An Alternative to Today’s Criminal Justice System
Ayoung American Prosecutor- Adam Foss once told of how he was faced with the life changing decision of charging an 18 year old teenager-Christopher, accused of stealing 30 laptops from a local retailer, with 30 counts of felony each carrying between under a year to a year in prison. He describes the situation that has lead Christopher to stealing those laptops- this teenager was in his last year in Secondary School and hoped to progress on to the University. Unfortunately he did not make enough from his part-time job to fund that dream and so, as teenagers without guidance do, he made a series of bad decisions that led him to steal the 30 laptops and sell them on the Internet.
The Boston Police had arrested Christopher, conducted their investigations and concluded the process by forwarding the case to Adam. Adam explains that although the law is clear on the charges of Larceny that were to be brought against Christopher he would only later come to appreciate what that criminal record would do to the young teenager’s life.
The Legal Theory of Nigerian Criminal Justice
In Nigeria our criminal justice system formed in the pre-colonial and colonial eras, was created with the intention of deterring acts found to be intolerable or offensive and criminalising or punishing acts of rebellion, against the local customary head and then against the constituted authority of the British Government. Evidence for this is in the simple fact that nearly all our prison facilities were built before 1960 and many are conversions of old prison fortresses built by traditional rulers. Till today our criminal justice system is based, like our British benefactors’ criminal justice system was, on a Retributive or Punitive theory of justice where the punishment fits the crime committed.
The Cost of the Finest Criminal Justice in the World
The American criminal justice system, perhaps one of the most robust and efficient at detecting and punishing crime is based on largely the same idea of justice. Today it has 2.3 million inmates (that is roughly the same population as Botswana). Each single imprisoned inmate costs the American government between $14,286- $60,076 per year to maintain. More than 36% of those male inmates are black African American and statistics collected by America’s hundreds of adult incarceration facilities shows that 77% of those adults who are put in prison reoffend within 5 years. And yet the US because it is one of the most sophisticated criminal justice systems in the world is able to continue to detect, try and imprison those who break the law.
Breaking Numbers
However, even with its strong capabilities to detect and investigate crime and with its expansive penal system infrastructure valued at $72 billion (i.e. nearly four times Nigeria’s entire national budget or some 371% of it), the American public is gradually becoming exasperated by the cost of keeping prisoners incarcerated. As Adam Foss said, with a cost of $109,000 for locking up young offenders and a 60% chance of re-offending “That is a terrible return on investment”. What you soon realise is that these numbers do not make sense. The most efficient criminal justice system in the world is built on an unsustainable premise, that every offender must be imprisoned.
Lessons to Learn from the American System
Lets go back to Christopher the teenager to be charged with 30 counts of Larceny, we learn a number of important facts. Firstly poverty and a lack of education is a significant determinant in the rate of offending. This means that those parts of the population suffering low literacy rates or little formal education i.e. black adults, black boys are especially at risk of offending. Secondly a criminal record significantly affects a young person’s ability to secure education at secondary and tertiary levels or a job, which in turn increases the likelihood of offending and imprisonment. We also learn that prosecutors, including ours here at home are trained to detect the likelihood of success in their prosecutions. Therefore they are motivated by their prosecution statistics i.e. the higher the conviction rate the better a prosecutor, the more likely a conviction is the more motivation to prosecute.
The prosecutor’s motivation therefore leads to the continuously swelling American prison system that exists today because the object of the system is to punish offenders. What is wrong with that you may say? At first glance nothing. It is justice for an offender to be punished of course, but what we do not see is that the system therefore places priority on detection and imprisonment rather than preventing crime. In a system where all the focus is on catching and punishing criminals, crime becomes a repetitive cycle as we see with the Black American population-lack of education leads to crime and crime leads to more lack of education.
Changing the Status Quo
So what do we do? We learn the lesson Adam Foss learnt. You see instead of charging Christopher with 30 counts of Larceny, which would have sent a young naïve teenager to an adult penitentiary where he would have inevitably become more embroiled in more severe crime, Adam Foss didn’t. Instead he began to work with Christopher “first on being accountable for his actions, and then, putting him in a position where he wouldn't re-offend.” They were able to get back 75% of the computers that Christopher sold and gave them back and arranged a payment plan for those he could not retrieve.
Six years later, while Adam was at a professional gathering a young man across the room from him was waving and smiling at him. The young man walked over and hugged Adam. He then introduced himself as Christopher. He had in the six years past become a manager of a large bank in Boston, all because someone cared enough to stop and pay attention to the ever-recurring cycle. By deciding not to charge, Christopher Adam had changed his life. He did not go to prison, or get a criminal record which meant he was able to go to University and be a productive member of society who was now giving back to it.
So Why is All This Important?
Looking critically at the Retributive justice legal theory we currently aspire to i.e. our aspiration to be able to detect, investigate and incarcerate offenders in a way that caters to the current sociocultural priorities of ensuring impunity and graft have consequences, we can see in the example of the best system in the world based on the same premise, that it is a gradually unsustainable premise. We are all learning that it is no longer enough simply to detect, investigate and punish crime, we must now actively begin to prevent it at the source and rehabilitate offenders. Last week the there were reports of the establishment of a new criminal records database for Nigeria to enable a nationwide record system. Of course such systems should be in place, however they cater to the symptoms of the problem not the wider epidemic.
We need to shift from the punitive focus in our prisons to a value based behavioural reorientation where priority is placed on removing the factors that increase the risk of offending- lack of education and poverty. Prisons need to become more like tertiary institutions where Prison officers are equipped with the training and skill to evaluate the history, of inmates and propose reorientation programs that positively impact their psyche and decision making process. If we do not and we keep treating them like the holding houses for the hardening of criminals and the cesspit of the “condemned” that is exactly what they will remain. We all ought to realise quickly, before it is too late, how much less safe we on the outside will be when those doors are opened.