The Future of
Justice
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.
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.
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
Two Core Perspectives
1.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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
Murton’s Model of Reform
+
-
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.
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
Footnote: A Fundamental Principle
of Bureaucracy
Individuals two levels up in the bureaucracy
do things for reasons that we, who are two levels
down, generally do not even begin to understand,
Because they have access to information that we
don’t have, they see things differently than we do,
and must react to/respond to pressures that we don’t
even know exist.
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.
What we have learned so
far…continued
3.
Why is there so much crime? It is a
more of a demand issue than a
supply issue.
4.
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.
5.
Strive with perseverance.
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
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
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)
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
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
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
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
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