Systems Sunday: Architectural Injustice
How our current justice system rewards cutting corners and trampling rights.
Last week, in Systems Sunday: Rewiring Democracy, we outlined the central claim of this series: that the failures we face as a society aren’t just the result of bad leaders or isolated events, but of broken systems. Gerrymandering, voter interference, the two party dipole these are not random misfires, but predictable outcomes of the rules and incentives we’ve built into our governing architecture. If we want to create a world that is more just, more functional, and more free, we can’t keep playing by broken rules. We have to change the systems themselves.
Each Sunday going forward, we’ll take a deep dive into a major structure shaping our lives, elections, criminal justice, economy, education, housing, transportation, and explore how systemic change can produce radically better outcomes. This is a series about possibility. Not empty reform for its own sake, and not utopian dreaming untethered from reality, but a deliberate examination of how incentive structures shape behavior and constrain imagination, and how they can be redesigned to serve the many instead of the few.
This week we break down the criminal justice system, and see how we can create justice from protecting the rights of individuals and holding those in power accountable.
In the United States, the criminal legal system is not broken, it is operating exactly as it was designed. The outcomes we see today: mass incarceration, racialized policing, prosecutorial impunity, and public distrust in the judiciary are not the product of individual bad actors or isolated dysfunctions. They are the consequence of a system designed to control and punish, rather than serve and protect.
This final Systems Sunday essay for the month ties together our critiques of the Supreme Court and democratic institutions with a broader structural indictment of the justice system as a whole. A legitimate legal system must be accountable, equitable, and responsive to democratic governance. Ours is none of these things.
The Constitutional Shield
The Supreme Court is often treated as a neutral arbiter, above the political fray. But its power is unchecked, its members unelected, and its legitimacy increasingly in doubt. As argued in last week’s essay, the Court’s right-wing supermajority has entrenched minority rule, gutted protections for the accused, and shielded police and prosecutors from accountability, all while benefiting from a web of elite influence, luxury gifts, and lifetime tenure.
This lack of accountability is replicated throughout the judiciary. Federal judges serve for life. State judges are often elected in partisan races funded by special interests. Prosecutors, arguably the most powerful figures in the system, face little external oversight, and police officers benefit from legal doctrines like qualified immunity that effectively place them above the law. The result is a justice system that, rather than guarding the constitutional rights of ordinary people, too often reinforces the power of those already in control.
We need structural change. First, federal judges and justices should be subject to term limits and binding ethics rules. No single person should hold a seat of such extraordinary influence for decades without any democratic check. Term limits, say, 18 years for Supreme Court justices, would ensure a regular turnover of perspectives while reducing the stakes of each individual appointment. History shows the danger of lifetime judicial rule: from the Court that struck down child labor laws in the early 20th century to the justices who upheld Japanese-American internment during World War II, unchecked judicial power has repeatedly entrenched injustice under the guise of “neutral” constitutional interpretation. A robust code of conduct, enforceable by an independent body, would end the current system where justices police themselves, and where lavish gifts or undisclosed conflicts of interest can be swept under the rug.
Second, independent judicial commissions must be empowered to investigate and discipline misconduct at every level of the bench. At present, judges are largely shielded from meaningful scrutiny, and the rare disciplinary action is slow, opaque, and inconsistent. The lesson of the Watergate era, when several federal judges resigned under threat of impeachment for corruption, was that even the judiciary is susceptible to political rot. But unlike that period, we now lack the will and the mechanisms to confront judicial wrongdoing swiftly. A national network of oversight bodies, insulated from partisan pressure and with authority to remove or sanction judges, would help restore public trust by showing that judicial power is not immune from the rules that govern the rest of us.
Finally, at the state level, judicial campaigns must be disentangled from the influence of wealthy donors and corporate interests. Transparent public financing for judicial elections would allow judges to run competitive campaigns without becoming beholden to the same political machines and special interests whose cases they may later decide. The dangers here are not hypothetical: in Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co. (2009), the U.S. Supreme Court itself found that extreme campaign spending in a state judicial race created “a serious risk of actual bias.” That was a single case that happened to make it into the national spotlight, many more go unnoticed. Paired with stricter disclosure requirements for outside spending, public financing would make state courts less an arena for partisan warfare and more a venue for impartial justice.
An End to Qualified Immunity, Bail, and Entrenchment
Qualified immunity is not a minor technical rule, it is a doctrine invented by the courts to shield public officials from accountability, particularly police. Under this doctrine, a police officer can violate your rights with impunity so long as there is no previous case with “clearly established” precedent involving the exact same conduct. The result is a Catch-22: the first time an officer commits a novel abuse, there’s no precedent, so the victim loses, and because the victim loses, no precedent gets set. This circular logic has led to courts excusing horrific abuses, from police siccing attack dogs on surrendering suspects, to shooting unarmed people without warning, to stealing property during searches. The doctrine’s modern form was crystallized in Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982) and expanded in subsequent rulings, but its practical effect has been to give public officials, especially police, an immunity from the law that ordinary citizens could never dream of.
Ending qualified immunity is a critical first step toward making the law apply equally to all. But it must be paired with other reforms that attack the broader architecture of impunity in the criminal justice system.
First, we must end cash bail, which punishes poverty rather than protecting public safety. Across the country, people accused of minor offenses languish in jail for days, weeks, or months simply because they cannot afford to pay for their freedom. Meanwhile, wealthy defendants accused of violent crimes can walk free within hours. Cash bail destabilizes communities, destroys jobs, and coerces guilty pleas from innocent people desperate to return to their families. The legacy of the 1980s “tough on crime” bail expansions shows exactly how this plays out: in jurisdictions that leaned heavily on cash bail, jail populations ballooned, not because crime spiked, but because poverty was criminalized.
Second, we must fund pretrial services and ensure that people accused of crimes have robust access to legal counsel and support. The right to an attorney is a constitutional promise, but in practice, public defenders are often so overburdened that they cannot give each case the attention it deserves. Historically, underfunded defense systems have fueled wrongful convictions, as in the notorious Scottsboro Boys case of the 1930s, where inadequate counsel played a key role in sending innocent men to prison. Modern reforms must not only fund more defense attorneys but also provide wraparound services, such as court date reminders, transportation assistance, and mental health support, that actually reduce failure-to-appear rates without incarceration.
Finally, we must decouple prosecutorial and police interests by separating the agencies responsible for prosecution from the departments that conduct arrests and investigations. In far too many jurisdictions, prosecutors rely on close relationships with police to build cases, making them reluctant to investigate or charge officers, even when those officers commit violent crimes. The cozy dynamic is nothing new: from the Rodney King beating in 1991 to the killing of Laquan McDonald in 2014, police misconduct has often gone uncharged until overwhelming public outrage forces prosecutors’ hands. Creating independent prosecutorial bodies for cases involving police would eliminate this conflict of interest and ensure that officers accused of misconduct face the same legal scrutiny as everyone else.
From Punishment to Public Safety
The United States has 5% of the world’s population but nearly 25% of its prisoners. We lead the world in incarceration, not because our streets are more dangerous, but because our legal and political systems have been engineered to criminalize poverty, addiction, mental illness, and race. The explosion of mass incarceration in the past half-century was not an accident; it was the result of deliberate policy choices. The “War on Drugs” declared in the 1970s, mandatory minimum sentencing laws of the 1980s, and “three strikes” rules of the 1990s all targeted marginalized communities while doing little to reduce crime. The outcome is stark: the U.S. locks up more people per capita than authoritarian regimes, with devastating consequences for families and entire neighborhoods.
A real justice system should be measured not by how many people it can punish, but by how effectively it can reduce harm. This requires a fundamental shift in priorities, from pouring billions into carceral institutions to investing in public health and community care. The history is clear: countries that have embraced rehabilitation over punishment, such as Norway and Portugal, have seen both crime rates and recidivism fall. By contrast, America’s obsession with harsher sentences has not made us safer; it has simply made our prison system a sprawling monument to political failure.
We can start by decriminalizing nonviolent drug offenses and replacing prison time with treatment. The evidence is overwhelming: addiction is a public health issue, not a criminal one. Portugal’s 2001 decriminalization of all drugs, combined with robust treatment and social services, dramatically reduced overdose deaths and HIV transmission without causing a spike in drug use. Here in the U.S., drug courts and diversion programs have shown similar promise, but they reach only a fraction of those who could benefit because criminalization still dominates our policy.
We should also close failing jails and prisons and reallocate their budgets to violence prevention, education, and restorative justice programs. In many cities, aging facilities cost millions to maintain yet produce no measurable public safety benefit. Redirecting those funds could pay for youth mentorship programs, community-based mental health care, and proven violence interruption strategies. The closure of New York City’s Rikers Island, though still incomplete, was driven by exactly this logic: investing in communities does more to prevent crime than warehousing human beings in inhumane conditions.
Finally, we must end mandatory minimum sentences and allow for individualized sentencing that accounts for context, rehabilitation, and the potential for redemption. Mandatory minimums strip judges of the ability to weigh the unique circumstances of each case, leading to absurd outcomes, such as decades-long sentences for low-level drug offenses. The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which reduced the infamous crack-powder cocaine disparity, was a step in the right direction, but it left much of the mandatory minimum framework intact. A humane justice system would trust judges to tailor sentences in ways that prioritize rehabilitation over retribution.
Public safety is not the product of longer prison terms. It is the result of stable housing, access to education, economic opportunity, and social support. The more we invest in these pillars of community stability, the less we will need prisons at all. History has already given us the blueprint, it’s just a question of whether we have the political will to follow it.
From Crisis to Reconstruction
The American justice system is a machine, engineered to protect the powerful and punish the powerless. But machines are made by human hands. And what’s made can be unmade.
Every pillar of our legal order: courts, prosecutors, police, has been bent to serve elite interests. This is not a glitch. It is the design. And no amount of tinkering will save it. We don’t need reform. We need a new blueprint.
A justice system worthy of democracy will not come from the top down. It will be built from the ground up, by communities reclaiming power, by laws shaped in the open, by institutions answerable to the people they serve.
The fight ahead is not just about legal change. It is about democratic rebirth. If we want a society rooted in dignity, fairness, and freedom, we must take it into our own hands, and build it together. Next week, we’ll explore how to dismantle entrenched systems of policing and prosecutorial power, and build justice rooted in community and democracy.
If you’ve made it this far, you’re clearly someone who values thoughtful critique over surface-level noise.
Join me every Sunday as we dig into the deeper systems behind the chaos, law, politics, power, and how we rebuild what’s broken.
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