From Inquest:
By any account, the criminal legal system inflicts tremendous harm. Stop-and-frisk policies produce hassle and humiliation. Pretrial detention disrupts lives and communities. Court proceedings impose serious burdens on victims, witnesses, and defendants alike. Punishment, by definition, entails hardship. The implicit justification for much of this harm is that the damage is worth it. We authorize the government to invade people’s privacy and restrict their liberty because, in theory, the system serves an important social good by preventing crime or ensuring comeuppance.
But what if the damage outweighs the good the system produces? And how do we figure out whether it does? We can quantify the fiscal costs of system components like arrests and incarceration. Their primary cost, though, is not fiscal: It is the harm to the person who experiences the search, arrest, or incarceration, as well as the indirect costs to family and community. Those human costs are harder to measure. Although activists and community groups have done critical work to qualitatively document the human costs of detention, quantifying those costs in a concrete way has been more elusive. How do you quantify the humiliation of a public arrest? The effects of imprisoning a young parent? On the other side of the balance, the social good that criminal law enforcement usually purports to promote is “public safety” — the prevention of crimes. How many crimes must we prevent to outweigh the costs of detention? Alternately, to the extent that punishment serves retributive goals, punishment must be proportionate to the offense. How do we determine if a punishment and an offense are comparably severe?
As important as these questions are, there have been very few attempts to quantify the harm of experiencing criminal law enforcement vis-a-vis the harm of experiencing crime. Continue reading >>>
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