A Humanist Perspective on Criminal Justice

In a recent post on his blog, It's Only Natural, John Shook brought up some important points regarding shortcomings of the American justice system, and while I don't completely agree with his conclusion that opposition to the death penalty is the only clear humanistic viewpoint on the death penalty, many of his criticisms of American justice are spot on.

In the article, John says:

"The pro-death side behaves as if some people’s value is higher than others, the rights of the victim outweigh the rights of the accused, the desire for retribution should dictate just punishment, and that the government needn’t defend everyone equally."

Here he has touched on something that is symptomatic of a more globally flawed philosophy of justice that is practiced in the American legal system, and that is the philosophy of justice as revenge. Americans treat incarceration as a means of retribution rather than rehabilitation. One can easily see this sentiment in commonly used idioms, such as "He needs to pay his debt to society."

But is retribution the ultimate aim of a criminal justice system? As a humanist, I should certainly hope not. It seems to me that the ultimate function of any kind of criminal justice is to protect the public and to prevent people from breaking our laws, and this is where the practice of incarceration enters the picture. Why do we incarcerate people to begin with? We should incarcerate people when they are harmful to the public. Hence, it seems only rational that it would be beneficial to all parties to rehabilitate those criminals that need to be incarcerated in order to reintegrate them into society as functional and contributing members thereby relieving the public from its obligation to provide for said criminals. This is only logical thinking for any humanist who is interested in minimizing the suffering of humans and animals.

Unfortunately, the philosophy behind much of the policy driving the current practices of American justice has little in common with this philosophy. Instead, the American system of incarceration is driven by a desire for vengeance. The American public is more interested in an individual "paying for what he has done" than in rehabilitating them. And it's expensive.

Moreover, the problem is getting worse. In his book, Crime and Punishment in America, Elliot Currie wrote:

In 1971 there were fewer than 200,000 inmates in our state and federal prisons. By the end of 1996 we were approaching 1.2 million. The prison population, in short, has nearly sextupled in the course of twenty-five years. Adding in local jails brings the total to nearly 1.7 million. To put the figure of 1.7 million into perspective, consider that it is roughly equal to the population of Houston Texas, the fourth-largest city in the nation, and more than twice that of San Francisco. Our overall national population has grown, too, of course, but the prison population has grown much faster: as a proportion of the American population, the number behind bars has more than quadrupled. During the entire period from the end of World War II to the early 1970s, the nation's prison incarceration rate--the number of inmates in state and federal prisons per 100,000 population--fluctuated in a narrow band between a low of 93 (in 1972) and a high of 119 (in 1961). By 1996 it had reached 427 per 100,000.

And the sad consequence of this mentality is that our nation is going broke for it, because revenge is expensive. Every time we send a man to prison for life, we are essentially saying that the taxpayers will feed, house, and provide medical care for that person for the rest of his life. Furthermore, by focusing on the punitive effects of incarceration rather than possible rehabilitative solutions, we are not only wasting tax money, but also ruining the lives and causing unnecessary suffering. In fact, not only are we not rehabilitating inmates, but our prisons are actually making them worse.

Ultimately, in an age in which America is faced with difficult fiscal decisions such as whether to fund education for our children, provide health care for the elderly, or rebuild infrastructure, can we really afford a prison system that is this flawed?