the staggering cost of not only constructing additional prisons to accommodate increasing numbers of prisoners who will never be released but also warehousing them into old age."

Source:

Craig Haney, Ph.D., and Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D., "The Past and Future of U.S. Prison Policy: Twenty-five Years After the Stanford Prison Experiment," American Psychologist, Vol. 53, No. 7 (July 1998), p. 718.


With regards to the war on drugs, I would say that it's one of those things that is becoming more and more unpopular and the public really doesn't care much about it, but it makes so much money for the DEA, police, prosecutors, prison system, military, drug cartels, banks (to launder money), and prescription drug companies that don't want people to have a cheap and effective alternative (medical marijuana) to their drugs being sold to the public, (like Oxycontin), that the War on Drugs will not being going away anytime soon.

Perhaps a bottom up approach needs to be done to reform the criminal justice system, starting at the local, then state, then federal level. Because Americans deserve a much better criminal justice system.