Our Morally Unacceptable Criminal Justice System

In an excellent new article in the New York Review of Books, author and law professor David Cole delivers a broad, thoughtful condemnation of the American criminal justice system as grossly inefficient and morally unacceptable. This piece should be required reading for members of Congress and state lawmakers.

Looking at new books by three leading thinkers on these issues, Cole focuses much of his story on the glaring racial disparities in our prison system and the role of race and socioeconomic inequality in our government's refusal to act. “If white male babies faced anything like such prospects, the politics of crime would look very different,” he writes.

Cole examines books by Paul Butler, Glenn Loury and Anthony Thompson. I’ve written briefly about Loury and Butler in the past, but not about Thompson, whose book Releasing Prisoners, Redeeming Communities, focuses (according to Cole) on the critical issue of providing opportunities for the 700,000 people freed from our prisons each year.

"Thompson proposes a variety of sensible reforms," Cole writes... "eliminating laws that irrationally bar ex-offenders from jobs and housing, providing health care and counseling to help smooth the transition back to life outside of prison." He challenges Thompson, however, for failing to answer the big question: 'Where is the political impetus for such reform?'

Cole also questions Butler on his suggestion that American citizens engage in jury nullification, by acquitting defendants even when they believe the prosecution has proved its case. Cole says the suggestion is not practical and should be understood as a "a symbolic act of resistance rather than a concrete solution to the problems of race and class inequality." That's an issue for another post on its own. I'll put it on my list.

This isn't new territory for Cole. His own 1999 book No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System examines these issues as well. He makes a convincing case for change. If you know people who are interested in these issues but perhaps not as well-versed in the injustices of our prison system, send them Cole's article. You'll add another solider to the fight for reform.

I'll leave you with Cole's conclusion:

Our addiction to punishment should be troubling not only because it is costly and often counterproductive, but because its race and class disparities are morally unacceptable...

The very fact that the US record is so much worse than that of the rest of the world should tell us that we are doing something wrong, and the sheer waste of public dollars and human lives should impel us toward reform. But as the authors of these three books make clear, we will not understand the problem fully until we candidly confront the fact that our criminal justice system would not be tolerable to the majority if its impact were felt more broadly by the general population, and not concentrated on the most deprived among us.

Thanks to change.org community member Mark Schmanke for sending this article my way.