The criminal justice system is out of balance and broken. True criminal justice reform to restore equal justice for all will require a top-to-bottom refocusing and rethinking of primary institutions and practices, beginning with the law itself and encompassing the police, the courts, and prisons.
We all want to live in a society where all people, including the police, respect the rights of others. The criminal justice system should protect people from harm through force or fraud. Laws should only prohibit relatively few actions that harm others.
A fair criminal justice system punishes only those who genuinely deserve punishment because they have harmed others, and punishment should be only in proportion to their wrongdoing.
Rather than performing its primary purpose of protecting people from harm, our criminal justice system has been manipulated into a vast array of rules and regulations outlawing many harmless voluntary acts, thus branding as “criminals” a large number of otherwise law-abiding people. Faced with the impossible task of reining in these “criminals,” government officials, from the police to the district attorneys, respond by inventing ways to circumvent civil rights protections.
We can create a wise, fair, and compassionate criminal justice system, but it will require going beyond cliches and catchphrases like “law and order” and “defund the police.”
A crime only occurs when someone uses force or fraud to harm another. If there is no victim, there is no crime. Prohibiting any action that doesn’t hurt someone just because a government official, or even a majority of citizens, thinks it’s wrong is immoral and has no place in a legitimate criminal justice system.
Criminal laws should be limited to prohibiting the violation of the rights of others through force or fraud or deliberate actions that place others involuntarily at significant risk of harm. Voluntary acts between consenting adults which harm no one should not be outlawed.