Yesterday, I described how the Criminal Code and Law Enforcement have been turned UPSIDE DOWN. Those functions "feed" citizens into the criminal justice system. What happens when they get there is just as bad.

Prosecution

From many reports, prosecutors are now the controlling factor in our criminal justice system, and many are being accused of building little empires for personal political gain. In the process, they've turned criminal justice upside down, especially in drug cases, by cutting deals for snitching, even if the person being snitched on is innocent. Their goal is to increase the number of people accepting guilty pleas. They can take one arrest and reduce that perp's charge in return for naming and testifying against other people.

Think about that... if the original perp is indeed a bad guy, is he going to have any restraint in naming other people... regardless of their actual guilt? Isn't it likely that a bad guy will lie to reduce his own charges? Isn't it likely that he'll implicate innocent people? The result can be that the truly guilty people end up with reduced charges for cooperating, while innocent snitch victims get the big charges because they don't have information with which to cooperate.

Other related tactics, especially in drug cases, include threatening an arrested person with prosecution of their friends and family members unless they plead guilty. Prosecutors (and law enforcement) have also decided that using deceptive practices are legitimate. UPSIDE DOWN.

Trial

Criminal justice doesn't get much better once it reaches trial stage. A massive complication of rules of evidence can often keep extremely relevant information from even reaching a jury or judge, so a verdict can be given that is truly ignorant of what really happened. In some cases, it can protect a guilty person, and in other cases it can lead to a conviction of an innocent person. Thanks to the aggressive nature of code, law enforcement and prosecution, our courts have become so jammed that gross mistakes are almost pre-destined due to everyone's case load, and the right to a speedy trial is jeopardized, leaving many people in jail for long periods, just awaiting a trial at which they could be found innocent. The pressure on the courts has a tendency to treat all who are charged the same... to treat them as guilty... as fodder for the "justice mill". Innocent until proven guilty has really been reversed. UPSIDE DOWN

Sentencing

As if running more people through the justice system, and treating them as guilty, and the complications of trial weren't enough, sentencing has become the WORST part of the justice system. Judges often have their hands tied with legislated minimum sentences and sentencing guidelines, and are forced to lay down sentences that they believe are unjustly harsh. Judges are speaking out against these rules that force them to ignore the individual circumstances of cases. Judges are retiring early or just dropping out because they can't stand giving sentences they see as unjust. One of the functions of a judge is to try to insure that the results are just and fair. They can no longer do that. UPSIDE DOWN

The result of all these injustices is an UPSIDE DOWN criminal justice system that has put 2.1 million Americans behind bars. It's a system that, because of mandatory minimum sentencing on drug and gun charges, is sentencing non-violent offenders (often so innocent that it would make you sick) to longer sentences than violent offenders. Because the prisons are overcrowded, violent offenders are being released while non-violent offenders sit out their mandatory sentences.

Our criminal justice system is so UPSIDE DOWN, and so destructive of lives, and so expensive, that I contend we would actually be better off without it. I invite you to think about your own situation. Are you more likely to be the victim of a crime, or more likely to fall afoul of some law yourself? Then ask yourself which would more seriously affect your life? For almost all of us, the protectors have, together, become more dangerous than what they're protecting us from.

Whose criminal justice system is it? Isn't it ours... the people? Why then are we being forced to live in fear of it? Why is it treating all of us as if we were the enemy?

Libertarians often discuss whether criminal justice should be considered a proper role of government, or whether it can be done better through private organizations. What has happened to our governmental criminal justice system is what happens to all governmental systems... they don't work, they become corrupted, and they become oppressive toward those they're supposed to serve. For any libertarian who hasn't yet been willing to remove criminal justice from their short list of proper governmental roles, that choice is getting easier every day. Our government is making complete anarchism look more like a preferred solution every day.