Essay Sample on Judicial Corruption in the United States

📌Category: Crime, Criminal Justice
📌Words: 903
📌Pages: 4
📌Published: 10 June 2022

Murder is one of the worst charges a person can receive in the American criminal justice system. A murder charge will completely change the course of a person's life. Now imagine being charged for a murder that you did not commit. In a country still riddled with racial inequality, this situation is much more likely to occur in a person of color rather than a white person. Typically court judges and legal officials show no remorse when finding a murder suspect guilty, even when the evidence does not fully support the charge. From various biases to a mere lack of grace, Just Mercy readily mentions the highly corrupted justice system and the need for prison reform that has plagued the United States since its founding. Proper rehabilitation and restorative justice, an approach initiated by the United Nations, aims to reduce such corruption and aid imprisoned people.  

Racial biases contribute much of the basis behind judicial corruption due to government leaders' former malicious segregation and unconscious racism. Throughout America's history, racial segregation was prevalent throughout the entire world. There was, and still is, constant discrimination against people of color. The justice system is still a perfect example of this. Bryan Stevenson explains, "In Alabama, even though 65 percent of all homicide victims were black, nearly 80 percent of the people on death row were there for crimes against victims who were white" (Stevenson). These statistics represent the high amounts of colored death row convicts. This result is distinct evidence of corruption because even years following the civil rights movements, there are still examples of this segregation that are still resolvable. A discussion by Ames Grawert, author of, How to Fix the Federal Criminal Justice System (in Part), talks about different methods to reshape the criminal justice system. He says,  "These penal­ties tend to fall hard­est on people of color: focus­ing again on FY 2018, roughly 70 percent of offend­ers convicted of a crime carry­ing a mandat­ory minimum were Black or Latino" (Grawert). The racial profiling that occurs throughout the criminal justice system is one of the leading causes of stereotypes against people of color. It inevitably leads to the arrest of darker people more frequently and more arduous trials than the average white person.

Through the various cases in Just Mercy, such as Marsha Colbey's, judicial biases are prevalent against people of color and those who face financial problems. Marsha's story is a tough case to read. Although Marsha was not colored, she was wrongfully accused of a murder that she did not commit. Only because she did not have the money to cover proper legal counsel in the trial was she found guilty and sent to live in prison for the murder of her child, which was delivered stillborn. As a recount of her case, the Equal Justice Initiative website states, "At trial, reliable scientific evidence supported Ms. Colbey's statement to police that her son was stillborn but the State obtained a capital murder conviction by presenting prejudicial evidence of Ms. Colbey's drug addiction and poverty in an effort to portray her as a bad mother who should be imprisoned regardless of her guilt" (Marsha Colbey). Aside from the extreme racial differentiation in the legal system, there is also apparent financial segregation. Colbey's financial status was a critical factor in her sentencing because of the United States government's subconscious bias against people stricken by poverty. Regardless of her apparent innocence, the defendants showed little effort to prove it. In Just Mercy, Stevenson says, "Walter made me understand why we have to reform a system of criminal justice that continues to treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent" (Stevenson 381). Stevenson's realization of the criminal justice system's financial biases underscores the system's corruption and its flawed views on mitigating circumstances. The comparison between both situations provides clear evidence of the differences in treatment between rich and poor. It creates the notion that the rich are always in a better position than an innocent black person, no matter the ruling.

Due to the exceptional effect it has on the convicted, rehabilitation is essential to reduce mass incarceration by limiting the number of repeat offenders. Initially, prisons did push to focus on rehabilitation, but however, as the number of incarcerated people rose, prisons were forced to turn to more harsh punishments. This is what originally destroyed the prison system as a whole. An article from the American Psychology Association says, "'This is what prison systems do under emergency circumstances--they move to punitive social control mechanisms,' explains Haney. '[But] it's a very short-term solution, and one that may do more long-term damage both to the system and to the individuals than it solves.'" (Benson). The only problem, however, was that the emergency circumstance has lasted since the beginning of the modern prison system. These social control mechanisms can be traumatizing to inmates and inevitably lead to repeat offenses because of their changed mental state. It is crucial that these prisoners receive the proper care to turn their lives around for the better to prevent them from committing more crimes in the future. An article by Janine Vaccarello from, Crimemuseum.org explains, "These methods are proven to have a positive effect on the prisoners and have helped many to overcome a background with little or no education. Upon their release, prisoners who have stuck with these programs are given a better opportunity to succeed and to become law abiding citizens" (Vaccarello). By committing to and maintaining the care that could be offered, prisoners would be far less likely to become repeat offenders. This will drastically reduce the overcrowding that is consistent throughout all prisons across the country. If there is an initiative to properly rehabilitate as many currently incarcerated people now, then in the future, the number of people in need, as well as the cost, will decrease dramatically.

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