Justice System Reform – Why We Can’t Get it Right. It’s All About Root Cause.

“Chicago police call for tougher penalties for firearm offenses after dozens of people were shot over holiday.”

You may have heard that dozens of people were shot in Chicago over this recent 4th of July weekend.  I just saw the headline above, which is the response from the Chicago police to the tragic weekend.  What struck me immediately is that this reaction is so stupidly human.  But sadly, it’s human nature.  To most, it would appear to be a quick-response, expedient solution to a terrible problem; and it’s the expediency of this “solution” that makes it attractive to both the politicians who make the laws and the constituency that elects them to office. The belief is that we can pass a law, make the penalties harsher, and then say, “There, we solved THAT problem.”  But guess what?  This will NOT solve the problem, and it NEVER will.  The US justice system has a culture of “punishment” and “revenge”.  We always seem to believe that the threat of more severe punishment will serve as a deterrent to future evil-doers.  The standard political response to the problem of “crime” has always been more cops, more prisons, and tougher sentences.  Well … the US already has the most draconian sentencing laws in the world, and yet, even though we have only 5% of the world’s population, we have 25% of the world’s prisoners (see Convictions  by the Numbers).

Doesn’t seem like super-tough sentences have done much to stem the US crime problem, does it?  And we know this.  Yet we, as an electorate, keep insisting from our legislators that there be more cops, more prisons, and ever tougher sentences.  It’s gotten to the point of being downright silly – tragic but silly.

So what should we do?  To fix any problem, you have to understand, and deal with, the root cause.  Unless you eliminate the root cause, the problem will not go away.  You can try to treat the symptoms of the problem (e.g. gun deaths in Chicago), but the problem will persist.  And I don’t believe we even know and understand what the root cause(s) of most crime are. I would expect that they’d have something to do with things like poverty, education, discrimination, culture, mental health issues, and more.

[Editorial observation:  I suspect that so-called “crimes of passion” are something that will always be part of the human condition, and we’re just stuck with them.]

Unfortunately, dealing with root cause is much, much more difficult than dealing with the obvious symptoms of a problem, and I believe this is largely why it doesn’t get done.  It takes lots of time, lots of money, and lots of effort – and who wants to do that when you can just pass a law making sentences harsher, and then tell yourself you’ve just addressed the problem?  It is absolutely human nature to jump to what seems to be the quickest, easiest solution, despite the fact that the “solution” may not cure the problem at all.

There ARE systematic ways to uncover root cause.  They involve structure, process, and data.  Please see our previous post on Six Sigma.  Root cause is at the very core of what Six Sigma is all about.  Unfortunately, given our justice system and our processes for enacting laws, I see no feasible way root cause analysis and corrective action could be applied to the US justice system – at least certainly not within my lifetime.  I expect that we’re just going to have to continue stumbling along with our electoral and legislative processes, and hope that some day enough voters and enough legislators eventually “get it.”