The criminal justice system refers to the agencies government charged with enforcing law, adjudicating crime, and correcting criminal conduct. The criminal justice system is an instrument of social control. Society considers some behaviors so dangerous and destructive that it either strictly controls their occurrence or outlaws them outright. It is the job of the agencies of justice to prevent social harm by apprehending and punishing those who violate the law and in so doing deter those who may be contemplating future wrongdoing. Although society maintains other forms of social control, such as the family, school, and church, these are designed to deal with moral, not legal, misbehavior. Only the criminal justice system has the power to control crime and punish criminals.

The contemporary criminal justice system in the United States is monumental in size. It consists of more than 55,000 public agencies and now costs federal, state, and local governments about $150 billion per year for criminal justice. It has increased more than 300 percent since 1982.

One reason the justice system is so expensive to run is because it employs 2 million-plus people in the more than 55,000 public agencies, including 17,000 police agencies, 17,000 courts, more than 8,000 prosecutorial agencies, about 7,000 correctional institutions, and more than 3,500 probation and parole departments. There are also capital costs. State jurisdictions continue to conduct a massive correctional building campaign, adding tens of thousands of prison cells every few years.

The system is so big because it must process, treat, and care for millions of people each year. Although the crime rate has declined substantially, close to 14 million people are still being arrested each year, including more than 3 million for serious felony offenses.

In addition, about 1.5 million juveniles are handles by the juvenile courts. Today state and federal courts convict a combined total of more than 1 million adults on felony charges.

Considering the enormous number of people processed each year, it comes as no surprise that the correctional system population is at an all-time high. More than 7 million people are now under the control of the correctional system, with more than 2 million men and women in the nation’s jails and prisons. About 4 million adult men and women are being supervised in the community while on probation or parole, a number that has been increasing by more than 3 percent each year since 1990.

Juries and judges are not skeptical of nor do they apply critical thinking to a state’s case against a defendant. This is why the fiction of “proving a fact beyond a reasonable doubt” is seldom applied in practice. In the classroom, yes. In actual practice, no.

The inculcation of the open ended word “reasonable” leaves to the hardliner one bright- line of proof, while quite another to the rights’ fundamentalist. The concept is beautiful but its application is without meaning. It leaves the prosecution demanding that any alleged fact is reasonable enough. While the defense claims, a fact must have undeniable truth.

The exhortation that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty is also a trope. A juror, a citizen, is neither socialized as a child nor lives in a mature society with such a paradigm. Quite the contrary, we all believe that a media allegation is true unless and until there is overwhelming factual evidence to the contrary.

American history has proven that the concepts of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are philosophically sound and humanist. The judicial interpretations and criminal justice applications have had cyclical variance through the centuries, lacked timely initiation and only rarely lived up to the standards contemplated by the writers.

The problem is systemic in that both judicial interpretations and criminal justice applications arise out of a consumptive and narcissistic society at both the federal and state levels.

Evil is a trope deeply embedded in our societal and political culture. As James Anne rightly insists, the incantation of radical evil “is inherently corrosive of democratic politics.” Likewise, it lends itself to a corrosive paradigm among juries. Juries hate the crime stated in the statute but often without critical application of the facts to a given statute. Law enforcement and prosecutors often stereotype defendants based on statute description without critical analysis of the suspect or the personal facts surrounding her.

The suspected defendant becomes the sacrifice, the “logical” equivalent of a theology of redemption through sacrifice and thus an “insight into the nature of language itself as a motive.”

Even experienced statute writers, that place where the law begins, are well aware of this. If the evil can be capulated in its broadest open-ended terms then the image of that evil can cast a broad net. For the jury, when they hear the prosecutor read the indictment, and then later receive the court’s written instruction on the law which is beyond anything they have ever read or heard, purification can only be achieved by a guilty verdict. The confusion of it all can only justify a verdict of guilty, somewhat guilty, a little guilty or guilty of something. The logic of atonement allows redemption through vicarious sacrifice, which is the principle of mortification by transference or scapegoat.

The more fearful and sinister the image painted by the prosecutor of the general nature of a criminal activity, the greater the juries’ corresponding sensation of endangerment and the stronger their need for redemption through vicarious sacrifice.

It is systemic in that it begins with centuries old rhetoric and paradigms of condemnation, permeates the opinions of those who are trying to be “good” in society and finds its way through codification into the criminal justice system.

In this book, I have taken a brief look at the dichotomy between examples of not so humanist application of certain Constitutional rights in Part I. Some from my own archive. These are used only as examples of how injustice can occur at any level of our system. Part II is intended as a critique of every participant in the courtroom.