Recently, the public has been busy discussing the light charges of the Public Prosecutor in the Novel Baswedan Case on the grounds that the Defendants “accidentally” injured the victim’s eye. This demand then sparked a lot of discussion in public spaces that questioned various irregularities in the case. Earlier, we also heard about the brutal actions of a Minneapolis Police officer against George Floyd, a black man who was accused of buying cigarettes with a fake $ 20 note that resulted in death. This case sparked anger among global citizens and a wave of anti-racism protests emerged in various countries such as the United States, New Zealand and Australia.
The unprofessionalism of law enforcement officers in the two cases above is only one of the many problems that arise in the Criminal Justice System. Various other problems that are no less complicated are overcriminalization and the decline in the authority of the criminal law, unclear purposes of punishment, disparity of crime, lack of attention to crime victims, social stigma and prisonization.
This brief discussion tries to look at the various problems that arise in the Criminal Justice System in general which are one of the factors causing the emergence of crimes
The Criminal Justice System as a Criminogenous Factor
The Criminal Justice System as part of criminal politics or crime prevention policies using criminal law in principle aims to control the occurrence of crimes so that they remain within acceptable tolerance limits. The four main components in the Criminal Justice System are the Police, Attorney General’s Office, Courts and Correctional Institutions which are expected to be integrated and coordinate with each other in order to achieve the objectives of the Criminal Justice System. The problem that then arises is that the Criminal Justice System, which is expected to be able to tackle crime, is often the cause of the crime itself (a criminogen factor).
The effectiveness of the Criminal Justice System will depend on many things and one of which is of course the professionalism of law enforcement officials. The unprofessionalism of law enforcement officers will have implications for many things, starting from the reduction in suspected criminal acts that can be detected (hidden criminals), especially in relation to high profile crimes, the emergence of judicial mafia to the occurrence of torture during the legal process.