Supreme Court Justice Says Criminal - Justice System Isn’t Working

WASHINGTON — Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy told a House subcommittee that the American criminal-justice system is too harsh, locks up too many people for too long and does so at an ultimate cost to public safety.

“In many respects, I think it’s broken,” Justice Kennedy said of the corrections system. The corrections system is one of the most overlooked, misunderstood institutions we have in our entire government. Lawyers are fascinated with the guilt/innocence adjudication process. Once the adjudication process is over, we have no interest in corrections. Doctors know more about the corrections system and psychiatrists than we do. Nobody looks at it. California, my home state, had 187,000 people in jail at a cost of over $30,000 a prisoner. compare the amount they gave to school children, it was about $3,500 a year.

Reform of criminal justice issues has become an increasingly bipartisan issue, since U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder declared in the spring of 2013 that “Too many people go to too many prisons for far too long for no good law enforcement reason.”

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