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Radley Balko is a senior editor at Reason Magazine whose award-winning investigative work focuses on criminal justice and civil liberties. His blog, The Agitator, is one of the most carefully curated resources for stories on the same subject.
Q. In your work, you've frequently reported on police abuses and the appropriate role of law enforcement in a free society. Though you're often writing in regard to specific controversies, I wonder if you have any general criticisms of the American criminal justice system. What's wrong about where we're at? What are the most urgent improvements you would recommend?
I think the main problem is too much attention to numbers and
statistics, which I think has been largely driven by the 40 years of
"get tough on crime" rhetoric and slogan-based crime policy we've been
getting from politicians. Everyone wants to boast about declines in
crime statistics. But the focus on raw numbers has created some
perverse incentives, from beat cops through mayors and police chiefs.
Ed Burns, the former Baltimore narcotics cop and co-creator of the HBO
series The Wire talks about this often. Drug cops are evaluated based
on how many people they arrest, and what quantity of drugs they seize.
Take what was saw in Atlanta after the Katherine Johnston case--the
92-year-old woman who was killed in a botched drug raid. Drug cops in
Atlanta had quotas of drug arrests and seizures they had to meet each
month. So there was a rush to meet the quota. If you got a tip about a
big drug stash somewhere, there was pressure to get there quickly
before it was moved, even if you had to take shortcuts in the warrant
process. If you're evaluated solely on raw arrest numbers, why take six
months to build a case against a mid- or high-level drug distributor
when you can get ten times the credit for arresting 10 street-level
guys? Why not take shortcuts if you can get away with it?
Prosecutors get re-elected or move on to higher office when they put
lots of people in prison. They rarely get credit for choosing not to
prosecute someone in the interest of justice. That's not to say it
doesn't happen. But there's rarely any professional reward for doing
so. In fact, they usually get flack for it, particularly in
high-profile cases. Prosecutors are also rarely sanctioned for bending
or breaking the rules. They're virtually immune from lawsuits, even if
they convict the wrong person, and even if prosecutorial misconduct was
a major factor in the conviction. So you have all this pressure on
winning convictions, with little sanction for going too far.
Federal criminal justice grants, asset forfeiture, promotions, higher
office -- all of these rewards are based on arrests and convictions,
not necessarily a fair administration of justice.
The other problem I think is a more general tendency in America toward
criminalizing bad behavior. We seem to be unable to accept the idea
that sometimes, bad things just happen. We want someone to be punished.
If there's no law on the books, we demand our politicians pass one.
Take the case of Lori Drew, the Missouri woman who used a fake MySpace account
to taunt once of her daughter's peers until the young girl committed
suicide. It's an awful case, and Lori Drew acted despicably. But
federal prosecutors in Los Angeles went after her based on a
ridiculously broad interpretation of hacking laws. Now Congress is
looking at overly broad, almost certainly unconstitutional legislation
aimed at criminalizing online "harassment."
Here's a pretty good rule of thumb: If you're naming a piece of crime
legislation after a crime victim, it's probably a bad law. It means
you're legislating out of anger, or in reaction to public anger over a
specific incident. That's generally not how good policy is made.
We have way too many laws, many that are too broadly written, and too
many incentives nudging the state toward putting too many people in
prison for as long as possible.
(more questions and answers to come...)
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