For the last few days, President Obama has been touring the country, talking about the desperate need for criminal justice reform. This past Thursday, he became the first sitting president [3] to visit a federal prison, a corrections facility in El Reno, Oklahoma. Two days prior, he spoke at the NAACP’s annual conference in Philadelphia.
Much of his speech was dedicated to discussing inequities in our country’s dispensation of criminal justice — he cited several statistics pointing to the disproportionate jailing of Latinos and African Americans — and the failings of a system that now houses nearly twice as many people as it did two decades ago. “[O]ur criminal justice system isn’t as smart as it should be,” the president said [4]. “It’s not keeping us as safe as it should be. It is not as fair as it should be. Mass incarceration makes our country worse off, and we need to do something about it.”
A national conversation around criminal justice in the United States, a country that jails more of its population than any other country in the world, by percentage and in number [5], is long overdue. In his new book, Unfair: The New Science Of Criminal Injustice, Drexel University associate professor of law Adam Benforado looks closely at the science at work in our justice system. His research reveals that not only do race and class have a tremendous impact on access to justice, issues such as juror life experience and the fatigue level of parole boards can mean the literal difference between freedom and incarceration — and sometimes, life and death — for those who find themselves caught up in the system.
In an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air [6], Benforado discussed the heavy emphasis placed on confessions in convictions, despite the fact that they aren’t always reliable evidence of guilt. “[O]ne of the things we know from psychology is that juries place great, great weight in confessions,” says [6] Benforado. “What we also know is that confessions can be a very bad way to convict a person. Sometimes we get it wrong.”
The Innocence Project, which is responsible for more than 330 exonerations, notes that [7] “more than 1 out of 4 people wrongfully convicted but later exonerated by DNA evidence made a false confession or incriminating statement.” Saul Kassin, a professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who has dedicated much of his career to researching false confessions, told Time [8] magazine in a 2013 interview that often, “[o]nce the confession is taken, it trumps everything else…its effects cannot be reversed.”
A significant part of the problem is the way in which confessions are obtained. Benforado says the interrogation process is essentially divided into two parts. In the initial stage, police tend to focus on behaviors that might indicate a suspect is lying. However, the methods for determining deception are rooted in false ideas about body language and the use of leading lines of questioning.