10: Current Issues in U.S. Criminal Justice
Image description: United States map covered by American flag
Image credit: “USA Flag Map” by Lokal_Profil is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5.
Learning Objectives
This chapter introduces students to current issues challenging the Criminal Justice System in the United States. It also discusses newly developed challenges in Cybercrime and Terrorism and touches on introduces students to the Department of Homeland Security. After reading this chapter, students will be able to:
- Define Transcarceration and Recidivism
- Specify the role mental health is playing in the criminal justice system
- Define Terrorism and Counterterrorism
- Recognize the complexities of Cybercrime
- Identify the responsibilities of the Department of Homeland Security
Weaving together threads presented throughout this text, this section will focus largely on the long-term crisis in U.S. prisons and jails – a result of a “punitive turn” that is now a half-century old, but refuses to fade. While the past decade has been dotted with sporadic attempts to roll-back draconian sentencing and teeming prisons, the impacts of such reforms has been modest. Moreover, state and federal governments have failed to address the collateral damage(s) of mass incarceration, as well as the social-structural problems continue to fuel it: recurrent drug epidemics, shifting forms of organized crime, a decaying social safety net, and a national struggle to treat mental illness. You have likely seen some of the terms, charts, and statistics shown in the chapters that follow; if so, please consider why such stark data – if widely known – fails to mobilize change, and why our culture continues to emphasize punishment over all else.
The data will show us that mass punishment has not worked, so why do we remain oriented toward retribution?
Background Knowledge Probe: Each chapter will begin by assessing your current knowledge about different criminal justice topics. Each of these topics will be covered by the chapter – meaning that you should be able to answer them correctly after you have completed the reading. All definitions can be seen by clicking on the bolded vocabulary terms in each chapter.
Please drag and drop the correct answer in the blank space provided. This is an ungraded exercise, but you may want to record which questions you answer incorrectly, so that you can verify that your knowledge has improved by the end of the chapter.
Infliction of punishment on those who deserve to be punished
