My opinion is that the levels of corruption in the American justice system have always been the same or are tending to decline in aggregate, similar to violent crimes (I don't have any statistics for corruption). It just seems that the opposite is happening because of the ubiquity and lack of cost associated with mass communication. To put it another way, when corrupt actions occur in a particular case, hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of people hear about it. This didn't always used to happen, especially when mass communication was centrally controlled by a few broadcasting corporations.
It would be helpful for you to have data to back up that sentiment. But quite frankly, I am very skeptical that corruption is on the decline. Yes, mass communcation makes it easier to hear about these sorts of violations, but easy mass communication has also opened the door to easy mass surveillance. So corruption is being expressed in new ways. Easy communications and information sharing also makes it possible for law enforcement to coordinate these kinds of dodgy ways of circumventing the spirit of laws and regulations.
The Corruption Perceptions survey is a useful metric. The USA tends to hang with Japan around the high teens in ranking year after year. Interestingly, there is a wider variance in perceptions of American corruption than for other countries.
>The Corruption Perceptions survey is a useful metric. The USA tends to hang with Japan around the high teens in ranking year after year. Interestingly, there is a wider variance in perceptions of American corruption than for other countries
I think the perception of corruption is interesting, because overall the West is far lower than elsewhere. Link for those interested: http://www.transparency.org/cpi2013/results
While when you actually talk to people, corruption in the West is pretty widely acknowledged and even outright accepted. For example, when the NSA stories first broke the reaction on Reddit was largely a mix of:
"Duh, this is confirming what we already know"
and
"Well, it's not like other countries aren't doing it too" (even though, at that time, only the NSA was being highlighted and there was little/no news about their European, Canadian, Australian etc. counterparts.
What had been previously relegated by the mass populace as conspiracy theory nonsense was very quickly accepted, and then very quickly relegated to acceptance.
What this would lead me personally to believe, from just watching these things unfold, watching the mass reaction to it and then talking with others about it, is that we in the West widely acknowledge corruption here but out of a combination of a feeling of powerlessness (what am I, Joe Bloggs, going to be able to do about it), being removed from it (this doesn't affect I, Joe Bloggs, all that much) and probably an inherent sense of nationalism (well, it's probably much worse over there in that other country) we actively downplay the level of corruption in our societies, and I believe that this probably ends up being reflected in these surveys.
I've no doubt that the above is conjecture, but it's just what I've formed from my own experiences. There is a very marked feeling of powerlessness though, and the little action taken, even political action, over the things that have been exposed in the West would solidify that opinion somewhat more.
the wider variance certainly would make more sense... the US has a ton of people. New Orleans PD is notoriously corrupt, the "Chicago Way" is even a thing (vote early and vote often!). Compare that to a mid size city/state like Des Moines, Iowa and of course you're going to see big differences in corruption perceptions.
While I fully agree that mass communication is inflating our perception, it also goes both ways. A person that get constantly bombarded that their profession is corrupt is more likely to yield to corruption themselves.
Indeed. It's hard to even say we have had popular rule of law given things like Korematsu, but these days we have legitimately challenging legal questions (about whether a human has to see something for it to count as a search, for instance), and as bad as some things are, it's not public mass lawless condemnation like there used to be. Now we have some private courts and a comparatively small number of suspicious governmental mishaps (perhaps an advantage to "Terrorism" being the enemy of our era -- hard to paint millions of people with that brush).
Systemic corruption, as with sketchy asset forfeiture, doesn't show up in corruption statistics. Pretty much any thuggery that did not end up in a conviction doesn't count.
