For nearly forty years the United States has been gripped by policies that have placed more than 2.5 million Americans in jails and prisons designed to hold a fraction of that number of inmates. Our prisons are not only vast and overcrowded, they are degrading—relying on racist gangs, lockdowns, and Supermax-style segregation units to maintain a tenuous order. Mass Incarceration on Trial examines a series of landmark decisions about prison conditions—culminating in Brown v. Plata, decided in May 2011 by the U.S. Supreme Court—that has opened an unexpected escape route from this trap of “tough on crime” politics. This set of rulings points toward values that could restore legitimate order to American prisons and, ultimately, lead to the demise of mass incarceration. Simon argues that much like the school segregation cases of the last century, these new cases represent a major breakthrough in jurisprudence—moving us from a hollowed-out vision of civil rights to the threshold of human rights and giving court backing for the argument that, because the conditions it creates are fundamentally cruel and unusual, mass incarceration is inherently unconstitutional. Since the publication of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, states around the country have begun to question the fundamental fairness of our criminal justice system. This book offers a provocative and brilliant reading to the end of mass incarceration.
Read more about the history and causes of mass incarceration and how activists are reforming and rethinking justice. Read WokeTM Books are created in partnership with Cicely Lewis, the Read Woke librarian.
See Scooby Axson, Judge in Brock Turner Case Recalled, Sports Illustrated, 13 June 6, 2018, available at: www.si.com/more-sports/2018/06/06/brockturner-stanford-rape-case-judge-recalled. See R. David Lacourse, Jr, Three-Strikes You're ...
In this volume, The Legal Process and the Promise of Justice, an eminent group of contemporary law and society scholars offer fresh and original analyzes of his work.
Charged follows the story of two young people caught up in the criminal justice system: Kevin, a twenty-year-old in Brooklyn who picked up his friend’s gun as the cops burst in and was charged with a serious violent felony, and Noura, a ...
The award-winning “radically original” (The Atlantic) restorative justice leader, whose work the Washington Post has called “totally sensible and totally revolutionary,” grapples with the problem of violent crime in the movement for ...
"This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to tackle mass incarceration, by one of the country's most thoughtful scholars.
Dean quoted in Cronin et al., U.S. v. Crime in the Streets, 76. See John Dean, Blind Ambition (New York: Pocket Books, 1970), 389–390. Muskie quoted in “U.S. Can't Put a Wall around Negro,” Chicago Tribune, September 16, 1968, 5.
Now, an alarming number of aspiring rappers are imprisoned. No other form of creative expression is treated this way in the courts. Rap on Trial places this disturbing practice in the context of hip hop history and exposes what's at stake.
Few observers would say the choice to feature Willie Horton, a black man, as the poster child for harsher punishment during George H.W. Bush's 1988 presidential campaign was coincidental. Indeed, on his deathbed, Lee Atwater, ...
Drawing attention to the fact that convictions today are nearly synonymous with guilty pleas, this contributed volume begins with an overview and history of plea bargaining, with chapters focusing on defendants, defense attorneys and ...