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Ideas on Criminal Justice

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

Conor Friedersdorf was kind of enough to interview me for my thoughts on criminal justice reform for his new Ideas blog at The Atlantic.

Here’s part one.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 9:32 am by Radley Balko and is filed under General Criminal Justice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Ideas on Criminal Justice”

  1. #1 |  MDGuy |  June 16th, 2009 at 9:58 am

    Way to go Radley, your points were all excellent and well-said. I think you really hit the nail on the head – our system has incentivized so much destructive and unjust behavior. I’m looking forward to the rest of the interview.

  2. #2 |  packratt |  June 16th, 2009 at 11:42 am

    Good piece, can’t wait to see the rest of it. (darn cliffhangers)

    Though, I wonder, if part of the problem is all the attention paid to crime statistics and numbers… does that make what I’m doing by trying to track police misconduct statistics the wrong approach to the problem?

    It’s something that a few others have already suggested, so it’s an honest question.

  3. #3 |  Tokin42 |  June 16th, 2009 at 2:20 pm

    Good start to an interview. What I’d like to see is this argument on display before congress.

  4. #4 |  Nick T |  June 16th, 2009 at 4:12 pm

    @2
    “does that make what I’m doing by trying to track police misconduct statistics the wrong approach to the problem?”

    Not necessarily. Statistics is certainly not good in terms of police and prosecutors whose job it is to administer justice and protect and respect people’s rights, as well as enforce and punish crime. When you take someone who has a job that involves a lot of judgment, and track how many times they come out on one side, you obviously incentivize those types of results. Police abuse probably can be fairly assesed by counting things such as citizien complaints or criminal charges.

    To anaologize, if you want to figure out how good a basketball player, his points per game average is a good place to start, but referees shouldn’t be judged by how many fouls they call.

  5. #5 |  Marty |  June 16th, 2009 at 4:19 pm

    ‘To anaologize, if you want to figure out how good a basketball player, his points per game average is a good place to start, but referees shouldn’t be judged by how many fouls they call.’

    excellent analogy!

  6. #6 |  supercat |  June 18th, 2009 at 12:56 am

    IMHO, what is perhaps most needed is for the government to start holding cops and government agents to at least as high a standard as ordinary people. If the government won’t obey its own laws, why should anyone else?

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