Book Critique of Justice Without Trial

Justice Without Trial

The author and professor of criminal justice, Jerome Skolnick, argues in his book entitled Justice Without Trial: Law Enforcement in Democratic Society, that the first line of defense in the protection of personal safety and property any democratic society is that of effective law enforcement. However, the police form not a human line of protective and retributive justice, as they ideally should, but instead have created and fucntion as a subculture with little respect for other institutions of justice in the nation, such as trial by jury and presumptions of innocence. Instead, Skolnick states that even in allegedly democratic America, justice takes place without a trial, in the eyes of the prejudices of a policeman when they see a supposed perpetrator in the night. The presumption of guilt in the heart of the policeman, rather than the objectivity of a judge becomes the most compelling determinant of how justice is reckoned, even in a rights-based society, as a result.

Skolnick wrote in 1966 that despite the appearance in the instutitionsal fabric of American society, of a disinterested justice ethic, the systemic focus upon clearance rates in the then-current American policy model of criminal justice encouaged police to merely create an appearnce of doing their job. Police, Skolnick argued when he first wrote the article that became the text under discussion, that the police were pursuing convictions rather than seeking truth at any price. Police were willing to see the innocent convicted, at the price of justice itself, merely to 'do their job' and they thought, to create a more secure society.

During the time period when Skolnick's book was first authored, during the height of the civil rights movement and around the time that the Supreme Court was just in the process of passing such landmark decisions as guaranteeing a suspect a right to an attorney and full knowledge of his or her rights, Skolnick's book must have seemed like a clarion call. Athough not specifically about race, because one of the later goals of the civil rights movement, specifically in urban areas, was to highlight the racial bias in the educational institutions and actual process of law enforcement, Skolnick's philosophy about an unjust police subculture, intent upon convicting even innocent suspects must have been highly resonant.

Some of the most famous images of the civil rights movement depicted white officers in the American South inflicting violence with bully clubs and hoses upon nonviolent demonstrators. But in Northern and urban areas as well, during an era of skyrocketing crime rates and increased polarization between poor and rich, during a relatively affluent period of American history, excesses of overenthusiastic policemen desiring to meet their clearance rate quotas were more vigorously wielded against blacks. Blacks reacted violently against the police as a result, creating racial tensions and increasing the gap of culture and philosophy between law enforcement personnel and the people whom they were supposed to serve.

Skolnick's book still contains features of great interest for the study of criminal justice. For instance, in his text, Skolnick focuses on what he calls the "working personality" of the policeman. In his text, Skolnick defines three elements of the policeman's personality: danger, authority, and efficiency. Like a soldier in a city under siege, the policeman in training is encouraged to believe he and the community he identifies with (white, usually, in Skolnick's day, and often of an ethnic, working class ethos) are in a constant state of danger and duress. As a result of this heightened state of danger and fear, police officers are encouraged to believe that absolute obedience to authority is always salutary, and that an efficient administration of the law and administrative policies are synonymous with justice. Efficiency even pursued at the expense of individual liberties is encouraged in a tacit way by administrators, and overall by the working, occupational culture of the police.

Such unofficial pressures and the general cultural, occupational climate produce "distinctive cognitive tendencies in police as an occupational grouping." (Skolnick, 1966). Also, people who become policemen have a pre-existing tendency to embrace certain values, according to Skolnick, and to come from certain ethnic and neighbourhood groups and areas than others, that stress order and obedience. All of these conspire to reinforce certain officer's personality profiles. It encourages the promotion of officers with a strongly militaristic ethos, and to exacerbate existing problems given an often-suspicious administrative intent upon overriding individual suspect's rights. Thus Skolnick belives he can speak with confidence of the development of a law enforcement subculture that reinforces preexisting values of suspicion as a positive, with few checks and balances, despite the stated presumption of innocence in the American system.