Criminal justice system, discussing how the system is now and what can be done to make it better in the united states. Elaborate on the contributions and a more healthy system. Include strategies,...

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The criminal justice system requires huge resource and is critical to the wellbeing of
society. Despite this, it has several critical flaws in its current form. It needs to be more
adaptive, sophisticated, responsive and preventative. This last attribute is the most critical,
since the use of the criminal justice system for punishment has created spiralling costs at all
levels and a significant degradation in the basic level of work within the system.
The criminal justice system (criminal justice system) comprises six principal groups
of stakeholders which must be investigated. Each of these requires different improvements
and strategies, although these improvements exist within a coherent overall ideal of
rationalisation and evidence-based practice. The three internal divisions are the legislature,
judiciary and corrections system. To complement these, we must also investigate the role of
law enforcement, policymakers, and the public within the broader criminal justice system.
This paper will briefly present an overview of each of these bodies and their relation to the
central criminal justice system, and then return to each of them and suggest strategies and
tactics that could be used to improve each one.
Due to the differences between the six stakeholder groups mentioned here, these
strategies are often very distinct from one another in their tactical realisation and relevant
projects, but are unified by the concept of collaborative justice, which will form the
conclusion of the paper.
Overview
As Andrews and Bonta (2010) note in their investigation of criminal justice policy
and practice, there is a basic tension underlying the criminal justice system. For the last three
decades ,policy has largely been formulated and enacted on a „get tough‟ approach. This has
resulted in booms in the prison population and the general population who become socially
disenfranchised after conviction, since they cannot get jobs or federal loans, vote, and so on.
These punitive measures have failed to reduce recidivism. On the other hand, there are
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several social models of rehabilitation and treatment that significantly reduce recidivism
rates, but these tend to exist outside of the formal criminal justice system. However, the
evidence in their favour is overwhelming. This stance is also supported by Reno (1996), and
a more detailed history of the problem can be found in Morrissey et al. (2009), which focuses
on the consequences of the significant number of adults and juveniles with mental disorders
entering the justice system, and the consequent problems that improper identification of these
conditions by judges and correction officials create.
Recently, however, more evidence has been gathered and more detailed analyses
performed looking at the real causes of and solutions to increased crime rates, and showing
the older ideological arguments to be false. For example, Levitt (2004) looks at factors
claimed to be critical to the drop in crime in the 1990s, and identifies several factors thought
to be critical that were not and a few that were. He shows that the strong economy, changing
demographics, changing gun control laws, increased use of capital punishment, or policing
strategies such as Giuliani‟s „broken windows‟ were not critical to the drop in crime, but that
the increase in the number of police, the receding crack epidemic, and legalisation of abortion
were critical. He also explores the increase in incarceration, noting that it had a significant
effect but qualifying this by pointing out the lack of evidence on the long-term societal
effects of mass incarceration. Despite these clear reasons for a change in practice, they are all
hindered by the over-riding consideration of, as McNeill (2009) investigates, “What works
and what's just?” In this paper, he notes that regardless of the evidence on hand, criminal
justice is often decided by moral rather than evidential concerns.
The System
Before exploring the particular aspects of the system, it is worth referring to Appendix
1, which presents a diagram from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (1997). Although this paper
will not be able to present a nuanced discussion of the various parts of the system, it is useful
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to be able to refer to, especially in noting the complexity of the system and the variety of
entrance and exit points available to actors within it.
Within the criminal justice system broadly, there is a clear need to identify those
things that actually lead to a reduction in crime and reoffence rates, rather than base policy
and behaviour on those things that are claimed (but not proven) to have a meaningful effect
on the crime rate. This is critical, especially when the police and law enforcement are
concerned. For example, Sherman et al (1984) note that the quality of police arrest statistics
is inconsistent due to a lack of proper procedure and a conflation of different crimes to
increase notional statistics (for example, increasing arrests for littering and loitering).
Internally, the single principal problem with the criminal justice system is its cost.
This is so great that several studies have been commissioned looking at ways to reduce the
prison population simply because of the level of state expenditure it represents. For example,
Drake et al. (2009) looked at treatment and alternative correction methods in Washington,
and found that multidimensional foster treatment family therapy and aggression replacement
training programmes all had reduced overall state cost a by $23,662 - $88,953 per person,
compared to the additional cost to the state of between $1650 and $17,470 for Scared
Straight, parole, and probation.
System I: Legislation
The first branch of the criminal justice system is the legislature. The legislature exists
at several levels, each of which creates laws regarding regulation, punishment, and revenue
raising (taxes). In the US, this creates three layers of law-making bodies, at the federal, state
and municipal levels. Each of these legislative bodies has different powers and different
concerns. For example, Federal agencies are empowered to co-ordinate legislation around
what constitutes a crime in the broadest sense, as well as broad provision for other laws to be
put into place. It also creates the oversight framework for all activities within the criminal
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justice system. On the other hand, state and municipal laws tend to be focused much more
around revenue generation for the local area, as well as public order and basic civil function.
Having these three layers of legislation can often present problems, since it can create
conflicts. This is especially evident recently in the treatment of marijuana, which has been
legalised at the state level but remains illegal at the federal level. The case of California,
investigated in Wagner & Dolan (2012), is a case in point. There are also different...