In the past, I have received my fair share of emails from families who have been deeply impacted and harmed by the criminal legal and family court systems. Both systems are meat-grinders; far too many people go in one way, and come out completely shredded and raw. Obviously, this outcome is not good for anyone; we just don’t really talk about it like we should.
I personally would like to believe that short of a cognitive impairment or a substantial personality defect, most prosecutors and judges do not wake up wanting to intentionally hurt people and their communities.
But many still send human beings into systems they know are violent, degrading, destabilizing, and often criminogenic. They do it while telling themselves they are doing justice. A contradiction of that magnitude does not sit quietly in the brain; it has to be managed.
And that management process has a name; it is called cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is what happens when a person holds two incompatible truths at the same time. For example:
- “I am a fair and ethical decision-maker.”
- “I am sending people into a system that predictably causes harm.”
The brain cannot tolerate that tension for long, so it resolves it by changing the story.
The Science in Plain Language
Psychologists have known for decades that when people are required to participate in harm under authority, they rarely change the behavior. Instead they will change the narrative.
They convince themselves:
- the person deserves it
- the harm is necessary
- the law leaves no choice
- or that someone else is responsible
This is not necessarily about cruelty; it is about survival. A mind protecting itself from the fact that they just disrupted a person’s life or destroyed a family. That they crushed someone’s future in some way. This is a mind that had to fully feel the weight of what mass incarceration does would not be able to keep functioning inside it.
So it builds armor.
How This Shows Up in Prosecutors
Prosecutors control the gateway to punishment.
They choose what to charge, evidence to emphasize, and what sentence to recommend. They know exactly what prison does. And yet they tell themselves:
- “I am protecting the community.”
- “They chose this.”
- “I do not decide the outcome.”
These are not at all neutral statements; they are cognitive defenses. They allow a person to feel moral while participating in a system that routinely destroys lives. How else would someone want to get up and go to work everyday otherwise?
How This Shows Up in Judges
Judges face the same psychological tension, with even more power.
They see the defendant.
They hear the family.
They know what the sentence means.
…And then they impose it anyway, and sometimes, they may even exceed it. To live with that, judges build stories too:
- “My hands are tied.”
- “The guidelines made me do it.”
- “This is what accountability looks like.”
- “There has to be punishment.”
- “I am just applying the law.”
But the law is not self-executing. Judgeschoose how to interpret, how to weigh, how to depart, how to individualize. Prosecutors choose what to charge. They are not unwilling participants; they applied for these jobs. Cognitive dissonance affords them buffer; it allows them to pretend that their discretion is not the key part to all of this. That it does not exist.
Why Dissonance Hardens Over Time
Here is the cruelest part: the longer someone has been sending people to prison, the harder it becomes to admit that some of those decisions were wrong. They become increasingly numb, because to feel it would mean accepting their role in inflicting years of unnecessary harm.
So the mind tightens its grip.
Defendants become more “monstrous.”
Mercy becomes more “dangerous.”
Doubt becomes “weakness.”
This is not because judges or prosecutors are bad, but because the human brain is wired to protect itself from unbearable moral injury.
The Brain’s Emergency Brake on Moral Injury
The human brain is not wired to sit calmly with unbearable harm. When someone’s job requires them to hurt other people, especially people who are innocent, vulnerable, or powerless, the brain activates its own emergency protection system. Psychologists call this moral injury. It is the psychological wound that forms when a person knows they are participating in something that violates their core sense of right and wrong.
To survive that kind of internal conflict, the brain does not usually choose accountability. It chooses anesthesia. It dulls empathy, reshapes memory, and rewrites intent so the person can keep functioning. It is a neurological defense against collapse. When people cannot escape a harmful role, their brains adapt by changing how they see the people they are hurting.
That is where cognitive distortion takes hold. Defendants stop being humans and become case numbers. Families become “noise.” Trauma becomes “noncompliance.” Once that mental shift happens, cruelty no longer feels cruel. It feels necessary. The system rewards this numbness with promotions, praise, and professional survival.
This is why people inside punitive systems often sound so certain they are doing the right thing even while destroying lives. Their brains are protecting them from the psychological cost of knowing they are not.
But neurological self-protection does not make someone safe to wield power over others. When judges, prosecutors, or officials rely on emotional shutdown and distorted reasoning to cope with moral injury, they are no longer making clear, humane, reality-based decisions. They are protecting themselves, not the public.
And that is why cognitive fitness is not a luxury in the justice system. It is a safeguard against the quiet ways the brain learns to excuse harm.
What this Does to Justice
When cognitive dissonance takes over, it destroys curiosity and accountability, removing the guardrails for humanity and decency:
- A prosecutor stops asking if a charge is fair.
- A judge stops asking if a sentence is proportional.
- The system stops seeing people.
So punishment becomes automatic, stories replace evidence, and harm becomes normalized.
Why Fit Bench Matters Here, Too
My proposed Fit Bench framework is not only about cognitive decline. It is also about psychological drift under power.
When decision-makers lose the ability to reflect on the consequences of their actions, when they become emotionally rigid, legally uncurious, or procedurally indifferent, that is a form of impairment. Not medical, but functional.
Fit Bench creates a system where:
- extreme sentencing patterns
- habitual guideline departures
- emotional volatility
- and procedural breakdowns
are no longer invisible.
Data breaks dissonance; evidence interrupts the stories people tell themselves and the harm they inflict.
The Bottom Line
Most judges and prosecutors believe they are good people. And I would really, genuinely like to believe that many of them are.
But good people inside harmful systems still do harm and cognitive dissonance is how they survive it.
Justice will not improve until we build systems that force honesty and accountability back into the room.
