Ethics in Criminal Justice

In Search of the Truth

Sam S. Souryal, John T. Whitehead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429682162
• Edition: 7
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Introducing the fundamentals of ethical theory, Ethics in Criminal Justice: In Search of the Truth, Seventh Edition, exposes the reader to the ways and means of making moral judgments by exploring the teachings of the great philosophers, sources of criminal justice ethics, and ethical issues in the criminal justice system.

It is presented from two perspectives: a thematic perspective that addresses ethical principles common to all components of the discipline, and an area-specific perspective that addresses the state of ethics in criminal justice in the fields of policing, corrections, and probation and parole. The seventh edition features discussion of current critical issues in criminal justice: accusations of racism, police shootings, stop and frisk policy, marijuana laws, mass incarceration, life sentences, prison privatization, the swift and certain deterrence model of probation, excessive probation fees, and the Good Lives Model in corrections. The seventh edition also offers completely revised coverage of capital punishment and the rehabilitation debate, and a discussion of how juvenile justice often fails to live up to its ideals. Finally, the book features new case studies of recent ethical dilemmas in criminal justice to enhance students' understanding of real-life ethics decision-making.

Suitable for advanced undergraduates or graduate students in criminal justice programs in the US and globally, this text offers a classical view of ethical decision-making and is well-grounded in specific case examples.

1

Acquainting Yourself With Ethics

A Tour of the Ethics Hall of Fame

They honestly consider they are doing the right thing.

—E.W. Elkington, 1907, on New Guinea cannibals

Or are you a clear thinker examining what is good and useful for society and spending your life in building what is useful and destroying what is harmful?

—Kahlil Gibran, Mirrors of the Soul

Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad laws bring about worse. As soon as any man says of the affairs of the State, “What does it matter to me?” the State may be given up for lost.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The present moral crisis is due among other things to the demand for a moral code which is intellectually respectable.

—R. Niebuhr

What You will Learn from this Chapter

To understand the foundation of ethics, you should learn about the virtue of knowledge and reasoning, the sources of intellect, the nature of truth, the nature of reality, the nature of morality, the nature of goodness, the relationship between actions and consequences, determinism and intentionalism, and the image of the ethical person.

You will also learn about the reasoning process, Plato’s divided line, the definition of morality and ethics, the grammar of goodness, the principle of summum bonum, and the utilitarianism measure.

Key Terms and Definitions

• Reasoning is a pure method of thinking by which proper conclusions are reached through abstract thought processes.
• The Divided Line is Plato’s theory of knowledge. It characterizes four levels of knowledge. The lowest of these are conjecture and imagination because they are based on impressions or suppositions; the next is belief because it is constructed on the basis of faith, images, or superstition; the third is scientific knowledge because it is supported by empirical evidence, experimentation, or mathematical equations; and the highest level is reasoning.
• Theory of Realism is Aristotle’s explanation of reality. It includes three concepts: rationality, the ability to use abstract reasoning; potentiality and actuality, the “capacity to become” and the “state of being”; and the golden mean, the middle point between two extreme qualities.
• Ethics is a philosophy that examines the principles of right and wrong, good and bad.
• Morality is the practice of applying ethical principles on a regular basis.
• Intrinsic Goods are objects, actions, or qualities that are valuable in themselves.
• Nonintrinsic Goods are objects, actions, or qualities that are good only for developing or serving an intrinsic good.
• Summum Bonum is the principle of the highest good that cannot be subordinated to any other.
• E = PJ² is the guiding formula for making moral judgment. E (the ethical decision) equals P (the principle) times J (the justification of the situation).
• Utilitarianism is the theory that identifies ethical actions as those that maximize happiness and minimize pain.
• Determinism is the theory that all thoughts, attitudes, and actions result from external forces that are beyond human control. They are fixed causal laws that control all events as well as the consequences that follow.
• Intentionalism is the theory that all rational beings possess an innate freedom of will and must be held responsible for their actions. It is the opposite of determinism.

Overview

Compared with other disciplines, criminal justice is an infant discipline. This is probably one reason why it is far more concerned with crime rather than with justice and with process rather than with philosophy. As a result, most criminal justice students and practitioners today have not been adequately exposed to the philosophy of justice or, for that matter, to any serious philosophical studies. Courses in ethics and justice are not usually required for a criminal justice degree, nor are they included in programs of professional training. A study in the ethics of criminal justice may, therefore, be an alien topic and can understandably cause a degree of apprehension. In order to reduce your anxiety and to better acquaint you with the topic, this chapter is designed to take you on a tour of the world of ethics. I will take you, if you will, on a journey into the “Ethics Hall of Fame,” introduce you to key concepts, and familiarize you with the works of leading philosophers. Knowledge gained from this chapter will serve as the foundation for the remainder of this book. Figure 1.1 illustrates the layout of the Ethics Hall of Fame.

Exhibit 1—Knowledge and Reasoning

Our first stop on this tour is at a pedestal supporting the bust of Socrates. The sculpture symbolizes the virtue of knowledge because Socrates was considered the wisest man in ancient Greece.

Figure 1.1 The Ethics Hall of Fame

Born in Athens—at the time, the greatest democracy of all—Socrates spent his entire life in search of the truth. Not surprisingly, he was later hailed as the patron saint of Western philosophy. We are more certain of the facts of his death than of the circumstances of his life because Socrates left no record of his own. The information about his accomplishments was gathered from the accounts of his disciples, particularly Plato, who was his most prominent student. According to these accounts, Socrates was an outstanding philosopher who served Athens well during times of war and peace.

A Life Unexamined Is Not Worth Living

Socrates (469–399 BCE) was central to the enlightenment of the world. He taught in the marketplaces of Athens, free of charge. Appearing uninterested in physical speculation, he went about engaging people in conversations and asking them familiar but important-to-everyday-life questions. He raised difficult questions about the meaning of life and, in particular, the natures of knowledge and virtue. He challenged his audiences to rethink and reason their lives rationally. In arguing his views, he demonstrated the power of “counterargument” and stung his opponents by exposing their unexamined beliefs. His famous credo was the memorable exhortation “a life unexamined is not worth living.” By the same token, we should think today that “a belief unexamined is not worth following,” “a policy unexamined is not worth executing,” and “a practice unexamined is not worth adhering to.” Every subject, topic, or issue in life must be open to intellectual scrutiny regardless of its nature or origin. The “beginning of wisdom” is allowing the human intellect to think freely and to emancipate the mind from the clutches of ignorance and the fetters of cultural, social, or religious bias.

Consistent with this Socratic dictum, students and instructors of criminal justice should be encouraged—rather than discouraged—to examine every policy, practice, or controversy in criminal justice without shyness, discomfort, or guilt. For instance, questions about crime and justice, the limits of punishment, the authority of the state, the role of prisons, fairness in the workplace, and other controversial practices in criminal justice should all be openly discussed. The reasoning behind such a commitment is dualistic. First, as citizens of a nation dedicated to “liberty and justice for all,” it is our obligation to enable everyone to experience the full measures of “liberty” and “justice” in our daily lives, thus making us better citizens. Second, as criminal justice professionals, it is our obligation to call attention to system failures and shortcomings in order to correct them. Failure to do so would make us responsible to the future generations of Americans who may point to their ancestors and ask, “If they kept doing it the same way, how did they expect it to come out differently?” (Friel, 1998).

Exploring Virtue

Socrates’s typical method of exploring virtue was by arguing against popular but erroneous beliefs in what was known as the dialectic method. Such arguments were conducted in a dialogue form in which the parties involved would engage in an exchange of questions and answers. The direction of questions and the validity of answers would point out the presence of contradiction or fallacy. By continuing this process, the truth of the disputed question would be either established or denied. The dialectic method, which was the trademark of ancient Greek philosophy, was later labeled the Socratic method in honor of its most skillful master.

In his philosophical teachings, Socrates addressed general topics such as knowledge, wisdom, and character, and he also discussed specific ideas of a moral nature, such as goodness, courage, and temperance. Regardless of the topic of inquiry that Socrates pursued, there is no doubt that his overall aim was to reeducate the people of Athens in the nature of arete, or virtue.

Knowledge and Virtue

Socrates argued that virtue is knowledge and knowledge is virtue. Both are one and the same. He taught that a person who knows what is right will, by virtue of such knowledge, do what is right. Conversely, committing a wrong act results from ignorance because evildoing can only be involuntary. At this point, it has been said that the students of Socrates interrupted him, suggesting that many Athenian leaders and politicians had frequently been in prison, thus proving Socrates to be wrong in his central assertion. To that, Socrates reportedly answered that those Athenians were certainly not knowledgeable enough; if they had been, they would have been able to anticipate the consequences of their intentions and abstain from doing wrong.

Socrates taught that genuine knowledge amounted to moral insight, which he considered prerequisite to success and happiness in life. Hence, Socrates’s classical exhortation to his students: “Know thyself.” By that dictum, Socrates referred to the obligation of all individuals to be knowledgeable of themselves and their talents and goals as well as their limitations. Socrates emphasized that success can be assured only through living an intelligent life in accordance with knowledge. It is interesting to note, at this point, that while Socrates was obviously the most knowledgeable among his peers, he always pretended to be limited in his intellect; hence the term Socratic irony.

To be a “philosopher” and to “study virtue” meant the same thing to Socrates. This is basically because the study of virtue requires a high level of diverse knowledge that can be possessed only by students of philosophy. In arguing philosophical matters in general, and ethical issues in particular, one quickly discovers the imperative of being well versed in other fields of knowledge. A worthy judgment of good and evil, Socrates pointed out, must depend on “whether it is made under the guidance of knowledge.” The Socratic quest for virtue was thus a fierce search for the truth that “every man can only find for himself.” Perhaps the central theme in the Socratic theory of knowledge can be restated in the rule that philosophers (as you should now start considering yourselves) are not free to make judgments about issues of which they have limited knowledge. Furthermore, proper ethical judgment cannot be based on whether one likes or dislikes an act or approves or disapproves of a policy, but on whether the act or the policy is consistent with reasoning, the highest level of intellectual capacity.

The Reasoning Process

Reasoning is a capacity that differentiates the human race from animals, birds, trees, and rocks. It is especially critical to the study of ethics because it is the only legitimate method of reaching the truths of life and living. Any other means is suspect. Reasoning is a pure method of thinking by which proper conclusions are reached through abstract thought processes. Based on the universal assumption that understanding is an exercise in duality—life and death, good and evil, light and darkness, happiness and misery—reasoning has developed as an exchange between a point and a counterpoint. Such an exchange can take place between two or more persons or within one’s own mind. The initial point in any such exchange is known as thesis and its response as antithesis. As a result, an intellectual compromise can be reached. This is known as synthesis. Every synthesis in turn becomes a new thesis that warrants a new antithesis, which in turn produces a new synthesis, and so on. The reasoning process can thus continue indefinitely until the debaters reach a point at which no further point can be made. At that point, the knowledge produced would be accepted as truth, as far as human beings are capable of discerning it. When truths are recognized over a long period, or are universally accepted, they become self-evident truths.

Pure reason emanates from the human intellect and functions independently of other faculties of consciousness such as will or desire. As such, pure reasoning can be defined as an intellectual talent that proceeds rationally and logically without reliance on sense perception or individual experience.

The goal of reasoning is to...