Hardly the first time I've posted about the criminal justice system, but then, it's a topic that I think deserves a lot of attention. The ways in which it doesn't really produce fair or desirable results are myriad and fairly well documented, but discussions on the topic tend to founder on exactly who's responsible, why they're doing it, and whether doing something about it will make us less safe.
This post about what reasonable doubt means (the entire series is good, by the way) includes one particular point that I think is extremely relevant: "A justice system should want one thing and one thing only: the prevention of more people becoming victims of crime." This question of exactly what we want our justice system to do can have a significant impact on how we design it and where we spend our time and money.
There are a lot of people who argue that the proper purpose of the justice system is to ensure that criminals are captured and punished, but I think that's incomplete, at best. It's tempting to argue that some great ideal should drive us to ensure that those who do good in the world are rewarded and those who do evil should be punished, but if we really wanted to do that, there'd be a lot of other ways we'd be spending our time and money besides just designing a system to accomplish the latter. The other option is to justify the system's existence in utilitarian terms... which basically requires it to actually have a positive effect like reducing crime.
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