Criminal Justice System: Drug Trafficking And Terrorism

In order to understand the complexity of the criminal justice system, one must be able to identify crime as a whole. Crime is defined as going against the laws of a state or the country. According to Neubauer& Fradella (2014), the criminal justice system is defined as a set of agencies, and processes established by the government; to control crime and impose penalties on the violators of the law. There are two main components of the criminal justice system; mainly the state and the federal justice system.

There is an order to the process of criminal justice. According to the Center for Victims of Crime (NCVC) (2012), the criminal judicial system is composed of law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, defense attorneys, the court system, and corrections. Law enforcement officers investigate crimes. Once law enforcement officers have conducted their investigations and have arrested the person they believe is the person that committed the crime, the process moves to the prosecution. A prosecutor gets assigned to the case, and the prosecutor 's office has the task of presenting evidence proving the guilt of the person arrested. The prosecutor must show the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that the person arrested

Making The War on Drug a top priority meant that other serious crimes like rape and murder would not be considered important as drug crimes. The federalization of drug as crime violated beliefs of states’ rights as street crime is what necessitates law enforcement. In the breathtaking book, “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander, “Huge cash grants were made to those law enforcement agencies that were willing to make drug-law enforcement a top priority”(73). Putting money on agencies to go towards a specialized narcotics task force meant that other more serious crimes are not taken as serious as drugs crimes. There are grand theft and violent assaults, which are a greater threat to communities than illegal drug use and abuse. The federal dollar began to flow and agencies were getting equipment and training. Local police forces used their funds to get military equipment. A retired police in New Haven said, “I was offered tanks, bazookas, anything I wanted”(74). Obviously, we as a society are not getting what we need from our nation’s police. Justice system

The justice system is constant work in progress as the system must change and evolve to meet the needs, demands and requirements of the times we live in. The justice system and its statutes sometimes struggle to keep up with the ever-changing world; thus making them lag behind. As stated, one of the core functions of the justice system is to provide intervention programs for those individuals who are deemed to be at risk. Intervention programs do exist but still the justice system is overburden with many criminal cases. The inability of justice programs to work as they are intended to is seen as one of the significant problems facing the justice system. Welsh and Harris (2013) seeks to explain the inability of the justice programs to not work in stating, “The problem is that many criminal justice interventions fall short of their goals because of poor planning, poor implementation, and poor evaluation. It is fair to say we have not yet discovered “what works” to reduce crime.” From this, it is clear that the development of interventions is not the issue and not the cause for them to not succeed in their mandates but the problem is within their planning.

When a person in the United States commits a crime they will be penalized for that said crime. The United States criminal justice system is the department established by the government to control crime and impose penalties on those who violate the law. The criminal justice system has allowed the government to lock away several people who have committed several crimes and who are a danger to society. With that being said, the criminal justice system also has some flaws. For instance, sometimes wrongfully convicted people get put in jail like in Adnan Syed’s case. Adnan Syed was convicted of killing his on-and-off-again high school girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, in Baltimore in 1999. He supposedly strangled her and has spent the last sixteen years

According to a statistic by the U.S. Department of Justice and their collaborators, the number of prisoners in the U.S. has grown by over 700 percent since the 1970s. This extreme increase in incarcerations means that people disregard the law and constantly commit crimes. But these crimes are not all equal. Crimes range everywhere from murder to simple drug use. Law enforcement punishes almost all of them equally. This can be seen as unjustified and something should be done about it, but that does not stop the crimes from happening. The only way to do that is to deal with the people behind the crimes, either by doing more to support them or remove the cause altogether.

In the criminal justice system, there are three major components. They are the police, the courts, and the corrections. Each one of the components has a role to play in the system. The police are in charge of arresting and investigating crimes. The courts are charged with the responsibility of punishing offenders while the corrections implement the court rulings. Out of the three the courts are the most harmful to the criminal justice systems. Once the police have done their investigations and arrested all offenders involved it will be up to the court to decide whether the person is guilty or not. This is where the problem comes in.

The National Criminal Justice Association was established in 1971 in Washington, D.C. It is a non-profit organization that serves as the principal liaison between state and local units of government, the various agencies of the U.S. government, and criminal justice interest groups. Its goal is to assist tribal, state, and local governments on crime prevention and crime control issues. Their goal is to create a balanced approach to the people’s complex public safety and juvenile justice system.

There are three components that make up the criminal justice system – the police, courts, and correctional facilities – they all work together in order to protect individuals and their rights as a citizen of society to live without the fear of becoming the victim of a crime. Crime, simply put is when a person violates criminal law; the criminal justice system is society’s way of implementing social control. When all three components of the criminal justice work together, it functions almost perfectly.

The history of this problem started in the late 1960’s when recreational drug use was on the rise with the middle class in America. From 1968-1969 the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs was founded, studies linked crime

As of September 26, 2015, there is a total of 93,821 inmates in prison for drug offenses, which is equivalent to 48.4 percent of the prison population. The use of illegal narcotics has been an issue within the country for decades; however, is incarceration the way to solve this problem? I think not. During the late 1960’s, poverty was a substantial issue within urban cities and secluded rural areas. On the other hand, recreational drug usage promoted by fashionable young, white Americans as a symbol of social upheaval and youthful rebellion coincided with the deprivation within many of these areas. The most notable drug reform in Nixon’s war on drugs. Nixon maximized federal drug agencies enforcing mandatory sentences and intrusive searches.

A shift is happening in America. The pendulum is swinging from the ideals of get tough and mass incarceration. The swing has both positive and negative affects on the prison system. On the plus side, prison populations are decreasing. By shifting away from incarcerating any who break the law, there are fewer drug dealers and fewer violent offenders in the system. The other side of this trend is that many who make these choices are likely to become repeat offenders.Individuals also may escalate their negative behaviors to more violent or disturbing crimes. The punishment may not do enough to deter these actions in the future. Opinions on the best way to handle criminals are as vast as the varying crimes committed. Some say that these individuals

The main issue when it comes to drugs in the United States is the inefficient policies and sentencing laws that have been created. Also, the injustices within these policies pertaining primarily to race. Once the “war on drugs” was claimed the only way the government and law enforcement saw fit to handling this skyrocketing issue was to incarcerate offenders. Although this solution worked for a while, other alternatives needed to be made. However, these alternatives were not made and this left the drug policies, sentencing laws, and injustices at a standstill. Alternative policies and sentencing laws need to be made due to high incarceration rates. These high rates are costing the government and tax payers more money out of their pockets. This

Within the jail and prison system there are many types of offenders living together. Some of these offenders require special attention and programs while incarcerated. These special requirements can be based on a mental or physical health issue, age, or type of offense; such as sex offenses or particularly violent offenses. For the purposes of this paper the focus will be on the special requirements of drug offenders, and more specifically drug abusers. On the surface it may not seem like these offenders need any special considerations while incarcerated. However, a deeper look will show that drug addicted offenders bring more than just an addiction with them, and if these things are not addressed they can pose additional problems for correctional

Crime is a blemish in almost every society. Criminals and law breakers have been around since biblical times and still haunt societies today. The American Criminal Justice System is in place to attempt to help control criminals. The idea is not to create a perfect society where no crime will be committed, but to contain the crime. Predicting crime is not an easy task, criminal justice officials take many steps to prevent crime from happening. Environmental Design is a key aspect of helping prevent crimes Crime prevention through environmental design is a problem-solving approach to crime prevention.