Why the criminal justice system should be changed Essays - Penology

Why the criminal justice system should be changed I feel like the court system and the way criminals are punished for their crimes is solid in areas but needs improvement. Criminals should be punished but sometimes i feel like this is taken to the extreme. There should be a difference for crimes that are committed by people who have no other option and people who commit crimes based on greed and ignorance. For example one thing that i see wrong in the court system is the death penalty. The death penalty should not be an option in the united states. The death penalty gives people gives people who have committed horrible crimes an easy way out of there punishment. There's a saying that's been around for awhile , ' An eye for an eye'',. My honest opinion about this statement is that if that was the case every time , then we would all be blind. Race, social and economic status, location of crime, and pure chance may be the deciding factors in the death penalty. Not only is the death penalty horrible but it is also expensive the actual cost of an execution is sufficiently higher than the cost of imprisoning a person for life. Families of murder victims go through a lot of trauma and loss and it takes alot to heal. However executing the murderer does not help these people heal nor does it end their pain Sometimes people have to steal but not for greed or for selfish reasons ,but for necessities of life. The only thing i would qualify as a necessity would would be food, water,and medicine. If someone steals two hundred thousand to buy a car would get the same prison time as someone who stole two hundred thousand to buy medicine for his sick wife. Stealing is wrong don't get the wrong idea but sometimes you have to do what's best for you and your family when there's no other option. it is necessary to be specific on what type of stealing was done due to a few factors. Generally speaking the punishment for minor theft is not as harsh, while more serious or widespread theft crimes are punished more strictly. Also some theft crimes that involve weapons or physical threats may sometimes be classified as violent crimes. I honestly think it's unbelievable that we dump nonviolent criminals in prison cells with violent ones, even in local jails and holding tanks. Even tho Most of the time nonviolent criminals do in fact learn a lesson or two. Ironically we spend an average of $20,000 per year, per inmate, teaching them this. For less than that we could be sending every nonviolent offender to college. To make matters worse, in most prisons when an inmate is threatened he or she is the one who gets locked up in a little cell for twenty-four hours a day, while those doing the threatening remain in the open population. If You ask me we should be doing the opposite and look up the violent criminals to show them them that we are not going to stand for those actions. In addition to the things that could be fixed the criminal justice system would be getting wrongfully convicted of crimes you never committed. People always feel like it's necessary to plead guilty for crimes they did not commit in order to avoid the death penalty or extremely long prison sentences. This has always been recognized by the U.S. legal system. There is a rising number in exonerations over the past couple years. However there is a growing awareness injustices occur every day in American courts.Because of this there are more and more profound doubts every day about the accuracy and fairness of the criminal justice system. This understanding is supported by considerable recent research. This rising in awareness and growing research has motivated a growing number of innocence projects. These projects work to exonerate wrongly convicted prisoners.