We must completely reframe our approach to the U.S. criminal justice system because it’s expensive, unfair, ineffective, and has been a destructive force in many people’s lives for decades. In almost every category – including the apprehension, prosecution, defense, sentencing, and punishment of Americans suspected or convicted of criminal offenses – we are failing miserably.
According to the World Prison Brief, there are almost 1.8 million prisoners in the United States, the highest in the entire world. We have the 6th highest prison population rate – meaning, the number of prisoners per 100,000 of the national population – beaten only by El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, Turkmenistan and American Samoa.
Does this sound good to you?
Practically every element of our criminal justice system is a textbook example of The Butterfly Effect at its very worst. Take, for example, the fact that, on any given day in America, there are around 555,000 people incarcerated who have not yet been convicted of a crime, even though judges have ruled most of them eligible for release until their fate is determined.
That’s weird…why in the world are they still there? Simple. They can’t afford bail.
To be clear: We are speaking about non-violent offenders only and there are A LOT of them. The FBI’s 2024 Crime in the Nation Statistics reported that 1,221,345 violent crimes (i.e., murder, nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) were committed in the United States in 2024, compared to 5,986,400 property crimes (i.e., burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson).
A report from the United States Commission on Civil Rights revealed that “in the United States, over ten and a half million people are arrested each year, the majority for low-level offenses, drug violations, and civil violations. For instance, in 2016, data showed that approximately 5 percent of arrests in the U.S. were for charges of violent offenses, and that charges of low-level offenses accounted for about 83 percent of arrests that year.”
The Commission also discovered that “between 1970 and 2015, there was a 433 percent increase in the number of individuals who had been detained pre-trial, and pre-trial detainees represented a larger proportion of the total incarcerated population” and that “data from the 75 largest counties showed that nearly all felony defendants (96 percent) who were held pretrial had a monetary bail set and they would be released if they had the means to post it.” However, “nine out of ten were unable to post it.”
This makes zero sense, because we keep these people locked up even though practically none of them are a danger to the public. During the pandemic, for example, the U.S. Justice Department released over 11,000 inmates from the federal prison system, ordering them to home confinement. Only 17 of these people committed new crimes after their release, and only ONE of those new crimes was violent (aggravated assault). ONE. THAT’S IT.
The Hamilton Project, an economic policy initiative within the Brookings Institution, describes the bail situation this way: “The median bail amount is more than $10,000 for felony defendants. While a typical household has roughly $20,000 in financial assets, much of this is not liquid, and it may be expensive to turn those assets into cash quickly. The median bail amount dwarfs the liquid savings of a typical household, meaning that many people would almost certainly have to borrow or use a commercial bail bonds firm to gain release from jail.”
“Given the typical 10 percent premium charged by the commercial bond industry, this implies a cost of roughly $1,200 to the typical felony defendant. More importantly, bail bond premiums are nonrefundable, meaning that many people will functionally have to pay a large fee in order to avoid pretrial detention. Even $1,200 is greater than the total financial assets of the poorest quintile, making it highly likely that poorer defendants would be unable to post bail.” Read the full report here.
Bail and other monetary sanctions are used disproportionally more in places where there are more black people, naturally. Cities with the highest populations of black people collect around $29 in criminal justice revenues per resident, compared to the $9 per resident collected in cities where there are fewer black people (these numbers are adjusted for the number of crimes committed in each place).
Setting aside for a moment that this is a direct violation of the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution, let’s really think this through:
We have people just sitting around in prison, waiting, instead of earning money and being mothers and fathers. So, as a society, what we get in the end are households with years of lost income; people losing job prospects and, as an extension, earning potential by the minute; and even more kids with no mother and/or father. THIS MAKES NO SENSE.
The most insane part is that we are paying a bloody fortune for these horrid outcomes. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics says that, in FY2022, the average cost of incarceration for a federal inmate was $42,672. State governments spent an additional $64 billion plus.
That’s bad enough, but studies that consider all the stakeholders involved, including the families of inmates, suggest that number is way low. One study by the Prison Policy Initiative, a not-for-profit think tank, estimated that – when you factor in everything from public corrections agencies to judicial/legal costs to health care – mass incarceration costs more like $182 billion a year, with a cost of $2.9 billion for the families of inmates alone. These costs to the families include $1.3 billion for telephone calls (specialized phone companies charge up to $24.95 for a 15-minute phone call) and $1.6 billion for commissary vendors who sell things to inmates.
Of course, even this study doesn’t include the opportunity cost of lost household incomes, which is massive. Nor does it mention the hidden consequences, which include the emotional, physical, educational, and financial well-being of the children whose parent(s) are in prison. The U.S. National Institute of Justice found that these children often “face a host of challenges and difficulties: psychological strain, antisocial behavior, suspension or expulsion from school, economic hardship, and criminal activity.”
The most frustrating part is that we keep doing things that obviously don’t work even though we have plenty of evidence that suggest there are much smarter, more effective ways.
The criminal justice system in Norway, consistently named among the very best in the world, is characterized by “broad police and prosecutorial discretionary powers, centralized bureaucracy, and a comprehensive network of institutions. Social, psychiatric, and psychological therapies play a large role in inmate programs, indicating the emphasis on rehabilitation.” The result of their “restorative justice” approach is that people leave Norwegian prisons with the physical and emotional skills they need to be high-functioning members of society.
An analysis of the Norwegian system by the U.S. Department of Justice found that “social defense is seen as the main aim of the criminal justice system. This goal is achieved through general deterrence and resocialization of the offender. Limited recidivism statistics indicate a 34.3 percent reconviction rate within a three-year period.”
Compare that to the United States, which consistently has among the highest recidivism rates in the entire world. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, “82 percent of individuals released from state prisons were rearrested at least once during the ten years following release. Within one year of release, 43 percent of formerly incarcerated people were rearrested.” Among these, “about half had a parole or probation violation or an arrest that led to a new sentence within three years, a rate that increased to about six in ten within ten years.”
This revolving door is made worse by the ineffective accountability measures we tolerate for the supervised population that lives outside concrete walls. Across America, well over 3.6 million people are on probation or parole on any given day. The sheer number of people not only prevents adequate accountability but, worse, it inhibits constructive, individualized case management plans that can reduce recidivism by guiding released prisoners to new paths.
Listen, we get it. Some Americans believe that those who break the law must pay and pay BIG for their egregious actions – which is why this nation has a chronic focus on punitive measures over rehabilitative ones. But we’ll say it again, if people just sit and rot in jail, all society gets in the end are households with years of lost income; people losing job prospects and, as an extension, earning potential; and even more broken families.
Okay, so let’s assume that the people who say that “criminals” should rot in jail for their transgressions are 100% right. What then? Then they would be right – congratulations – but their being right in no way offers a tangible solution for how we change the course of this crisis going forward (and, make no mistake, we have no choice but to change it because the entire system just isn’t working).
Is being right more important than being smart?
And it just goes on and on. Just wait until you hear this. Though they are only 13 percent of the population, black people were 28 percent of those killed by police in 2020. Using data from the Mapping Police Violence Database, FiveThirtyEight calculated that: “Black people were arrested and killed by police at higher rates than white people in 34 of the 37 largest U.S. cities. Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Chicago and Milwaukee had some of the largest disparities in policing outcomes between black and white residents.”
“In these cities, black residents were policed at high rates while white residents were policed at relatively low rates. Police arrested black people at several times the rate of white people, even for offenses like drug possession which have been found to be committed at similar rates by black and white communities. And police in these cities also killed black people at substantially higher rates than white people, even after accounting for racial differences in arrest rates.”
That’s unconscionable, but it gets even worse. According to a study published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, killings by American police officers have been undercounted over the past forty years by more than half.
Between 1980 and 2018, roughly 55 percent of police killings were officially classified as another cause of death. This massive inaccuracy occurred for two reasons: Either medical examiners did not list police involvement on the death certificate, or the deaths were incorrectly coded in the national database.
The study also revealed that Oklahoma, Arizona, Alaska, and the District of Columbia had the highest rates of police killings; that black people were three and a half times more likely to be killed by the police as white ones; and around twenty times as many men as women were killed by the police over that time.
Do you find it odd that the American public doesn’t really know much about these killings? Well, here’s why.
After collecting and analyzing ten years’ worth of data on almost 40,000 payments made to resolve police misconduct allegations – paid by twenty-five of America’s largest police and sheriff’s departments – The Washington Post discovered over $3.2 billion had been spent to settle claims of allegations of police misconduct during that time.
This is startling to say the least, but this next sentence is just downright hard to believe: Over 1,200 law enforcement officers involved in these allegations had been the subject of at least five payments. Over two hundred of them had been the subject of ten payments or more:
“The repetition is the hidden cost of alleged misconduct: Officers whose conduct was at issue in more than one payment accounted for more than $1.5 billion, or nearly half of the money spent by the departments to resolve allegations. In some cities, officers repeatedly named in misconduct claims accounted for an even larger share. For example, in Chicago, officers who were subject to more than one paid claim accounted for more than $380 million of the nearly $528 million in payments.” What the…WHAT??? How is this even possible?
Listen, most police officers in this country are amazing human beings. They put their lives at risk every single day for our safety, and we could not appreciate or respect them more. But we have to stop enabling and protecting the bad ones. Lives literally depend on it.