Author : William J. Stuntz
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 425 pages
File Size : 40,69 MB
Release : 2011-09-30
Category : History
ISBN : 0674051750
Rule of law has vanished in America’s criminal justice system. Prosecutors decide whom to punish; most accused never face a jury; policing is inconsistent; plea bargaining is rampant; and draconian sentencing fills prisons with mostly minority defendants. A leading criminal law scholar looks to history for the roots of these problems—and solutions.
Author : Roger Roots
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 20,88 MB
Release : 2014-12-07
Category : Criminal courts
ISBN : 9781492928898
Dr. Roger Roots, America's most provocative scholar of criminology and constitutional history, argues that America's criminal courts have gradually abandoned adversarial due process and embraced a more inquisitorial model of justice favored by prosecutors. In theory, convicting someone of a crime should be more difficult than obtaining a civil judgment by winning a lawsuit against him. The burden of proof is higher (beyond a reasonable doubt in criminal cases, as opposed to a mere preponderance of evidence in civil cases), and there are supposedly a number of constitutional protections for criminal defendants that do not apply to civil litigants. However, in modern courtrooms, convictions are obtained almost effortlessly by prosecutors. In The Conviction Factory, Dr. Roots traces the history of American criminal justice from its roots in English common law and then follows this history into the twenty-first century. Roots details how the adversarial model of justice, which pits the prosecution against the defendant on a level playing field, has been quietly and slowly whittled away. This book is exhaustively footnoted. It represents a continuation (and partially a compilation) of Roots' previously published law review articles on the subject of criminal procedural history. The Conviction Factory is more than just a history of criminal procedure. It is a gripping yarn that provokes fundamental questions about fairness, justice and trust in the institutions of government.
Author : Michael Tonry
Publisher : University of Chicago Press Journals
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 27,6 MB
Release : 2013-10-06
Category : Law
ISBN : 9780226097510
For thirty-five years, the Crime and Justice series has provided a platform for the work of sociologists, psychologists, criminal lawyers, justice scholars, and political scientists as it explores the full range of issues concerning crime, its causes, and it remedies. For the American criminal justice system, 1975 was a watershed year. Offender rehabilitation and individualized sentencing fell from favor and the partisan politics of “law and order” took over. Policymakers’ interest in science declined just as scientific work on crime, recidivism, and the justice system began to blossom. Some policy areas—in particular, sentencing, gun violence, drugs, and youth violence—became evidence-free zones. Crime and Justice in America: 1975-2025 tells the complicated relationship between policy and knowledge during this crucial time and charts prospects for the future. The contributors to this volume, the leading scholars in their fields, bring unsurpassed breadth and depth of knowledge to bear in answering these questions. They include Philip J. Cook, Francis T. Cullen, Jeffrey Fagan, David Farrington, Daniel S. Nagin, Peter Reuter, Lawrence W. Sherman, and Franklin E. Zimring.
Author : Michael Klarman
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : pages
File Size : 41,28 MB
Release : 2011-12-30
Category : Law
ISBN : 1139505580
The past several decades have seen a renaissance in criminal procedure as a cutting-edge discipline and as one inseparably linked to substantive criminal law. This renaissance can be traced in no small part to the work of a single scholar: William Stuntz. This volume brings together twelve leading American criminal justice scholars whose own writings have been profoundly influenced by Stuntz and his work. Their contributions consist of essays on subjects ranging from the political economy of substantive criminal law to the law of police investigations to the role of religion in legal scholarship - all themes addressed by Stuntz in his own work. Some contributions directly analyze or respond to Stuntz's work, while others address topics or themes Stuntz wrote about from the contributor's own distinctive perspective.
Author : Christine S. Scott-Hayward
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 309 pages
File Size : 31,5 MB
Release : 2019-09-24
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0520970497
Most people in jail have not been convicted of a crime. Instead, they have been accused of a crime and cannot afford to post the bail amount to guarantee their freedom until trial. Punishing Poverty examines how the current system of pretrial release detains hundreds of thousands of defendants awaiting trial. Tracing the historical antecedents of the US bail system, with particular attention to the failures of bail reform efforts in the mid to late twentieth century, the authors describe the painful social and economic impact of contemporary bail decisions. The first book-length treatment to analyze how bail reproduces racial and economic inequality throughout the criminal justice system, Punishing Poverty explores reform efforts, as jurisdictions begin to move away from money bail systems, and the attempts of the bail bond industry to push back against such reforms. This accessibly written book gives a succinct overview of the role of pretrial detention in fueling mass incarceration and is essential reading for researchers and reformers alike.
Author : Michelle Alexander
Publisher : The New Press
Page : 434 pages
File Size : 38,49 MB
Release : 2020-01-07
Category : Law
ISBN : 1620971941
One of the New York Times’s Best Books of the 21st Century Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly‚ Slate‚ Chronicle of Higher Education‚ Literary Hub, Book Riot‚ and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller—"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education—with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." —Adam Shatz, London Review of Books Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.
Author : Traci Burch
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 13,40 MB
Release : 2013-08-21
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 022606509X
The United States imprisons far more people, total and per capita, and at a higher rate than any other country in the world. Among the more than 1.5 million Americans currently incarcerated, minorities and the poor are disproportionately represented. What’s more, they tend to come from just a few of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the country. While the political costs of this phenomenon remain poorly understood, it’s become increasingly clear that the effects of this mass incarceration are much more pervasive than previously thought, extending beyond those imprisoned to the neighbors, family, and friends left behind. For Trading Democracy for Justice, Traci Burch has drawn on data from neighborhoods with imprisonment rates up to fourteen times the national average to chart demographic features that include information about imprisonment, probation, and parole, as well as voter turnout and volunteerism. She presents powerful evidence that living in a high-imprisonment neighborhood significantly decreases political participation. Similarly, people living in these neighborhoods are less likely to engage with their communities through volunteer work. What results is the demobilization of entire neighborhoods and the creation of vast inequalities—even among those not directly affected by the criminal justice system. The first book to demonstrate the ways in which the institutional effects of imprisonment undermine already disadvantaged communities, Trading Democracy for Justice speaks to issues at the heart of democracy.
Author : Adam Benforado
Publisher : Crown
Page : 402 pages
File Size : 44,28 MB
Release : 2015
Category : Law
ISBN : 0770437761
A legal scholar exposes the psychological forces that undermine the American criminal justice system, arguing that unless hidden biases are addressed, social inequality will widen, and proposes reforms to prevent injustice and help achieve true equality before the law.
Author : Thomas Nolan
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 190 pages
File Size : 14,39 MB
Release : 2019
Category : African American neighborhoods
ISBN : 9780367026707
Policing and police practices have changed dramatically since the 9/11 terrorist attacks and those changes have accelerated since the summer of 2014 and the death of Michael Brown at the hands of then-police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Since the November 2016 election of Donald Trump as president, many law enforcement practitioners, policy makers, and those concerned with issues of social justice have had concerns that there would be seismic shifts in policing priorities and practices at the federal, state, county, and local and tribal levels that will have significant implications for constitutional rights and civil liberties protections, particularly for people of color. Perilous Policing: Criminal Justice in Marginalized Communities provides a much-needed interrogatory to law enforcement practices and policies as they continue to evolve during this era of uncertainty and anxiety. Key topics include the police and marginalized populations, the use of technology to surveil individuals and groups, the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the erosion of the police narrative, the use of force (particularly deadly force) against people of color, the role of the police in immigration enforcement, the "war on cops," and police militarization. Thomas Nolan's critique of current practice and his preliminary conclusions as to how to navigate contemporary policing away from the pitfalls of discredited and counterproductive practices will be of interest to advanced undergraduates and graduate students in Policing, Criminology, Justice Studies, and Criminal Justice programs, as well as to researchers, law enforcement professionals, and police policy makers. y to surveil individuals and groups, the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the erosion of the police narrative, the use of force (particularly deadly force) against people of color, the role of the police in immigration enforcement, the "war on cops," and police militarization. Thomas Nolan's critique of current practice and his preliminary conclusions as to how to navigate contemporary policing away from the pitfalls of discredited and counterproductive practices will be of interest to advanced undergraduates and graduate students in Policing, Criminology, Justice Studies, and Criminal Justice programs, as well as to researchers, law enforcement professionals, and police policy makers.
Author : Alec Karakatsanis
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 41,28 MB
Release : 2025-01-14
Category : Law
ISBN : 9781620979143
A "searing, searching, and eloquent" (Martha Minow, Harvard Law School) investigation into the role of the legal profession in perpetuating mass incarceration--now in an accessible paperback format from the award-winning civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis doesn't think people who have gone to law school, passed the bar, and sworn to uphold the Constitution should be complicit in the mass caging of human beings--an everyday brutality inflicted disproportionately on the bodies and minds of poor people and people of color, for which the legal system has never offered sufficient justification. Usual Cruelty offers a radical reconsideration of the American "injustice system" by someone who is actively--and wildly successfully--challenging it. Hailed by luminaries from James Forman Jr. and Vanita Gupta to U.S. Circuit Judge Bernice Donald, and MacArthur Award-winning poet and attorney Reginald Dwayne Betts, Usual Cruelty offers a condemnation of the whole deplorable enterprise, starting with profound questions about the specific things our system chooses to criminalize (marijuana plants, low-level gambling, petty theft) versus those we don't (tobacco plants, high-level gambling by bankers, massive wage theft by employers). It calls out a bail system that charges people money to go free despite the lack of any evidence this will make them more likely to show up in court or make anybody safer. And it explores the everyday brutality of our courts, prisons, and jails, and the ways in which the legal profession has allowed itself to become desensitized to the everyday pain these institutions inflict on our most vulnerable populations. Now in an accessible paperback format, Usual Cruelty will cement Karakatsanis's reputation as one of the most inspiring civil rights lawyers of our time.
