, Research Paper
Crime and Punishment have been around since the dawn of time. Each time period had it’s way to deal with it. Some of the ways worked and some did not. In ancient
Roman times, a criminal was punished by being made a spectacle of in the gladiators arena where they would fight until the other was dead. And even in the early
American ages of very religious times, they had many cruel and even barbaric forms of punishment such as beheadings and tarring and feathering people. These types of
punishments were a real deterrent for criminals in the past, but in more recent years, the punishments and life for criminals has gotten a lot lighter. It is now a lot harder to
get a criminal put in jail for his or her full sentence, and even if the criminal is put in jail for his or her sentence, they have many ways of wasting the taxpayers money. And
even a criminal who has the death penalty usually sits on death row for years and appeals numerous times wasting our money even more. It is things like this and others as
such that make the criminal justice system such a problem in our society today.
In our nation, from the point a person is arrested for committing a crime, he or she is given all the breaks that can be given. A person could get off of a murder just
because he or she wasn’t read their rights properly. After being arrested, the person is then taken to the police station where they may or may not go to jail. They either
get their date to appear before the judge or go to jail to await their trial. While in jail, they get fed, they get to be sociable, and they even get to play sports and work out.
Does this sound like a punishment? To me, it sounds like a vacation. A person is in jail for a reason, not to do normal everyday things and waste our money on petty
things.
Many examples of criminals wasting money go on every day. Inmates of prisons are always suing the government for the most trivial of things such as in the case of
Howard Jameson, who sued because he didn’t have the proper weight training equipment for his type of exercise he wanted to do. He has wasted over seventeen
thousand dollars in lawyers’ fees and filing fees of taxpayer’s money (Garcia, 94). Another example of this is inmates changing their names while incarcerated. Ea
an inmate changes his or her name, it costs from two to four hundred dollars.(Weiss, 95). And wasting money, is just one of the problems with our justice system.
Another problem with the justice system is the courts. The court system in America is so selective that it makes the criminals think they may just get off of a crime because
the system is so inconsistent. For example, if a man and a woman were to commit the same crime, the man would probably get convicted, and the women would
probably be let go. The term “Justice is Blind” is often used to describe the legal system. Maybe justice should be blind, blind to sex, race, and wealth status. If a person
is any of the above, his or her status changes in the courts. If a person has money, he or she is more likely not to be convicted than a person that does not. Problems like
these may not be entirely the fault of the courts. They may feel pressure from higher officials such as politicians that also may be a major cause of injustices in the system.
All throughout history there are stories of corruption in the political parties and government of the nation. If we cannot have honest and sincere leaders, how can we ever
expect to have a good legal system. There is so much bribery going on between the government officials and the legal system, the politicians may as well be the judges
and the judges may as well be the politicians.(Stanford, 94) High ranking officials in the government and even celebrities get a different kind of treatment in the jails even if
they are convicted.
For example, when Representative Rick Tonry was convicted of extortion. He didn’t go to the same jail that you or I would go to, he went to one of those country
club-type jails where he was allowed to play tennis and golf and even roam around unsupervised. If this is the punishment for doing a crime if one is a political figure, what
do they get for just being a politician?
Overall, the whole justice system in America may just need an overhaul. The allowance of criminals wasting taxpayer’s money may be a great place to start. Even if the
justice systems were reformed, that couldn’t be the end of the reform. The government, police force and maybe even the constitution would have to be improved upon
also.