William Stuntz's The Collapse Of American Criminal Justice

The first five chapters of The Collapse of American Criminal Justice by William Stuntz discusses the history of the criminal justice, and it’s flaws as well. He goes in details how things work, and of course the collapse of the system. Stuntz seems to believe although their has been improvements in the constitution, it’s still not perfect. He also suggests some of the things that need to be change. In chapter one Stuntz discusses the rise of violence in the early nineteenth and twentieth century, and the arrival of European immigrants, along with African Americans heading north. This also caused a drift between all immigrant groups, young immigrant males began to have rival gangs, also along with no care from the government. In the early

Stuntz discusses how there has been a big shift of power in the criminal justice system. When America was first getting started the judge had more power, but today that power has shifted and the judge has less power than the prosecutors. The federal government has big concerns in other areas, while the criminal justice is not its’ own, but works differently. The responsibility and the management of the criminal justice system belong to local elected officials, local law enforcement, and state law. Also the criminal justice system tends to focus more on the Bill of Rights, which four of them are specifically about crime in America (Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth). Stuntz also discusses substantive and procedural law and shows how they can be related, but are also very different. Substantive law defines what a crime and what punishments fit, meanwhile procedural law is about the process the of the criminal justice system, for example, procedural law will explain the steps a police officer must take in order to have a justifiable arrest. There’s also a lot of comparison between the nineteenth century criminal justice process , and the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, there was no elected officials the judge made all decisions, and prosecutors were only paid by cases and conviction, which caused to convict even the pettiest of crimes. Meanwhile, in the twentieth century the balance of power

He starts with the North, and how it was the most successful when it came to crime control. In the North there was a lot more people because of immigration from Europe, and the blacks that moved from the South. With there being a lot more people, there was also many job opportunities, and more law enforcement agencies than the West and the South. However, there was discrimination, specifically against women, blacks, and poor Europeans. The South was much poorer it had less law enforcement agencies, and as a result it had more crimes. In the South law enforcement paid little attention to the black neighborhoods, and as a result it led to hate crime. Three quarters of murder victims in the South were black, while one-third of the killers were black they might have had a chance to escape detection because the victim was black, however, if the victim was white they 're will be serious punishment. The West had less law enforcement agencies than the North, but more than the South, and they all also had a higher incarceration rate than both. The big crime area in the West were urban areas, especially were there was a lot of minorities. The police acted like rival gangs towards each other, and in Arizona they really focused on people who did wrong against anybody in the agencies, or they 're friends. This is somewhat different from today, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the