A Struggle in the Economy = A Struggling Justice System

What, above anything possible, would be the worst we could lose in this recession? Your job? Well that is pretty bad. Your health care? That is certainly worse. But those are things that affect individuals separately, not collectively. How about a failing business? That affects a collective, but only a small portion. On a societal level, certainly the worst thing we can lose is exactly what this country was founded on : justice. Without justice we certainly have no rights or individual and collective freedoms. Most would emphatically agree, with the exception of a large number of idiots (from the Greek word for "inward" or "private" and the word "individual" itself is possibly derived from idiot). Sure, without justice our society would be flooded with criminals and con artists.

But one would argue that most cities haven't cut budgets too much on law enforcement and have increased the number of police officers. This, of course, is variable from city to city and from region to region, but mostly true. But the police are not the whole equation to justice. As Dick Wolfe (creator or Law & Order) puts it : "In the criminal justice system the People are represented by two separate and equally important groups : the police who investigate crimes and the the District Attorneys who prosecute the offenders..." In the past six months, since the Stimulus Package ran dry, civil courts have had to lay off a good portion of their staff, which means more work per person. So the police can bring in offenders, but if the civil courts cannot handle the work load a lot falls through the cracks. I recently spoke to an architect working on the Brockton Courthouse and he mentioned that they were not just renovating the building, they had to volunteer billable hours of clerical work.

Of course, a good deal of technology has been developed and commercialized and is available, which can help relieve the issues that arise with budget cuts. One new technology that is experimentally being used in courts is teleconferencing; essentially, holding trials digitally. This helps save the costs of transporting defendants and detainees from jails and juvenile centers, as well as paying for jurors' hotel and meals, and the judge only has to come into the office have drinks with the DA. Sounds great, but then there is the Sixth Amendment that is violated, the Confrontation Clause : the right to face your accuser.

Ideologically, the judicial system is what maintains Democracy. Without it the Nation loses all concepts of justice. Justice, the foundation of this country and the protection rights and freedoms. Now, all of this I have certainly over-hyped, simply to illustrate a point. Our judicial system is certainly suffering in this economy, but the civic staff are just working harder. Justice seems to be served, though it is struggling to do so. But the point is, of all things we can possibly lose, the worst is justice. That is what distinguishes the human society from the ambivalent natural world of "kill or be killed" and survival. Justice is our natural order of rights and freedom. Most strongly, freedom from.