Justice System

At twenty I stood in a courtroom facing up to ten years. Someone in the system saw something worth saving and gave me a chance. Not everyone gets one. This is the story of how justice works, who it works for, and the four-thousand-year-old pattern that's never really changed. 

Transcript

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Justice system. So I had my experience with the judicial system, and I look back now and see it gave me a chance. Not sending me to prison was the right call. Honestly, that wouldn't have helped me, in fact, it could have been so detrimental that it completely changed the trajectory of my life. I imagine I would have come out bitter, angry, surrounded by people who'd done far worse, learning things I didn't need to learn, and instead of straightening out, I'd have gone further down a road I was already dangerously close to. But instead I used it as a chance to say, right, that's that, that's a road I'm not going down. And I didn't. But I was brought up in a good home, two parents, a warm house, adventures, gifts, and lots of laughs. My privilege is right there, and not everyone has that. There will always be cries of, well, that's no excuse. People have it tough and they don't break the law, and I understand that argument, but the fact is it is an excuse. Until you have lived someone's experiences, it is impossible to judge them fairly. A kid who grows up with nothing, no stability, no safety, no one showing them what a good decision looks like. That kid is not starting from the same place as I was and pretending otherwise is dishonest. The system I went through gave me a chance because someone in that system saw something worth saving. Not everyone gets that. So let's go as far back as we can to see where the idea of justice first appears in history, because if we're questioning everything else in this book, we might as well question this too. The oldest evidence of a written legal code was found at Ebla in modern Syria, dating back to around 2400 BCE, but only fragments survive. The oldest one we can actually read is the Code of Urnammu from Summa in modern Iraq, written around 2100 BCE over 4,000 years ago. It contained 57 laws and was carved onto clay tablets in cuneiform script. The King Urnamu, or possibly his son Shulgi, presented the laws as coming from the gods, which is a trick we've seen before and we'll see again. And the prologue declared that the king had banished malediction, violence, and strife, and established equity in the land. Now here's the interesting thing. The Code of Urnamu, the oldest surviving set of laws in human history, was actually more lenient than what came after it. Most punishments were monetary fines. You stole something, you paid compensation. You injured someone, you paid them. It was closer to what we'd now call restorative justice, the idea that you make things right rather than just punish. Capital punishment existed, but only for the most serious offences like murder and robbery. The main issue with this though is the obvious. Those who can afford it can pay and get off relatively lightly, those that can't feel much harder. Three hundred years later came the Code of Hammurabi, two hundred and eighty-two laws carved into a seven foot pillar of black stone in Babylon around 1750 BCE. This is where an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth comes from. It was harsher, more rigid, and it introduced something that should trouble anyone who believes in equality before the law. It had three tiers of justice. If you were wealthy, you got one punishment, if you were a free citizen, you got another, and if you were a slave, you got the worst of it. A doctor who killed a rich patient had his hands cut off. A doctor who killed a slave just had to pay a fine. Different rules for different people depending on where they sat in the hierarchy. So the pattern is there from the very start. The first attempt at written law was fairer than the second. The system got harsher over time, not more just, and by the time Hammurabi carved his laws into stone, the principle was already established that the rich and the poor would be treated differently. Four thousand years later, you could argue not much has changed. Both Ur Namu and Hammurabi claimed their laws were given to them by the gods. Moses did the same thing with the Ten Commandments centuries later. The message every time is the same, don't question the rules because God wrote them. It's the oldest trick in the book, and it worked then the same way it works now. You wrap authority in something sacred, and suddenly questioning it becomes not just illegal but immoral. Now let's jump forward a few thousand years, because for most of recorded history there was no such thing as a police force. Laws existed, but enforcement was local, messy and inconsistent. In England, up until the early 1800s, policing was done by unpaid parish constables, elected locals who had no training, no uniform and no real authority beyond what the community gave them. If things got seriously out of hand, the army was sent in, which as you can imagine didn't tend to end well. In 1819 at St. Peter's Field in Manchester, a crowd of 60,000 people gathered peacefully to call for the right to vote. The cavalry charged into them. At least 18 people were killed and hundreds injured. They called it the Peterloo Massacre. It was against that background, a country terrified of revolution, an industrial population growing faster than anyone could control, and a ruling class who needed order without the political cost of sending in the military, that Robert Peel created the Metropolitan Police in 1829. London at the time had a population of nearly one and a half million people and was policed by just 450 constables and 4,500 night watchmen spread across dozens of separate organizations. Crime was rising, or at least the reporting of it was, and the middle and upper classes wanted something done about it. Peel's genius was making the police look civilian. He dressed them in blue rather than military red, gave them wooden truncheons instead of swords, put them in top hats to look like ordinary citizens, and insisted they patrol on foot. The message was clear, these are not soldiers, they are your neighbours in uniform. His most famous principle, whether he actually wrote it or not, was that the police are the public and the public are the police. Their effectiveness was to be measured not by the number of arrests, but by the absence of crime. The first constables were paid a guinea a week, more than a labourer but less than a skilled worker, and they worked twelve-hour shifts six days a week, walking up to ten miles a day. They were not popular. Handbills called them raw lobsters and blue devils and Peel's bloody gang. Officers were physically attacked in the streets, some were impaled, some blinded, and on one occasion a constable was held down while a vehicle was driven over him. Within a year the first officer was killed on duty, but crime fell, and within 30 years every city in Britain was required to have its own police force modelled on Peel's design. The idea crossed the Atlantic and shaped police forces across America from the 1840s onwards. So the first modern police force was created not because the public demanded protection, but because the ruling class needed a way to maintain order without using the military. It was born out of fear of revolution, not a desire for justice. That doesn't mean it was a bad idea. Peel's principles were genuinely progressive, and the concept of policing by consent is one of the better ideas anyone has had about how power should work. But the origin matters because it tells you who the system was designed to serve first, and the answer isn't ordinary people. Peel's idea worked though, at least on paper. Crime fell, the public eventually came round, and within 30 years every city in Britain had a police force modelled on his design. The concept crossed the Atlantic and shaped American policing from the 1840s onwards. For a while it was genuinely one of the better things a government had ever done. Civilians keeping order by consent, no weapons beyond a wooden truncheon, measured not by arrest but by the absence of crime. If it had stayed that way, this would be a very short chapter. But it didn't stay that way, it never does. By the mid-20th century, policing in both Britain and America had become something Robert Peel would not have recognised. The science had improved enormously. Fingerprinting, forensic evidence, criminal databases, radio communication, specialist detective units, all of it meant that police were genuinely better at solving crime than they had ever been. Thousands of dedicated officers spent their careers doing extraordinary work, pulling people from burning buildings, talking armed suspects down, spending years on cases that brought killers to justice, working nights and weekends in communities that needed them. There are officers who have saved lives and changed lives and never once made the news for it, and that deserves to be said clearly. The vast majority of people who join the police do it because they want to help, and plenty of them do exactly that for their entire careers. But the institution itself developed a sickness, and the sickness had a name. It was institutional racism, institutional corruption, and institutional arrogance, and in some cases all three at the same time. In 1970, a group of black activists in London, known as the Mangrove Nine, were put on trial after protesting against the Metropolitan Police's repeated targeting of a Caribbean restaurant in Notting Hill called the Mangrove. The police had raided the place twelve times without finding anything illegal. The nine defendants were acquitted of the most serious charges, and the trial became the first judicial acknowledgement that racial hatred existed within the Met. That was over fifty years ago. Everyone in the UK should know the story of Stephen Lawrence. He was murdered in an unprovoked racist knife attack in Elton, South London. Five white suspects were identified almost immediately. The police investigation was so incompetent, so riddled with failures, so lacking in basic professionalism that Stephen's family were forced to campaign for years just to get anyone to take the case seriously. His mother Doreen Lawrence, who would later become a Baroness, said publicly that the investigation failed because her son was black. In 1999, the McPherson Report was published following an inquiry into the handling of the murder. It found that the investigation had been marred by a combination of professional incompetence, institutional racism, and a failure of leadership by senior officers. It concluded that the Metropolitan Police was institutionally racist and made 70 recommendations for reform. It took until 2012, nearly 20 years after the murder, for two of the suspects to finally be convicted. Twenty-two years after the McPherson report, a parliamentary committee investigated what had changed. Baroness Lawrence told them, things have become really stagnant and nothing seems to have moved. At current rates of progress, the committee found that police forces won't be representative of the communities they serve for another twenty years, which would be nearly half a century after McPherson raised the issue, and over fifty years after Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death on a pavement in South East London. Then, in 2021, a serving Metropolitan Police Firearms Officer called Wayne Cousins kidnapped, raped, and murdered a woman called Sarah Everard as she walked home in South London. He used his warrant card and handcuffs to stage a fake arrest. The Baroness Casey review that followed found the Met was still riddled with misogyny, racism and homophobia. Senior officers had previously dismissed the problems as a few bad apples, but the review made clear it was the barrel that was rotten and had been for decades. Around the same time it emerged that between 2014 and 2015 a serial killer called Stephen Port had murdered four young men he met on Grinder, dumping their bodies near his flat in East London. The Metropolitan Police investigation was so poor, so lacking in what reviewers called professional curiosity that a coroner's inquest accused the force of institutional homophobia. Four young men were dead, and the police had barely looked into it. Now America has its own version of this story and it's worse. The history of American policing cannot be separated from the history of American racism, because in large parts of the country the two were the same thing. In the southern states, before the Civil War, the earliest forms of organized policing were slave patrols, groups of armed white men whose job was to capture runaway slaves and suppress any attempts at resistance. After abolition, those same structures didn't disappear, they evolved into the police forces and sheriff's departments that enforced Jim Crow segregation for the next hundred years. The Ku Klux Klan had members serving as police officers, sheriffs and judges throughout the South, well into the 20th century and in some cases beyond it. The civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s saw American police turn fire hoses on children, set dogs on peaceful marches, beat protesters unconscious on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, and stand by while black churches were bombed. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover ran a program called Cointel Pro that infiltrated civil rights organizations, surveilled Martin Luther King, sent him a letter encouraging him to kill himself and worked actively to destroy the movement from within. This wasn't rogue officers, this was institutional policy. In 1991, a bystander filmed four Los Angeles police officers beating a black motorist called Rodney King with batons over 50 times while he lay on the ground. All four officers were later acquitted. The city then erupted, and 63 people died in the riots that followed. In 2020, a Minneapolis police officer called Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of a black man called George Floyd for over nine minutes while Floyd said, I can't breathe. And bystanders begged the officer to stop, Floyd died. The footage was seen around the world and sparked protests in every US state and in countries across Europe, Asia, and South America. It wasn't a new problem. It was one that was now being actively filmed by the general public. Between these two events, an uncountable number of black Americans were shot, choked, beaten, and killed by police officers across the country. Some names became known: Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy shot dead within two seconds of police arriving, Brionna Taylor, shot in her own bed during a botched raid that entered the wrong house. Philando Castile, shot during a routine traffic stop with his girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter in the car. For every name that made the news there were hundreds that didn't. And yet alongside all of that, there were officers who gave everything to protect their communities, who ran into danger while everyone else ran out, who spent decades building trust in neighborhoods that had every reason not to trust them, who solved cases that nobody else could, who treated every person they met with dignity regardless of the colour of their skin. The tragedy of institutional corruption is that it poisons the reputation of everyone in uniform, the good and the bad alike, and the people who suffer within the force are the ones who joined for the right reasons and now have to carry the weight of everything their institution has done wrong. Now let's talk about courts, because if policing is where the justice system meets the street, then the courts are where it decides who pays and how much. There is a phrase you hear a lot in legal circles, justice is blind. The idea being that the law treats everyone equally regardless of wealth, status or background. It's a nice thought, and in some courtrooms with some judges it might even be true. But the data tells a different story. If you steal£100 from a shop, you will almost certainly be arrested, charged, taken to court, given a criminal record, and in some cases sent to prison. If you steal£100 million through financial fraud, market manipulation or tax evasion, you will almost certainly be investigated by a regulatory body, offered the chance to settle with a fine and walk away without a criminal conviction. The crime is the same, taking something that doesn't belong to you, but the system treats them as entirely different things depending on who is doing the taking. After the 2008 financial crisis, the number of senior banking executives in the United States who went to prison was one. One person, Karim Serageldin, a mid-level credit Suisse trader, got 30 months. Nobody from Goldman Sachs, nobody from JP Morgan, nobody from Lehman Brothers, nobody from any of the institutions that caused the worst financial disaster in 80 years saw the inside of a cell. The banks paid fines, billions in fines, but fines paid by a corporation are just a cost of doing business. Nobody is personally punished. The money comes from shareholders and customers, not from the people who made the decisions. Meanwhile, in Britain, benefit fraud costs the government an estimated£6.3 billion a year. Tax evasion and avoidance by corporations and wealthy individuals costs the government an estimated£36 billion a year. One of these gets front-page headlines, political campaigns, dedicated investigation units and prison sentences. The other gets a polite letter from HMRC and sometimes a fine. I'll let you guess which is which. And then there are the cases that make you question whether the word justice should be used at all. In Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, between 2003 and 2008-2, judges called Mark Tiavarella and Michael Conahan ran what became known as the Kids for Cash scandal. What they did is almost too grotesque to believe, but every word of it is documented and proven in court. Conaghan, who was the senior judge, shut down the county-run juvenile detention centre. Then both judges accepted$2.8 million in kickbacks from the builder and co-owner of two private for-profit juvenile prisons. In return, Chavarella, who presided over the juvenile court, imposed a zero tolerance policy that guaranteed a steady flow of children into those private facilities. Over five years, roughly 2,500 children appeared before Chavarella. Over half of them had no legal representation. Children as young as 12 were sent away in handcuffs for offences that should never have resulted in detention. A 14-year-old girl was sentenced for creating a fake MySpace page, mocking her assistant principal. A 14-year-old boy was locked up after his parents unknowingly bought him a stolen scooter from a family member. He ended up in and out of the system for five years. A 13-year-old girl was detained for throwing a volleyball at another student. Children were sent to prison for trespassing in a vacant building, for stealing a CD from Walmart, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time with no one to speak for them. One 16-year-old girl who appeared before Shiavarella for driving the wrong way down a one-way street was sentenced to 11 months. The judge counted the buttons on her shirt and used that number as the sentence. Another juvenile went in for a release hearing and was sentenced to an additional eight months because they picked the wrong sports team. These are not exaggerations. These are findings of fact from a federal court. Several of the children who passed through Ciavarella's courtroom later died. Some from drug overdoses, some by suicide. One mother called Sandy Fonso, whose son Ed was imprisoned by Ciavarella at 17 and never recovered, confronted the judge outside the courthouse after the scandal broke. Her son had killed himself. She screamed at him that he had ruined her son's life. He walked past her without a word. In 2011, Chiavarella was found guilty of twelve federal charges, including racketeering, fraud, and money laundering. He was sentenced to 28 years in prison. He still insists he did nothing wrong. Conahan pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 17 and a half years, but was released to home confinement during COVID with six years still to serve, and then had his sentence commuted entirely by President Biden in his final round of clemency. The builder who constructed the private prisons got one year. The co-owner who paid the kickbacks got 18 months at a low security facility in Florida. A federal judge ordered Schiavarella and Conaghan to pay$206 million in damages to the victims,$106 million compensatory and$100 million punitive. They will almost certainly never pay a penny of it. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out 4,000 juvenile convictions, 4,000 children who had been found guilty by a judge who was being paid to find them guilty. 4,000 families who were told the system had weighed the evidence and made a fair decision when the reality was that the decision had been bought and paid for before the child even walked through the door. This is not a story about two bad judges. This is a story about a system that allowed it to happen for five years. A system where children appeared in court without lawyers and nobody questioned it. A system where a judge could send a 12-year-old to a private prison for a minor offence and nobody stepped in. A system where the people making the rules were the same people profiting from the punishment. And when it was finally exposed, the people at the bottom, the children, got the worst of it. And the people at the top, the builders and the investors, got a slap on the wrist and a comfortable cell. 4,000 years ago, the Code of Urunamu attempted to establish fairness. It used fines instead of mutilation, compensation instead of cruelty. Three hundred years later, Hammurabi introduced three tiers of justice based on class one law for the rich and another for the poor. 4,000 years after that, we're still running the same system. The details have changed, but the structure hasn't.