Doing Justice, Preventing Crime

Abstract

Abstract In the 2020s, no informed person disagrees that punishment policies and practices in the United States are unprincipled, chaotic, and much too often unjust. The financial costs are enormous. The moral cost is greater: countless individual injustices; mass incarceration; the world’s highest imprisonment rate; extreme disparities, especially affecting members of racial and ethnic minority groups; high rates of wrongful conviction; assembly-line case processing; and a general absence of respectful consideration of offenders’ interests, circumstances, and needs. The main ideas in this book about doing justice and preventing crime are simple: Treat people charged with and convicted of crimes justly, fairly, and even-handedly, as anyone would want done for themselves or their children. Take sympathetic account of the circumstances of peoples’ lives. Punish no one more severely than he or she deserves. Those propositions are implicit in the rule of law and its requirement that the human dignity of every person be respected. Three major structural changes are needed. First, selection of judges and prosecutors, and their day-to-day work, must be insulated from political influence. Second, mandatory minimum sentence, three-strikes, life without parole, truth in sentencing, and similar laws must be repealed. Third, correctional and prosecution systems must be centralized in unified state agencies.