To Protect and To Serve 1
To Protect and To Serve:
Ethics in the Criminal Justice Field
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To Protect and To Serve: Ethics in the Criminal Justice Field
Among the numerous challenges confronting the United States today, perhaps no domestic issue is more troubling or more urgent than that of the relationship between the law enforcement and the communities they are bound to protect and to serve. Charges of rampant malpractice and abuse within the criminal justice system have led to a widespread distrust of law enforcement in some communities and abject disdain for them in others. The results have been all too apparent and all too tragic in recent weeks, with mass shootings claiming the lives of eight police officers in two major American cities and a spate of lower-profile but, for the families and communities, no less devastating attacks nationwide. If the public is ever to feel truly safe and if law enforcement is ever to enjoy again the respect and trust it deserves, then it must begin with the repairing of the relationships between law enforcement and the community. An important first step in this process is the emphasis on the training and reinforcement of ethical practices within the criminal justice community, beginning during the professional’s undergraduate education and continuing through recruitment, training, and beyond. Only when criminal justice professionals incorporate a more deliberate, reflective, and responsive ethical system, one which evaluates and responsibly addresses the ethical norms and values by which they and their communities and organizations operate can those in the field hope to regain the trust of their communities and to cultivate harmony where once there was only discord. A proactively ethical orientation to criminal justice will allow the mutually-inflicted wounds to begin to heal.
The Importance of Self-Reflection
One of the greatest obstacles to ethical behavior is each individual’s blindness to the assumptions, norms, and values by which s/he operates. This cognitive schema shapes the individual’s view of the world and his/her place in it, and that shapes in powerful ways both the individual’s attitudes and his/her behaviors. Bailey and Ballard (2015) argue that ethics training is essential for any criminal justice professional. Further they suggest that beginning this work while the aspirant is still training, whether in an undergraduate program or at the academy, is particularly vital. The goal, they assert, is to empower professionals to recognize and to respond to the ethical norms by which they operate. They write, “Meaningful understandings of ethical behavior become apparent when choices are seen as being determined by one’s own working models and subsequent rules of living. Therefore, enduring change in behavior must come out of changes in the working models” (p. 208). In other words, effective behavioral change occurs only when the criminal justice professional (aspiring or established) learns to understand and critically assess her own worldview, the often subconscious assumptions, beliefs, values, and needs that drive behavior and perception. It is only once the professional begins to understand why he thinks, acts, and feels as he does that he can then begin to modify those models and those actions. This is the heart of effective, ethical change.
The Importance of Other-Awareness
Ethics do not exist in a vacuum. They do not live and die with the individual herself. Rather, ethics is a sort of system of exchange, driving not only how one sees the world, but also how one engages with it. Further, it is enacted amid a diverse and amorphous array of players, ethical agents who are themselves operating according to their own individual worldview.To behave in an ethically responsible way, it is essential to be able to understand and respond effectively not only to one’s own ethical system, but also to the manifestation of the ethical norms of others. This is not to endorse a complete ethical relativity, the abandonment of a universal code of values. This is only to recognize that to be effective and ethical in the field of criminal justice is to understand that those with whom one interacts, especially those on the “other side” of the system (arrestees, defendants, convicts) are informed and motivated by their own cognitive models, the perceptual schema which shape behavior and individual ethics. Good work in the field requires an earnest effort to recognize and to understand—if not to endorse or validate—the other’s worldview, to recognize its role in shaping attitudes and actions, and to respond accordingly. In promoting the study of wrongful convictions in criminal justice programs, Henry (2014) suggests that in many cases, wrongful convictions can be traced to the inability of those within the system to understand the worldview and ethical systems of the accused. This leads to the presumption of guilt where none exists. In analyzing the research data on false confessions, Henry describes the manner in which police pre-determinations of guilt shape the police interview process and may give rise to false confessions:
They interrogate suspects to obtain information that confirms their theory of guilt….Once detectives misclassify a suspect, they often subject him to an accusatorial interrogation, replete with various forms of psychological coercion. This is particularly effective when police are dealing with vulnerable subjects, such as people who are highly suggestible and compliant, people who have cognitive impairments, are juveniles, or are mentally ill. (p. 241)
At the heart of this process is an unethical failure of other-awareness. The detective is driven by his/her own perceptual schema, so much so that s/he has lost capacity for empathy, the ability to perceive the world as another might perceive it, and the capacity to recognize how that perspectival difference can shape behavior (including leading to false confession). Ethical criminal justice work, then, must consider the other, as well as the self.
The Importance of System Analysis
In addition to understanding how ethics shape and are shaped both by one’s own worldview and the worldview of others, it is also vital to understand the complex interplay of norms, beliefs, values, and behaviors within established systems, whether that be the community as a whole or the criminal justice system—the courts and police departments—operating within the community. In her analysis of career-ending police misconduct, Kutnjak Ivkovic (2009) found that the “few bad apples” model does not necessarily hold true. Rather, she asserts that the career-ending misconduct most often occurs within a larger environment of misconduct, amid a pervasive environment of unethical values, perceptions, and patterns of behavior.
Environmental factors play a role not only in cases of gross misconduct, but in the everyday practice of ethics within the criminal justice system. The impact of these factors is far more prevalent in daily professional practice which does not rise to the level of malpractice but which may nevertheless to the underserving of vulnerable populations. In his study of the practice of plea bargaining by criminal defense attorneys, Blume (2016) argues that an attorney’s ethical mandate to serve the best interests of his/her client may in fact blind the attorney to what those individual interests may be. Specifically, Blume suggests that the ethos within criminal defense law is so strongly oriented toward plea bargaining that jury trials are rarely considered, regardless of the evidence at hand or the client’s guilt. This is a systemic ethos which in fact undermines the ethical values it is purported to uphold. Blume argues that collective action is needed in order to spur sweeping institutional change; he suggests that only when defense attorneys make it a practice to refuse plea deals will clients truly begin to receive the legal protections they deserve, including the highest possible standards of defense and the assurance of fair and equitable hearings and trials.
The Ethical Mandate
As has been shown, the practice of ethics in the field of criminal justice depends upon the ability to assess, understand, and modify as needed the ethical norms, cognitive schema, and perceptual models by which individuals, groups, and organizations operate. An ethics seminar, then, must operate on all these levels. Such a seminar would include 1) training in ethical self-reflexivity, requiring students to recognize the ethical models shaping their behavior and attitudes for the purposes of adapting these models in responsive and responsible ways and 2) empathy training, facilitating the awareness of other perspectives, the schema, models, and norms which shape—in both positive and negative ways—the behaviors of others. Only through this can viable responses be developed which will enable the cultivation of productive, ethically-responsible relationships between the professional and others, particularly those on the “other side” of the law. An ethics seminar would also need to feature 3) training in organizational analysis and optimization, ensuring that the “bad apples” model does not degenerate, as is all too often the case today, into the “bad orchard” reality. This will ensure that systemic ethics failures will be recognized and remediated at the collective, not simply the individual, level. Finally, the ethics seminar will need to feature 4) training in ethical methods, including the responsible and effective use of science, which, as Ryberg (2014) has noted, can too easily be misapplied if not undertaken through a profound ethos of care, and 5) training in responsible community outreach. No amount of individual or organizational ethical reform will prosper if it is not combined with responsible, proactive community outreach designed to rehabilitate damaged relationships between the criminal justice community and those it is designed to protect and to serve.
Conclusion
In an environment in which relationships between the law enforcement community and the population it serves is at an all-time low, the return to a deliberate and proactive professional ethics is essential. Regardless of the branch of service or the level of service, ethical training must be implemented early and continued throughout the entirety of a professional’s career. Such training would enable him/her to recognize and optimize one’s own ethical system, to understand and respond responsibly to the ethical models of others, and to ensure that the systems to which one belongs (whether the community, the department, the division, or the profession as a whole) is guided by an ethical system which honors the professions’ onus to protect and to serve. Then and only then will the egregious wounds mutually inflicted and mutually suffered by the law enforcement community and the people they serve begin to heal.
References
Bailey, K. & Ballard, J. D. (2015). Teaching ethics to criminal justice students: Focusing on self-identity, self-awareness, and internal accountability. Teaching Ethics, 15(1), 201-212.
Blume, J. H. (2016). How the ‘shackles’ of ethics prevent structural reform in the American criminal justice system. New England Journal on Criminal and Civil Confinement, 42(1), 23-38.
Henry, J. S. (2014). Promoting the study of wrongful convictions in criminal justice curricula. Journal of Criminal Justice Education, 25(2), 236-251.
Kutnjak Ivkovic, S. (2016). Police misconduct: Rotten apples, rotten branches, and rotten orchards. Criminology and Public Policy, 8(4), 777-785.
Ryberg, J. (2014). Neuroscience and criminal justice: Introduction. Journal of Ethics, 18, 77-80.