Nobody Asked for This

The criminal legal system does not rehabilitate, restore, or resolve. It processes. And everyone who passes through it pays a price they did not agree to.

I have been in enough courtrooms, read enough case files, and sat across enough tables from enough different people to say this plainly: I have never met anyone who was glad the criminal legal system entered their life. Not a single person. Not victims. Not people who caused harm. Not the families who had nothing to do with any of it and got processed alongside them anyway.

That is not an emotional statement. It is an observational one. And the research, when you actually read it, says the same thing.

The criminal legal system is not experienced as justice by the people who pass through it. It is experienced as damage. That holds whether the person is a crime victim pressing charges, a defendant serving time, a child whose parent was taken, or a mother trying to visit a son through layers of institutional obstruction. The experience differs in form. The outcome, the sense of being ground up by something that did not care about you, is consistent.

This piece is about why.

What the System Promises and What It Delivers

The system sells itself as a mechanism for justice, deterrence, and public safety. Those are the terms. What it actually delivers, for most people in most cases, is process without resolution. Procedure without repair. Punishment without any measurable connection to the harm that preceded it.

Contact with the criminal legal system is framed publicly as either deserved (for those who caused harm) or necessary (for those who experienced it). What that framing obscures is that both of those framings place the burden of the system’s costs on the people who are least able to refuse the contact and least equipped to absorb the consequences.

What Happens to Victims

Let me be specific about something that is rarely said clearly in accountability journalism: the criminal legal system is not designed around victims. It is designed around the state’s interest in punishing conduct. Victims are witnesses. Their role in the process is to provide testimony that the state can use. The outcome of that process is not, and has never been, primarily about what the victim needs.

Research on secondary victimization, the documented harm caused to crime victims by the legal process itself, bears this out consistently. A study examining 137 victims of violent crimes who had been involved in criminal trials found that a high proportion reported overall negative effects from the proceedings. Damage to trust in the legal system and damage to faith in a just world were among the strongest findings, stronger than effects on self-esteem or general coping. The legal process, in other words, tends to compound the original harm rather than address it.

Research on sexual assault survivors finds that negative responses from law enforcement during initial reporting actively deter victims from reporting future crimes. Studies show that survivors who were not believed when they first reported experienced not only distrust of the justice system but lasting harm to their wellbeing and their capacity to find any resolution. Cross-examination, a structural feature of the adversarial process, has been described by a significant portion of domestic violence victims as adversarial and retraumatizing.

The result is a system that most victims of violent crime decline to enter at all. Research indicates that only about a quarter of victims of violent crime report incidents to police, with lack of confidence in being taken seriously and fear of retraumatization among the documented reasons. The system built to protect victims operates, in practice, as something many victims rationally choose to avoid.

That is not a failure of individual actors. That is the structure producing the predictable outcome of its design.

What Happens to People Who Caused Harm

There is a version of the accountability argument that says: the system is hard on people who caused harm because it is supposed to be. Consequences are the point. I understand that argument. I do not find it sufficient when the consequences in question bear no discernible relationship to the harm caused or any mechanism of repair.

The formal sentence, the period of incarceration or supervision, is only the beginning. The National Inventory of Collateral Consequences of Conviction has catalogued nearly 44,000 state and federal legal sanctions that attach to a criminal record. These are not punishments imposed by a judge at sentencing. They are automatic, largely invisible, and often permanent consequences that govern whether a person can work, rent an apartment, vote, receive public benefits, hold a professional license, or access education. Nearly 80 percent of them are permanent, meaning they do not expire when the sentence does.

The stated purposes of criminal punishment include rehabilitation and reintegration. Those purposes collide directly with a legal architecture that makes reintegration structurally impossible for many people. You cannot pay restitution without income. You cannot stabilize without housing. You cannot access education when student aid is barred. The system articulates goals of reentry and then constructs legal barriers to every pathway that makes reentry possible.

I am not arguing that consequences for harm should not exist. I am noting that the consequences the system actually delivers bear so little relationship to repair, accountability, or any workable theory of reintegration that they function primarily as permanent exclusion.

What Happens to Families

This is the category of harm that receives the least institutional attention, because the people it affects have the fewest procedural rights within the system and the least political standing to demand them.

The families of incarcerated people, and in particular the children, did not cause the harm that triggered their contact with the system. They are, in the language of researchers at Washington University, the collateral damage of the criminal justice system in a very real and tangible way. They experience that damage with no legal recognition as affected parties, no formal services, and no remedy.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has found that children with incarcerated parents are exposed to nearly five times as many adverse childhood experiences as their peers. The CDC links adverse childhood experiences to a range of outcomes that persist into adulthood: dropping out of school, chronic health problems, mental illness, and substance use. Research on parental incarceration finds that children of incarcerated fathers experience a 22 percent average drop in family income during the period of their father’s imprisonment, a financial disruption that continues after release because of the collateral consequences that bar employment and stable housing.

A meta-analysis of 40 studies on children of incarcerated parents found that antisocial behaviors were present more consistently than any other documented factor, including mental health issues and substance use. The system that processed the parent produces a next generation of contact with that same system, and the cycle is not accidental. It is the documented, measured output of the design.

Partners of incarcerated people face financial strains, emotional isolation, and navigating an institutional apparatus that is not built for human access. Approximately 80 percent of incarcerated women have experienced some form of trauma before their incarceration, and correctional facilities generally lack the infrastructure to address it. The barriers to contact between incarcerated mothers and their children, high phone costs, restricted visiting hours, physical distance, are structural features, not oversights.

What Money Buys and What It Doesn’t

There is a version of the argument that says the system is hard on everyone. That no one escapes contact with it unscathed. That is true as far as it goes. What it misses is that the system is not a single experience. It is a tiered one. And the tier you occupy is determined almost entirely by what you can pay.

Pretrial detention is the clearest example. In most jurisdictions, what determines whether you go home after an arrest or sit in a cell for weeks or months is not the evidence against you. It is whether you can post bail. The median bail bond for a felony has been set at approximately $10,000. That number is manageable for people with assets. It is catastrophic for people without them. Research from the University of Maryland finds that pretrial detention results in higher rates of household insolvency, with documented increases in Chapter 7 bankruptcies and judgment liens. The detention itself, before any conviction, before any finding of guilt, drives families toward financial collapse.

The downstream effects compound. Research published in the American Economic Review found that pretrial detention reduces future employment and earnings. The Brennan Center for Justice found that a felony conviction reduces annual earnings by roughly 22 percent on average, and a misdemeanor conviction by approximately 16 percent. These are not consequences imposed at sentencing. They are consequences imposed by the process, regardless of outcome, and they fall hardest on people who could least absorb the loss.

The quality-of-representation gap is not theoretical. Studies consistently find that defendants represented by privately retained counsel obtain better outcomes than those represented by public defenders, not because public defenders are less committed, but because the caseload math makes adequate preparation structurally impossible. Attorneys cannot investigate cases they have twenty minutes to review. They cannot develop trial strategy for clients they have met twice before walking into a courtroom. The wealthy hire lawyers who can do those things. The middle class and poor take what is assigned and hope for the best.

Then there are the fees. Criminal legal fees are charged at every stage of the process, including fees for using a public defender, fees for probation monitoring, and fees for supervision that continues after release. Many states charge these fees regardless of a defendant’s ability to pay, and failure to pay them can result in additional sanctions, additional court dates, and in some jurisdictions additional incarceration. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has documented that these fee structures push people already navigating poverty deeper into it, creating a cycle where criminal legal involvement generates debt, debt generates additional contact with the system, and additional contact generates more debt.

What this means in practice is that the system does not simply harm everyone. It harms people according to their resources. The wealthy can afford bail, private counsel, expert witnesses, and the time to fight charges. The middle class can afford some of these things, for a while, until the legal costs exhaust whatever financial cushion they had. The poor cannot afford any of it and are processed accordingly. The system that claims to dispense equal justice produces outcomes that are a direct function of ability to pay.

I have never met a wealthy person who described their encounter with the criminal legal system the way the people I have sat across from describe theirs. The wealthy have encounters. Everyone else has ordeals.

The Courtroom Is the True Crime

I want to be precise about what I mean here, because the claim sounds inflammatory and the evidence behind it is not. What happens inside courtrooms and prosecutors’ offices is not always a pursuit of justice. It is often a negotiation among institutional actors who have careers to advance, dockets to clear, and no particular obligation to the person whose life is being processed. That is not a cynical interpretation. It is what the documented incentive structure produces.

Start with plea bargaining. More than 95 percent of felony convictions in the United States are obtained through guilty pleas. The ABA’s Plea Bargain Task Force, which included prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, and academics, found substantial evidence that the practice creates perverse incentives across the system for lawyers and judges who focus on disposition rates and getting through cases quickly rather than resolving cases justly. A criminal case is settled by plea bargain approximately every two seconds during a typical workday in the United States. That pace is not justice. It is throughput management.

The consequence of that pace is that innocent people plead guilty. Not in rare cases. Routinely. According to the Innocence Project, more than 11 percent of people exonerated through DNA evidence had previously entered guilty pleas to crimes they did not commit. The National Registry of Exonerations puts that figure at roughly 20 percent of exonerations since 1989. The mechanism is not mystery. When the alternative to a plea is the trial penalty, the additional years added to a sentence for refusing to plead out and losing at trial, innocence becomes a rational argument to abandon. The gap between the plea offer and the potential trial sentence can be seven to nine years or more. People make the calculation the system forces them to make.

Then there is what happens to the evidence. Brady v. Maryland established in 1963 that prosecutors have a constitutional obligation to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defense. Six decades later, the Brennan Center and the Innocence Project continue to document systematic Brady violations: suppressed witness statements, withheld crime lab reports, buried evidence of deals made with government informants. A 2010 Innocence Project study found that 10 percent of DNA exonerations involved allegations of prosecutorial evidence suppression. Oklahoma Appleseed’s review of over 500 current cases estimated that up to 30 percent of cases in certain counties may involve prosecutorial misconduct. The accountability for these violations is minimal. The Northern California Innocence Project found that the state bar publicly disciplined only one percent of prosecutors in cases where courts had already found misconduct.

And beneath all of it: delay. The continuance, the rescheduled hearing, the postponed trial date, the motion that could have been filed months ago, is not neutral. Every date reset is a job missed, a day of childcare unbudgeted, a shift a person could not cover because they had to appear in court. Research documents that defendants, particularly those in pretrial detention, experience loss of jobs, income, housing, and family stability as direct effects of case processing time. The Brennan Center has documented that the system is filled with entrenched economic incentives that drive processing without resolution, where revenue is extracted from the people being processed at every stage. The parties to a case are not customers of the process. They are its raw material.

I have watched people show up to hearings that accomplished nothing, burning vacation days and losing hourly wages to sit in a courtroom for twenty minutes while two attorneys who already knew what they were going to say exchanged pleasantries with a judge before agreeing to come back in six weeks. The person whose case it was had no input into the timing, no explanation for why six weeks was necessary, and no compensation for the time they lost. That is not an edge case. It is the ordinary operation of a system that has optimized for institutional convenience and has never been required to account for the cost it imposes on the people inside it.

The backroom deals are not always corrupt in the legal sense. They do not need to be. They are the informal economy of a system where relationships between prosecutors and judges, between courthouse regulars who have known each other for years, produce outcomes that have nothing to do with the facts of any particular case. Favors are extended, charges are adjusted, cases are continued or expedited based on dynamics that are invisible to the person sitting at the defense table. The system calls this professional discretion. From the outside, it is indistinguishable from a closed network deciding outcomes before anyone walks into a room.

The Consent Nobody Gave

Here is the thing I keep coming back to, across all of it. Nobody in any of these categories opted in. Crime victims did not choose to be harmed. People who caused harm were, in many cases, themselves products of the conditions the system creates. Families had no role in any offense and no standing in any proceeding. Children were simply children.

The system arrives uninvited in all of their lives and does what it does, which is process, document, sanction, exclude, and surveil, and then it leaves. The people remain. They deal with the aftermath without institutional support, without clear timelines, and without any mechanism designed around their actual recovery.

I have worked alongside enough people in enough stages of this process to observe something that the research confirms: the most consistent outcome of contact with the criminal legal system is the conviction, shared across categories and across years, that the system was not built for you. Whether you are the person who was harmed, the person who caused harm, or the person who happened to love either of them, the experience lands roughly the same way.

Nobody asked for this. And nobody who went through it is glad they did.

That uniformity is telling, with one caveat: the damage is not distributed equally. Wealth absorbs some of it. The wealthy have encounters with the system. Everyone else has ordeals. But even for those with resources, the experience is not one of gratitude. It is one of survival. The question worth asking is not whether the system is broken. The question is what it would mean to build something that actually worked, for everyone who passes through it, not just those who can pay their way to a lighter version of it.