| Chapter 30 | |
| Justice | |
| Most people have a deep-seated need to be treated fairly. Without this, they will take revenge against the perceived perpetrator. Perpetrators often think such reprisals are excessive or not warranted at all and take their own counter revenge. Such vicious cycles can continue for years. Especially with gradually escalating conßicts, Òwho started itÓ becomes impossible to determine and/or moot. | |
| The concept of a Òjustice systemÓ was invented to nip such counter-productive interactions from continuing unabated. Over time, these entrenched systems have become primarily monopolistic businesses that are rewarded by creating more conßict. Police in much of the world are funded by the citizens they apprehend. The guilt of the citizens is secondary to the revenue stream they provide. The US program of Òcash and carryÓ [Sallah 2014] proves this kind of pervasive police corruption is not limited to the developing world. | |
| The process | |
| The basic legal process, at least in the USA, is: | |
| 1. Apprehend suspects. | |
| 2. Determine their innocence or guilt. | |
| 3. If theyÕre guilty, imprison and/or fine them. | |
| 4. DonÕt help them return to society when they get out. | |
| 5. Since it is difficult for convicts to get jobs and housing, many will resort to crime. | |
| 6. Repeat | |
| Little of this process has much to do with Justice. In fact, in promotes more injustice. The best solution is, to the extent possible, to get rid of most of the legal process by eliminating root causes of crime. | |
| Police | |
| The role of the police is to deter and apprehend suspects. By drastically reducing scarcity, we drastically reduce property crimes. By regulating, not prohibiting drugs, another large class of criminal behavior disappears. To the extent that marijuana replaces alcohol, bar room brawls go up in smoke. | |
| With fewer thieves, the need to keep a gun in a house is greatly lessened. For the remaining paranoid, non-lethal weapons (for both police and home-owners) will reduce violence. No one gets shot in a domestic dispute. We can reduce domestic violence even further by providing a place to sleep for a couple of nights for anyone in a crisis. | |
| If we design cars to not be able to exceed the speed limit except for Òemergency passingÓ, and to automatically report erratic behavior, most of the need for traffic cops disappears. Hand-eye tests before starting a car can greatly reduce drunk, sleepy or otherwise accident-prone driving. Parking tickets can be mailed out based on a carÕs GPS, eliminating meter maids. Personal Rapid Transit (See Transportation) further reduces traffic violations. | |
| With reduced crime, there will be fewer incidents where citizens feel wronged by the police. Understanding the psychology of rage may help threatened police (and others) react with restraint [Shirmer 2015]. We expect that the elimination of war, Òclass warfareÓ, and much of political polarization, will result in fewer angry political demonstrations, and less need for crowd control. | |
| WeÕll also have fewer veterans with PTSD. Roughly three times the number of Vietnam vets committed suicide than died in combat [NIMH 2017]. 20% of Iraq war vets have PTSD, a major cause of suicide and domestic violence [Badger 2014]. | |
| Most child abductions are by parents that feel theyÕve been treated unfairly in separations or divorces [Robinson 2016]. Divorce is largely about Òwho gets the moneyÓ with the government coming down firmly on the side of É the lawyers. The primary business strategy of divorce lawyers is to encourage the participants to fight with one another (this is like offering a terrorist a gun so heÕll leave you alone). With a decent, lawyer-free justice system, we surmise child abductions and all sorts of aggressive behavior will go down. | |
| White collar crime | |
| Crime might be associated in the public imagination with poverty, but white collar crime is where the big bucks are. Insider trading on Wall Street is pervasive [Grurich 2014]. | |
| That kind of money buys a criminal multiple McMansions, yachts, airplanes, É and politicians and lawyers. Politicians and lawyers are mostly the same group of people, since lawyers become politicians and vice versa. They then promote white-collar crime by resisting laws targeting it, and thwarting enforcement. This makes white-collar crime particularly nasty, undermining public confidence in business and government. | |
| Why do white-collar criminals, usually already well off, do it? We chalk it up to the unbounded-acquisitiveness ethic of Capitalism. Our business and political hierarchies select for sociopathic people who single-mindedly seek wealth and power, in a form of Obsessive-Compusive Disorder (OCD). | |
| Racism | |
| The killing of an unarmed black man in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014 started a media frenzy of reporting on related incidents in the United States. Many minorities are familiar with systematic racism directed at them by police. | |
| The frequency of such incidents was exacerbated by the philosophy of Broken Windows Policing, which said, fix the little things and the big things will be fixed too. New York, under mayor Rudy Giuliani, adopted stop and frisk, later found unconstitutional. It quickly morphed into hassle minority citizens. | |
| In 2005, Martin OÕMalley was the mayor of Baltimore (and in 2016, a candidate for US President). In Baltimore under OÕMalley, Òin 2005 an incredible 108,000 of the cityÕs 600,000 residents were arrested.Ó. | |
| ÒBetween 2002 and 2004, Chicago police received 10,149 complaints of misconduct, which resulted in only 19 total acts of meaningful disciplineÓ. ÒBetween 2009 and the first half of 2014, New Yorkers complained of 1,048 incidents involving choke holds, which had been banned by NYPD for more than a decadeÓ. ÒNone of the those offending officers saw significant repercussionsÓ including the policeman that killed Eric Garner, another unarmed black man [Taibbi 2015]. | |
| Some muse that ÒThe Criminal Justice SystemÓ is so named because the system itself is criminal. We suspect the best fix is reducing scarcity. That will reduce criminal activity and decrease mistrust between inner city residents and their police. | |
| Determining guilt | |
| The primary role of the courts is supposed to be to determine the innocence or guilt of a suspect. Importantly, nobody in a court room actually cares about the truth (except an innocent suspect). The prosecution wants to prove the suspect guilty. The defense wants to prove the suspect innocent. The judge wants to enforce the rules. The jury, if there is one, wants to go home [Bennion 2015]. All this arguing is expensive, and doesnÕt address the truth. We think the professionals shouldnÕt compete, but rather should collaborate to find out what actually happened. | |
| Because of the competitive nature of a court room, cases get drawn out. The trick of Òplea bargainingÓ was invented to save prosecutorsÕ effort. The truth is not a commodity that can be bargained. Innocent suspects are browbeaten into copping a plea, because they have no faith in the process. According to one study [Palmer 2013], juries get it wrong 10% to 25% of the time and judges wrongfully convict in 37% of their cases. With those odds, a perfectly innocent defendant may conclude that its better to plead guilty to a crime they didnÕt do and take a shorter sentence than to proceed to a trial with an uncertain outcome with a potentially longer sentence. | |
| The fact that laymenÕs judgment is twice as good as legal professionals tells you something important about our ÒJusticeÓ system. If you had a job where you had to make a critical judgment about a personÕs future, and got it wrong over a third of the time, donÕt you think youÕd be fired? Its hard to find information on judges getting fired because its so rare. | |
| Cooperative justice | |
| Rather than a court being a battle field where competitors attempt to destroy one another, we propose a different model, which we call Cooperative Justice. A suspect is, within 24 hours of being detained, asked if he did what he is suspected of doing. If he says ÒyesÓ, heÕs moved into Restorative Justice for sentencing and possibly a Norway style ÒcampusÓ (see below). | |
| If the suspect says he didnÕt do it, at first heÕs believed, and invited to join several professional Òtruth findersÓ to help figure out Òwho dun itÓ. The truth finders explain to the suspect that anyone who is found guilty, the sentencing in Restorative Justice and/or the Norway style prisons are pretty good. This lessens the severity of punishment and lowers the downside of admitting guilt. | |
| The truth finders, assisted by the suspect, examine all the evidence together, including encouraging the suspect to tell them everything he can about the case that will help them all find out whoÕs guilty. The suspect might inadvertently reveal a clue that proves his guilt. He might Ògive upÓ and admit guilt, or, together, they might discover another suspect who gets the same respectful treatment. If the proceedings are inconclusive, the suspect is freed, but must be available for further discussion should new evidence or suspects turn up. | |
| Sentencing | |
| Sentencing is designed to punish the convicted. This gives the victim some sense of ÒjusticeÓ, but does little to prevent a criminal from re-offending. Recidivism is the rate that a criminal is convicted of another crime after they leave prison. In the US, itÕs 76% over 5 years [Dickinson 2014]. | |
| Restorative Justice is a fairly new process whose goal is to prevent recidivism while giving the victim a more concrete compensation. The victim, the criminal and their friends and family, are brought together to discuss the appropriate ÒrestitutionÓ that the criminal should pay the victim. It could be money, time working on a project or some other thing the victim believes is valuable. The criminal must apologize and give the victim their due. Lots could go wrong with such a process, but experience shows that more goes right than in the conventional process [Sherman 2007]. Restorative Justice is mis-named because it only deals with sentencing, not determining guilt. Still, we believe it can be an important piece of justice. | |
| The prison industrial complex | |
| The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) is an industry that benefits from convictions, the more the merrier. They lobby to keep drugs illegal, because 65% of US inmates are drug abusers. Combine those with drugs being involved in how they got into prison in the first place, and weÕre up to 85% of the prison population [Sack 2014]. The PIC benefits from repeat customers so they have an incentive to increase recidivism. ÒAs it is, our prison system does little more than teach addicts how to be better addicts.Ó [Sack 2014]. Prisons are ÒuniversitiesÓ for learning new tricks of the trade. Parole officers are supposed to counsel ex-cons in how to stay clean. TheyÕre admittedly understaffed, but theyÕre also grossly ineffective. | |
| Norway has an entirely different model. The purpose of prison is to prepare a criminal for integration into society when they get out. Since Norway has no death penalty and a sentencing limit of 21 years, most criminals do get out. The basic strategy is to have the prison be as normal and supportive as it can be. PrisonerÕs ÒcellsÓ look like private college dorm rooms. They have a door that the prisoner chooses to leave open or closed. There are kitchens where prisoners can cook for themselves or others. They take classes in useful skills. They have jobs where they can earn money, some of which can be spent on the inside on clothes, special foods etc. and some is saved to help the prisoner when they get out. They are not released until they have a job and a place to live. | |
| From [Benko 2015] we learn: US prisons cost $31k per year per inmate. This Norwegian prison costs $93K. But proponents claim itÕs worth it. Recidivism in the US is 60% over 2 years but in whereas in Norway its only 20% over 2 years. (Due to other differences, itÕs prudent not to read too much into such statistics.) Instead of a repeat offender, or an unemployed or homeless person, society gets the benefit of the skills of an employed citizen in a stable situation. | |
| Stop competing for justice | |
| The major theme of this book is that cooperation is better than competition, especially if we solve scarcity. As in most of our institutions, competition is the dominant process in the US legal system. It imposes artificial scarcity on suspects for months or sometimes years with a policy that is effectively ÒJustice delayed is justice deniedÓ. Our courtrooms canÕt hope to find the truth with expensive, adversarial lawyers, plea bargaining, inconsistent application of (lobbyist-written) law, intimidation, etc. | |
| New processes for justice can benefit everyone (but the current legal professionals). Cooperative Justice is a plausible new way to better understand the truth behind crimes. Restorative Justice helps victims recover and offenders appreciate the consequences of their actions. Norway-style prison campuses treat convicts with respect, and train their ÒstudentsÓ in how to make it without crime. ÒParoleÓ should help convicts find jobs, housing and a more responsible lifestyle rather than merely restricting their freedom. | |
| The battlefield of adversarial justice makes the process of the US legal system more like war than science. Because | |
| ÒTruth is the first casualty of warÓ | |
| Ð Sen. Hiram Johnson, 1817 | |
| truth is also the first casualty of our legal system. And prisons are just like military field hospitals, in that as soon as as the residents leave them, theyÕre sent into activities likely to land them back in the same place, in short order. Justice isnÕt supposed to be a battleÑitÕs supposed to end battles. |