A criminal justice system is an organization that exists to enforce a legal code. There are three branches of the U.S. criminal justice system: the police, the courts, and the corrections system.

Police

Police are a civil force in charge of enforcing laws and public order at a federal, state, or community level. No unified national police force exists in the United States, although there are federal law enforcement officers. Federal officers operate under specific government agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF); and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Federal officers can only deal with matters that are explicitly within the power of the federal government, and their field of expertise is usually narrow. A county police officer may spend time responding to emergency calls, working at the local jail, or patrolling areas as needed, whereas a federal officer would be more likely to investigate suspects in firearms trafficking or provide security for government officials.

State police have the authority to enforce statewide laws, including regulating traffic on highways. Local or county police, on the other hand, have a limited jurisdiction with authority only in the town or county in which they serve.

Figure 1. Here, Afghan National Police Crisis Response Unit members train in Surobi, Afghanistan. (Photo courtesy of isafmedia/flickr)

Courts

Once a crime has been committed and a violator has been identified by the police, the case goes to court. A court is a system that has the authority to make decisions based on law. The U.S. judicial system is divided into federal courts and state courts. As the name implies, federal courts (including the U.S. Supreme Court) deal with federal matters, including trade disputes, military justice, and government lawsuits. Judges who preside over federal courts are selected by the president with the consent of Congress.

State courts vary in their structure but generally include three levels: trial courts, appellate courts, and state supreme courts. In contrast to the large courtroom trials in TV shows, most noncriminal cases are decided by a judge without a jury present. Traffic court and small claims court are both types of trial courts that handle specific civil matters.

Criminal cases are heard by trial courts with general jurisdictions. Usually, a judge and jury are both present. It is the jury’s responsibility to determine guilt and the judge’s responsibility to determine the penalty, though in some states the jury may also decide the penalty. Unless a defendant is found “not guilty,” any member of the prosecution or defense (whichever is the losing side) can appeal the case to a higher court. In some states, the case then goes to a special appellate court; in others it goes to the highest state court, often known as the state supreme court.

Figure 2. This county courthouse in Kansas (left) is a typical setting for a state trial court. Compare this to the courtroom of the Michigan Supreme Court (right). (Photo (a) courtesy of Ammodramus/Wikimedia Commons; Photo (b) courtesy of Steve & Christine/Wikimedia Commons)

The United States incarceration rate has grown considerably in the last hundred years. In 2008, more than 1 in 100 U.S. adults were in jail or prison, the highest benchmark in our nation’s history. And while the United States accounts for 5 percent of the global population, we have 25 percent of the world’s inmates, the largest number of prisoners in the world (Liptak, 2008b).

Figure 3. “America’s incarceration rate is at a two-decade low.” Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (May 2, 2018). “U.S. Incarcerates a Larger Share of Its Population than Any Other Country.” Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (May 1, 2018).

Prison is different from jail. A jail provides temporary confinement, usually while an individual awaits trial or parole. Prisons are facilities built for individuals serving sentences of more than a year, whereas jails are small and local, prisons are large and run by either the state or the federal government. Increasingly jails operate more like larger prisons, as institutions like Los Angeles County Jail have nearly 20,000 inmates (63 percent of which are non-violent offenders) in seven facilities over 4,000 square miles. Rikers Island in New York City, which sits on a 40-acre complex with ten different facilities (including a juvenile facility), house nearly 14,000 inmates^[2].

Parole refers to a temporary release from prison or jail that requires supervision and the consent of officials. Parole is different from probation, which is supervised time used as an alternative to prison. Probation and parole can both follow a period of incarceration in prison, especially if the prison sentence is shortened.

Dig Deeper

Read this story about Kalief Browder, arrested at age 16 on a robbery charge, held at Rikers Island for more than 1,000 days, including two years in solitary confinement, and then released when his charges were dropped. Read about Kalief’s experiences in jail and what occurred after he was released.

His story has been documented in a six-part Netflix series titled The Kalief Browder Story

Watch the following video from vlogger Hank Green about the messy situation that is mass incarceration in America:

Types of Crimes

Not all crimes are given equal weight. Society generally socializes its members to view certain crimes as more severe than others. For example, most people would consider murdering someone to be far worse than stealing a wallet and would expect a murderer to be punished more severely than a thief. In modern U.S. society, crimes are classified as one of two types based on their severity. Violent crimes (also known as “crimes against a person”) are based on the use of force or the threat of force. Rape, murder, and armed robbery fall under this category. Nonviolent crimes involve the destruction or theft of property but do not use force or the threat of force. Because of this, they are also sometimes called “property crimes.” Larceny, car theft, and vandalism are all types of nonviolent crimes. If you use a crowbar to break into a car, you are committing a nonviolent crime; if you mug someone with the crowbar, you are committing a violent crime.

We discussed the differences between street crime, or offenses committed by ordinary people against other people or organizations, usually in public spaces, and corporate crime, or white-collar crime, which are committed by workers in a business environment. Embezzlement, insider trading, and identity theft are all types of corporate crime.

An often-debated third type of crime is victimless crime. Crimes are called victimless when the perpetrator is not explicitly harming another person. As opposed to battery or theft, which clearly have a victim, a crime like drinking a beer when someone is twenty years old or selling a sexual act do not result in injury to anyone other than the individual who engages in them, although they are illegal. While some claim acts like these are victimless, others argue that they actually do harm society. Prostitution may foster abuse toward women by clients or pimps. Drug use may increase the likelihood of employee absences. Such debates highlight how the deviant and criminal nature of actions develops through ongoing public discussion.

Hate Crimes

The term “hate crime” refers to a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.”^[3] Hate itself is not a crime—and the FBI is mindful of protecting freedom of speech and other civil liberties.

Figure 5. Hate Crime Victims in 2016. Chart: The Conversation, CC-BY-ND Source: FBI

From Roman persecution of Christians in the 1st century AD, to 6 million people, predominantly Jews, killed in the Holocaust in the 20th century, we find many examples of hate crimes. When hate crimes are state-sponsored, such as the Holocaust, the Indian Removal Act (1830), or slavery in the U.S. (1619-1865), we can see the state’s efforts to eliminate legal rights and deny citizen rights to certain people. The Nuremberg laws were enacted in Germany in 1935, which stripped Jews of any citizenship rights. In Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), the U.S. Supreme Court decided that an African American did not qualify as a U.S. citizen and effectively said that even blacks in free territories had no rights and were still legally the property of white slaveowners. A series of laws and Supreme Court decisions in the 18th and 19th centuries rendered Native Americans landless and stripped them of citizenship rights, which allowed the U.S. government to take land from them with impunity.

In a contemporary context, reports of hate crimes have increased steadily since 2016. The FBI has been investigating hate crimes in the U.S. since World War I, but like many violent crimes, much of the available statistical data depends on how crimes are categorized and whether hate crimes are reported at all. Orlando, Florida reported just five (5) hate crimes in 2017. In 2016, a gay nightclub in Orlando, was the site of one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history with 49 dead and 53 wounded, but is not included in the 2016 Florida Hate Crimes Report. Testimony by the shooter Omar Mateen’s wife seemed to affirm the fact that it was a terrorist act, but that the site was not chosen because of its LGBTQ+ population, but rather out of convenience and lack of security (the initial target being Disney Springs, which has far more security).^[4]

A white man opened fire inside a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine people in 2015. He was immediately charged with a hate crime and confessed to the shootings the morning after in hopes of starting a race war^[5] (Wikipedia). South Carolina is one of a handful of states with no hate crime laws, so he was charged with nine counts of murder in South Carolina but also was tried in federal court and convicted of 33 federal hate crime and murder charges and sentenced to death.

Figure 6. Hate Crimes in Top 10 U.S. Cities. Chart: The Conversation, CC-BY-ND Source: Brian Levin, James Nolan and John Reitzel

 

Crime Statistics

The FBI gathers data from approximately 17,000 law enforcement agencies, and the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) is the annual publication of this data (FBI, 2011). The UCR has comprehensive information from police reports but fails to account for the many crimes that go unreported, often due to victims’ fear, shame, or distrust of the police. The quality of this data is also inconsistent because of differences in approaches to gathering victim data; important details are not always asked for or reported (Cantor and Lynch 2000).

Due to these issues, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics publishes a separate self-report study known as the National Crime Victimization Report (NCVR). A self-report study is a collection of data gathered using voluntary response methods, such as questionnaires or telephone interviews. Self-report data are gathered each year, asking approximately 160,000 people in the United States about the frequency and types of crime they’ve experienced in their daily lives (BJS, 2013). The NCVR reports a higher rate of crime than the UCR, likely picking up information on crimes that were experienced but never reported to the police. Age, race, gender, location, and income-level demographics are also analyzed (National Archive of Criminal Justice Data, 2010).

The NCVR survey format allows people to more openly discuss their experiences and also provides a more-detailed examination of crimes, which may include information about consequences, relationship between victim and criminal, and substance abuse involved. One disadvantage is that the NCVR misses some groups of people, such as those who don’t have telephones and those who move frequently. The quality of information may also be reduced by inaccurate victim recall of the crime (Cantor and Lynch, 2000).

Public Perception of Crime

Neither the NCVR nor the UCR accounts for all crime in the United States, but general trends can be determined. Crime rates, particularly for violent and gun-related crimes, have been on the decline since peaking in the early 1990s (Cohn, Taylor, Lopez, Gallagher, Parker, and Maass, 2013). However, the public believes crime rates are still high, or even worsening. Recent surveys (Saad, 2011; Pew Research Center, 2013, cited in Overburg and Hoyer, 2013) have found U.S. adults believe crime is worse now than it was twenty years ago.

Figure 7. While public perception holds that crime rates are on the rise, violent crimes have, in fact, decreased significantly since the early 1990s. “Public perception of crime rate at odds with reality.” Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C. (January 31, 2018).

Inaccurate public perception of crime may be heightened by popular crime shows such as CSI, Criminal Minds and Law & Order (Warr, 2008) and by extensive and repeated media coverage of crime. Many researchers have found that people who closely follow media reports of crime are likely to estimate the crime rate as inaccurately high and more likely to feel fearful about the chances of experiencing crime (Chiricos, Padgett, and Gertz, 2000). Recent research has also found that people who reported watching news coverage of 9/11 or the Boston Marathon Bombing for more than an hour daily became more fearful of future terrorism (Holman, Garfin, and Silver, 2014).