Why do we execute the innocent and celebrate criminal police?

Crime
Why do we convict innocent people? We punish innocent people with the death penalty and it happens regularly because justice isn’t perfect. If criminal justice was perfect we wouldn’t have to call it a system but my point here isn’t merely philosophical. Why do we not punish those who hurt innocent people when they’re behind a badge or a corporation or some other entity which seems to exist absent of criminality? There is an answer to this question, my point is not rhetorical.

Why does the system only seem to punish some offenders of crime and why does it so rarely make good to those whom the system harms or are harmed through some form of corruption? The reason is that an individual intention is hard to prove. If a person is motivated by racist feelings, how does one prove that? Even if statistics show that an entire police force, an entire criminal justice system for that matter disproportionately targets certain ethnic or cultural backgrounds, who do you punish?

Our system is designed to produce change in members of our society through crime and punishment. If an error is systemic, if the racism is systemic, then the system has to be put on trial. However, no one has the authority to put the system on trial even when laws are created by politicians who we know have lied and were corrupt. The solution is not to grant that power to one person or one body and call it The Supreme Court, no, we must write into the system a declaration that serves the greater good of society. We must give the criminal justice system the ability to put itself on trial not based around a single case but based around the very purpose of the system itself, the law’s effectiveness to reduce instances of crime.

This might seem like hogwash and that’s because the very idea of a trial has lost all meaning in the modern criminal justice system. Guilt or innocence is not meant to be the purpose of a trial but truth and meaning is. Through the examination of facts and motives the desired outcome is to produce a timeline of the events which surround the crime so as to assess the appropriate punishment or declare that the individual did not commit a crime at all. Yet when prisons are festering with corruption, crime, and all the moral failings one would only expect from hell itself then there can only be one affect, deleterious. In this sense, even the guilty are innocent before they become familiar with prison, afterward they’re merely insane.

It’s this logic, which manifests a nightmarish prison environment for everyone involved that simultaneously fails to condemn those white collar criminals, corporate criminals, and criminal police. Our complacency and the complacency inherent in a system which feeds off of civilians with ever increasing rates of recidivism, an ever widening prison population, and an ever decreasing degree of justice has allowed such a place to be manufactured for millions of our countrymen to endure. One day we will have to change the way we deal with crime. We cannot maintain a system which fails to punish those it condemns by removing them from society and placing them into a situation wherein there’s increasing evidence that our society is wrong. Or to put it another way, what good is it to remove a person from public society if they are placed somewhere without any tangible social order? When we fail to punish those who commit crimes which cause harm to the public good there is no social order to protect.