Purposes and Major Components of the U.S. Criminal Justice System
The major purpose of the U.S. criminal justice system is to arrest, prosecute, and punish people who break the law. Crime is certainly nothing new. Since the earliest time in human history, and when people started coming together to form social contracts outlining how this new social order would function, sooner or later, someone broke the rules. It was not, however, until the nineteenth century that formal criminal justice agencies were established. In 1829, the first police agency, the London Metropolitan Police, was established to keep the peace. It would be another two decades or so before U.S. cities followed suit. As will be seen later in this course, the first prisons were created to house criminal offenders, first referred to as penitentiaries. Still, and with the creation of additional local, state, and federal police departments, court systems, and departments of corrections, it took some time for this new system to work together in any systematic fashion. It was not until the creation of the National Commission of Law Observance and Enforcement in 1931 and by then-President Herbert Hoover that any real effort was made to evaluate the impact that these systems of justice were having on society at large. The Commission discovered a complex and overly-regulated system and moved to assist in streamlining these systems to reduce the complexity.
Whether or not the complexity of the 50 separate state systems of justice, under the umbrella of the federal system of justice, has been reduced is debatable. This is because of the size of the contemporary justice system in the U.S. It is estimated that over $200 billion is spent every year across these justice systems. There are roughly 16,000 police agencies that retain over one million people annually; There are nearly 17,000 court, more than 8,000 prosecutorial agencies, and approximately 6,000 correctional institutions. Consider the costs of prison beds at, on the average, about $22,000 per year and for one inmate. With the U.S. incarcerating over 2.3 million people (state and federal prisons and county jails), it is not difficult to see why the total costs of the criminal justice system in some states are more than the costs of education or public welfare programs.