The American criminal justice system as it exists today is a mechanism of sickening and entirely unnecessary cruelty, incarcerating more people than any other country in the world—both per capita and by total number.  

Like many aspects of American society, the depravity of the system is masked by its normality. It is hard to become outraged by injustice when one doesn’t know that real justice is possible.  

As long as it is thought of as normal, as the default vehicle of justice, very little thought will be given to the prescription of extended incarceration as a solution to crime. This is a mistake. 

What it comes down to is this: however incarceration might be justified instrumentally, it is intrinsically immensely cruel to lock a human being in a cage. In a society that at least ostensibly values liberty, the idea of stripping a person of their freedom so completely should be regarded as absolutely despicable. To then treat that person the way prisoners are treated in America, by overcrowding their prison, placing them in solitary confinement, taking away their right to vote, forcing them to work for less than a dollar an hour and generally depriving them of a basic level of dignity, should be unthinkable. 

And it is entirely purposeless. The harsh treatment of those convicted of crimes is clearly not the result of an overzealous pursuit of a safer society, because it actually makes society less safe. 

To illustrate this, take a look at Norway. Norway once had a primarily punitive justice system similar to the one in the United States. Like the U.S. system, theirs’ was a disaster. It was inhumane and it was ineffective, with a recidivism rate of 91 percent, meaning that of the prisoners who were released, 91 percent later became repeat offenders. Reform began in 1968 when the Norwegian people decided that having a system that was incredibly cruel and didn’t work was a bad idea. They began to shift the focus of their criminal justice system away from punishment and towards restorative justice, abolishing forced labor in 1970 and juvenile delinquency centers five years later. Today, their prisons are renowned for treating inmates with dignity and respect, by providing them with ample accommodation and training for reintegration back into society. They also incarcerate people for much shorter periods of times, with a maximum sentence of 21 years (at the end of the 21 years more time can be added if they are not rehabilitated).  

So did their system, once stripped of most of its cruelty, plunge Norway into chaos? No. Norway now has a recidivism rate of 20 percent, one of the lowest in the world along with one of the world’s lowest crime rates. As it turns out, treating a person with respect and dignity tends to foster respect and dignity. 

Clearly, then, the goal of our justice system is not the betterment of society. Its goal is to purely inflict suffering. This can be attributed in large part to racism, since those preyed on most by the system are minorities and the poor to whom a significant portion of society are unwilling to extend empathy. The systemic racial bias is present in many different forms, but one of the most striking is the historical discrepancy in sentencing between powdered and crack cocaine; those in possession of crack cocaine, a drug found more commonly in poor black communities, being sentenced much more harshly than those in possession of powdered cocaine is common, even though the two are essentially the same. The influence of private prisons has also had some impact on the problem since prisons that profit off incarceration are lobbying for stricter sentencing laws. But, more than anything, what has kept the system from being reformed is the fact that the shape of the American justice system has been so perverse for so long that it has warped our perception of justice itself.  

When the institution that is supposed to exemplify justice inflicts so much suffering simply for the sake of suffering, it is natural for a person growing up with such a system to project this onto the ideal itself. And so, justice to them becomes purposeless and necessarily cruel. That is not what justice is, and it is not what our justice system has to be. 

America urgently needs to radically restructure the criminal justice system, pivoting away from purely punitive measures and towards more restorative ones like those used in Norway. It needs to treat incarceration as an intrinsically awful infliction only to be used when absolutely necessary. It needs to ensure that conditions are adequate for those who are incarcerated. It is not a choice between compassion and rationality, it is a choice between rational compassion and irrational cruelty.