Democratizar la justicia penal 2: Las tres grandes áreas de la justicia penal

Reconstructivismo y tres principios (uno para cada área)

Joshua Kleinfeld, organizador del volumen, escribe también un largo trabajo titulado “Three principles of democratic criminal law”. Los tres principios corresponden a las tres grandes áreas en que divide a la teoría penal. En sus términos: “Normative criminal theory as a field can be, I submit, divided into three parts: the theory of criminalization (what conducts should constitute a crime?); the theory of punishment (what principles should guide the type and extent of punishment meted out for crimes?); and the theory of criminal procedure (what principles should guide the administration and enforcement of criminal law?). The theory of punishment received such disproportionate attention that it is sometimes confused with the field as a whole –as if “punishment theory” and “criminal theory” were the same thing – but these three branches are in fact distinct” (1475).

Sobre el primer punto, defiende “the moral culture principle of criminalization”, según el cual “the only conduct that may justly be criminalized is conduct that violates and expressively attacks the values on which a community´s social organization is based, unless the merits of criminalizing another type of conduct are so great as to substantially outweigh the harm criminalizing it does to those same community values” (1476). Señala que lo que se llama crimen es entonces algo que es, por su propia naturaleza, “antisocial”. La idea es que el principio cultural afirma que el derecho penal “should almost never be purely positivistic”. Criminal law should be codified customary law” (1477). Ello, reconoce, implica alejarse mucho de la práctica dominante en la actualidad. Es “radical” en ese sentido, pero también “conservadora” en sentido burkeano, ya que difiere a la “evolved wisdom embedded in the practices of a functioning society”. Se opone al ideal utilitario y, asimismo, a la noción liberal dominante que gira en torno al “principio del daño” milleano, al que considera poco democrático –no puede responder a las “convicciones de las personas a las que el derecho penal pretende dirigirse (1478).

El segundo principio al que se refiere es al “prosocial punishment”, que dice que “criminal punishment should aim, both expressively and functionally, to protect, repair and reconstruct the normative order violated by a crime while at the same time minimizing the damage to the normative order caused by punishment itself” (1479). El propósito final del castigo es “to restitch a torn social fabric” (1481). “Normative reconstruction” es distinto de las cuatro justificaciones comunes del castigo: “retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation and incapacitation” (1482).

El tercer principio en juego es el llamado “The We the People principle of criminal procedure”. El mismo sostiene que “the administration and enforcement of criminal law should be by and of the people, that is, solidaristic, public, embedded in local communities, primary value rational rather than instrumentally or formally rational, primary under lay rather than official control, open to particularized and equitable acts of moral judgment, and seen by a democratic polity as procedurally legitimate. In short…hold that the values and the principles of institutional design undergirding the We the People formula in the US Constitution should be the normative center of criminal procedure” (1483).

Este principio, nos dice, permite que veamos lo que está mal del “plea bargaining”, desde una perpectiva democrático-reconstructiva: ella sirve para “excise the laity from the administration of criminal justice, empowering state officials and other legal professionals to exercise control on the basis of the rule-oriented and instrumental reasoning characteristic of bureaucratic governance” (1484).

Su propuesta es el “reconstructivismo”: “to use the cliched but helpful metaphor, where crime tears the social fabric, criminal law’s distinctive function is to restitch it.” (1458). El reconstructivismo es un tipo de consecuencialismo comunitarista (ibid.). Más información sobre el reconstructivismo, más abajo.

Hoy el derecho penal, agrega, ha quedado en manos de burócratas profesionales que razonan en modos formales e instrumentales y no de acuerdo a formas orientadas por valores (1486). Examinando la presente crisis, muestra que “The American public is likely unaware that plea bargaining has replaced the criminal jury trial and would probably be dismayed to discover that fact. It was not lay citizens that did away the trial, but legal insiders –prosecutors, judges, even public defenders –acting on their interests, and indeed acting to exclude lay citizens from participating.” Y sostiene que “the single most important development in modern history of American criminal procedure, and it seems empirically a major contributor to mass incarceration, was not voters’ doing…the decision to embrace plea bargaining as an institution, and the many thousands of individual case disposition through plea bargaining, trace back to legal insiders” (1487-8).

Su punto no es el de que la ciudadanía sea inocente y solo los agentes públicos culpables, sino que la narrativa dominante al respecto es muy simplista, y subestima el papel jugado por los “legal insiders” y otras fuerzas burocráticas (1488).

En su opinión, la dureza del sistema penal americano se debe a una combinación entre el temor y enojo público con un enfoque burocrático e instrumentalista. Y junto a ello, una comunidad profesional en la justicia criminal, orientada a controlar el crimen del modo más eficiente posible.