Researching Mass Incarceration and Prison Abolition

Race, Law and Hypercriminality by Sarah Corbett-Batson In a world of fake news and virtual reality, where social media posts seem more real than the materiality of racial capitalism, this book develops the idea of ‘hypercriminality’, as a means of explaining how racial disproportionalities in the criminal legal system persist, despite discourses of a post-racial meritocracy. Drawing on critical race theory, the work of Judith Butler, and Jean Baudrillard’s conception of the hyperreal, the book considers how neoliberal legal discourse constructs and reproduces hyperreal racialised legal subjects. The simulated violent figure of the racialised gang member, rioter, drug dealer, or sexual predator is made to appear ‘real’ through legal and evidential concepts such as dangerousness or bad character. The belief that this simulation is real is deployed to justify the carceral state and masks the structural, and racialised, violence of capitalism itself. Revealing the ‘hypercriminality’ of racialised legal subjects, the book thus offers a timely critical legal intervention that aims to advance the urgent project of decarceration, abolition, and transformative justice.

Excessive Punishment: How the Justice System Creates Mass Incarceration by Lauren-Brooke Eisen, ed. America can't shrink its reliance on mass incarceration until we confront our approach to punishment. These essays by renowned experts in a variety of fields and voices from incarcerated populations focus on our deep-rooted impulse to punish people in ways that are far beyond what could be considered proportionate. Together, they illustrate how necessary it is to rein in the punitive excess of the criminal legal system, which is inexorably entwined with the legacy of slavery. They also highlight how we have marginalized poor communities and people of color through criminalization and punishment. Addressing a range of issues-from policing to prosecution to incarceration to life after prison-the writers highlight how our nation has prioritized excess punishment over more supportive and less traumatic ways of dealing with social harm. The essays explore whether, when, and how we could have made different decisions that would have changed the way these systems of punishment and social control evolved. Looking ahead, they also ask how we can learn from this failed experiment with mass incarceration and prioritize human dignity over human misery.

Confirmation Bias in Criminal Cases by Moa Liden Confirmation bias is a tendency to search selectively for and emphasize information that is consistent with a hypothesis or preferred conclusion. At the same time, opposing information is ignored or interpreted in ways that do not threaten the predetermined conclusion. Importantly, confirmation bias is a more or less subconscious phenomenon. Hence, legal actors and criminal practitioners who are expected to be objective, who may make genuine efforts to be objective, and who also perceive of themselves as objective, may still display a confirmation bias. This includes police officers, crime scene investigators, forensic analysts, pathologists, prosecutors, and judges, and the range of distinct decision-making tasks that these actors undertake; for example, interviews with suspects, witnesses, plaintiffs, crime scene investigations, autopsies, decisions about whether to press charges, and whether to convict. Since confirmation bias can be present at all stages of criminal investigations and proceedings, it constitutes a serious risk of error, for example resulting in wrongful convictions and wrongful acquittals. It is therefore essential to find and use bias mitigation measures, and a good starting point is the explanations of this bias provided in cognitive, emotional and motivational, social and organizational psychology. This includes measures such as changing decision-maker, contextual information management, linear sequential unmasking, and structured evaluations of the evidence.

Criminal Testimonial Injustice by Jennifer Lackey Through a detailed analysis that draws on work across philosophy, the law, and social psychology, this book shows that, from the very beginning of the American criminal legal process in interrogation rooms to its final stages in front of parole boards, testimony is extracted from individuals through processes that are coercive, manipulative, or deceptive. This testimony is then unreasonably regarded as representing the testifiers’ truest or most reliable selves. With chapters ranging from false confessions and eyewitness misidentifications to recantations from victims of sexual violence and expressions of remorse from innocent defendants at sentencing hearings, it is argued that there is a distinctive epistemic wrong being perpetrated against suspects, defendants, witnesses, and victims. This wrong involves brute State power targeting the epistemic agency of its citizens, extracting false testimony that is often life-shattering, and rendering the victims in question complicit in their own undoing. It is concluded that it is only through understanding what it means to respect the epistemic agency of each participant in the criminal legal system that we can truly grasp what justice demands and, in so doing, to reimagine what is possible.

The Fear of Too Much Justice: How Race and Poverty Undermine Fairness in the Criminal Courts by Stephen Bright & James Kwak In The Fear of Too Much Justice, legendary death penalty lawyer Stephen B. Bright and legal scholar James Kwak offer a heart-wrenching overview of how the criminal legal system fails to live up to the values of equality and justice. The book ranges from poor people squeezed for cash by private probation companies because of trivial violations to people executed in violation of the Constitution despite overwhelming evidence of intellectual disability or mental illness. They also show examples from around the country of places that are making progress toward justice.

American Injustice: Inside Stories From the Underbelly of the Criminal Justice System by David S. Rudolf Renowned criminal defense and civil rights attorney David Rudolf has spent decades defending the wrongfully accused. In American Injustice, he draws from his years of experience in the American criminal legal system to shed light on the misconduct that exists at all levels of law enforcement and the tragic consequences that follow in its wake. Tracing these themes through the lens of some of his most important cases—including new details from the Michael Peterson trial made famous in The Staircase—Rudolf takes the reader inside crime scenes to examine forensic evidence left by perpetrators; revisits unsolved murders to detail how and why the true culprits were never prosecuted; reveals how confirmation bias leads police and prosecutors to employ tactics that make wrongful arrests and prosecutions more likely; and exposes how poverty and racism fundamentally distort the system.

The Dark Side of the Criminal Justice System: War Crimes & the Black Community, 1960-1990 by Ronald L. Morris The high rates of Black arrests and incarceration from 1960-1990 were a direct result of deliberate government policies and a zealous criminal justice system, under the patriotic umbrella of the War on Crime. This stateside war shared a lot of similarities with the Vietnam war happening simultaneously: racism and extreme cruelty towards those seen as the enemy, deprecation of the others' culture, forceful use of a militarized police with combat experience, repeated failure to observe human rights, and mass incarceration. Unfortunately, this conflict continued long after the Vietnam war ended. Ronald L. Morris reviews those dark times, analyzing their causes, short- and long-term effects, and calls for change.

Just Pursuit: A Black Prosecutor's Fight for Fairness by Laura Coates When Laura Coates joined the Department of Justice as a prosecutor, she wanted to advocate for the most vulnerable among us. But she quickly realized that even with the best intentions, “the pursuit of justice creates injustice.” Coates’s experiences show that no matter how fair you try to fight, being Black, a woman, and a mother are identities often at odds in the justice system. She and her colleagues face seemingly impossible situations as they teeter between what is right and what is just. On the front lines of our legal system, Coates saw how Black communities are policed differently; Black cases are prosecuted differently; Black defendants are judged differently. How the court system seems to be the one place where minorities are overrepresented, an unrelenting parade of Black and Brown defendants in numbers that belie their percentage in the population and overfill American prisons. She also witnessed how others in the system either abused power or were abused by it—for example, when an undocumented witness was arrested by ICE, when a white colleague taught Coates how to unfairly interrogate a young Black defendant, or when a judge victim-blamed a young sexual assault survivor based on her courtroom attire.

Incarceration Without Conviction: Pretrial Detention and the Erosion of Innocence in American Criminal Justice by Mikaela Rabinowitz Incarceration Without Conviction addresses an understudied fairness flaw in the criminal justice system. On any given day, approximately 500,000 Americans are in pretrial detention in the US, held in local jails not because they are considered a flight or public safety risk, but because they are poor and cannot afford bail or a bail bond. Over the course of a year, millions of Americans cycle through local jails, most there for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. These individuals are disproportionately Black and poor. This book draws on extensive legal data to highlight the ways in which pretrial detention drives guilty pleas and thus fuels mass incarceration--and the disproportionate impact on Black Americans. It shows the myriad harms that being detained wreaks on people’s lives and well-being, regardless of whether or not those who are detained are ever convicted. Rabinowitz argues that pretrial detention undermines the presumption of innocence in the American criminal justice system and, in so doing, erodes the very meaning of innocence.

The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago by Flint Taylor With his colleagues at the People’s Law Office (PLO), Taylor has argued landmark civil rights cases that have exposed corruption and cover-up within the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and throughout the city’s political machine, from aldermen to the mayor’s office. Taylor's book takes the reader from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark—and the historic, thirteen-year trial that followed—through the dogged pursuit of chief detective Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects. Taylor and the PLO gathered evidence from multiple cases to bring suit against the CPD, breaking the department’s “code of silence” that had enabled decades of cover-up. The legal precedents they set have since been adopted in human rights legislation around the world.

Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration by Heather Schoenfeld Reframing the story of mass incarceration, Heather Schoenfeld illustrates how the unfinished task of full equality for African Americans led to a series of policy choices that expanded the government’s power to punish, even as they were designed to protect individuals from arbitrary state violence. Examining civil rights protests, prison condition lawsuits, sentencing reforms, the War on Drugs, and the rise of conservative Tea Party politics, Schoenfeld explains why politicians veered from skepticism of prisons to an embrace of incarceration as the appropriate response to crime. To reduce the number of people behind bars, Schoenfeld argues that we must transform the political incentives for imprisonment and develop a new ideological basis for punishment.

Chokehold: Policing Black Men by Paul Butler Cops, politicians, and ordinary people are afraid of black men. The result is the Chokehold: laws and practices that treat every African American man like a thug. In this explosive new book, an African American former federal prosecutor shows that the system is working exactly the way it's supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespread―all with the support of judges and politicians. In his no-holds-barred style, Butler, whose scholarship has been featured on 60 Minutes, uses new data to demonstrate that white men commit the majority of violent crime in the United States. For example, a white woman is ten times more likely to be raped by a white male acquaintance than be the victim of a violent crime perpetrated by a black man. Butler also frankly discusses the problem of black on black violence and how to keep communities safer―without relying as much on police.

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman Jr. Former public defender James Forman, Jr. is a leading critic of mass incarceration and its disproportionate impact on people of color. In Locking Up Our Own, he seeks to understand the war on crime that began in the 1970s and why it was supported by many African American leaders in the nation’s urban centers. Forman shows us that the first substantial cohort of black mayors, judges, and police chiefs took office amid a surge in crime and drug addiction. Many prominent black officials, including Washington, D.C. mayor Marion Barry and federal prosecutor Eric Holder, feared that the gains of the civil rights movement were being undermined by lawlessness―and thus embraced tough-on-crime measures, including longer sentences and aggressive police tactics. In the face of skyrocketing murder rates and the proliferation of open-air drug markets, they believed they had no choice. But the policies they adopted would have devastating consequences for residents of poor black neighborhoods.

Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment by Angela J. Davis (Editor) Policing the Black Man explores and critiques the many ways the criminal justice system impacts the lives of African American boys and men at every stage of the criminal process, from arrest through sentencing. Essays range from an explication of the historical roots of racism in the criminal justice system to an examination of modern-day police killings of unarmed black men. The contributors discuss and explain racial profiling, the power and discretion of police and prosecutors, the role of implicit bias, the racial impact of police and prosecutorial decisions, the disproportionate imprisonment of black men, the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, and the Supreme Court’s failure to provide meaningful remedies for the injustices in the criminal justice system. Policing the Black Man is an enlightening must-read for anyone interested in the critical issues of race and justice in America.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander Jarvious Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole."As the United States celebrates the nation's "triumph over race" with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or have been labeled felons for life. Although Jim Crow laws have been wiped off the books, an astounding percentage of the African American community remains trapped in a subordinate status--much like their grandparents before them.In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community--and all of us--to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon By turns moving, sobering, and shocking, this unprecedented Pulitzer Prize-winning account reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, convicts—mostly black men—were “leased” through forced labor camps operated by state and federal governments. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history.

No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System by David Cole No Equal Justice examines subjects ranging from police behavior and jury selection to sentencing, and argues that our system does not merely fail to live up to the promise of equality, but actively requires double standards to operate. Such disparities,Cole argues, allow the privileged to enjoy constitutional protections from police power without paying the costs associated with extending those protections across the board to minorities and the poor.

Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America by Jerold S. Auerbach Focuses on the elite nature of the profession, with its emphasis on serving business interests and its attempt to exclude participation by minorities.

Prisoners' Vote: A Multidisciplinary and Comparative Perspective by Martine Herzog-Evans & Jérôme Thomas, eds. Through different legal and criminological angles and perspectives, this book addresses the controversial question of whether prisoners should have the right to vote, as well as the optimal modalities for such a vote. By adopting a comparative approach to explore the legal systems of very different jurisdictions, such as the former Eastern Bloc, England, Ireland, the USA and France, the book reveals a recent trend in opening up the right to vote.

Race, Africana Communication, and Criminal Justice Reform: A Reflexive and Intersectional Analysis of Adaptive Vitality Discusses issues and themes surrounding communication, social media, online protests, policing, criminal justice reform, and freedom of speech. Honoring the legacy of Dr. James Conyers, this volume offers analyses grounded in Africana praxis and communication principles that embrace social justice and challenge systems based on race, arguing for the importance of establishing networks of communication that benefit all people.

Advancing Equity at the Intersection of Race, Mental Illness, and Criminal Justice Involvement by Deanna M. Adams Mental illness and racial inequity are prevalent within the criminal justice system. This book provides key concepts necessary for attorneys to develop their own personal equity framework and approaches to their legal practice.

Children in Conflict with the Law: Rights, Research and Progressive Youth Justice by Ursula Kilkelly, Louise Forde, Sharon Lambert & Katharina Swirak, eds. This book ​presents an original synthesis of the leading international research on children in conflict with the law, providing an evidence base for a rights-based justice system. Informed by international children’s rights standards, this book presents relevant research findings in a clear, succinct and accessible manner, identifying the key evidence underpinning three rights-based themes of Prevention, Diversion and Justice, and Reintegration. This book is the first analysis to map leading inter-disciplinary research against the international children’s rights framework in relation to children and the justice system. In this way, it provides a unique evidence base for the implementation of children’s rights in youth justice and will support all those seeking to study, advocate or implement progressive approaches to children in conflict with the law.

Extending Justice: Strategies to Increase Inclusion and Reduce Bias by Bernice B. Donald & Sarah E. Redfield, eds. Extending Justice: Strategies to Increase Inclusion and Reduce Bias offers expert perspective and actionable tools for interrupting bias. The first book in this series, Enhancing Justice: Reducing Bias, was written to increase awareness of implicit bias and serve as a benchbook for judges. This book goes the next step to be useful to a wider audience with virtually every chapter offering thoughtful context and practical strategies for interrupting unintentional bias. Edited by two proven leaders in the field, with twenty-six chapters written by fifty diverse authors, the voices here combine to provide wide-ranging and user-friendly science and tools.

Restorative Justice and Criminal Justice: The Case for Parallelism by Derek R. Brookes Criminal justice is primarily designed to serve the public interest in relation to criminal acts. Restorative justice is designed to address the harm-related needs of individuals in the aftermath of wrongdoing. These distinct aims require such different processes and priorities that any attempt to integrate restorative justice within the criminal justice system will almost invariably undermine the quality and effectiveness of both. In this book, the author argues that the optimal relationship between the two should therefore be one of maximum independence: the instruments of the state should not be used to impose or enforce the decision to participate in restorative justice, any component of the restorative justice process or its outcome. It is also suggested that, in the absence of legislative innovation, this kind of separation is likely to require that restorative justice is situated after a case has actually exited the justice system, or after it has, in legal terms, effectively done so, as in a post-sentence context.

Change From Within: Reimagining the 21st-Century Prosecutor by Miriam Aroni Krinsky Growing up in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects, Kim Foxx never anticipated that she would become the chief prosecutor in the country’s second-biggest county. When Chesa Boudin was a baby, his parents were arrested and incarcerated. Visiting them in prison for decades helped shape his convictions about what justice does—and doesn’t—look like in the United States. Now, along with eleven other reform-minded prosecutors voters put in office throughout the country, they reflect on the task they set for themselves: making change from within. Using the power of their office, which has traditionally fueled mass incarceration and harsh punishments, this new breed of elected prosecutors has joined the movement to shake up the justice system. In Change from Within, these visionaries describe their journeys to office, what they are doing to change “business as usual,” the pushback they’ve experienced, and their thoughts on reforms that are possible working from the inside.

Fixing Legal Injustice in America: The Case for a Defender General of the United States by Andrea D. Lyon & foreword by Cynthia W. Roseberry In these times of reckoning―at last―with America’s original sin of slavery and racist policies, with police misconduct, and with mass-incarceration, many in our country ask, “What can we do?” In this powerful and insightful book, Andrea D. Lyon explicates what is wrong with the criminal justice system through clients’ stories and historical perspective, and makes the compelling case for the need for reform at the center of the system; not just its edges. Lyon, suggests that we should create an office of the Defender General of the United States and give it the same level of importance as the Attorney General and the Solicitor General. Such an office would not be held by someone who represents law enforcement, or corporate America, but rather by someone who represents and advocates for accused individuals, collectively before the powers that be. A Defender General would raise his or her voice against injustices like those involving the unnecessary killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, or the Texas Supreme Court’s refusal to let an innocent man, cleared by DNA, out of prison. The United States needs a Defender General.

Justice for All: Repairing American Criminal Justice by Charles E. 'Chuck' MacLean & Adam Lamparello Justice for All identifies ten central flaws in the criminal justice system and offers an array of solutions – from status quo to evolution to revolution – to address the inequities and injustices that far too often result in courtrooms across the United States. From the investigatory stage to the sentencing and appellate stages, many criminal defendants, particularly those from marginalized communities, often face procedural and structural barriers that taint the criminal justice system with the stain of unfairness, prejudice, and arbitrariness. Systematic flaws in the criminal justice system underscore the inequitable processes by which courts deprive citizens of liberty and, in some instances, their lives. Comprehensive in its scope and applicability, the book focuses upon the procedural and substantive barriers that often prohibit defendants from receiving fair treatment within the United States criminal justice system. Each chapter is devoted to a particular flaw in the criminal justice system and is divided into two parts. First, the authors discuss in depth the underlying causes and effects of the flaw at issue. Second, the authors present a wide range of possible solutions to address this flaw and to lead to greater equality in the administration of criminal justice. The reader is encouraged throughout to consider and assess all possible options, then defend their choices and preferences. Confronting these issues is critical to reducing racial disparities and guaranteeing Justice for all.

Justice In-Between: A Study of Intermediate Criminal Verdicts by Federico Picinali Most contemporary criminal justice systems adopt a 'binary' system of verdicts. In a binary system, there is a single evidential threshold, or standard of proof. If the standard is met, the verdict is 'guilty', the defendant is convicted, and punishment is permitted. If the standard is not met, the verdict is 'not guilty', the defendant is acquitted, and punishment is forbidden. There is no middle ground between the verdict of 'not guilty' and that of 'guilty'. An intermediate verdict represents such middle ground, intermediate between acquittal and conviction both in terms of the strength of the incriminating evidence that is needed to warrant the verdict and in terms of the severity of the consequences that the verdict may produce for the defendant. Justice In-Between is a study of intermediate criminal verdicts and advances a novel justification of such controversial devices, with the aim to produce a consensus amongst scholars subscribing to different theories of punishment. Indeed, the book shows that one cannot investigate the choice of the standard of proof nor, importantly, that of the verdict system, in isolation from the question of the justification for punishing.

Understanding Legitimacy in Criminal Justice: Conceptual and Measurement Challenges by Liqun Cao, ed. This book updates the recent quantitative and qualitative, empirical and theoretical literature on legitimacy, focusing on how it can be measured in diversified research environments. Highlighting the different measurements and the critique surrounding them, this volume is a coherent and systematic guide to theory on legitimacy. This book is divided into three sections: Theoretical framework, Legitimacy and its measures, and Legitimacy International. Within these three parts, individual chapters are expected to provide in-depth analysis of core topics, including development, measurement, and cultural disparities, and collectively represent a comprehensive review of legitimacy in theory and in methodology in the global context.

Diversity Judgments: Democratizing Judicial Legitimacy by Roy L. Brooks The US Supreme Court's legitimacy-its diminishing integrity and contribution to the good of society-is being questioned today like no other time in recent memory. Criticisms reflect the perspectives of both 'insiders' (straight white males) and 'outsiders' (mainly people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community). Neither perspective digs deep enough to get at the root of the Court's legitimacy problem, which is one of process. The Court's process of decision-making is antiquated and out of sync with a society that looks and thinks nothing like the America of the eighteenth century, when the process was first implemented. The current process marginalizes many Americans who have a right to feel disenfranchised. Leading scholar of jurisprudence Roy L. Brooks demonstrates how the Court can modernize and democratize its deliberative process, to be more inclusive of the values and life experiences of Americans who are not straight white males.