FORWARD (THIRD EDITION)
This edition of, Justice Blind? Ideals and Realities of American Criminal Justice,is substantially different from the first edition. While the main ideas from the first edition remain – because so much about American criminal justice has remained the same – America’s reaction to the attacks of September 11th, 2001 have fundamentally changed our country.
Since this day, the people and government of the United States of America have been obsessed with terrorism. Terrorism generally refers to the use of violence to instill fear in order to achieve some political purpose. For example, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary provides this definition of terrorism: “the systematic use of terror (a state of intense fear) especially as a means of coercion ... violence (as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands.”
America’s obsession with terrorism means that to some degree, crime has taken a back seat in terms of importance. Public opinion polls show that the things Americans used to worry about (e.g., school shootings and child abductions) are less worrisome than terrorism. Interestingly, Americans are also greatly concerned about the direction of their country and the domestic and foreign policy decisions pursued by their leaders. A recent poll showed that two-thirds of Americans think their country is heading in the wrong direction.
In addition to making thousands of arrests and detaining hundreds of people for years, the “war on terror” has given us military action against Afghanistan and a disastrous war in Iraq. Congress quickly passed the USA PATRIOT Act and later created the Department of Homeland Security. It then passed the Military Tribunals Act, a law that is so extreme it even allows the use of heresay evidence and evidence obtained by coercion in military trials, and it excuses any abuses committed by US military officials in the war on terror.
Further, President Bush has also authorized the indefinite detention of even American citizens as “enemy combatants” without criminal charges, created a top-secret domestic spying program under the auspices of the National Security Agency, and authorized government agencies to read the email and open the mail of normal, American citizens. Some civil libertarians claim the right to privacy implicit in the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution no longer exists.
Because of the significance of the war on terror for our country, as well as its clear implications for criminal justice practice, I give as much attention to issues related to terrorism as I can throughout the book. While the book is still not about terrorism per se, you’ll see that the problems which plague our wars on crime and drugs – thoroughly analyzed in the first and second editions of this text – also plague America’s war on terror.
In this edition, I examine America’s war mentality and discuss how it is relevant to the main thesis of this text. For example, I show that the anti-terrorism laws in the United States have swung the pendulum farther toward a crime control model of criminal justice by eroding the Constitutional protections that Americans enjoy in order to make it easier for police, courts, and corrections to investigate, arrest, detain, convict, and punish alleged terrorists.
Additionally, I illustrate how media coverage of September 11th (and America’s subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) maintained fear in Americans so that they would be more likely to support tougher methods of fighting terrorism, even if it means given up some of their own freedoms. Americans were also less likely to even question their own government and its actions, which inevitably lead the types of abuses of official power (such as corruption and wrongful conviction) and erosions of Constitutional protections that I documented in the first and second editions of this book.
To end on a more positive note, there are real signs that Americans are rising to resist the policies that got us in the situation in which we now find ourselves. For example, American citizens elected enough Democrats into Congress to rustle away both the House and the Senate from Republican control. Now, there is significant debate about the war in Iraq and Congress has begun to question other American policies related to the war on terror. This is not to say that the problem is Republicans, but rather that with Democrats in control of Congress, it is once again possible that the checks and balances of America’s democratic form of government will once again function properly. Further, public opinion has unquestionably turned against the war in Iraq. Americans are even willing to consider a complete withdrawal of US forces from the country. Such developments suggest the possibility that Americans may be willing to question America’s war approach itself, offering hope that our wars on crimes, drugs, and terrorism might soon be replaced by more efficacious methods of reducing the problems that face our nation.
