Without question, the American justice system punishes families long before it decides guilt. Most judges and prosecutors know and understand this and rather than challenge the status quo, they go through the motions anyway, and many times, make things worse than they have to be. And on the outside, it never affects them directly, because they get to keep their jobs no matter the harm they unleash and the complete destruction it causes.
To those of us watching it unfold, it’s unfathomable; who could knowingly do this to their own community? Despite what its actors tell themselves, the criminal justice system does not merely “adjudicate guilt”; it economically devastates people who cannot afford fines, fees, or bail conditions, escalating legal involvement and destabilizing employment, housing, and family.
Recognized as the criminalization of poverty, this phenomenon occurs not because people are dangerous, but because inability to pay is treated as defiance or disrespect rather than addressing it as the structural barrier it actually is.
And despite knowing this, we find judges throwing fits because defendants can’t afford gas or transportation to appear in their court. They become angry because a homeless person without an address didn’t receive a summons and as a result, didn’t show up. Framing someone’s economic disadvantage as a slight against them and “disrespect toward the court.” They put their ego front and center before realizing that statistically, the people in front of them are fighting everyday for survival; financial and otherwise. But how long can anyone keep the mental gymnastics up? How long before humanity seeps in?
Heavy is the head that wears the crown. But how heavy is the heart that carries out horrific acts of injustice? As a result, there’s a facet to all of this that we may not see: the legal system isn’t just breaking defendants. It’s quietly breaking the people running it, too.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Lawyers struggle with substance abuse at rates that should alarm everyone. A landmark 2016 study by the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation and the American Bar Association found that roughly 21% of licensed attorneys qualify as problem drinkers—nearly double the rate in the general population. Another 28% struggle with depression, 19% with anxiety, and 23% with stress. These aren’t minor statistical blips; they represent thousands of legal professionals self-medicating just to make it through their workday.
The Journal of Addiction Medicine published the full study, which surveyed nearly 13,000 currently practicing attorneys. The researchers found that younger attorneys and those in the first ten years of practice showed even higher rates of problem drinking and depression. The pattern is clear: the longer you work in this system, the more damage it does.
Judges fare no better. Studies find that judges experience similar patterns of alcohol misuse and mental health struggles. Judges also experience depression and anxiety at rates comparable to attorneys, coupled with the added weight of making life-altering decisions daily while maintaining an appearance of impartiality.
Without question, the psychological toll of this work is staggering, yet we’ve built a system that pretends these are just professionals who lack resilience rather than people drowning in the wake of institutional dysfunction.
It’s not a coincidence, nor is it weakness. It’s what happens when you force human beings to operate a machine designed to chew people up.
Working in a System That Demands You Harm People
Imagine going to work every day knowing your decisions will separate children from parents, will cost someone their job, will push a family into homelessness, and being told this is just how it works. That there’s no alternative. That you should feel good about “upholding the law” while watching the human wreckage pile up.
Now imagine doing that for years. Decades.
Research on moral injury, a term originally used to describe the psychological damage experienced by combat veterans who participate in or witness actions that violate their moral code, increasingly applies to legal professionals. A 2022 study published in the International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice examined prosecutors working in child abuse cases and found they face a wide range of occupational stressors including heavy caseloads, exposure to traumatic material, lack of organizational support, and the emotional demands of their work, all contributing to high rates of burnout and psychological distress.
Prosecutors face enormous pressure to maintain conviction rates and appear “tough on crime.” Defense attorneys watch clients destroyed by pretrial detention they can’t afford to fight. Judges navigate impossible caseloads while bound by mandatory minimums and sentencing guidelines that strip away discretion and humanity. Everyone involved becomes a cog in a machine that damages people as a matter of routine business.
The cognitive dissonance is crushing. You went to law school to pursue justice, and instead you’re participating in a system that punishes poverty, that treats allegations as guilt, that considers children’s suffering an acceptable cost of doing business.
So you drink. Or you pop pills. Or you work yourself into burnout and call it dedication. Because the only alternative is admitting you’re part of something fundamentally broken, and that’s a truth most people can’t live with while still showing up to work.
So you lie to survive.
The Pretrial Punishment Machine
The damage starts immediately. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, people in jail have a median annual income of $19,185 prior to incarceration—less than half that of non-incarcerated people. Someone gets arrested, can’t afford bail, loses their job within days because they can’t show up. Research from the Stanford Law Review shows that people held in pretrial detention were about 43% more likely to be sentenced to jail and received significantly longer sentences than similarly situated defendants who were released pretrial. Another study by the Wisconsin Criminal Justice Council found that defendants who remained in jail the entire pretrial period were over four times more likely to be sentenced to prison compared with those released before trial.
The damage starts fast. Research published by the U.S. Courts shows that as detention days accumulate, the likelihood of employment disruption and job loss rises sharply, with losses increasing significantly once people are held beyond the first several days. For many low-level cases, that disruption is not hypothetical. Human Rights Watch reports that people who cannot afford bail routinely spend an average of nearly two weeks in jail while still legally innocent, even for non-felony charges.
Even short jail stays can trigger cascading instability. A national analysis found that brief periods of incarceration can make it impossible to keep a job, pay rent or a mortgage, or even meet basic family obligations.
And the housing fallout is not anecdotal. The New York City Criminal Justice Agency reports that pretrial detention is associated with loss of employment and an increased likelihood of homelessness, even when controlling for charge type and prior history.
By the time the case is resolved, the punishment has already landed. The system can demolish a person’s stability before it ever proves guilt.
In fact, defendants detained pretrial are significantly more likely to be convicted than similarly situated defendants who are released, primarily because detention weakens their bargaining position and increases the likelihood of pleading guilty. Pretrial detention equates to harsh outcomes way before guilt is established, illustrating how detention itself functions as a punishment and disadvantage in the criminal justice process.
And the people running this system see it happen over and over. They know what pretrial detention does. They know that cash bail is just a wealth test. They know that court dates scheduled without regard for work or childcare create impossible choices for families. They know, and most of them do it anyway because “that’s the system” and they shrug it off.
How do you live with that knowledge and maintain any sense of moral clarity? How do you look at yourself in the mirror when you’ve just ordered someone held on bail you know they can’t pay, knowing their kids will suffer, knowing they’ll probably lose everything even if they’re eventually acquitted?
You don’t. Not without chemical help or psychological compartmentalization so severe it qualifies as dissociation.
The Isolation of Knowing
Here’s the really insidious part: judges and prosecutors often can’t even talk about what they’re experiencing. The 2016 ABA study found that despite high rates of mental health problems and substance use, only 3.5% of lawyers sought help for alcohol use, and only 5.7% sought help for depression. Stigma and confidentiality concerns were cited as major barriers.
Judges are expected to maintain an appearance of impartiality and emotional distance. Prosecutors are part of a culture that valorizes toughness and treats doubt as weakness. Prosecutorial culture often means admitting uncertainty or expressing concern about the human costs of prosecution is viewed as weakness or unsuitability for the role.
Admitting that the work is psychologically damaging, that you’re struggling with what you’re being asked to do, can end careers. So people suffer in silence. They self-medicate. They develop anxiety and depression that goes untreated because seeking help might raise questions about their fitness for the bench or their ability to handle the job. But in turn, they also receive significant grace that is not afforded to the average person, receiving shorter sentences, if they receive one at all.
Research on secondary traumatic stress shows that legal professionals (particularly those working in criminal justice) experience trauma symptoms similar to direct victims of trauma through repeated exposure to their clients’ traumatic experiences and the harm inflicted by the system itself. The system protects itself by ensuring that the people who might reform it are either too broken to try or too afraid to speak up.
Breaking the Cycle
The substance abuse and mental health crisis among legal professionals is a symptom, not the disease. The disease in question, is a justice system that treats human suffering as a completely acceptable byproduct of its operation. That forces people to choose between their conscience and their career. That punishes families first and asks questions later, if ever.
There are documented successful alternatives to cash bail that maintain court appearance rates while minimizing harm to defendants and their families. Jurisdictions that have eliminated cash bail have not seen increases in crime or failure to appear rates, demonstrating that the harm inflicted by pretrial detention is wholly unnecessary.
We can’t fix the mental health crisis among lawyers and judges without fixing the system that’s breaking them. That means ending cash bail, ensuring pretrial services don’t destroy lives, swift and sure accountability for prosecutors and judges who intentionally inflict unnecessary harm.
It means acknowledging that the current system isn’t really justice at all; it’s violence dressed up in procedure.
And it means recognizing that when we celebrate prosecutors for high conviction rates or judges for being “tough,” we’re celebrating people who’ve learned to shut off their humanity; to ignore human suffering, including their own. That’s not leadership. That’s the survival mechanisms required to function within a system that grinds down everyone it touches.
The families being destroyed by pretrial punishment deserve better. The lawyers and judges drowning in substance abuse and depression deserve better. We all deserve a system that doesn’t require people to break themselves or others to function.
Until we build that, we’re all just casualties of a machine that was never designed to produce justice in the first place.
Additional Reading and Sources
Mental Health and Substance Abuse Among Legal Professionals
- Krill, P. R., Johnson, R., & Albert, L. (2016). “The Prevalence of Substance Use and Other Mental Health Concerns Among American Attorneys.” Journal of Addiction Medicine, 10(1), 46-52.
- American Bar Association. (2016). “New Study Affirms High Rates of Problem Drinking, Mental Health Issues Among Lawyers.”
- Swenson, David, PhD, LF; Bibelhausen, Joan, JD, Buchanan, Bree, MSF, JD; Hon. Shaheed, David; Yetter, Katheryn. “Stress and Resiliency in the US Judiciary,” Journal of The Professional Lawyer, American Bar Association, 2020. .
- National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being. (2017). “The Path to Lawyer Well-Being: Practical Recommendations for Positive Change.“ American Bar Association.
Pretrial Detention and Its Consequences
- Rabuy, B., & Kopf, D. (2016). “Detaining the Poor: How Money Bail Perpetuates an Endless Cycle of Poverty and Jail Time.” Prison Policy Initiative.
