To the editor of Prison Reform, it is my position that the current affair of our nation’s justice system is an injustice to convicts being sentenced and law-abiding citizens alike. To make my case, let’s first consider the extreme example of the death penalty. This is clearly a polarizing area; not because of apathy regarding justice but instead varying opinions on what justice looks like. No matter how you envision justice, let me pose the question: what would doing the most good for the most people look like?
The obvious “good” in this example is serving justice to those harmed, including our society. In this regard, many people are quick with an opinion about the extent these hardened criminals or “monsters” are deserving of mercy. This is an oversimplification of a complicated issue. To elaborate, let’s consider how we address the obesity pandemic in America. Today we’re beset by fast food advertising, sweets and chocolates in checkout aisles, and sedentary work environments. How would the narrative change if we attempted to drive obesity rates down by making obesity illegal? Upon criminalizing obesity, we would see obese “criminals” incarcerated in vast numbers while fast food and candy bar manufacturers would continue to profit. Clearly, this would be an outrage, where society treats (or punishes, rather) the symptoms instead of the cause. Now imagine the uproar against injustice if fast food companies were encouraged to advertise more by prisons because they shared in the profit of people becoming obese.
This is exactly what’s happening in our nation’s justice system today. We have criminalized drugs instead of treating it as a healthcare issue, leading to 25% of the world’s incarcerated population being in the U.S., a country with 4% of the world’s total population. Similarly, the prison system has in large part been outsourced to for-profit corporations. This has led to a landslide of injustices including overpriced toiletries available to inmates, inadequate healthcare available to inmates, and private corporations lobbying for higher mandatory sentences to keep prison populations high. What’s most shocking is that the common person is not even aware of this injustice.
Coming back to the death penalty example, these are the cases that garner the most publicity, and the times where your common citizen is quickest to cast judgement. However, this is such a rare approach to assessing justice. A much more common way of considering justice is seen in tort law, performance reviews in the corporate arena, and military-structured chain of command. This “common” justice is simply to elaborate on the relationship between responsibility and accountability. We can only hold those accountable that also had some degree of responsibility for that outcome. How can we incarcerate the obese when they had no say in the ubiquity of junk food? How can we incarcerate law-breakers when they had no say in propensities of crime in their neighborhood? Similarly, we can only assume the authority to decide other’s fate if we also assume the responsibility of their well-being. For example, if I have to share my earnings to help those living in poverty, then also give me the authority to mandate who of those in poverty are required to go to college, and hold them accountable for refusing. If they instead have free-will and ability to choose to go to college and they decide not to, and I have no say in that, then don’t make me accountable for improving their condition. Again, give me both authority and responsibility, or neither.
Tying this back to the death penalty, people are quick to condemn criminals to death, but take no responsibility for the outcome: they became a criminal. If society demands justice against crime, then also take on the burden of giving its citizens the support they need to avoiding becoming a criminal. If you criminalize obesity, also take on the responsibility of abolishing fast food. In other words, don’t look for bad people, look for bad system.
