The Future of Justice

1. The Future of Justice

2. The Future of Justice • Crime has emerged as a significant political issue in the past 50 years: • Increased public awareness of this social problem • Politics polluted the science • Hard even for criminologists at times to determine the nature and scope of the problem • Politics aside, the data do suggest that we have a crime problem, particularly a violent crime problem. • Crime destroys individuals, families, and neighborhoods, undermines social order, carries huge costs, and at times threatens civilized existence. • Crime has always existed and will exist in the future.

3. The Future of Justice…continued Criminology/medical analogy (yet again) – crime and death/disease will always be with us, but there are some things we can do to reduce the severity of the nature of crime and disease. As we do this, we must deal with three conceptual realities: • There are some programs/policies/strategies which can reduce the severity of the nature of crime, but they are not politically palatable and thus are not able to be implemented. • Some programs/policies/strategies don’t work (and at times actually make the situation worse), but we do them anyway because they are politically palatable. • There are some programs/policies/strategies that do work, and they are politically palatable as we implement them. Unfortunately, there are not enough of these.

4. The Future of Justice…continued We need to find more programs/policies/strategies that work, and we need to get them implemented. To do so, we need to Improve in the arenas of: 1. scientific criminology a. preventative and curative specificity b. inter and intra crime specificity 2. political criminology a. be attuned to the zeitgeist b. create a fertile environment

5. Two Core Perspectives • Preventative -Dissuades would-be offenders from engaging in criminal pursuits through: a. an iron fist orientation – specific and general deterrence, mass incarceration b. a velvet glove perspective - bonding theory, social opportunity theory, social disorganization theory, altruistic motivation strategies. c. Bio-chemical intervention As in medicine, preventative measures cannot stop death or disease, so we must also engage in curative ventures.

6. Two Core Perspectives…continued 2. Curative -Identify and apprehend perpetrators, and a. Hold the guilty (specific deterrence/incapacitation) b. Help the guilty by making offenders: 1. More law abiding citizens (rehabilitation) 2. More productive citizens (reintegration) There are elements of both crime control and due process in all of these. So while there is obvious agreement that the justice system needs to engage in preventative and curative activities in the strategic sense, there is not a lot of consensus as to just how to achieve that end in an operational context.

7. Two Core Perspectives…continued It is important to engage in these curative and preventative ventures: 1. Without violating the public conscience (humane treatment) 2. Without jeopardizing public law (constitutional rights) 3. Without emptying the treasury (cost effectiveness/fiscal accountability) 4. Without violating the principle of pragmatism (pragmatism quotient) 5. Without violating the principle of political practicality (palatability quotient)

8. The Future of Justice…continued • The future of justice? It won’t always be there. Mistakes will be made. Justice will not always be swift and outcomes will not always seem fair, and for any semblance of justice to exist in the future, the rule of law must prevail. • The people want the justice system to do and be all things, and yet it is lucky if it can do anything consistently! The great question is, what changes in what institutions (church, school, family, corporate America (business and industry), courts, police, corrections, can cause what shifts in criminal behavior?

9. Thomas Murton, The Dilemma of Prison Reform, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976. • Reform is a path, a direction; it is not a destination • Progress is indirect, and at times even regressive (Quinney’s bureaucratic gravitation notion) • Progress is slow • Focus on the when, not the what • Reformers must hide their reformist tendencies to be successful • Cooptation • Don’t be selfish • Focus on the people, not the program

10. Murton’s Model of Reform + -

11. Murton…continued • When involved in a reform effort, remember that bureaucracies are like elephants, so: • Don’t try to move/fight one by yourself, or you will lose. If there is going to be a confrontation, enlist the support of another organization that is equally as powerful. • Avoid a fight if you can and instead appeal to the conscience of the administrators through a velvet glove/carrot approach.

12. Murton…continued • When involved in a reform effort, remember that bureaucracies are like elephants, so: • Recognize your ignorance, and remedy that deficiency (you don’t understand the nature of the entire elephant/the organization as a whole, ie., Aesop's fable). • Recognize your information base limitations and move with deference (elephants can hear and smell and see more things than we can and consequently make decisions based on understandings and pressures and information: • that we don’t even know exists • that we have no way of acquiring

13. Footnote: A Fundamental Principle of Bureaucracy Those individuals two levels up in the bureaucracy do things for reasons that we often do not even begin to understand, because they have access to information that we don’t have, see things differently than we do, and are reacting to/responding to pressures that we don’t even know exist.

14. What Have We Learned So Far 1. Shifts in criminal justice system operations to date have had rather minor potential positive impacts, and they tend to be short-term. 2. Answers to the crime problem lie primarily outside the justice system and consequently await a more active and attuned public. Justice officials have a role, but citizens have a bigger role.

15. What we have learned so far…continued • Why is there so much crime? It is a more of a demand issue than a supply issue. • We have been asking the wrong question – we should not be asking why there is crime, but why there is virtue, and build upon the latter. • Strive with perseverance.

16. The salvation of the state is watchfulness in the citizen. Nebraska state motto Take sides. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Elie Wiesel (Nobel Prize winner, Nazi death camp survivor) Do not go gentle into the night. Rage, rage at the dying of the light. Dylan Thomas Take arms against a sea of trouble, and by opposing, end them. Shakespeare’s Hamlet

17. Silence gives consent. They came first for the Communists and I did not speak up because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak up because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the unionists and I did not speak up because I was not a unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I did not speak up because I was not a Catholic. They the came for me, and by then, there was no one left to speak. Martin Niemoeller Nazi death camp survivor

18. The Night of the Long Knives The Night of the Long Knives (or Operation Hummingbird), was a purge that took place in Germany between June 30 and July 2, 1934, when Hitler and the Nazi regime carried out a series of politically-based executions. Concerned with presenting the massacre as legally sanctioned, Hitler had the cabinet declare, "The measures taken on June 30, July 1 and 2 to suppress treasonous assaults are legal as acts of self-defense by the State." The Night of the Long Knives represented a turning point for the Nazis and the German government. It established Hitler as "the supreme judge of the German people", placing him de jure and de facto above the law. Centuries of Jurisprudence proscribing the principles of the rule of law were pointedly and violently swept aside. The purge established a pattern of violence that would characterize the next ten years of the Nazi regime. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives)

19. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish and ulterior motives.  Do good anyway. If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway. The biggest people with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest people with the smallest minds.  Think big anyway. What you spend years to build may be destroyed overnight.  Build anyway. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.  Do good anyway. Give the world the best you have and you will get kicked in the teeth.  Give anyway.                        Winston Churchill

20. The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.                        F. Scott Fitzgerald

21. Ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the horrible truth and be shattered….yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I dimply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, I can feel the sufferings of millions, and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again. Anne Frank

22. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing Edmund Burke It is not the critic who counts or he who points out how the strong stumble or the doer of the deed could have done better. The credit belongs to those who are in the arena, whose faces are marred with blood and sweat, who have failed and may well fail again, but who continue to strive valiantly. paraphrased from Teddy Roosevelt

23. Press on. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful individuals with innate/natural talent. Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not. The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence is singularly omnipotent. Never, never, never, never, never give up. Winston Churchill