Judicial System Reform

Justice; it is a word that is pertinent to anyone who lives in America. It stands for the very foundation in which the nation was founded on. It means that evil will be punished and the good shall be rewarded. Is that really the case, though? There are cases in which innocence gets punished and the guilty go free; this is not what the founding fathers were hoping for. In fact, the justice system of America today is slow, inefficient, and filled with much personal bias. It is not about whether justice is being done; it is about who gets the win for the case. For these reasons alone should the legal system in America be fixed or at least touched up.

Ever since America has begun its war on crime, the amount of people in jails have sky-rocketed exponentially. Some people might see this as a good crackdown on crime, but the reality is that it is costing the American people millions in taxes. In 1982, the amount the federal government spent on prisons was nine billion dollars; in 1999, the figure raised up to forty-nine billion (Weinstein, 1). It costs a lot of money to house criminals already, but raising the amount of people actually going to jail is only making the taxes and payments that much more. That is not to say that the people in jail do not deserve to be there because the general population wants to save some money on taxes. It is also due to the fact that some people that go to jail only come out to go right back in.

In a study of prisons, the researchers found that up to ninety-five percent of people in jail now are expected to get out sometime in the future. Archer and George Washington University law professor Stephen A. Saltzburg, who conducted the study, said that “for too long we have focused almost exclusively on locking up criminals…. We have to remember that roughly 95% of the people we lock up eventually get out. Our communities will be safer and our corrections budgets less strained if we better prepare inmates to successfully reenter society without returning to a life of crime.” (Weinstein, 2). This brings up another point: the American people are paying so many taxes to the government for the prison system, why waste it if they just go right back to jail? The study also showed that one-third of the 650,000 inmates in prison are expected to go back to jail. It seems as if it is a waste of money to pay for such methods when they obviously not working. A new alternative to prison should be though up, one that would actually rehabilitate people and criminals alike.

In 2001, my dad got into a car accident in which the driver of the other car died. He was around seventy-six and had a heart attack after a few days in the hospital. My dad had below the legal limit of alcohol in his system (equal to that of one can of twenty four ounce beer). The ensuing trial and judicial process opened up many questions in my head. First of all, the judicial process moves as slowly as it does to run around America on foot. The accident was in 2001 and the trial didn’t finish until 2004, which meant there was a lot of downtime. The cogs of justice turn slowly, I guess. Secondly, the bias in the judge was so blatant and horrible that it made me severely doubt the judicial process. Out of the 250judges in New Jersey, one being the best and 250 being the worst (namely on a scale of accuracy with the outcomes, personal bias, and effectiveness), the judge we received was ranked 248. He would not let our lawyer speak, he gave wrong definitions of words, and forced his opinion on witnesses and the jury. Even when the prosecutor forced a witness to change his statement for an allotted sum, the judge dismissed it and allowed his testimony, even after our lawyer proved he was wrong. It is this kind of actions and such that could confuse a jury and put the wrong man away to jail. This happened in 2004.

When my father did get a guilty decision and sent to jail, the judge did nothing but slander him in the sentencing. He called him a “horrible burden on society as well as a terrible person that will get what he deserves”. He then sentenced my dad to seven years in jail with no bail, where he had to serve eighty-five percent of his time before being considered for parole. For comparison’s sake, a man who was drunk behind the wheel of a ferry crashed it into a dock and killed two people. He only received four years with the eligibility of parole around fifty percent of his time served. Things like this made me decide that the judicial process should be filled by people with regards for the law, not personal bias against anyone. How can a man’s simple accident be enough to ruin an entire families life since 2001, whereas a man that kills two people can only be put away for a few years?

Thankfully, the appellate court ruled with us. They decided that the judge gave the wrong definition of reckless to the jury and that was grounds for confusion to cause a guilty verdict. It is saddening to know that only the higher courts actually take in regards for the law as well as the correct amount of morality to decide something is right. My father got out of jail in September of 2005, but we still need to go back to trial. This time, we get a different judge and different everything. Hopefully it will work out better this time, with a judge that is there because he showed the right amount of prestige for the law and not for himself.