THE "NEW JUSTICE" SYSTEM
The focus of the "new justice" system is not the individual who is accused of committing a crime, or their constitutional rights, or assuring justice for them, or of rehabilitating them if they have been convicted of a crime.
Increasingly, the focus today seems to be on vindicating the victim; upon punishment; upon vengeance. A wrong has been done and someone must pay! Someone must be punished! We must stamp out crime! Society demands it. Our politicians demand it. That is what American justice is about in the 1990s!
It seems based upon fear. People are simply afraid. Although the crime rate in recent years has tended to level off somewhat or, in some instances, even diminish slightly, there is no denying that there has been a tremendous increase in virtually all kinds of crime in America since the end of World War II.
Today, with the wide spread use of drugs, no neighborhood is immune to crime, no neighborhood is safe. The problem is real and people are scared -- genuinely frightened -- as more and more their lives, and those of their families and friends, are touched by it. They feel stalked by crime!
Unfortunately, those flames of fear are fanned, not just by the news media who serve up a steady stream of mayhem on the nightly news but, by the entertainment industry who saturate tv and movie screens with continuous tales of crime and violence. Murder is on the daily menu. Recall the study, released a few years ago, about how many thousands of murders the average child is exposed to on television by the time they grow-up ?
Politicians seek to perpetuate themselves in office by running as "law and order" candidates and promising to get "tough on crime". Led by the F.B.I., law enforcement agencies, at every level, drown us in crime statistics while appealing for more money to "fight crime".
This saturation of the public consciousness perpetuates the fear, and fuels a paranoia, that is bringing us to the brink of national hysteria.
The "new justice" system seems based upon anger. People are outraged. So angry that they willingly give up their own rights just to deny someone accused of a crime, their rights! They elect politicians to appoint more prosecutors as judges and enact more and more laws, criminalizing more and more conduct, and imposing harsher and harsher sentences each year.
"Three strikes" laws have proven to be so popular that we are now moving toward "two strikes", and even "one strike" laws!
Unfortunately, people seem more concerned with punishing the wrong than they are in determining who really committed it. They seem increasingly willing to simply take the word of the police on that!
Even though one of the most fundamental of our Constitutional Rights is the Right to be Presumed Innocent, surveys have repeatedly shown that most Americans today simply do not believe in that principle. Instead, they tend to believe that anyone accused of a crime, must be guilty -- otherwise the police would never have arrested them!