Under a crushing volume of cases, even well-meaning judges cannot consider the circumstances of a person's life that led to the crime. Justice then goes wrong every day by doing exactly what we ask of it, which is to process cases quickly. Fixing this starts with paying attention to the facts of people's lives that bring them to court.
When judges are rewarded for moving as many cases as possible each day, the court becomes a factory rather than a place of trials. Defense lawyers get almost no time with clients, so defendants, even innocent ones, plead guilty to charges they deny. Meanwhile prosecutors reduce charges to lock in convictions, and the case flowchart outranks everything else.
A huge share of criminal defendants are dependent on drugs, which ties drug use closely to crime. Everyone in the courtroom, from judge to prosecutor to defense lawyer, knows the court is poorly equipped to treat addiction. Yet drug cases keep flooding in and choking the system, at great cost and with little result.
When judges must win elections, their sentences can be shaped by fear of losing their seat rather than by the case alone. Where jobs are filled through political machines, lawyers who donate to a judge's campaign then argue cases before that same judge, a built-in conflict of interest. Appointing judges on merit would loosen this pull toward voters' whims.
People who handle a stream of human suffering every day stop seeing it as tragic. Guards come to treat a disabled man as just another faceless offender, knowing nothing of his life, and they shout insults at prisoners as if they were the dregs of humanity. This willful blindness to the human being in front of them becomes part of the job's culture.