I agree this issue is part of the larger trend you're talking about, but we absolutely can start to address the imbalance of resource allocation in the criminal justice system without solving the underlying economic disparities, which are a generational challenge. With growing awareness of inequalities throughout this system, articles like this highlight some simple changes we could make to make the system a bit less unfair. In this case, it's simply a few more lawyers and investigators.
Shoring up the system with lawyers and investigators doesn't change the fact that those who can't afford professional representation are getting second-tier justice. Period.
Similarly, raising the minimum wage (for example) will never change the fact that there are vast, lucrative swathes of the economy that are and always will be unavailable to those without lots of spare capital. Period.
They're not getting second-tier justice. Second-tier justice would be fine by them.
They're getting seventh-tier justice. Caseloads that average a single attorney-hour. 98% plea rates. Victimless crimes. Police departments known to fabricate evidence and permitted to persecute, detain, & search with no cause. Years between arrest and trial. Prohibitive bail money. Confiscation of what savings they have to pay a lawyer, on grounds that it's connected to a crime. Tracking of all their communications. A tolerated culture of prison violence. "Stop resisting". Asset forfeiture. Sentence lengths that shock the world.
We don't need to fix all economic inequality to fix these things, because there are other times in our history and other places in the world that have drastically less of these problems, without fixing economic inequality.
The drug war didn't just throw 1% of our population in prison, to satisfy those needs it completely hollowed out due process; You need to have a wealthy family behind you at this point to experience due process as envisioned by the reformers that established it; If you live in the wrong neighborhood and have the wrong color skin no amount of money will pay for it.
End the drug war entirely. End vice prosecutions. Focus on victimful crimes.
Increase the funds PD's get to the level DA's get. A PD's got a lot more to do than a DA, because the DA has police officers behind it feeding it cases. Funding parity is a Schelling Point.
Stop electing DA's, stop electing judges, stop electing sheriffs; "Tough on crime" is the only campaign strategy these people use, and it's implied to mean "Harsher than was the case last year". That outcome ceases to be remotely just after a few years.
Enfranchise felons with voting rights. The reasoning that they're incapable of voting correctly stems directly from racial persecution.
Cameras everywhere.
Training in conflict de-escalation, like the rest of the world's police forces.
Reduce the prison sentences you give out substantially, and drastically increase spending on the crime-avoidance strategies we pilloried as bleeding-heart liberal ideas. Turns out the most strongly supported finding in criminology is that they work a lot better than increased sentencing.
With the savings from all this prison reduction, build prisons that don't inflict trauma on their prisoners, don't require violence to survive in, and most importantly, don't require joining an organized criminal enterprise, a prison gang, to be comfortable in. Gangs destroy what little benefit you get from imprisoning people.
With what's left over, shift resources away from SWAT & drug enforcement, and towards dramatic increases in the size of the detective force. Higher capture rates beat longer sentences at deterring crime by a very large factor.
Rebuild at least parts of the public mental health system that we shut down completely in the 70's.
Specifying a solution is easy; that's a purely technical exercise. The hard problem is figuring out how we get from where we are now (A) to where we want to go (B); that's a political problem.
Admittedly based on anecdotes, the public defenders I have met are highly-educated, committed, creative professionals who typically choose this profession because they see the same structural forces but believe they can make a difference at the individual level. These are not second-tier individuals. If we give them the tools, resources, and support they need to actually do their job then there is no doubt in mind this would be a positive, albeit small, step in the right direction.
I'm sure most public defenders are marvelous public servants.
But are you arguing that those who are forced to use the PD because they can't afford a lawyer are getting the same deal as someone hiring a professional defense team?
