The judicial system in the U.S. is in serious need of an overhaul. People file civil lawsuits as a legal means to harass, criminals manipulate the system to literally get away with murder and special interest groups use courtrooms to enforce political correctness. Although much of this probably stems from the attitude that the purpose of the government is to solve everyone's problems, the justice system itself is ultimately responsible for this since it allows itself to be used in this fashion.

It is customary for criminals to receive time off for "good behavior", meaning that each day they do not violate rules in prison, a day is shaved off their sentence. This is why so many criminals end up serving half the time they were sentenced to. Illinois recently passed a bill called 'Truth in Sentencing', which mandated that each convicted criminal must serve at least 85% of their sentence. Incredibly, the Supreme Court ruled that this was unconstitutional because it was attached to another bill. This means that the legislature has to write and pass another bill before it can be applied to any criminal. Those being convicted in the meantime will get the usual day for day deductions in their sentences. You have to wonder what they were thinking when they did this.

As bad as the situation is with our criminal courts, it is even worse in the civil courts. The only criteria required to file a civil lawsuit is that somewhere there is a lawyer willing to take the case. Considering the number of lawyers that find a case and then seek out clients for it, this is seldom difficult. Often good people hesitate to help a stranger out of fear of being sued for it later. Cops get sued for arresting people, prisons get sued for housing them and the victims of all this are the law-abiding people who can't figure out why nothing can be done about the crime problems in their community. It is not unusual for police to be falsely accused of racism and brutality. Although there are true cases of these things happening, too often the accusations are false and are made with the intention of suing for a monetary award.

The civil courts are also used as a means to enforce the social beliefs and morality of special interest groups on the public at large. The situation has deteriorated to the point that people are being sued for not being politically correct. Concerns about sexual harassment have men at the workplace getting nervous if they imply that their co-worker is of a different gender than themselves. Because of the refusal of the justice system to set boundaries, the solutions to many of our problems end up becoming problems themselves. With no clear definitions of acts that violate a person's civil rights, extreme measures are imposed on minor and trivial infractions. It seems to me that if they set a criteria for punishments to be applied to, it would resolve these issues. Maybe they are afraid that since it is impossible to foresee every situation, they would risk overlooking something and get sued.

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