By Russell M. Gold.
How should a community balance spending on playgrounds and recreation centers, public schools, mental and physical health care, garbage collection, employment programs, supporting community-based nonprofits, and criminal law? That question is profoundly important, but it is rarely asked without substantial distortion in criminal law spending. Government officials (and perhaps voters) reflexively see robust spending on police and prosecutors as essential to promoting public safety. And they often get to spend someone else’s money toward these ends. Yet officials and voters rarely see the financial costs of the carceral state—let alone its tragic human costs. Among the many pathologies of American criminal law is the way in which our systems diffuse and hide costs and decision-making across numerous actors and levels of government. States pay for prisons while counties pay for prosecutors; indigent defense is funded by states, counties, or some combination of the two—although all vastly underfund it. Defendants and their loved ones are charged fees for the privilege of intense suffering that the criminal legal system inflicts on them—suffering exacerbated by inadequate funding. States and the federal government give counties “free money” to prosecute more and differently than they otherwise would—money counties rarely feel able to refuse. Full Article