Crime & Punishment in America

In the last twenty years the criminal justice system in the United States has swelled to gargantuan size. Both the amount of money spent to maintain our penal system and the number of individuals currently under state supervision have both ballooned exponentially. Although many politicians have attempted to address the growing fear of crime in America, few have actually done much to alleviate the problem. Since the late 1970s, the escalating crime rate has prompted a simplistic, status quo response from Washington D.C., with the majority of Congress voting in favor of inflated spending to increase the amount of prisons, the number of police, and the length of sentences for all offenders.

In their books, David J. Krajicek and Elliott Currie both acknowledge that several fundamental problems exist with the current American criminal justice system. The authors agree that simplistic and shortsighted crime policies have left the United States with an incarceration rate that is dramatically higher than any other industrialized modern society. In 1971 there were fewer than 200,000 inmates in state and federal prisons. By the end of 1996, the number was approaching 1.2 million. The prison population, in short, has nearly sextupled in the course of twenty-five years. 1.7 million people are currently in prison, but the percentage of the population that is incarcerated has grown much faster: as a proportion of the American population, the number behind bars has more than quadrupled (Currie p.12-13).

While both authors are appalled by this trend in the American penal system, they deviate on the appropriate place to lay the blame. Currie insists that these staggering numbers are a result of misguided "get tough" policies implemented by the United States government since the early 1980s. Although Krajicek concedes that the government must bare some of the responsibility for the two-fold problem of increased incarceration and growing crime rates, he believes that the presentation of violence in the media is at the root of the problem.

"Americans have lost confidence in a criminal justice system that appears unable to prevent lawlessness and inept and solving a crime after it has happened…By and large, the media have failed to hold politicians accountable for anticrime grandstanding that often plays off the sexy anecdotes presented on TV and in newspapers" (Krajicek p.143).

Paul Klite, founder of the Rocky Mountain Media Watch (RMMW), agrees with Krajicek's assessment that the media is primarily responsible for our misguided view of crime in the United States:

"We're biologically programmed to react to violence and sex and flashing lights, and TV news broadcasts use those stimuli over and over to hold an audience. It's great for advertising, but it's terrible for democracy. While the newscast feeds viewers a steady diet of emotion, important issues don't get covered because there is no time left" (Krajicek p.27).

In a 1995 survey, of one hundred local television broadcasts by RMMW, the organization found that 42% of all news time was devoted to mayhem, defined as stories about crime, disasters, and war. According to Krajicek, the media perpetuates the belief that America is soft on crime and that the criminal justice system frequently coddles violent criminals. Again, both authors agree that the strategy of cracking down on crime by making more arrests and establishing longer sentences for criminals does little to address the growing crime rate. The U.S. Sentencing Commission, appointed by Congress in the mid-1980s with an implicit assignment to recommend more mandatory sentences, concluded in its 1993 report that mandatory minimums were costly and largely ineffective. Congress largely ignored the report (Krajicek p.140).

Although mandatory sentences seldom tackle the real problem, they allow politicians a safe course of action that vaguely responds to the media's simplistic portrayal of crime. Often the perpetrators convicted are non-violent drug offenders that pose no immediate threat to those around them. The Department of Justice acknowledges that 21.2% of the total federal prison population and 36.1% of all federal drug prisoners are low-level drug offenders with no record of violence. Those caught by police tend to be crack carhops, the unskilled workers at the bottom of the narcotics hierarchy. Many fit the typical profile of the U.S. inmate: poor, underemployed, undereducated (Krajicek p.141).

Although these types of arrests provide statistical relevance to the "war on drugs" or "cracking down on crime," they seldom have a noticeable impact. This is largely due to the "replacement effect" where by putting one drug dealer in jail simply opens up a position for someone else in the drug trafficking operation. The replacement effect is especially strong for drug offenses, but is also important in the case of much juvenile crime, which often takes place in groups. Putting one member of a gang of youth muggers behind bars may have little impact, if any, on the gang's overall rate of crime (Currie p.30).

"The 'replacement effect' stems from the incapacitation element of a prison sentence. The basic idea, presented by Ben Wattenberg in the Wall Street Journal is that, "a thug in prison can't shoot your sister" (Currie p.28).

While this primitive reasoning can sound appealing, it is important to realize that our failure to match the increasing rates of imprisonment with corresponding increases in programs to reintegrate offenders into productive life means that we are steadily producing ever-larger armies of ex-offenders whose chances of success in the legitimate world have been diminished by their prison experience (Currie p.30).

With current incarceration rates, most offenders will eventually be released. There is simply not enough room in America's prisons to keep all the criminals behind bars. This mentality of "lock them up and throw away the key," neglects to examine attempts at rehabilitation and ignores the issue of overcrowded prisons. According to Currie, it would be far more practical to invest funds in prison services like schooling, drug treatment, or job training in the hope that offenders will be more prepared to integrate into normal society once released. Funds available to the criminal justice system are often used to increase prison capacity instead of promoting rehabilitation services. Adding to this problem, the diversion of resources to the correctional system has aggravated the deterioration of troubled communities and narrowed the economic prospects for low-income people, who have maintained high levels of crime despite huge increases in incarceration; the persistence of violent crime paradoxically leads to calls for more of the same. And so the cycle continues (Currie p.34).

In addition, the tactics of "fighting crime" used by lawmakers and endorsed by the American media are worsening an epidemic problem. The money that has been spent on formulating new, stricter laws, incarcerating criminals, and building new prisons is money that has been taken from the public sector. Ultimately, the media have championed these tactics without providing the American people with a critical look at the evidence for such claims. Facilities and institutions that teach, train, socialize, and nurture the population suffer from decreased funding and attention. Ironically, it is these universities, schools, shelters, and community centers that have shown the greatest promise in building community and slowing the growing rate of crime in the United States. Whether the media or government is the primary perpetrator of the erroneous criminal justice system is still largely debated. However, determining which institution is most at fault seems of little importance when compared to debunking the myths surrounding the criminal justice system in the United States.