Ethical Decision Making In Criminal Justice Essay

When a person becomes a peace officer - or any position that has inherent authority - ethical dilemmas will soon present themselves. If such an individual has divorced the concept of morals and ethics from practical daily-living then you can expect their decision-making to end where the consideration of others begins and therein lies the root of much of the world’s ills. The result of such actions harms not only the officer and the victim but reflects on the whole of the American criminal justice system. Because of their visibility the necessity for officers to not only to have a working knowledge of ethics but to practice the highest conceivable notion of it - including morality and impartiality.

Many consign such notions as either unachievable or impractical. Not only can one act in the highest capacity one can achieve but it has been done by countless others before us. The self-justification of the divorce of ethics and

daily-life acts as a veil over one’s perception of reality and distorts the thoughts and deeds in proportion to the rigidity of such a belief.
The problem here lies in the fact that the only agent of control is inside the individual. If preconceived notions render it inert and help cannot reach it from the outside then we end up with such cases as populate our prisons. Namely the “recidivists” who, despite their multiple trips to a facility designed to make its inhabitants change and not want to come back, continue living with their same system of beliefs and consequently relive the same results.
The ethical dilemma for our criminal justice system is this: Does the criminal justice system as we have designed it force upon its actors unnecessary struggle in ethical decision making?

Another way to put this is to ask if the system as we have made it allows for the “best” ethical decision to be the easiest decision to make at the moment. The best ethical decision may be obvious but be the hardest thing to do thanks to how an officer feels their superiors - or public - may react. An officer may choose to lie under investigation as opposed to laying bare harsh truth that would see him ostracized or his department in serious trouble. The system we live under does not infrequently punish those that act in accordance to high ethical thinking and reward those that self-seek - it’s no wonder people find it easy to justify selfishness and complain altruism is impractical. Were our system to practice altruism then so to would its inhabitants; and those that took advantage of it would be judged by those more fit to judge than are our

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