How openly is failure discussed in criminal justice circles?
We fail a lot more than we succeed, but there’s an immense amount of effort dedicated to avoiding knowledge about failure. In medicine, there’s a much clearer professional ethic that says, you ought not do things that cause harm. Covering up failure in medicine would be seen as unethical, but you don’t have a corresponding sense of ethics in criminal justice. Why does such a stark difference exist in the willingness of the medical and criminal justice fields to admit to failure? There are a number of factors, but one is that we haven’t wanted to pay more to professionalize the field of criminal justice. For example, you can walk into a juvenile justice facility and deliver cognitive behavioral treatment with little or no training. That’s not true in other fields. Also, there’s a hubris that people have in the system where they think they know things that they don’t. Many judges who get to sentence people and make judgments about a person’s risk of re-offending have never had a criminol
