Criminal Justice (1): Introduction and Media Portrayals

The Doc Ock Problem

I first became interested in American Criminal Justice when I was a junior in high school (51 years ago!). We had to write a semester research paper for Junior English and I somehow selected prison reform as my topic. I even interviewed representatives of the Indiana Department of Corrections as background. Once I decided to major in sociology at Purdue, I took classes in social problems, stratification, and criminology that further fed my interest. I had the plan of working in the corrections department as “a force for good”.

I wound up going to grad school and earning a PhD in sociology in order to teach. But in grad school, I continued taking courses that fed my criminal justice interest. Once I was teaching in Christian liberal arts colleges, I regularly taught some criminal justice courses. My repertoire of classes included Intro to the Criminal Justice System, Criminological Theories, Criminal Justice Policy, and Restorative Justice.

I explored some common themes over the course of my teaching career that I thought were important for undergraduates to understand. For example, in the introductory course I would make clear that what we call “The Criminal Justice System” isn’t a system at all but a series of disconnected pieces each operating by their own ground rules.¹ That police activity is mostly reactive and not proactive (so the impact on increasing or decreasing crime rates is tentative at best). That as much as we like to believe in “deterrence” — the idea that punishing offenders will make others think twice — it cannot be supported by empirical evidence.

I’ll deal with many of these ideas in detail in this series. But I want to begin with what I consider to be the singular problem that shapes our thinking about crime and punishment.

I call it the Doc Ock problem.

Alfred Molina as Doc Ock in Spiderman: No Way Home

For the uninitiated, Doctor Octavius was a scientist investigating robotics. He could use artificial limbs he had created through the use of a special harness. Due to a lab accident, the limbs become fused to his body and his brain turns to anger, making him one of Spiderman’s arch villains.²

Actually, early in my career, I used Dick Tracy villains in my classes but very quickly none of my students even knew who that was, so I adjusted. The Dick Tracy villains were more closely related to the work of phrenologists like Cesare Lombroso who believed that measuring bumps on the skull and the slope of the forehead would correlate with criminal propensity. For those of you under 50, the bad guys in the Dick Tracy comic strip were easily identifiable: Wrinkles, Mumbles, FlatTop. Dick Tracy and his girlfriend Tess Trueheart, on the other hand, were beautiful.³

Back to Doc Ock and his accident. Remember, Peter Parker also had an accident. He got bit by a radioactive spider, which gave him spidey powers even while remaining the hapless Peter. But Ock’s accident renders him a violent criminal who wants to kill Spiderman. The Doc Ock Wikipedia page suggests that Ock’s brain mutated in the accident along with his limbs.

The Doc Ock problem follows from this storyline. The reason Doc Ock commits crime, violence, and mayhem is because something happened that left him broken.⁴ The enemies can be defeated but they’ll be back in the sequel. They can be contained, for only the moment.

But they can’t be cured. There is no fix. They are what they are.⁵ Even after serving a sentence and being released, we treat them as an “ex-con” with the implicit assumption that they may be okay “for now”, but who knows what the future holds?

Consider how often media stories use words like thug or monster to describe someone accused of a crime. We ask, “what makes someone do this horrible thing?” Answers run the gamut, but usually wind up with a version of the “something’s broken” image.⁶

We can, of course, try to help the offender but we don’t think it’s going to work because they aren’t like you and me.⁷

This idea that criminals are broken is the poisoned fruit that influences everything we do in criminal justice. This message is repeated, either explicitly or implicitly, in our daily television fare.⁸

I didn’t watch Criminal Minds on CBS because 1) I knew this trope was at the heart of it and 2) serial killers are a rare phenomenon, not a story one can tell every week. But I have watched my share of NCIS shows. If I tired of those, I could watch three hours of FBI shows on CBS. Or twenty years of Dick Wolf programming on NBC: Law and Order, Law and Order Criminal Intent, Law and Order: SVU. Even PBS likes their upper-crust mystery shows like Endeavour and Grantchester.⁹

That’s not even considering the scores of buddy police movies that have been made over the years. Whatever is necessary is allowed because “somebody has to stop these monsters.”

Very few shows treat the offender as a human being (a notable exception is HBO’s excellent “The Night Of”). Rarely is there a story about the nature of defense offered to the offender. Perry Mason is long past. Shows about successful defense attorneys fade very quickly.¹⁰

When you take the Doc Ock problem that assumes that criminals are broken, combine that with sensational police-first news coverage, and add in thousands of hours of television and movies, it’s no surprise that we have a criminal justice system that incarcerates way too many people. It’s predictable that we assume guilt from the get-go (except in jury chambers). It’s not surprising that politicians make news with hyperbolic claims about the dangers of cash bail (which actually applies to innocent people who are waiting for adjudication). We have to hold those people in jail until trial because they’re broken and might act out again.

I’ll explore many of the different component of the Criminal Justice “System” throughout this series. But underneath it all, there is the assumption that Doc Ock is evil and irredeemable. He’s not like you and me.

1. As the tragedy and subsequent report on Uvalde makes clear, conversations about “law enforcement” put together a host of diverse agencies that don’t always coordinate well.

2. Spoiler: There’s a very nice redemption arc for Doc Ock in “No Way Home”

3. Chester Gould, who created the strip, was not exactly subtle.

4. Which is true of all of Spiderman’s enemies: Green Goblin, Sandman, and Electro

5. West Side Story’s “Dear Officer Krupke” illustrates that while there may be many problems faced by the Jets, “the best of us is no damn good.”

6. Tucker Carlson recently argued that “nagging women” is what breaks young men and causes them to do violent things.

7. Wes Moore just won the Maryland Democratic Primary. He is the author of The Other Wes Moore, which explores how his life turned out in contrast to another Wes Moore (who also grew up in Baltimore) serving life in prison.

8. In the season two opener of “Only Murders in the Building”, Steve Martin’s character tells some show-runners “there aren’t nearly enough crime shows on CBS”.

9. A contrary point to the one I’m making: based on what is available on BritBox and Acorn, Europe loves their two person detective teams in spite of the relatively lower crime rate.

10. The Netflix version of The Lincoln Lawyer was excellent but ends up (Spoilers!) aligning with the Doc Ock trope.