"The Tip of the Punishment Iceberg"

Does the public’s focus on high-profile crimes, the death penalty and DNA exonerations overshadow the bigger problems in our criminal justice system? Doug Berman, whose excellent blog Sentencing Law & Policy I link to often, says the punishment problem in our country is obscured by sensational crime headlines and even occasional good news like wrongful convictions being overturned.

Photo-ops and news stories often become the catalyst for specific, targeted policy reform, Berman says, and that leads us to forget about the vast expansion of our prison system and the damage caused by our addiction to punishment.

"In the criminal justice system those kind of anecdotes tend to skew a broader picture of what needs to be of persistent concern in the work of legal reformers and policy reformers," Berman said in an interview last week on Berkeley's KPFA radio.

The sprawling reach of parole, the loss of voting rights, the expansion of sex offender registries and dozens of other issues aren't getting the attention they deserve, he says.

"It's gone largely unnoticed. There's an understanding that we've gotten more severe in our criminal justice system... but just how severely we punish and how many people we have locked behind bars is still something that is not nearly the part of the public conversation that I think it should be," he said.

Berman makes a great point here, and I agree that we need more focus on issues like parole, drug sentences and mandatory minimums. The public, however, still wants their sensational crime news and I'm a believer in using the big flashy story to get a little tidbit about reform in front of a few eyeballs. Doug’s interview on KPFA is worth a listen, and serves as a good reminder that we all need to do our part to ensure that the whole story about our criminal justice system is told.

How will you get these stories out there?