Actions aimed at fixing errors and making necessary or desirable changes in the criminal justice system
3 Biggest Challenges To The Criminal Justice System Today
Numerous issues, such as recurrent violent crime in cities, cybercrime, and addiction, beset our criminal justice system. Crime reduction, rehabilitation, and fair justice continue to suffer in the US due to an antiquated and unequal criminal justice system.
Numerous justice structures throughout the industry are saddled with excessive caseloads and suffer from a lack of suitable financial and human resources. This leads to a variety of issues with the legal system, including:
- Extreme levels of impunity
- Delays in justice administration and management
- Pretrial detention is used excessively and for too long
- Improper use of the available sentencing choices
- Jails that are overcrowded and unable to perform their rehabilitation role
- Offenders who repeatedly commit crimes
For the sake of this post, however, we’ll focus on the top three challenges to the criminal justice system that directly affects the public. They are violence against women, violence against children, and the lack of victim protection and support.
Violence Against Women
The amount of violence against women in the globe today, regardless of the state of progress, is dangerously high. A few different types of crime, including intimate partner abuse, sexual assault, harassment, human trafficking for sexual exploitation, child marriage, and female genital mutilation, take physical, sexual, and mental forms.
Worldwide, one in three women has enjoyed physical or sexual abuse, usually at the hands of a close friend or partner. One in every three female murder victims is slain by their accomplice or a member of their own family.
Violence against women and children is no longer seen as a serious crime in many communities, and as a result, it goes undetected and is not addressed by the legal system. This is despite their detrimental and long-lasting effects on the health, fitness, and safety of women and girls and their families and communities.
Collaboration between the social, police, legal, and health sectors is essential for ensuring that patients are included and supported.
Violence Against Children
A major threat to sustainable development, violence affects hundreds of millions of children worldwide, cutting beyond culture, class, education, income level, and ethnic basis. Children have the right to protection against physical, emotional, and psychological injury and abuse.
States are expected to take all necessary steps to ensure that children who are victims of violence recover physically and mentally and may reintegrate into society. States shall also ensure that children are protected from torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading practices in all circumstances.
They may no longer be held in adult prisons during conflict; imprisonment should only be used as a last option. Additionally, the goal of any judicial intervention should be to help them reintegrate into society.
Children who have experienced violence may not have the skills necessary to vindicate their rights because they may not get the proper correctional assistance, knowledge of legal procedures, or access to health care.
Victim Protection and Support
Criminal justice systems frequently fail to adequately serve crime victims. To prevent secondary victimization, revictimization, and increase incident reporting, victim aid and safety must be improved.
Another factor that might increase the protection of crime victims is access to prison services. It is crucial for female offenders since they typically originate from disadvantaged and marginalized backgrounds.
Criminal justice systems must carefully balance the needs for safety and security that groups and societies have, the needs for justice and reparation that victims have, and the need to keep offenders accountable while also ensuring their rehabilitation, social reintegration, and a reduction in recidivism.
Access to justice for everyone and maintaining efficient, accountable, and inclusive criminal justice systems are essential to long-term progress and are addressed by Sustainable Development Goal 16.
That’s Not All
When they are detained, 50% to 80% of males tested positive for narcotics. As a result, drug use and criminal activities have become intertwined. Currently, determining the ramifications of this is a major task.
Is it true that if we don’t jail individuals for drug use, it becomes less of a problem? According to the most recent information available, there were 2 million criminals jailed in the US and nearly 7 million persons under supervision. We must ascertain the cause of this.
More than just the criminals are impacted by this problem. It has significant effects on people inside and outside of the communities where the atrocities were committed.
