If you are listening to TJMS, chances are you want to reform the thing most people call “The Criminal Justice System.” In our community, we’re beginning to call it “The Legal System,” because it’s not really just and everybody who enters into it is not a criminal, but whatever you call, whatever we call it, I need us to understand a bigger point…
It’s not one big system.
And because it’s not one big system – with one set of rules, with one set of laws, and with one CEO, but instead is 30,000 micro systems, each with their own set of rules and laws and policies – it can’t be reformed or overhauled or even just torn down in one fell swoop. To change this system, it has to be changed, in many instances, one jail, one prison, one police department, one sheriffs office, one DA’s office, one town, one city, one county, one state, one law – at a time.
And I think this is both great news for us – and also absolutely horrible news for us.
It’s great – because while we might not be able to change the whole system, we are strong enough to change parts of it, piece by piece, person by person, law by law.
Organizations and activists across the country are targeting individual police departments, individual jails, and are seeing some progress.
So the great news is that if you are determined and organized enough, you can change these micro systems in substantive ways that impacts tens of thousands of lives.
I have friends who chose to work with the Trump administration to change the microsystems in the federal government. While only about 7% of all people are in federal prisons, they’ve been able to help over 3,000 men and women be set free from federal prison in the past few months alone under the First Step Act.
That’s the great news. That’s what happens when we focus and act on the microsystems, we can change them.
We have 1,719 state prisons, 109 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,163 local jails, and 80 Indian Country jails as well as about 100 military prisons, immigration detention facilities. That means we have about 7,000 jails and prisons in this country.
We currently have 12,501 police departments. We have about 3,000 county sheriff’s offices. And we have about 2,500 other police departments that include campus police departments on college campuses, state police departments, and other law enforcement agencies – meaning we have about 18,000 different law enforcement agencies nationwide.
We have about 2,400 district attorneys. These are the locally elected prosecutors. Some places call them county attorney, others call them the states attorney. Either way, 93% of all court cases come through those 2,400 offices. You may have heard me say recently that of the 2,400 DA’s, 150 of them cover over 50% of all people who are incarcerated.
So let me do the math on the total number of systems there: 2,400 DA’s + 18,000 law enforcement offices + 7,000 jails and prisons – that’s 27,400 systems. And if we add to that number, all of the different local, state, and federal agencies that fall outside of those 3 main categories – we end up with about 30,000 different law enforcement agencies in the United States.
What we’ve learned is that we have federal laws, state laws, but also county laws, and city laws. For instance, in the city of Atlanta, which is actually just one small circle, in the much bigger map of metropolitan Atlanta, which is about 15 different counties, it’s now legal in the small city of Atlanta to possess a tiny amount of weed in your pocket, but if you take that tiny amount of weed to the next city or county over, which is still considered metro-Atlanta, you will have broken the law. If you take it to the airport you will have broken federal law, because weed is still illegal federally.
You see, just traveling around Atlanta with a little weed in your pocket is a highly complicated thing because we don’t have one system, but tens of thousands of smaller legal systems.
The United States has 51,200 judges on the local, state, and federal level. And as you likely saw in the Amber Guyger case – each judge can run their courtroom in wildly different ways. While each judge has local, state, and federal laws to consider, they have huge leeway in how to run that court and how to interpret those laws.
We have over 1 million law enforcement officers across local, state, and federal departments. And, as we’ve seen, each of them interpret policies and laws in their own unique ways.
I said all of this to say that we can’t solve a problem we can’t describe. We can’t solve a problem if we don’t even know the equation. We can’t solve a problem if we don’t truly know how to describe it.
We need to be able to dig deeper, much, much deeper and describe this problem better so that we can work to solve it. Today I just wanted to do this overview, because for the next few months, I am going to lead us in some ways to help proactively address some of our biggest challenges.
