"The Problem with the ‘Criminal Legal System’"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new essay in Vital City authored by Greg Berman.  I recomment the full piece, and here are some excerpts:

The field of criminal justice is not immune to this problem [of “style-guide liberalism”].  For example, in many quarters, people are no longer referred to as defendants or inmates (and certainly never criminals) but as “justice-impacted individuals" or “justice-involved individuals” instead. The ungainliness of this phrasing is matched by its opacity. Is a crime victim a “justice-impacted individual”? A witness? Aren’t we all “justice-impacted” at some level?....

[T]he campaign to spread “criminal legal system” springs from a very different impulse than “justice-impacted individual” — instead of seeking to affirm a long-suffering population, in this case the goal is to tear down a venerated institution....

Worse than being exclusionary, “criminal legal system” reads as a pejorative to those who staff the system.  One wonders why responsible voices on the left, which traditionally has sought to argue in favor of greater investment in government, would deliberately, and with such a broad brush, try to undermine one of our most important democratic institutions.

It is of course true that the American justice system has been responsible for numerous miscarriages of justice over its long history.  But many of our most important systems — think about the health care system or the child protection system, for example — often fail to live up to their appellations.  Despite its shortcomings, no one is arguing for the education system to be re-named “the social advancement system.”

Justice is, of course, an aspirational goal. Not even the system’s fiercest defenders would claim that it achieves justice in all cases. But having this goal as a north star gives the system — as fractured and beleaguered as it is — a sense of identity and purpose.  Don’t we want our law enforcement, community supervision and correctional agencies to at least strive to achieve justice? No one is motivated to go to work to try to achieve “criminal legal.”