Ethics

Informants  Informants are individuals who provide difficult to obtain information to law enforcement officials.  This type of information source implicates several criminal justice ethics concern because informants by definition violate the trust of other people when providing the information.  Indeed, in this respect it has been noted that To obtain evidence, they pressure business partners, life-long friends, and even family members to rat on each other by betraying secrets.  Some informants are typically confidential, some may commit crimes, and some may be pressured into becoming informants while some may do so voluntarily.  One of the main reasons that criminal justice professionals rely on informants is because of legal limitations, such as constitutional protections, that make the collection of information difficult without inside informants.  Care must be taken to distinguish truthful information from false information because of potential biases and secret agendas by informants.

Interrogation  An interrogation is a law enforcement tool to extract or otherwise discover information from a person through a variety of questioning contexts and techniques.  This is a direct attempt to seek information, unlike the indirect attempts represented by informants, and legal and ethical considerations impose several constraints on law enforcement officers conducting interrogations.  Interrogations may involve a variety of types of people, ranging from innocent witnesses to actual suspects in criminal cases, and interrogation methods should vary depending on the nature of the subject of an interrogation.  Because of the compulsory nature of a police interrogation, whether seeking information or a confession, the Supreme Court has demanded constitutional protections for persons being interrogated such as the Miranda warnings regarding the potential consequences of an interrogation and the right to legal counsel.  Interrogations therefore must conform to certain legal and ethical norms if the information or confession secured is to be admissible in a court of law.

Strict Constructionist  This term refers to how people interpret and apply the law in general and the American Constitution in particular as it apples to criminal justice issues.  A strict constructionist, such as Justice Scalia for instance, believes that legal statutes and constitutional provisions should be read literally, that the personal beliefs of judges should not be used to aid or alter a literal reading, and that this represents the limited power of the judicial branch of government. Specifically, as noted in the legal literature, Strict constructionists hold that constitutional interpretation should be confined to a literal reading of the Constitution informed by an understanding of its historical context HYPERLINK httpwww.questiaschool.comPM.qstaod98945511(OBrien, 2000, pp. 14-15).  This leads to a more limited view of the rights of criminal defendants, as is the case with Fourth Amendment issues and the exclusionary rule, and it assigns more responsibility to Congress to pass laws on controversial issues because it is more directly responsible to the voters than the appointed Supreme Court.

Incapacitation  Incapacitation refers to the philosophical approach underlying different sentencing policies and options in the criminal justice system.  Unlike policies and sentencing laws primarily designed to deter individuals from committing certain types of criminal accts, policies and laws premised on incapacitation are instead premised on a form of absolute punishment in which criminal offenders are effectively incapacitated as a result of severe incarceration policies implemented through criminal sentencing guidelines and laws.  Incapacitation is frequently supplemented by other sentencing approaches in Colorado, for instance, it has been noted that CSP does not stop at incapacitation and continues to provide inmate programs and staff contact that encourage productive and socially acceptable behavior changes.  Generally speaking, however, incapacitation refers to severe sentencing policies and laws for the most violet types of people and those who are especially disruptive and difficult to control or reform.

Entrapment  Entrapment is a difficult concept to define with any precision because there are conflicting definitions offered by people with different perspectives.  On the one hand, some define entrapment as a contrived scenario through which law enforcement induces a person to commit a criminal act that they would have committed without the aforementioned inducement.  On the other hand, others argue that entrapment is too frequently a law enforcement inducement which tricks people into committing crimes that they may not have committed absent the aforementioned inducement.  This raises several ethical concerns because the underlying goal of entrapment is to catch people predisposed to certain types of crimes rather than to create through law enforcement activities new classes of criminal.  One critic of entrapment, citing the latter definition, has argued that  Entrapment is when you, the big, bad policeman, put evil thoughts into the mind of an otherwise innocent, law-abiding citizen and so coerce him to commit a crime for which you can then arrest him.   While this may be an overstatement, it does raise the relevant criminal justice ethics issue of preventing crime and creating crime.