Justice System

The Criminal Justice System of the city of Proles is a hybridized mix of several colonial systems.

Order of Justice
Civil policing has traditionally been the responsibility of the Order of Justice, which has its central headquarters in District 4. During its pre-dome height, the Order of Justice employed nearly 35,000 police officers, detectives, guards, and justices. After the dome was sealed, the Order's prestige declined rapidly along with that of district 4. Twenty-five years later, it was considered defunct, with the headquarters mostly abandoned, and only a handful of employees remaining with minimal pay. The Order's former duties were completely subsumed by private firms.

After the formation of the Proles Free Army, the organization took over the Order of Justice and moved it to a new building, located on the border of district 4 near district 2. Civilian police officers and detectives are being hired at a steady rate. As the civilian justice forces grow, military oversight remains in the persons of Lieutenant Elizabeth Stanton and General Hob Ravani. Avarice Platoon, under the command of Lt. Stanton, acts as the SWAT team for the Order of Justice as of this time.

Criminal Justice
Prior to the revival of the Order of Justice, those arrested by private security firms were remanded to corporate prisons, commonly owned by the same company. Trials, nominally still under the Order of Justice, were rare and generally conducted for the purposes of spectacle and reality show ratings. Prisoners were generally given maximum sentences according to Proles law and generally allowed to work their sentences down with free labor.

Under the Order of Justice, criminal cases are handled by a Justice working in tandem with the Justice Computer and have three phases: indictment, trial/plea, sentencing. The entire run of these phases generally takes less than a few hours each, though a week is allowed for the gathering and collation of evidence in more complex cases.

Indictment
The arrested person is brought before a panel of the Justice Computer and a human Adjunct Justice and all evidence presented. The justice computer renders an advisement on if indictment and remand to custody is recommended. Judges are present to take extenuating circumstances (such as self-defense) into consideration and veto the computer's judgment.

The Indictment phase was where corruption was most prevalent during the Order's decline, with eminently bribe-able human judges often vetoing indictments for those who could afford it, and marking the proposed indictment as in error so it would not be recorded permanently.

Trial/Plea
The option of offering a plea to those indicted is entirley upon the discretion of human judges. Trials are overseen by a panel consisting of two human Justices and the Justice Computer. The Justice Computer compiles all presented evidence and testimony and tabulates factors to render a verdict of guilty or innocent. The human Justices must then unanimously agree with the computer's ruling upon review of the evidence. If the two human Justices unanimously dissent, most often due to extenuating circumstances, their ruling is upheld. If there is disagreement between the two Justices (highly unusual), the trial begins over with an extra week allowed for evidence gathering, and a new Justice panel selected randomly from the pool of available Justices.

The Plea phase was another corrupt factor during the Order's decline, with Justices often erroneously deciding to offer extremely lenient pleas to indicted prisoners.

It should be noted that during the regrowth of the Order of Justice, simple cases, mostly misdemeanors or non-violent crimes, have to be left entirely to the discretion of the Justice Computer to prevent an insurmountable backlog while new personnel are brought in.

Sentencing
At the end of trial, the Justice Computer renders a recommendation for sentencing in strict adherence to the law. The recommendation is considered and then modified by another two Justice panel, which must agree unanimously on the result. Insurmountable disagreements trigger the selection of a new panel.

The most common sentence for minor crimes is community service and a fine, though failure to pay fines often results in prison time. Prison sentences range from a few months to life. There is no death penalty in Proles, as that is considered too barbaric. Extremely violent and sociopathic offendors may, at the Order's judgment, be remanded to the custody of Bifrons, Inc, for behavioral modification.

Prisons
At any given time, approximately 0.7% of the populaion of Proles is in prison. Residents of district 4 are disproportionally represented in that population.

At this time, private prisons are prevalent, though new prisons run not-for-profit by the Order of Justice are being constructed. Since the return to power of the Order of Justice and its insistence that automatic maximum sentencing will be abandoned, private prison corporations have protested this as being soft on crime. Private security companies still control much of the security in the city, and most still remand alleged criminals to the possession of prisons owned by their parent corporations.