The U.S. justice system is broken. It’s one of the few things the Left and the Right agree on. Typically, on the Left, the system is seen as too harsh on the disadvantaged. On the right, as too lenient to the criminals.

I believe this disagreement is superficial. Deep down, the U.S. justice system is poisoned by one dysfunctional belief shared by the Left and the Right, and yet I haven’t ever heard it discussed.

The picture of a sick court

We can see the first true signs of the disease in court. Have you ever watched a sentencing for some horrendous crime in the U.S.?

Usually, at some point, the judge is done with the formal part and goes off on the criminal, roughly along these lines:

- “You are the most despicable individual I’ve seen in my X years of serving on this court.”

- “There is no punishment I can enact that would be adequate to the vileness of your crimes.”

- “I sentenced you to three counts of life in prison, served consecutively, without the possibility of parole. And while it is vastly inadequate to your transgressions, perhaps the victims’ families and the public can find some closure knowing you shall rot in your cell until the rest of your days, and will never again breathe a single breath as a free man.”

This is fairly common in the U.S. Here is one example. Here’s another. Here’s yet one more. The crimes these individuals have committed are indeed repugnant. However, for any person who has not grown up in the U.S., such sentence announcements look odd, no matter the crime.

In most of the civilized world, the tone of the judge never strays from formal and dispassionate. Here’s an example life sentence announcement in the U.K. Here’s one from Kazakhstan (life sentence) and one from Russia (24 years’ sentence). You don’t need to know Russian to hear the difference in mood.

The announcements are usually just a soporific recitation, “according to such and such statute, the court assigns a punishment of four years in prison, and, according to such and such statute, the court further assigns a sentence of life in prison, and according to such and such…” and so on.

In the U.S., there is also a dry part, of course, but then the fun begins. Judges add a little extra, some biting “parting words”, as this news segment puts it.

Why?

If you have noticed this, have you ever asked yourself why this is considered normal?

By law (last time I checked) the sentences are is typically X years in prison, not X years in prison plus a public humiliation session. Why is it considered appropriate for judges to moralize, upbraid, or outright insult the criminals?

If your answer is “the judges just express their emotions,” it’d be a strange way to look at it. There are numerous jobs requiring interaction with awful people on a daily basis. Nurses, psychiatrists, policemen, and, of course, cashiers, all have to suffer insufferable people while maintaining a professional attitude.

Why is it different for a judge? Why, after the lengthy trial process is over, a judge gets his or her 30 seconds of fame, where they can “let go” and compete with other judges in displays of eloquence, scorn, or patronizing compassion (“may God have mercy on your soul”, etc.).

Before becoming familiar with the U.S. culture, I’d never heard a judge go into a harangue about how unspeakable the crime was, or how much the victim has suffered, and I’d definitely never heard a judge give a (dubious) religious interpretation of the event (all of which is done here). The public, however, as you can see in the video comments, loves it.

I believe this isn’t a harmless cultural quirk, but a crack in the surface of the U.S. justice system through which we can glimpse its true blighted core.

The disease

What I think is happening is this: both the judges and the public feel that the laws, when the crime is especially disturbing or cruel, are not adequate to restore justice.

That’s why the judges want to add an extra bit of poison to their words. Maybe they can say something that will reverberate in the criminal’s mind while he “rots in his cell”. This way, it’s like adding a bit of a torture. Still not quite just, but getting there.

The public cheers, because they also feel how the justice is now restored a tiny bit more, though in their heart of hearts, I bet they wonder “Why, again, did we prohibit torture?”

So what is the disease of the U.S. justice system? And how do the left and the right come together in their sickness?

The disease, in my view, is the mistaken belief in Justice on Earth. Typically, the Left is accused of the naïve belief in restorative justice, but as we can see, the Right are just as guilty. People from both sides of the isle don’t seem to have the guts to accept that life is unjust, and there is little we can do about it.

In the next section, we’ll see how the Left’s reasoning is just a different manifestation of the same error.

Why the belief manifests as “lenience” on the Left and as “harshness” on the Right?

So how come the shared misguided belief in restoring justice on earth leads to the Left and the Right advocating for opposite things?

Well the Right and the Left do differ on where they stand on free will and nature vs. nurture. So the diseased belief’s manifestation is mediated by this extra variable.

Right-leaning reasoning looks like this:

• You are a master of your own destiny, so it’s you who chose to commit a crime. Hence, to restore justice we need to punish you really harshly for your poor choices.

Left-leaning, like this:

• You are a product of your environment and largely a victim of circumstances. Even if you’re not poor, perhaps you were never taught morals by your parents and don’t know better. You really had no choice but to become a criminal. So to restore justice on earth, we need to be lenient.

These lines of reasoning are bad enough in and of themselves (because they are too extreme), but when they compete with each other, it’s even worse. Now we have Right-leaning judges going into their tirades on people who (from the Left’s perspective) had no choice, and the people cheer. The left is horrified at such injustice, and the Left-leaning judges become extremely lenient to compensate “on average”. The Left cheers that the justice pendulum has swung their way. The Right, abhorred by the injustice, demands even harsher sentences whenever possible, and the cycle repeats.

The crux of the tragedy, and what to do

The tragedy of the situation is that the true disagreement between the Left and the Right about free will and “nature vs. nurture” wouldn’t actually matter, if not for their shared obsession with restoring justice on earth.

Imagine we all came together as adults and agreed that life is unjust and unfair. And that while it is sad, all we can do right now is to try to minimize harm and suffering in the world, and maximize well-being.

Then the issue becomes conceptually quite simple.

You can’t bring the victims back, you can’t undo harm by doing more harm, no matter how harshly you punish the perpetrators. Similarly, no matter how unfair it is that someone grew up with awful parents who taught him to do awful things, if you don’t enforce law and don’t lock up dangerous people, it will result chaos (meaning more suffering for everyone).

The only two things that matter then, really, are the reoffence probabilities and the deterrence effects we need to know to determine appropriate punishments that’d result in the best outcomes for the society (including the criminals). It’s not easy to estimate optimal values for these, but if we reframed the question this way, the topic would at least lose the idiotic ideological charge that makes it such a sore point at present.

And if you’re thinking “sure, happiness, safety, and well-being are all good and all, but I want JUSTICE,” it’s your right. Just know that if we set aside this unachievable, undefinable, and fairly useless concept, life will suddenly become much better for a lot of people.