Punishment Without Crime How Americas Misdemeanor System Traps Innocents by Alexandra Natapoff 2018 Hardcover-image
Punishment Without Crime How Americas Misdemeanor System Traps Innocents by Alexandra Natapoff 2018 Hardcover-image

Punishment Without Crime How Americas Misdemeanor System Traps Innocents by Alexandra Natapoff 2018 Hardcover

$ 2.91

gtin13: 9780465093793 brand: Basic Books Item Height: 1.5 in Reviews: "Thisimportant book completely upends the criminal justice conversation. Natapoff documents dark truths about the misdemeanor process-how itforces the innocent to plead guilty, how it disregards basic legal rights, andhow it inflicts deep injustice. Her insights inspire both outrage andinnovation. Punishment Without Crime provides a terrific new understanding of a flawed criminal system, and itoffers a much-needed path toward the fair and just criminal system Americadeserves. A necessary book for our times."-- Barry Scheck, cofounder of the Innocence Project, "This is an indispensable book for understanding the real American criminal courts-emphatically not the version familiar from film and television. The millions processed through our misdemeanor courts every year--overwhelmingly poor and people of color-rarely receive anything like procedural justice and often are burdened with stigma and harsh collateral consequences that lock them into disadvantage. Understanding and repairing this broken system is of the utmost importance if we want to be able to call our criminal courts a system of justice ."-- Carol S. Steiker, Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law and codirector of the Criminal Justice Policy Program, Harvard Law School Dewey Decimal: 364.60973 Item Length: 9.6 in ISBN-10: 0465093795 Publisher: Basic Books Item Width: 6.4 in Topic: Discrimination & Race Relations, Law Enforcement, General, Criminal Law / Sentencing Format: Hardcover Synopsis: A revelatory account of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminals. Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new interpretation of inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over 13 million cases each year. People arrested for minor crimes are swept through courts where defendants often lack lawyers, judges process cases in mere minutes, and nearly everyone pleads guilty. This misdemeanor machine starts punishing people long before they are convicted; it punishes the innocent; and it punishes conduct that never should have been a crime. As a result, vast numbers of Americans -- most of them poor and people of color -- are stigmatized as criminals, impoverished through fines and fees, and stripped of drivers' licenses, jobs, and housing. For too long, misdemeanors have been ignored. But they are crucial to understanding our punitive criminal system and our widening economic and racial divides. A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2018, Punishment Without Crime provides a sweeping and revelatory new account of America's broken criminal justice system from the perspective of the paradigmatic American crime-the lowly misdemeanor. While felony trials grab headlines, the petty offense system is far more representative of criminal justice as most Americans actually encounter it. Petty offenses make up 80 percent of state and local criminal dockets; over 13 million misdemeanor cases are filed every year, four times the number of felony cases. Misdemeanors are one of the largest and most unappreciated causes of our criminal system's size and its harshness-and a crucial source of American inequality.Misdemeanor cases are by definition "minor," but their impact is not. Each year, the petty offense process sweeps millions of people from arrest to a guilty plea or conviction. In effect, police get to decide who will be convicted of minor crimes, simply by arresting them for offenses like driving on a suspended licenses, marijuana possession, disorderly conduct, and loitering. In thousands of low-level courts around the country, prosecutors do little vetting, most defendants lack lawyers, legal rules and evidence are often ignored, and judges process cases in minutes or even seconds. The consequences are serious and lasting: stigmatizing criminal records, burdensome fines, jail for those who can't afford to pay bail or fees, and collateral effects including loss of jobs, housing, and benefits. Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new explanation for America's racial and economic inequalities, showing starkly how misdemeanor arrests and prosecutions brand vast numbers of disadvantaged Americans as criminals and punish them accordingly. For the first time, prize-winning legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff illuminates the full scale, scope, and workings of the misdemeanor process, drawing on never-before-compiled data as well as revealing narrative examples. The misdemeanor system, she reveals, targets and stigmatizes racial minorities as "criminals," exacerbates economic inequality by funding its own operation through fines and fees, and produces wrongful convictions on a massive scale. For too long, misdemeanors have been ignored as petty. Reckoning with the misdemeanor machine is crucial to understanding America's punitive and unfair criminal justice system and our widening economic and racial divides., A revelatory account of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminals Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new interpretation of inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over 13 million cases each year. People arrested for minor crimes are swept through courts where defendants often lack lawyers, judges process cases in mere minutes, and nearly everyone pleads guilty. This misdemeanor machine starts punishing people long before they are convicted; it punishes the innocent; and it punishes conduct that never should have been a crime. As a result, vast numbers of Americans -- most of them poor and people of color -- are stigmatized as criminals, impoverished through fines and fees, and stripped of drivers' licenses, jobs, and housing. For too long, misdemeanors have been ignored. But they are crucial to understanding our punitive criminal system and our widening economic and racial divides. A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2018 LCCN: 2018-023630 Number of Pages: 352 Pages LC Classification Number: KF9300.N38 2018 Language: English Dewey Edition: 23 Intended Audience: Trade Genre: Law, Political Science, True Crime, Social Science Illustrator: Yes Item Weight: 19.9 Oz Publication Year: 2018 ISBN-13: 9780465093793 Book Title: Punishment Without Crime : How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal Author: Alexandra Natapoff

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