Transparency, Part One: The Awkward (But Necessary) Fit of Transparency

There should always be transparency in the criminal justice system.  There should also be boundaries for the sake of privacy and safety.  But sensible, well-planned, real transparency is necessary for accountability at all levels of the criminal justice system: cops, criminalists, coroners, courts, prisons, and all those decision-making bodies like city councils, parole boards, and police commissions who impact how the criminal justice system runs.

I can hear the collective mumbling from those in the criminal justice system (especially cops, who are often the primary targets of transparency efforts) who are tired of hearing the toll of the “transparency” bell.  I know most of them know this, but just to go over it one more time, then we’ll move on…

Without that necessary transparency both the criminal justice system and the citizens it is supposed to protect and serve are harmed: courtrooms are stocked with uninformed juries (or, worse, misinformed juries) who deliver bad verdicts, public distrust of walled-off police departments grows like a murky blue monster hiding under their beds, prisons become incubators for gangs to grow their ranks and strip out any remaining humanity from the softest of their members before they are returned to society to wreak more havoc.  Unfortunately these are becoming the traits our society expects of our criminal justice system rather than traits that it seeks to eliminate.

Now, for those of you who think I just chastised a bunch of cops for not wanting to be accountable, you’re wrong.  ALL levels of the criminal justice system require transparency.  Community activists and the press tend to focus on cops, which means that the dirt just builds up elsewhere.  Most who work in the criminal justice system understand all too well why transparency is necessary.  They simply dread the extra work and micromanagement that it brings.

If you want to understand why someone would dread “transparency” because of the extra work and micromanagement it brings, put yourself in their shoes.  Think about your own job or your favorite sport or hobby.  Something that you’re good at and that you love doing.  Now imagine that someone who knows absolutely nothing about that thing that you love to do comes in one day and wants to hover over your shoulder and watch how you do it, question how you do it, ask if there’s a better way you could be doing it, and then asks you to write down everything you’re doing all the time in a format that makes sense to them but not to you.  And that’s how that job or sport or hobby is going to be from now on.  That’s transparency.  It’s necessary, but that doesn’t mean it’s comfortable.

Transparency is also a hard pill to swallow when it’s still thought of as preemptive punishment for future wrongdoing.  Many agencies have begun to embrace transparency for what it should be: a tool to help communicate to the public that an agency is the upstanding, responsible institution that it should be and to clearly define standards for employees.

But the public should be able to just trust that criminal justice agencies are dependable and trustworthy, right?  That’s a nice sentiment, but scandals of the past (and, unfortunately, the present) have tarnished that story-book vision of criminal justice agencies as protectors of the public, defenders of justice.

Which means that transparency will always be necessary and the methodologies used will always need to be evaluated to make sure they are working.