From Harvard Magazine:
For a nation “conceived in Liberty,” as Abraham Lincoln emphasized with a capital L in hand-writing his Gettysburg Address, it should be shocking that the United States has locked up almost a quarter of the prisoners in the world despite having less than 5 percent of the population. Nearly two million people are behind bars, with an almost six-fold increase in the U.S. rate of incarceration during the past half-century—and a current rate as much as 10 times that of other economically advanced nations. Yet those facts are not shocking: mass incarceration is embedded in American culture and society, a result of six decades of triumphant tough-on-crime politics.
Rachel Elise Barkow, J.D. ’96, Seligson professor of law at New York University, and a leading thinker about criminal law and policy, summarizes those politics in Justice Abandoned as “aggressive policing, less due process, more detention of people accused of crimes, and longer sentences served under ever-harsher conditions.” The book is groundbreaking, engrossing, and authoritative. The argument it makes, while detailed and dense, is lucid and persuasive.
Justice Abandoned is an exposé about the Supreme Court. Between 1968 and 1991, in a half-dozen landmark rulings, and in many more relying on them since, Barkow concludes that the Court has “played a pivotal role in establishing mass incarceration in America,” with “a direct through line between the Court’s pronouncement that a practice is constitutional and its explosive use throughout the country.” She writes that her book’s “central goal” is to expose the Court’s “culpability.” Continue reading >>>
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