1980s Criminal Justice

New York in the 1980s was full of crime, both in and around the city. Crime, unemployment, and homelessness were high; also, according to Smith, “crack was blighting whole families and neighborhoods. Violent-crime rates were rising for the third straight year, and homicides would set a record” (Smith). In addition, I can see from the video that the 1980s were a bad time for New Yorkers. The police were out of line when doing their job because they were very aggressive to the boys. They did not follow procedures. I believe the cops just wanted a story from the boys and that there was racial profiling. The cops knew that the boys would cave in at some point. The tactics on the part of the police were not ethical because they just wanted a …show more content…
I believe, however, that the criminal justice failed the boys and the city of New York because everybody just looked the other way in regard to the boys. From the “Central Park Five” account, their experience was not a good one. The film went from person to person—while most of them got their GED diploma while in prison, overall they all had horrible experiences from the interrogation to the trial, and for these people who lost their youth to a horrible experiment, I believed there should have done from them in sense maybe getting their life back together. Since there lost their youth to this experiment In Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, Andrew Karmen explains that the Fourteenth Amendment offers equal protection under the law for everybody, regardless of their race, sex, or class; justice is blind (2010). However, I believe that this principle was not honored in regard to the boys who were not given a change in venue at their trial. I believe that in this case, everybody involved already had made their decision in regard to the boys, and they were not given a fair