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Notes -
I think the costs on society for a criminal trial are likely high:
I find the system to pressure defendants into guilty pleas by threatening them with much longer sentences if they insist on their constitutional right to trial by jury abominable. Giving them a discount of 10% of their sentence if the case is clear-cut as a cost saving measure might be reasonable, but any more than that seems silly. If your suspect is guilty of a crime which will earn them ten years, don't offer them a plea deal for three years, just drag them in front of a jury. And if you have reasonable doubts that they are guilty of the ten year offense, don't threaten them with it.
I would be surprised if the public defenders cost more than a third of the expected total costs of a criminal trial. (In fact, I think that there is an argument to be made that the prosecutor and the defender should receive roughly equal compensation -- both are experts which will require a similar amount of time to familiarize themselves with the case, and paying one side more than the other will skew the results.)
If a state can't afford a separate prosecutor and judge, it can't afford a justice system.
If a state can't afford a defender, it can't afford a justice system.
I've got a copy of Stuntz's The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, so one big issue immediately comes to mind. The problem is that however good this might sound, and however abominable threatening longer sentences for exercising one's right to a jury trial may be, we're just not able to do this.
It's hard to get exact numbers, because most the data is on plea bargains as a fraction of convictions rather than of defendants, so you need to find the overall conviction rates — and thus acquittal rates — to compute that, and it's somewhat harder to find (and varies from state to state). But for the Federal government, you've got plea bargains at 98% of convictions, combined with a (2012) 93% overall conviction rate, to give something like 91% of all Federal criminal defendants pleading guilty. For the states, these numbers are a bit lower, something like 95% of convictions; which, for example, Texas, with an 84% average conviction rate (higher for misdemeanors than felonies), gives approximately 80% of all criminal defendants pleading out.
Thus, if something like one out of every nine Federal defendants who would currently take a plea deal insisted on a trial, you'd double the number of trials. If half of them did so, the number of trials would increase sixfold. (Similarly, one quarter of Texas plea-takers choosing trial to double trials, and half choosing juries would triple the court cases.)
Our systems already strained, overloaded, and prone to long delays with just the load it has now. I can't see any path to the vast expansion that would be necessary if any significant fraction more insisted on their day in court.
Now, the usual answer many people give to this issue is that we need to find a way to reduce the load by charging fewer things as crimes. While you might get some traction there at the Federal level, the problem is then that there isn't really all that much of the "Three Felonies a Day"-type offenses. Even the "mere drug possession"* cases make up a much smaller fraction of convictions than many people think. The bulk of felonies remain things like murder, assault, theft, rape, etc. that pretty much every society criminalizes. In this very example, we're already seeing many offenders of this sort being "let loose on the streets" — can we really picture even more "legalizing crime" than we already have?
Yes, that's exactly the point — with the crime rates of the current American population, we really can't afford a traditional Anglo-American justice system.
This is a point I've been talking about online for years. When you look at things like police per capita, police funding, prisoners per capita, and then set them against violent crime per capita, and compare internationally, the US winds up an unusual outlier — because we, pretty much uniquely, combine the police force of a wealthy "first world" nation… and the crime rates of a "third word" one. On the prisoner/crime ratio, we come out as locking up less of our criminals than many European nations… it's just that we have a crime rate many times higher. On Wikipedia's list of intentional homicide rate per 100,000 people (a proxy for violent crime in general), the United States sits right between Zimbabwe** and Yemen. It's four times higher than in France, over five times higher than that of the UK or Finland, eight times that of Germany, and thirty-two times that of Japan.
To change our current situation, we're looking at radically reforming and vastly expanding our entire justice system (and associated expenditure), or else the population either turning to non-state methods of addressing crime.
* It's my understanding that in many cases where an individual is convicted and sentenced for just illegal drug or gun possession, it's because they were also charged with other, more violent offenses and pled down to those — the plea bargain going in that direction because crimes of possession are the easiest, relatively, to prove in court — thus making the odds of losing in court the highest, and the value for the defendant of pursuing a jury trial the lowest — while the other charges would likely involve attempting to elicit testimony from victims and witnesses who live in communities where "snitches get stitches" and such.
** Where, recently, police were reportedly driven from a police station by goblins.
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