Mass incarceration, lengthy probationary periods, unreachable bail amounts, and felony criminal records feed the machine of our criminal justice system. The system is not broken; the assembly line of arrest, charge, conviction, and imprisonment is doing exactly what it was built to do. But this inherited system is a plague upon the cornerstone of the “Progressive Prosecutor” who is charged with the role of the “Minister of Justice.” With nearly 10.6 million people rotating in and out of the U.S. jail system each year, the Progressive Prosecutor knows the old ways of doing things are no longer tenable.
As a minister of justice, the role of the prosecutor is not to obtain a conviction above all else, rather it is to see that justice be done. “The role of an American prosecutor as a minister of justice is firmly established.” It is easy to see how even the most skilled prosecutor can still, even with the best of intentions, fail as a minister of justice. Prosecution work is one of the most emotionally challenging lines of public service one can choose. Secondary trauma from crime scene visits, autopsy reviews, and victim interviews added to the stress of battling opposing counsel in front of a jury who will ultimately decide guilt or innocence takes a toll on even the most resilient prosecutor.
What, then, is the path of least resistance when a prosecutor is already stressed and pushed to the limit? It is to achieve a conviction. After all, it is a measurable unit of success; guilty verdicts equal success—a simple and easy equation to understand. The prosecutor, at their core, is to be a minister of justice above all else. Their choices should consider what is best for the defendant as much as they consider what it does for the victim.
The math is not simple anymore in the context of the justice system. Guilty verdicts no longer equal success—justice now equals success. Like it or not, prosecutors have been partly waning at their true duties for a while now. As an individual who has served as a prosecutor for ten years and, prior to that, as a law enforcement officer for nearly five years, it is clear to me that most prosecutors, at their core, are good people who want to do right by the public they serve. However, the system they inherited is not built to allow them much, if any, meaningful success in that goal. Court dockets are overcrowded with cases. Time and money are always low. Finding meaningful solutions often requires prosecutors to step off the assembly line of justice, many times demanding they do something entirely outside their training. The failure of the prosecution in the fulfillment of their role as minister of justice in the criminal justice system is not, in my humble opinion, intentional. Its ideals have just been long forgotten and set to the wayside—a frill that comes out once in a while when there is time to slow down and actually evaluate a case realistically. For this reason, it has simply become easier for prosecutors to go after the conviction and a sentence, both of which are very tangible measures of so-called success.