Criminal Justice

The writings of Alexis de Tocqueville on democracy and prisons, those of Michel Foucault on punishment and prisons, and those of Emile Durkheim on deviance expose the myths within the U.S. Criminal Justice System. Each of these philosophers equated law enforcement, the courts, and crime and corrections as dynamic entities that were a reflection of its cultural institutions and values. In the U.S., the criminal justice system exists to maintain order and to achieve this under the rule of law. The three main components of the criminal justice system (law enforcement, the courts and corrections) are a reflection of American cultural institutions and values. However, in maintaining the rule of law in a democracy the rights of individual citizens and checks upon initiatives of legal officials create a tension between operational consequences of ideas of order, efficiency, and initiative, on one hand and legality on the other. This analysis will discuss three current trends in the criminal justice system. Each is a reflection of the growing injustices within the criminal justice system due to the growing class divisions in U.S. society based on race, economics, and power:: the distancing of police from the communities they serve; the increasingly bureaucratic and ineffective nature of the court system; and the growing tendency of prison as a means to punish versus rehabilitating inmates.

The U.S. has 5% of the world's population but 25% of

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evoke a sense of fear or unease. These orders are implicit and indirect. The laws enabling control aren't there" (Crank 1998, 215). The increasingly bureaucratic and ineffective nature of the court system continues to widen the gap between "haves" and "have-nots." The legal system's credibility is being severely undermined by numerous examples that there is a different justice for "rich" and "poor" and for "whites" and "minorities" in the U.S. In his book The Process is the Punishment, Malcolm M. Feeley (1992) uses his experience of handling cases in a lower criminal court to address this trend. Mirroring our social construction perspective of social institutions, Feeley (1992) notes, "Law is above all, a normative ordering. It gives expression to deeply felt sentiments within a society" (15). Feeley demonstrates that changes in American politics and society bring change to the court system. He discusses how applying Constitutional Law to the lower courts and appointing court attorneys for virtually every offense that might end in jail time for defendants are possible reasons for court inefficiency and not increased caseload. Further, he argues that the theory of situated action guides most courtroom proceedings rather th

Category: Government - C