The American Bias: The Exhaustive Failure of Our Criminal Justice System
This article is an online version of the print article for the S/S ‘20 Lexington Line edition. The print version can be viewed here!
The criminal justice system is not broken. It functions exactly how its creators intended.
The American prison system is infamous for its brutal conditions, stone-cold prisoners, and guards as guilty as those they remand. Its second most infamous apparatus? The prison reform system. For a country so keen on claiming its citizens are its number-one priority, our criminal justice system reflects something else. The United States and criminal justice, though, have a complex yet unsurprising history.
Policing was not around during the earliest conception of the United States. Policing, in fact, was something many Americans were not quick to jump on based on the sole idea that it stemmed from a “night-watch duty” that was sometimes used as punishment. The first legitimate form of policing, created in the South of 1704, was slave patrol—slave patrol being, in its essence, an ongoing manhunt for freed or escaped slaves. As one can imagine, a policing system with roots tied aggressively around the continuance of oppression will always hold slivers of that origin. As much as it may grow and change, policing has an origin story that many Americans are not privileged enough to forget.
Source: DemWritePress
In the late 19th century, a time of political powerhouses and the menaces of Reconstruction, policing had evolved into an arm of politics wherein captains and sergeants of different precincts were chosen by local political party ward leaders. Cue the birth of a word that is very familiar sliding off the tongue of any American-raised citizen: Corruption. Fast-forward to the 20th century, in which policing migrated towards more of an air of “professionalism.” This led to the start of the very closed-off police system we know today, in which the public has little to no access to the inner workings of a police force, or to the rationale behind its decisions.
We’re in the 21st century. Police brutality is intrinsically entwined with racial bias, corruption generated by political agendas, and citizens living in fear of being apprehended and jailed because of the sour reputation of prisons nationwide.
Racism, prejudice, and wealth status all play a shining and significant role in the process of incarcerating a person. Matthew Henriksen, a teacher at Haas Hall Academy Springdale in Arkansas, has spent the last five years volunteering as a teacher at prison workshops. Henriksen’s one-on-one experience within the reform system has granted him insight to the system, illuminating the disparities of the criminal justice system.
“We criminalize poor people in [America] in a variety of ways,” Henriksen says. “The bail system perpetuates this, so when you do get arrested and you can’t afford a lawyer, and you’ve lost your job because you’ve been in jail because you can’t pay bail… You take the plea.” It’s a cycle, and one that those who are not afforded the luxuries of things like robust savings accounts or family lawyers cannot pay to escape. So, most Americans.
Fortunately, liberal states like California have noticed the deficiency in humanity within the confines of the remand process. California is the first state to eliminate cash bail. There is a flipside to this, naturally: according to the Prison Policy Initiative, 74% of people held by jails were not convicted of any crime in 2019. However, this remains a monumental step toward recognizing cash bail as a branch of privilege, for those who do have the wealth status can easily buy their way out of remand in jail, whereas those who do not have the necessary funds are forced to wait in prison for their hearings. In this sense, the playing field is leveled in terms of wealth-related privilege.
California (Oakland, specifically) has also banned landlords from background-checking their tenants’ criminal records. The discontinuance of tenant background-checking is extremely useful for ex-offenders to be more properly reintegrated into society. Many ex-offenders struggle with reintegrating not only because of engrained behavioral issues due to the mental exhaustion and abuse they may face in prison, but also because there is an ongoing stigma that former inmates are not deemed “safe” to be in the workplace after they’ve served their time. Or, that they don’t deserve to live in the same building as affluent couples and bustling families. The isolation ex-offenders face once they are placed back into the real world is an explicit component for America’s high recidivism rate of 76.6% within five years.
Andrew Skotnicki, a theological and criminological ethics professor at Manhattan College, says that there are many different ways to get sent back to jail and that being in the parole system now is like walking on glass.
“There are the egregious [ways to violate parole] that we all know, with regards to housing and employment and the stigma of a criminal record… but the parole system has turned upside down from what it was originally meant to be: a way to elevate and give concrete, programmatic interventions to get people on their feet,” Skotnicki says.
Skotnicki, who has also been teaching prison workshops at Rikers and Westchester County Jail for eight years, emphasizes how arduous it can be for parolees to reintegrate into society. Prison, for any extended period of time, can create behavioral effects.
Professor Tim Foran, Assistant Director of the Writing Center at LIM College, was a prison guard for four months in a Mississippi federal prison known as Marshall County Correctional Facility. He stands as a witness to the survivalistic nature of life in prison.
“[Prisoners] are intelligent people. I realized quickly, if they had the same opportunities as you or me, they could be teaching [at a college]. One thing I didn’t like about being a prison guard was the perception of inmates as being subhuman,” Foran says.
Source: Prison Policy Initative
Prisoners’ behavior regresses once they are released because they are often treated as “less than” by prison guards, wardens, and even by each other. As anticipated, this negatively impacts the way many parolees and ex-offenders behave in the real world, adding another layer of difficulty to their assimilation.
Prisons as institutions are not purposefully unjust, as we are sometimes led to believe by the plethora of voyeuristically-inaccurate television shows that attempt to show what “prison” is really like. Foran explains away the preconceived notion that prison guards are born cruel by clarifying that many prisons, including Marshall County Correctional Facility, are usually understaffed and overpopulated. He states that with the number of inmates versus the number of guards versus the amount of work that is expected to be finished in a day, “It is impossible to do it all.”
The prison system, the reform system, the entire criminal justice system—they are exemplary of wastefulness in America. They lean toward inefficiency. I am not saying they are exactly useless or wholly inadequate, as there are many facets within the criminal reform system that prove to actually be helpful or useful overall. Prison writing workshops, like the ones Matthew Henriksen and Andrew Skotnicki work in, are examples of ways we can still grant prisoners the slices of humanity that they should not be stripped of in the first place.
Where these systems fail is why people get convicted, like lack of wealth to afford proper representation or resources to prevent them from committing crimes, or where they grew up, or even worse, the color of their skin. Tie all three of those factors together, and you have the very commonplace triple threat of a disenfranchised citizen of America that was born into a series of unfortunate circumstances. The reform system imposes rules and order that are made to unceasingly prevent ex-offenders from realistically rehabilitating.
They pay the price for it, and a lot of Americans don’t even blink.
The elimination of isolating post-prison-reform tactics can lead to a real and inclusive nation. We go so far as to be inclusive of everyone whose rights have been alienated; people have died for black rights, for POC rights, for gay rights, for women’s rights, for trans rights, for human rights. People have died in the name of social justice, and noticeable changes occur. People advocate and die for prisoners rights too, yet legislative reform eludes the issue.
The criminal justice system, as it is now, often could lead one to use “prisoner” and “slave” interchangeably. Not much changed at the core; only transparent surface mutations. A majority of white legislators create and implement laws, and the majority of people who are negatively impacted by it tend to be people of color. Ana Swanson, a Washington Post reporter, claims in an article that “unsettling research into the psychology of courtroom decisions has shown that our personal backgrounds, unconscious biases about race, gender and appearance, and even the time of day play a more important role in outcomes than the actual law.” Surprising? Well, not entirely. Heartbreaking?
Yes. Definitely.
Source: Berkeley
Adam Benforado, a professor of law at Drexel University, outlines these troubling tendencies in his book “Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice.” Benforado’s book uses psychology and neuroscience to dissect judicial decisions that dictate hundreds of thousands of American citizens’ fates. In an interview with Swanson, he notes that “With respect to witnesses, we know that attractive witnesses are more likely to be believed… weight has an impact. In one study, women who were overweight or obese were treated much more harshly by mock jurors than people who were thin.”
Benforado also ties in the most common thread, saying, “[Recruiters] look at a resume differently if it has an African-American name or a white name. In all these cases, the people that are engaging in this discriminatory behavior… are not doing so out of racial animus. [They] are engaging in automatic behavior which has been engrained over a lifetime of being exposed to a culture in which African American lives are devalued and blackness is coded with a lot of negative imagery.” The science of internal biases attests to how the judiciary system is complicit in contributing to the inequality found within the criminal justice system.
Fixing what was created as broken is not simple. Prisoners lose the right to vote while serving time. Ex-offenders lose the right to vote if they spent a year or more behind bars. And why? Our government yearns to fill these concrete jails with more and more people, and fails to do it justly by participating in conscious and unconscious racial and wealth biases. The impoverished, the unlucky, the damned—they fill up large parts of our prisons, and those in the position to change things silence them. As Henriksen says, “The prison system is a means of marginalizing people of color. The idea behind it might not be intentionally racist, but there’s implicit racism in where we draw the lines of wealth and who gets access to the limited amount of capital that’s out there amongst us.”
I am a 21-year-old girl who grew up in a nice suburb and was positioned to live a life where I would never have to face these atrocities against humanity if I so chose. I don’t fit into this narrative. Some would say I shouldn’t even be a part of this narrative. Yet I look, I stare, I ask questions, because it is so outside of myself and begging for attention.
It is something I know is so much bigger than myself, bigger than a few prison workshops, bigger than a cry into darkness at select politicians; and this is only a tiny scratch on the surface of the complexity of America’s criminal justice system. It is unimaginably difficult to leave those who are not granted the same bias-based privileges unacknowledged and forgotten. It is even more difficult to recognize that my privilege, along with everyone else who checks off the privilege-carrying-boxes, is a means to help those who are disenfranchised. It is difficult to open your eyes from a slumber you did not ask for.
It is difficult to know where to begin. It is much easier to remain complacent through silence.