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Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System
From an award-winning civil rights lawyer, a profound challenge to our society’s normalization of the caging of human beings, and the role of the legal profession in perpetuating it
Alec Karakatsanis is very interested in what we choose to punish. For example, it is a crime in most of America for poor people to wager in the streets over dice; dice-wagerers can be seized, searched, have their assets forfeited, and be locked in cages. It’s perfectly fine, by contrast, for people to wager over international currencies, mortgages, or the global supply of wheat; wheat-wagerers become names on the wings of hospitals and museums.
He is also very concerned about how the bail system, meant to ensure that people return for court dates, has morphed into a way to lock up poor people who have not been convicted of anything. He’s so concerned about this that he has personally sued court systems across the country, resulting in literally tens of thousands of people being released from jail when their bail was found to be unconstitutional.
Karakatsanis does not believe there should be two different justice systems for the rich and for the poor. And he certainly doesn’t think people who have gone to law school, passed the bar, and sworn to uphold the Constitution should be complicit in the mass caging of human beings. Usual Cruelty is a profoundly radical reconsideration of the American “injustice system” by someone who is actively, wildly successfully, challenging it.
Alec Karakatsanis is very interested in what we choose to punish. For example, it is a crime in most of America for poor people to wager in the streets over dice; dice-wagerers can be seized, searched, have their assets forfeited, and be locked in cages. It’s perfectly fine, by contrast, for people to wager over international currencies, mortgages, or the global supply of wheat; wheat-wagerers become names on the wings of hospitals and museums.
He is also very concerned about how the bail system, meant to ensure that people return for court dates, has morphed into a way to lock up poor people who have not been convicted of anything. He’s so concerned about this that he has personally sued court systems across the country, resulting in literally tens of thousands of people being released from jail when their bail was found to be unconstitutional.
Karakatsanis does not believe there should be two different justice systems for the rich and for the poor. And he certainly doesn’t think people who have gone to law school, passed the bar, and sworn to uphold the Constitution should be complicit in the mass caging of human beings. Usual Cruelty is a profoundly radical reconsideration of the American “injustice system” by someone who is actively, wildly successfully, challenging it.
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First published October 29, 2019
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September 25, 2025
Every single law student and lawyer must read this
August 2, 2019
Alec Karakatsanis is an enormously passionate lawyer. Right out of school, he has been fighting for the poor and the abused, defending the constitution against all comers, be they judges, district attorneys or lawyers. His book, Usual Cruelty is a thoughtful and thorough examination of what is wrong with the criminal justice system from an abuse and civil rights standpoint. Despite having reviewed numerous other such books, I found this one thoroughly shocking, well-reasoned and personal, with a bent towards recognizing how to fix it all.
He calls the system the punishment bureaucracy. Everything it does seems aimed at putting people in cages and taking away their constitutional rights, as if that, somehow, will reduce crime. Of course it doesn’t. It just makes the USA the world leader in keeping people in cages. Nothing the system does is based on science. Its sentences, fines and bail have nothing whatever to do with what will make the country a better place. Or rehabilitate the accused. It’s so bad that in California Karakatsanis heard lawyers for the attorney general argue for higher bail on the premise that people facing bail should be presumed guilty.
He goes after big names, like Eric Holder and Kamala Harris, who bemoaned the potential loss of all that free slave labor if the system gets truly reformed. He is constantly astounded that judges dispense with constitutional rights or sentences or bail in any way connected to the accused before them. Karakatsanis is giving his life to change this, and encourage newly minted lawyers to join him.
He asks a lot of hard questions, like “Are we sure that putting human beings in cages is absolutely necessary to creating a world with fewer people smoking marijuana or physically harming other people?” He attacks the widespread policy of suspending drivers’ licenses for any offence at all. It is not only irrelevant to the crime, but all but ensures the accused will be nailed again for driving with a suspended license. Or worse, the accused not being able to drive at all. In California, more than four million drivers licenses get suspended for being too poor to pay fines, bail or court costs. Driving with a suspended license has become the number one crime in many jurisdictions, Karakatsanis says. “That crime serves no function other than to criminalize poverty.”
Americans are spectacularly good at criminalizing poverty. In Ferguson Missouri, police make an average of 3.6 arrest a year – per household. Inability to pay means more jail time, waiting for a trial, and often coming out even further in debt as the private sector jailers ensure inmates pay way too much for everything from aspirin to toilet paper. Some of these private services have contracts that require the state to keep the jails at least 90% occupied, and it sure isn’t with bankers and lawyers. Because the justice system provides discretion. The district attorney picks which crimes and accuseds to prosecute, letting off the wealthy and the privileged, and focusing on the poor. It’s what the laws were written to prevent, but Karakatsanis points out the gaping difference between the rule of law and living it. Hint - there’s no connection.
In a grueling hundred page essay, he lists all the offenses against the accuseds. They are mostly against nonwhites and the poor. He points out that the constitution stipulates pretrial incarceration as a “carefully limited exception,” but the skimming of bail money by judges, counties and private contractors ensures it applies to the vast majority of cases today. “Over 72% of federal criminal defendants are now confined to jail cells for the entire duration of their prosecution,” he says. 13 million are transferred from their homes to prisons every year, and 2.3 million are in prison on any given day. Nearly half a million are there for being unable pay a fine or post cash bail. The fine is most often for old traffic tickets, a scam of its own.
And that’s just the first chapter. The other two chapters are completely different. They are moral arguments to attract idealistic law graduates before they go corporate and forget their passions for justice. He argues every conceivable angle that might pass through a young lawyer’s mind. He flows from morality to reality to law and to justice. And guilt, as in conscience.
It’s a hugely passionate and horrifying story from the land of the free.
David Wineberg
He calls the system the punishment bureaucracy. Everything it does seems aimed at putting people in cages and taking away their constitutional rights, as if that, somehow, will reduce crime. Of course it doesn’t. It just makes the USA the world leader in keeping people in cages. Nothing the system does is based on science. Its sentences, fines and bail have nothing whatever to do with what will make the country a better place. Or rehabilitate the accused. It’s so bad that in California Karakatsanis heard lawyers for the attorney general argue for higher bail on the premise that people facing bail should be presumed guilty.
He goes after big names, like Eric Holder and Kamala Harris, who bemoaned the potential loss of all that free slave labor if the system gets truly reformed. He is constantly astounded that judges dispense with constitutional rights or sentences or bail in any way connected to the accused before them. Karakatsanis is giving his life to change this, and encourage newly minted lawyers to join him.
He asks a lot of hard questions, like “Are we sure that putting human beings in cages is absolutely necessary to creating a world with fewer people smoking marijuana or physically harming other people?” He attacks the widespread policy of suspending drivers’ licenses for any offence at all. It is not only irrelevant to the crime, but all but ensures the accused will be nailed again for driving with a suspended license. Or worse, the accused not being able to drive at all. In California, more than four million drivers licenses get suspended for being too poor to pay fines, bail or court costs. Driving with a suspended license has become the number one crime in many jurisdictions, Karakatsanis says. “That crime serves no function other than to criminalize poverty.”
Americans are spectacularly good at criminalizing poverty. In Ferguson Missouri, police make an average of 3.6 arrest a year – per household. Inability to pay means more jail time, waiting for a trial, and often coming out even further in debt as the private sector jailers ensure inmates pay way too much for everything from aspirin to toilet paper. Some of these private services have contracts that require the state to keep the jails at least 90% occupied, and it sure isn’t with bankers and lawyers. Because the justice system provides discretion. The district attorney picks which crimes and accuseds to prosecute, letting off the wealthy and the privileged, and focusing on the poor. It’s what the laws were written to prevent, but Karakatsanis points out the gaping difference between the rule of law and living it. Hint - there’s no connection.
In a grueling hundred page essay, he lists all the offenses against the accuseds. They are mostly against nonwhites and the poor. He points out that the constitution stipulates pretrial incarceration as a “carefully limited exception,” but the skimming of bail money by judges, counties and private contractors ensures it applies to the vast majority of cases today. “Over 72% of federal criminal defendants are now confined to jail cells for the entire duration of their prosecution,” he says. 13 million are transferred from their homes to prisons every year, and 2.3 million are in prison on any given day. Nearly half a million are there for being unable pay a fine or post cash bail. The fine is most often for old traffic tickets, a scam of its own.
And that’s just the first chapter. The other two chapters are completely different. They are moral arguments to attract idealistic law graduates before they go corporate and forget their passions for justice. He argues every conceivable angle that might pass through a young lawyer’s mind. He flows from morality to reality to law and to justice. And guilt, as in conscience.
It’s a hugely passionate and horrifying story from the land of the free.
David Wineberg
September 25, 2019
I can't even begin to underscore how powerful and important this is. Usual Cruelty should be required reading for all Americans. The subtitle for this book is "The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Justice System," but it covers so much more than that. It is a call for us to step back and fundamentally rethink why our punishment and criminal "justice" system works the way it does - eventually coming to the realization that it does not work. This is one of the most eye-opening books I've read in a long time, one that should deeply change the way you think about criminality, prisons, and criminal justice reform. It's typical of me to not be pithy in my reviews, but this one particularly deserves a deep dive. Here we go.
There are several aspects of this book that I found highly effective. First, Karakatsanis does not say "imprisoning" or "jailing" people. Instead, he calls it "caging." And when you put it that way - because that's what it is, no bones about it - you can't help but confront the suffering that jails and prisons inflict on people.
Second, he emphasizes over and over that declaring actions criminal, investigating crimes, policing people, and putting "criminals" in jail is all a choice. We have this idea that there is a fundamental delineation between criminals and non-criminals. Someone committed a crime, so they deserve to be in jail or prison. But, we have all committed crimes of some sort - we've sped, had a drink underage, filed taxes improperly, tried drugs, etc. What makes our crimes different from the crimes that people are caged for? It is the product of people (usually lawyers) who exercise legislative discretion to criminalize something like the possession of marijuana and associate a punishment of years in prison for this action. It is the exercise of investigative discretion for police to target low-income black neighborhoods to catch people in the act, rather than going to Columbia University's dorm rooms, where drugs would also likely be found. It is the exercise of prosecutorial discretion to actively clamp down on crimes like drug possession and sentence poor people of color to years in prison for this act.
Third, he dispenses with the fiction that all of the above exercises of discretion are acting in the best interest of society. If we truly wanted to target the crimes that most negatively impact our physical/financial safety and wellbeing, we would be targeting white collar criminals, who cost us tens of billions of dollars every year, or we would target the corporations that pollute our air and water systems. Instead, we target lots and lots of low-level "criminals" - people who can't pay fines, who shoplift, who are homeless, or who possess drugs. If we truly wanted to not see these actions happen again, we would use methods that have been proven to be penologically effective. Instead, we do not even stop to ask how effective caging people is at reducing crime - we just do it and ignore the fact that rates of recidivism are too high to show that caging works.
Fourth and finally, Karakatsanis makes use of often hard-to-read lists: a particularly depressing list of crimes that prosecutors have chosen to not take to court ("Jail guards in Florida locked a man with mental illness in a shower, turned on scalding hot water, laughed at him, and left him there until he died. Prosecutors chose not to prosecute the guards."), stories of real people facing unbelievable sentences ("It is about Jorge Andrade, who is serving fifty years to life for stealing nine videos from Kmart, and Gary Ewing, who is serving twenty-five years to life for stealing three golf clubs."), and litanies of so-called progressive prosecutors (like Eric Holder and Kamala Harris) and all the ways they really work to just keep the system functioning in the way it always has. It is important to read and understand these lists to address the problem of desensitization he discusses. However, he also presents concrete, actionable ways to truly reform the criminal justice system, acknowledging the need for restorative justice. This is not a fairy-tale concept: we need to do things like stop building new prisons, improve affordable housing, expand community arts programs, and build more companies with worker power.
Please pick up this book for yourself and your friends and thank me later. P.S. All of the proceeds go to the Essie Justice Group, a woman-led prison abolition group!
There are several aspects of this book that I found highly effective. First, Karakatsanis does not say "imprisoning" or "jailing" people. Instead, he calls it "caging." And when you put it that way - because that's what it is, no bones about it - you can't help but confront the suffering that jails and prisons inflict on people.
Second, he emphasizes over and over that declaring actions criminal, investigating crimes, policing people, and putting "criminals" in jail is all a choice. We have this idea that there is a fundamental delineation between criminals and non-criminals. Someone committed a crime, so they deserve to be in jail or prison. But, we have all committed crimes of some sort - we've sped, had a drink underage, filed taxes improperly, tried drugs, etc. What makes our crimes different from the crimes that people are caged for? It is the product of people (usually lawyers) who exercise legislative discretion to criminalize something like the possession of marijuana and associate a punishment of years in prison for this action. It is the exercise of investigative discretion for police to target low-income black neighborhoods to catch people in the act, rather than going to Columbia University's dorm rooms, where drugs would also likely be found. It is the exercise of prosecutorial discretion to actively clamp down on crimes like drug possession and sentence poor people of color to years in prison for this act.
Third, he dispenses with the fiction that all of the above exercises of discretion are acting in the best interest of society. If we truly wanted to target the crimes that most negatively impact our physical/financial safety and wellbeing, we would be targeting white collar criminals, who cost us tens of billions of dollars every year, or we would target the corporations that pollute our air and water systems. Instead, we target lots and lots of low-level "criminals" - people who can't pay fines, who shoplift, who are homeless, or who possess drugs. If we truly wanted to not see these actions happen again, we would use methods that have been proven to be penologically effective. Instead, we do not even stop to ask how effective caging people is at reducing crime - we just do it and ignore the fact that rates of recidivism are too high to show that caging works.
Fourth and finally, Karakatsanis makes use of often hard-to-read lists: a particularly depressing list of crimes that prosecutors have chosen to not take to court ("Jail guards in Florida locked a man with mental illness in a shower, turned on scalding hot water, laughed at him, and left him there until he died. Prosecutors chose not to prosecute the guards."), stories of real people facing unbelievable sentences ("It is about Jorge Andrade, who is serving fifty years to life for stealing nine videos from Kmart, and Gary Ewing, who is serving twenty-five years to life for stealing three golf clubs."), and litanies of so-called progressive prosecutors (like Eric Holder and Kamala Harris) and all the ways they really work to just keep the system functioning in the way it always has. It is important to read and understand these lists to address the problem of desensitization he discusses. However, he also presents concrete, actionable ways to truly reform the criminal justice system, acknowledging the need for restorative justice. This is not a fairy-tale concept: we need to do things like stop building new prisons, improve affordable housing, expand community arts programs, and build more companies with worker power.
Please pick up this book for yourself and your friends and thank me later. P.S. All of the proceeds go to the Essie Justice Group, a woman-led prison abolition group!
January 27, 2021
I’m a public defender. I would give 10 stars to the introduction and the first essay (entitled “The Punishment Bureaucracy” and comprising the bulk of the book). The writing probably is not winning any awards, and the writer is a little prone to laundry lists, excessive quotation, verbosity, and self glorification (such a lawyer... and look at me over here laundry listing!). That said: this is THE TRUTH. I wish I could make every American read it - including and particularly judges, politicians, and prosecutors, but also my fellow defense attorneys and my clients behind bars, and also basically everybody else.
The rest of the book is just ok. The middle essay (“The Human Lawyer”) had a couple compelling anecdotes, but it really lost me with the focus on law students at Harvard, their article selection for journals, and on-campus interviewing by law firms. The “human lawyer” archetype didn’t really work for me and seemed to miss the complicated and ever-evolving relationship PDs and civil rights lawyers can have with the work. The third essay was more of a repeat of the first, with a more pointed call-out to lawyers. The author has a few really good points that he repeats many, many times. I’d love to help him edit this into a compelling TED talk, though he probably wouldn’t think he needed my help.
Interestingly, though being critical of all so-called progressive prosecutors in office at the time he wrote this, I saw Alec recently appeared on SF DA Chesa Boudin’s podcast... something I need to check out.
A taste:
“One defining feature of America’s punishment system is that is inflicts cruelty on such a scale that it no longer feels cruel.”
“The law enforcement religion is hostile to the view that a society that is more equal would have less crime. Not because that idea is untrue, but because the very goal of the criminal legal system is to preserve certain elements of an unequal social order.”
“Hundreds of years of criminal acts against Black people were unpunished, such that the rule of law was formally converted into a tool to produce slavery by another name. Given this history, one of the central tasks for punishment bureaucrats is to push the myth that the legal system at some point became different and more objective than it has been throughout its entire history.”
“Just as we should be wary of throwing one person in jail if the evidence against her is unsound, so too should we worry about throwing millions in jail if the evidence supporting the connection between massive incarceration and a better society is unproven.”
PREACH.
The rest of the book is just ok. The middle essay (“The Human Lawyer”) had a couple compelling anecdotes, but it really lost me with the focus on law students at Harvard, their article selection for journals, and on-campus interviewing by law firms. The “human lawyer” archetype didn’t really work for me and seemed to miss the complicated and ever-evolving relationship PDs and civil rights lawyers can have with the work. The third essay was more of a repeat of the first, with a more pointed call-out to lawyers. The author has a few really good points that he repeats many, many times. I’d love to help him edit this into a compelling TED talk, though he probably wouldn’t think he needed my help.
Interestingly, though being critical of all so-called progressive prosecutors in office at the time he wrote this, I saw Alec recently appeared on SF DA Chesa Boudin’s podcast... something I need to check out.
A taste:
“One defining feature of America’s punishment system is that is inflicts cruelty on such a scale that it no longer feels cruel.”
“The law enforcement religion is hostile to the view that a society that is more equal would have less crime. Not because that idea is untrue, but because the very goal of the criminal legal system is to preserve certain elements of an unequal social order.”
“Hundreds of years of criminal acts against Black people were unpunished, such that the rule of law was formally converted into a tool to produce slavery by another name. Given this history, one of the central tasks for punishment bureaucrats is to push the myth that the legal system at some point became different and more objective than it has been throughout its entire history.”
“Just as we should be wary of throwing one person in jail if the evidence against her is unsound, so too should we worry about throwing millions in jail if the evidence supporting the connection between massive incarceration and a better society is unproven.”
PREACH.
April 11, 2021
This is simultaneously the most powerful book I've ever read about the so-called criminal justice system, and the clearest explanation of what the so-called criminal justice system actual is in practice. "The Punishment Bureaucracy," in particular, should be read by every person heading off to law school in the hopes that enough of them will refuse to participate in the continued destruction of countless lives through vehicles of state violence such as policing and prisons.
The problem with this book is that it is a terrible indictment on our society. Yes, the prosecutors and judges who through their desire to amass prestige and privilege are willing to perpetuate great harm, but also the cops, corporate lawyers, CEOs, and politicians who are okay with the harm that is being produced because they benefit from the oppression that is built into American society.
But this book also provides an alternative for those same people. It gives a vividly clear picture of their complicity and culpability, which will allow them the opportunity to change course. As he says in "The Human Lawyer" on page 128, "... there is always a next moment in which you can decide to do the right thing--to be a better person."
This is a must read for everyone who wants a more just society, lawyer or not.
The problem with this book is that it is a terrible indictment on our society. Yes, the prosecutors and judges who through their desire to amass prestige and privilege are willing to perpetuate great harm, but also the cops, corporate lawyers, CEOs, and politicians who are okay with the harm that is being produced because they benefit from the oppression that is built into American society.
But this book also provides an alternative for those same people. It gives a vividly clear picture of their complicity and culpability, which will allow them the opportunity to change course. As he says in "The Human Lawyer" on page 128, "... there is always a next moment in which you can decide to do the right thing--to be a better person."
This is a must read for everyone who wants a more just society, lawyer or not.
March 23, 2021
a must read!!!!!
August 15, 2025
There are a number of themes that come through in Alec Karakatsanis’ USUAL CRUELTY: THE COMPLICITY OF LAWYERS IN THE CRIMINAL INJUSTICE SYSTEM. One is the extreme scale of brutality we, both as legal professionals and more broadly as American society, inflict upon those deemed “criminals”—a class which, not-so-coincidentally, is overwhelmingly composed of the poor and nonwhite. Another is how desensitized we have become to the horrors inflicted in the name of so-called “law enforcement”. A third is the fact that the very term “law enforcement” is a misnomer; laws are generated politically and enforced disproportionately based on the whims and biases of the many players in the judicial system (officers, lawyers, prosecutors, judges), and—again—often not at all against the wealthy and white. Fourth is the fact that the criminal “justice” system as currently maintained is starkly violative of Constitutional principles, and toward ends which provide no demonstrable benefit beyond ensuring the balance of power remains entrenched as-is. Fifth, to bring it back around again, is the shocking abandonment of any genuine interrogation about whether the actions we take in executing criminal “justice” are right or moral. “[F]ew ideas have caused more harm in our criminal system than the belief that America is governed by a neutral ‘rule of law’.”
Karakatsanis almost always refers to jailing and imprisonment as “human caging”, the better to draw attention to how depraved it is. “A society makes choices about what acts to render worthy of different kinds of punishment. The decision to make something punishable by human caging authorizes the government to treat people in ways that otherwise would be abhorrent,” he states, before drawing attention to the fact that those choices are made by politicians within economic, social, and racial systems as they already exist. Political choices determine what is or is not defined as a crime: should it be a crime to hoard wealth, to abuse a family dog, “abuse thousands of pigs to make higher profits from their flesh”, drill for oil, belong to a union, decline to belong to a union, participate in a lynch mob, enslave people, hit one’s child, refuse to identify oneself to a police officer, search a person without probable cause, grow tobacco, hold profits offshore, terminate a pregnancy, possess a gun, or “expose secret government misdeeds in the media”? Next, political choices determine how those things defined as “crime” are punished: how harshly should we punish speeding, “selling various derivatives of the coca plant”, domestic assault, sleeping under a bridge, illegally searching someone, downloading music, committing murder, or tax evasion? These political choices play out at every level of the criminal “justice” system, including definitions of affirmative defenses such as duress or necessity (as an example, he points out that poverty is not commonly accepted by American courts as a sufficient excuse for theft of subsistence goods) and resource allocation (under President Clinton, funding for federal public housing reduced by roughly the same amount the federal prison budget increased, and while police currently focus the majority of their energy on low-level arrests, tens of thousands of rape kits go untested across the United States).
Karakatsanis stresses that it is appropriate for a political process to make decisions about what society should punish or celebrate, but his point is that our criminal laws “are not an objective mechanism for increasing overall well-being by efficiently reducing harmful behavior”; they are arbitrary, and frequently rooted in the worst aspects of human existence, including existing power dynamics, racial bias, and economic self-interest. Federal law famously treats crack cocaine offenses more harshly than powder cocaine offenses, though the two are functionally identical; there is no legal or scientific basis for punishing possession or distribution of the one more harshly than the other, except that powder cocaine is used more frequently by whites than crack cocaine. Even after a unanimous Senate vote in 2010 reducing the disparity in sentencing, it was lowered from 100:1 to 18:1 with no justification for maintaining any disparity and without making the reduction retroactive “to help the thousands of human beings already in prison because of a law that everyone agreed had no basis”.
Let’s talk about “appropriate punishment”. Karakatsanis sees “a remarkable lack of intellectual rigor in every corner of the punishment bureaucracy: almost no one carrying out punishment in our legal system has any clue about whether what they are doing is leading to any good. They don't even know, for example, if locking people in jail cells actually increases or decreases the frequency of things that they call ‘crimes’—and a lot of evidence suggests that it makes communities less safe. They lack the most basic data, evidence, or rational explanations that one would expect from people before they cage millions of human beings in frightening conditions and separate tens of millions of families.” The Constitution theoretically protects one from unreasonable searches and seizures. If one’s behavior is characterized as a “crime”, however—say they have marijuana in their pocket rather than a cigarette—then “the person may be bound in metal chains, removed from the street, strip searched, placed in a cage, and held in solitary confinement with no human contact or natural lights. The person can be kept in that cage for decades. The person can lose her right to vote, be removed from public housing and have her family removed from public housing, be kicked out of school, and be barred from employment. She can also be deprived of basic human needs, such as hugging her child or having a sexual relationship with her spouse. All of this treatment is allowed only because the person is a ‘criminal’.” Again, this has nothing to do with any assessment of harm being prevented: second-hand smoke alone kills 41,000 people a year, the equivalent of 12 September 11 attacks on the United States, but cigarette possession is not criminalized—instead, the marketing and distribution of tobacco is a lucrative business.
The inhumane way we treat prisoners deserves a moment to fully appreciate. The author describes representing people in Ferguson, MO, in 2014 who were “sleeping on top of each other on the floor in jail cells covered in feces and mold with no access to natural light or fresh air because they could not pay old tickets to the city.” One man “with serious physical disabilities” was jailed without a lawyer or his medications because he could not pay a ticket for allowing a woman to sleep over in his home without getting an occupancy permit that the city required for friends, relatives, or romantic partners to stay overnight. Another woman was jailed for more than 48 days “without a shower, toothbrush, or any way to clean her menstrual bleeding because she could not pay traffic tickets.” At a later point in the book, Karakatsanis asks the reader to imagine a sentencing hearing for marijuana possession, assault, or another crime:
The author rightly diagnoses the reason American society so easily dismisses all of this: it isn’t happening to wealthy white people. If it were—if “vast numbers of young, wealthy, and white drug criminals at private schools and famous universities were harassed and beaten by police in the streets, had their family homes raided at night, were sexually and physically assaulted in prisons, and were confined to live and die in cages” with no empirical evidence of any benefit—then “[o]ur culture would see it as widespread violence in need of serious justification, if not a human rights crisis demanding urgent and immediate action, rather than as a vague and impersonal aspect of the need for ‘law enforcement’.” Instead, Karakatsanis notes sardonically, “tens of millions of shackled bodies later, we're starting to have symposia in which people talk about whether everything will be better if we give police more money to buy cameras for their lapels.”
But the author’s larger point deserves further discussion: the deprivation of a fundamental right requires strict scrutiny. That is, the government must show that the law it is trying to enforce is “narrowly tailored” to achieve legitimate ends. This is why we require evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” in criminal cases (except in those cases where prosecutors successfully pressures a defendant into pleading guilty). Once that threshold is met, though, there is then zero scrutiny about the “calibration of punishment and the treatment of accused people”. We authorize massive deprivations of liberty with little or no evidence those strategies work, much less that they work best. Karakatsanis adds that the claim “prisons exist to lower crime rates” is an unquestioned article of faith among “rule of law” proponents, casually asserted to suggest the punishment bureaucracy is a good-faith attempt to reduce “crime” for the public benefit, but there is no evidence in American history this supposed goal has ever been achieved. This belief, he says, is “a core malignancy that needs to be found in order to dismantle mass incarceration.” Punishment bureaucrats need people need to believe that our legal system is objective and “trying its best to promote well-being, morality, and human flourishing [in order to] support the system’s perceived legitimacy and our acceptance of its authority over us.”
“What kind of legal culture allows the massive deprivation of basic liberty and inflicts so much pain without any evidence?” Karakatsanis asks. This comes back to the idea that the people who created the contemporary “criminal justice system” are broadly comfortable with the way society looks; “law and order”, to them, means maintaining the existing order, and do not want to solve “crime” if it means a society that looks much different, i.e. “more equal and with less private profit”. He asserts that the religious zeal for “law enforcement” is hostile to a view that a more equal society would have less crime not because it is untrue, but because the entire goal under this mindset is to preserve certain elements of an unequal social order even if that inequality creates “crime”. He offers as an example the so-called “war on drugs”. This effort has cost “more than a trillion dollars, tens of millions of arrests, hundreds of millions of police stops, tens of millions of years in prison, tens of millions of lost jobs and educations and homes, millions of square acres of spray-poisoned forests, tens of millions of voting rights (including at least one presidential election), tens of millions of children separated from a parent, hundreds of thousands of deaths due to the resulting drug wars and American intervention in Latin America, and massive militarization and surveillance by local police of every American city and town.” Most of this activity was due to personal use of certain drugs, behavior this country protects for other harmful substances like alcohol and tobacco. In 2015, for example, “more people were handcuffed and caged for marijuana offenses than for all ‘violent’ crimes combined.” Despite these costs, drug use has either not gone down or has significantly increased. “Only idiots would pursue legal strategies that are so counterproductive and destructive for so long—and our legal system’s bureaucrats are sophisticated, not idiotic. The ‘war on drugs’ is about something else.”
It's political. “Bureaucrats decide which offenses to punish and which to ignore. The people making these choices call themselves ‘law enforcement’.” Karakatsanis then produces an extensive list of examples showing where the priorities of “law enforcement” lie. It is well-documented that U.S. government employees committed torture during the so-called “war on terror”, including “physical beatings, anal rape, mutilation of genitals, electric shocks to the body, waterboarding (a crime for which the United States previously prosecuted foreign soldiers), chaining people naked to walls in freezing temperatures until they died, hanging people by their arms until it appeared that their shoulders would break, locking a person in a box with insects, forcing people to remain awake for eleven straight days, and other physical and psychological tactics designed to inflict pain so severe that the inability to bear that pain would lead to people providing information.” Many were killed—federal prosecutors knew of at least 100 deaths caused by this torture. Yet no person was ever prosecuted for committing these crimes. Prosecutors chose not to pursue these violations of federal criminal law. The 2008 “financial crisis” was caused by bankers engaging in massive criminality, “throwing 14 million people into poverty and therefore leading to many deaths” while the wealthiest 400 Americans saw their wealth increase by $30 billion. “As of 2013, not a single high-ranking banker has been prosecuted by federal prosecutors for actions that led to the 2008 world economic collapse.” The Obama administration, in fact, argued banks could not be prosecuted because they were too big and “the effects of prosecution could hurt the economy”. The author points out that even if one believed this unfounded claim—that the prosecution of criminal banks would result, or that that would be a bad thing—no individuals were prosecuted either. The Obama administration’s justifications do not explain the failure to prosecute the CEOs involved in the scandal.
It goes on and on. The MOVE bombing in Philadelphia was perpetrated by “law enforcement”; no person was prosecuted for this murder of social justice advocates. COINTELPRO was a long-running FBI program in which FBI agents committed felony crimes against advocates for progressive causes, including blackmail, burglary, threats, kidnapping, murder, illegal wiretapping, intercepting and changing of letters, and more. When COINTELPRO was discovered, “law enforcement” agents were assigned to investigate… not the crimes, but those who anonymously revealed the cries to Congress and the media. Federal prosecutors decided that not a single FBI employee would be prosecuted for these crimes. Obama ordered American drone strikes during his presidency, and many of these drone strikes went wrong, including erroneous bombings of “wedding, funerals, hospitals, journalists, and other civilian targets”. American prosecutors decided that Obama and others involved in these decisions should not be prosecuted for these killings.
REVIEW EXCEEDS THE MAXIMUM CHARACTER LIMIT. CONTINUED IN THE COMMENTS...
Karakatsanis almost always refers to jailing and imprisonment as “human caging”, the better to draw attention to how depraved it is. “A society makes choices about what acts to render worthy of different kinds of punishment. The decision to make something punishable by human caging authorizes the government to treat people in ways that otherwise would be abhorrent,” he states, before drawing attention to the fact that those choices are made by politicians within economic, social, and racial systems as they already exist. Political choices determine what is or is not defined as a crime: should it be a crime to hoard wealth, to abuse a family dog, “abuse thousands of pigs to make higher profits from their flesh”, drill for oil, belong to a union, decline to belong to a union, participate in a lynch mob, enslave people, hit one’s child, refuse to identify oneself to a police officer, search a person without probable cause, grow tobacco, hold profits offshore, terminate a pregnancy, possess a gun, or “expose secret government misdeeds in the media”? Next, political choices determine how those things defined as “crime” are punished: how harshly should we punish speeding, “selling various derivatives of the coca plant”, domestic assault, sleeping under a bridge, illegally searching someone, downloading music, committing murder, or tax evasion? These political choices play out at every level of the criminal “justice” system, including definitions of affirmative defenses such as duress or necessity (as an example, he points out that poverty is not commonly accepted by American courts as a sufficient excuse for theft of subsistence goods) and resource allocation (under President Clinton, funding for federal public housing reduced by roughly the same amount the federal prison budget increased, and while police currently focus the majority of their energy on low-level arrests, tens of thousands of rape kits go untested across the United States).
Karakatsanis stresses that it is appropriate for a political process to make decisions about what society should punish or celebrate, but his point is that our criminal laws “are not an objective mechanism for increasing overall well-being by efficiently reducing harmful behavior”; they are arbitrary, and frequently rooted in the worst aspects of human existence, including existing power dynamics, racial bias, and economic self-interest. Federal law famously treats crack cocaine offenses more harshly than powder cocaine offenses, though the two are functionally identical; there is no legal or scientific basis for punishing possession or distribution of the one more harshly than the other, except that powder cocaine is used more frequently by whites than crack cocaine. Even after a unanimous Senate vote in 2010 reducing the disparity in sentencing, it was lowered from 100:1 to 18:1 with no justification for maintaining any disparity and without making the reduction retroactive “to help the thousands of human beings already in prison because of a law that everyone agreed had no basis”.
The standard narrative portrays "criminals" as a vast collection of individuals who have each made a choice to "break the law." Convictions and punishments are consequences that flow naturally from that bad choice: we must enforce the "rule of law." But these crimes are not chosen because of some assessment of the amount of harm prevented, and punishments are not selected because of demonstrated penological success. The difference in the way the bureaucracy treats someone using cocaine and someone using vodka has no empirical connection to the respective harm caused by those substances or to any analysis of how to prevent addiction to them. Instead, forces external to well-reasoned policy contribute to definitions of criminality and to decisions about appropriate punishment.
Let’s talk about “appropriate punishment”. Karakatsanis sees “a remarkable lack of intellectual rigor in every corner of the punishment bureaucracy: almost no one carrying out punishment in our legal system has any clue about whether what they are doing is leading to any good. They don't even know, for example, if locking people in jail cells actually increases or decreases the frequency of things that they call ‘crimes’—and a lot of evidence suggests that it makes communities less safe. They lack the most basic data, evidence, or rational explanations that one would expect from people before they cage millions of human beings in frightening conditions and separate tens of millions of families.” The Constitution theoretically protects one from unreasonable searches and seizures. If one’s behavior is characterized as a “crime”, however—say they have marijuana in their pocket rather than a cigarette—then “the person may be bound in metal chains, removed from the street, strip searched, placed in a cage, and held in solitary confinement with no human contact or natural lights. The person can be kept in that cage for decades. The person can lose her right to vote, be removed from public housing and have her family removed from public housing, be kicked out of school, and be barred from employment. She can also be deprived of basic human needs, such as hugging her child or having a sexual relationship with her spouse. All of this treatment is allowed only because the person is a ‘criminal’.” Again, this has nothing to do with any assessment of harm being prevented: second-hand smoke alone kills 41,000 people a year, the equivalent of 12 September 11 attacks on the United States, but cigarette possession is not criminalized—instead, the marketing and distribution of tobacco is a lucrative business.
The inhumane way we treat prisoners deserves a moment to fully appreciate. The author describes representing people in Ferguson, MO, in 2014 who were “sleeping on top of each other on the floor in jail cells covered in feces and mold with no access to natural light or fresh air because they could not pay old tickets to the city.” One man “with serious physical disabilities” was jailed without a lawyer or his medications because he could not pay a ticket for allowing a woman to sleep over in his home without getting an occupancy permit that the city required for friends, relatives, or romantic partners to stay overnight. Another woman was jailed for more than 48 days “without a shower, toothbrush, or any way to clean her menstrual bleeding because she could not pay traffic tickets.” At a later point in the book, Karakatsanis asks the reader to imagine a sentencing hearing for marijuana possession, assault, or another crime:
The prosecutor stands to address the court and produces a wheel. The prosecutor proposes as a punishment that the judge spin the wheel to determine the defendant's fate. The prosecutor declares that, based on the way that her office has constructed the wheel, there is a one in ten chance that the person's punishment is that he will be taken into the next room and raped . . . [T]his is essentially what we do when, in doctrinal silence, we allow people to be sentenced to American jails and prisons . . .
[A]t some point lawyers allowed the legal system to view caging a person as more acceptable than other physical and psychological punishments and, then, we allowed those cages to degenerate into places in which people will contract life-threatening illness, endure the torture of solitary confinement, be raped and physically assaulted, be deprived of sunlight and fresh air, and experience a variety of other horrors. We then found it unimportant to incorporate those harms into our lawyerly doctrinal thinking.
The legal profession and the doctrines that it produces exhibit a willful blindness to the extent of the physical and psychological punishments that we perpetrate. Putting a human being in a cage is brutal business— one that every lawyer should study in meticulous detail for herself. Lawyers must understand and communicate what it does to a person to strip from the person almost every form of humanity that we take for granted every day: to prevent him for years from eating at a restaurant, going on a date, making love, visiting a museum, traveling to a new place, having walls between his bed and his toilet, hugging his mother, seeing his grandfather before he dies. And the consequences of the policing-to-incarceration pipeline go well beyond the things that come with physical banishment. They include what we do to people in our cages: scandalous medical and mental health care, beatings and stabbings, rampant sexual trauma, extended periods of confinement alone with no one to interact with and no natural light, and coerced labor; obliteration of parental and other friendship and family relationships through unaffordable for-profit prison phone contracts; revocation of the right to vote; unemployment and homelessness for dependent families; deportation; and crushing cycles of debt, despair, and alienation.
The author rightly diagnoses the reason American society so easily dismisses all of this: it isn’t happening to wealthy white people. If it were—if “vast numbers of young, wealthy, and white drug criminals at private schools and famous universities were harassed and beaten by police in the streets, had their family homes raided at night, were sexually and physically assaulted in prisons, and were confined to live and die in cages” with no empirical evidence of any benefit—then “[o]ur culture would see it as widespread violence in need of serious justification, if not a human rights crisis demanding urgent and immediate action, rather than as a vague and impersonal aspect of the need for ‘law enforcement’.” Instead, Karakatsanis notes sardonically, “tens of millions of shackled bodies later, we're starting to have symposia in which people talk about whether everything will be better if we give police more money to buy cameras for their lapels.”
But the author’s larger point deserves further discussion: the deprivation of a fundamental right requires strict scrutiny. That is, the government must show that the law it is trying to enforce is “narrowly tailored” to achieve legitimate ends. This is why we require evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” in criminal cases (except in those cases where prosecutors successfully pressures a defendant into pleading guilty). Once that threshold is met, though, there is then zero scrutiny about the “calibration of punishment and the treatment of accused people”. We authorize massive deprivations of liberty with little or no evidence those strategies work, much less that they work best. Karakatsanis adds that the claim “prisons exist to lower crime rates” is an unquestioned article of faith among “rule of law” proponents, casually asserted to suggest the punishment bureaucracy is a good-faith attempt to reduce “crime” for the public benefit, but there is no evidence in American history this supposed goal has ever been achieved. This belief, he says, is “a core malignancy that needs to be found in order to dismantle mass incarceration.” Punishment bureaucrats need people need to believe that our legal system is objective and “trying its best to promote well-being, morality, and human flourishing [in order to] support the system’s perceived legitimacy and our acceptance of its authority over us.”
“What kind of legal culture allows the massive deprivation of basic liberty and inflicts so much pain without any evidence?” Karakatsanis asks. This comes back to the idea that the people who created the contemporary “criminal justice system” are broadly comfortable with the way society looks; “law and order”, to them, means maintaining the existing order, and do not want to solve “crime” if it means a society that looks much different, i.e. “more equal and with less private profit”. He asserts that the religious zeal for “law enforcement” is hostile to a view that a more equal society would have less crime not because it is untrue, but because the entire goal under this mindset is to preserve certain elements of an unequal social order even if that inequality creates “crime”. He offers as an example the so-called “war on drugs”. This effort has cost “more than a trillion dollars, tens of millions of arrests, hundreds of millions of police stops, tens of millions of years in prison, tens of millions of lost jobs and educations and homes, millions of square acres of spray-poisoned forests, tens of millions of voting rights (including at least one presidential election), tens of millions of children separated from a parent, hundreds of thousands of deaths due to the resulting drug wars and American intervention in Latin America, and massive militarization and surveillance by local police of every American city and town.” Most of this activity was due to personal use of certain drugs, behavior this country protects for other harmful substances like alcohol and tobacco. In 2015, for example, “more people were handcuffed and caged for marijuana offenses than for all ‘violent’ crimes combined.” Despite these costs, drug use has either not gone down or has significantly increased. “Only idiots would pursue legal strategies that are so counterproductive and destructive for so long—and our legal system’s bureaucrats are sophisticated, not idiotic. The ‘war on drugs’ is about something else.”
It's political. “Bureaucrats decide which offenses to punish and which to ignore. The people making these choices call themselves ‘law enforcement’.” Karakatsanis then produces an extensive list of examples showing where the priorities of “law enforcement” lie. It is well-documented that U.S. government employees committed torture during the so-called “war on terror”, including “physical beatings, anal rape, mutilation of genitals, electric shocks to the body, waterboarding (a crime for which the United States previously prosecuted foreign soldiers), chaining people naked to walls in freezing temperatures until they died, hanging people by their arms until it appeared that their shoulders would break, locking a person in a box with insects, forcing people to remain awake for eleven straight days, and other physical and psychological tactics designed to inflict pain so severe that the inability to bear that pain would lead to people providing information.” Many were killed—federal prosecutors knew of at least 100 deaths caused by this torture. Yet no person was ever prosecuted for committing these crimes. Prosecutors chose not to pursue these violations of federal criminal law. The 2008 “financial crisis” was caused by bankers engaging in massive criminality, “throwing 14 million people into poverty and therefore leading to many deaths” while the wealthiest 400 Americans saw their wealth increase by $30 billion. “As of 2013, not a single high-ranking banker has been prosecuted by federal prosecutors for actions that led to the 2008 world economic collapse.” The Obama administration, in fact, argued banks could not be prosecuted because they were too big and “the effects of prosecution could hurt the economy”. The author points out that even if one believed this unfounded claim—that the prosecution of criminal banks would result, or that that would be a bad thing—no individuals were prosecuted either. The Obama administration’s justifications do not explain the failure to prosecute the CEOs involved in the scandal.
It goes on and on. The MOVE bombing in Philadelphia was perpetrated by “law enforcement”; no person was prosecuted for this murder of social justice advocates. COINTELPRO was a long-running FBI program in which FBI agents committed felony crimes against advocates for progressive causes, including blackmail, burglary, threats, kidnapping, murder, illegal wiretapping, intercepting and changing of letters, and more. When COINTELPRO was discovered, “law enforcement” agents were assigned to investigate… not the crimes, but those who anonymously revealed the cries to Congress and the media. Federal prosecutors decided that not a single FBI employee would be prosecuted for these crimes. Obama ordered American drone strikes during his presidency, and many of these drone strikes went wrong, including erroneous bombings of “wedding, funerals, hospitals, journalists, and other civilian targets”. American prosecutors decided that Obama and others involved in these decisions should not be prosecuted for these killings.
REVIEW EXCEEDS THE MAXIMUM CHARACTER LIMIT. CONTINUED IN THE COMMENTS...
March 2, 2021
Do you believe we have a true justice system in America that conforms to rules laid out in the Constitution and to Supreme Court rulings? If so, you could not be more wrong and this very short book should be on your reading list.
There is good news from Illinois. It has become the first state to pass a law that, among several other good provisions, is ending the practice of money bail which has resulted in poor people going to jail because they could not afford to pay the bail amount. This is incarceration before trial, which should be impossible under our system that assumes innocence until guilt is proven, but throughout the states it is common practice. Karakatsanis relates the case of a woman jailed in this way who remained there for three years as the "justice" system took its time analyzing the small quantity of marijuana she had been arrested for carrying. He tells us that several hundred thousand people are in jail every day before they have gone to trial and for the same inability to make bail. Incredibly, there is a Supreme Court ruling that prohibits this, but it is ignored.
The author of Usual Cruelty, Alec Karakatsanis, is a lawyer who seeing the title of this book as an inherent part of the court system in the United States, set out to change it by confronting the courts with the glaring contradiction between standard practice and the true justice they claim to provide. His organization, the Civil Rights Corps, has challenged pre-trial incarceration using the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, winning the case in seven southern states and Kansas, setting the stage for what Illinois has just done.
The issue is a prosecutorial system the feeds on the bodies of the poor with no restraints while defense for the indigent comes down to underfunded and manpower strapped public defender offices giving their lawyers far too many cases to handle with regard to justice for clients that society finds no trouble ignoring. How bad are things? Consider the following information from the book about the so-called reform in the offices of prosecutors of which Kamala Harris was said to be one. (Italics mine.)
"It is remarkable how little these prosecutors have tried to do so far considering that we would need eighty percent reductions in human caging to return to historical U.S . levels and to those of other comparable countries. None of them have reported reducing prosecutions by more than a few percentage points , and most of them have not reported any reductions at all.
> None of them are calling for smaller prosecutor offices or fewer police.
> None of them are seeking a massive shift in investigative resources away from investigating the crimes of the poor to investigating the crimes of the rich.
> None of them have prosecuted a single one of their own employees for withholding evidence or obstruction of justice.
> None of them have announced a policy of declining to prosecute all drug possession.
> None of them have stopped prosecuting children as adults.
> None of them have sought to eliminate fines and fees for the indigent.
> None of them have opened a systemic civil rights investigation into the brutality, neglect, and crimes against confined people that are rampant in their local jails.
> None of them have set up a truth and reconciliation commission to confront the past racism and barbarism of their offices and local police.
> None of them have taken serious steps to transition their approach to a restorative justice model."
The author's most telling claim is that there is no proof that what we do in the United States regarding "law enforcement" has positive effects either in reducing crime or preventing recidivism while the conditions in prisons are inhumane and yet not changed. In short, what is being accomplished for the good of society?
Prosecutors make the decision on who to go after and from the very top, from President Obama, came the statement upon looking at what was done during the G. W. Bush years by that administration and by the big banks that "we must look forward, not backward."
As Karakatsanis remarks, the statement has never been addressed to anyone who has committed a low level crime and it never will be. Our justice system daily tells us by who it goes after that some people will be relentlessly pursued for minor crimes and deprived of their liberty even before trial while others who commit major crimes will not even be questioned, nor will any investigation be started.
We have a grotesque income disparity that is matched by a justice disparity and they both run smoothly when looked at by those whose lives are not touched by them. How far this is from liberty and justice for all.
Read this book. Get outraged by exposure to the truth.
There is good news from Illinois. It has become the first state to pass a law that, among several other good provisions, is ending the practice of money bail which has resulted in poor people going to jail because they could not afford to pay the bail amount. This is incarceration before trial, which should be impossible under our system that assumes innocence until guilt is proven, but throughout the states it is common practice. Karakatsanis relates the case of a woman jailed in this way who remained there for three years as the "justice" system took its time analyzing the small quantity of marijuana she had been arrested for carrying. He tells us that several hundred thousand people are in jail every day before they have gone to trial and for the same inability to make bail. Incredibly, there is a Supreme Court ruling that prohibits this, but it is ignored.
The author of Usual Cruelty, Alec Karakatsanis, is a lawyer who seeing the title of this book as an inherent part of the court system in the United States, set out to change it by confronting the courts with the glaring contradiction between standard practice and the true justice they claim to provide. His organization, the Civil Rights Corps, has challenged pre-trial incarceration using the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, winning the case in seven southern states and Kansas, setting the stage for what Illinois has just done.
The issue is a prosecutorial system the feeds on the bodies of the poor with no restraints while defense for the indigent comes down to underfunded and manpower strapped public defender offices giving their lawyers far too many cases to handle with regard to justice for clients that society finds no trouble ignoring. How bad are things? Consider the following information from the book about the so-called reform in the offices of prosecutors of which Kamala Harris was said to be one. (Italics mine.)
"It is remarkable how little these prosecutors have tried to do so far considering that we would need eighty percent reductions in human caging to return to historical U.S . levels and to those of other comparable countries. None of them have reported reducing prosecutions by more than a few percentage points , and most of them have not reported any reductions at all.
> None of them are calling for smaller prosecutor offices or fewer police.
> None of them are seeking a massive shift in investigative resources away from investigating the crimes of the poor to investigating the crimes of the rich.
> None of them have prosecuted a single one of their own employees for withholding evidence or obstruction of justice.
> None of them have announced a policy of declining to prosecute all drug possession.
> None of them have stopped prosecuting children as adults.
> None of them have sought to eliminate fines and fees for the indigent.
> None of them have opened a systemic civil rights investigation into the brutality, neglect, and crimes against confined people that are rampant in their local jails.
> None of them have set up a truth and reconciliation commission to confront the past racism and barbarism of their offices and local police.
> None of them have taken serious steps to transition their approach to a restorative justice model."
The author's most telling claim is that there is no proof that what we do in the United States regarding "law enforcement" has positive effects either in reducing crime or preventing recidivism while the conditions in prisons are inhumane and yet not changed. In short, what is being accomplished for the good of society?
Prosecutors make the decision on who to go after and from the very top, from President Obama, came the statement upon looking at what was done during the G. W. Bush years by that administration and by the big banks that "we must look forward, not backward."
As Karakatsanis remarks, the statement has never been addressed to anyone who has committed a low level crime and it never will be. Our justice system daily tells us by who it goes after that some people will be relentlessly pursued for minor crimes and deprived of their liberty even before trial while others who commit major crimes will not even be questioned, nor will any investigation be started.
We have a grotesque income disparity that is matched by a justice disparity and they both run smoothly when looked at by those whose lives are not touched by them. How far this is from liberty and justice for all.
Read this book. Get outraged by exposure to the truth.
January 7, 2022
I’ve followed Alec Karakatsanis (@equalityalec) for a while now on twitter. Alec is a good guy, which is not something I can say of any lawyer that I’ve met. And the more I learn about Alec the cooler I think he is. So, I must admit that I feel a little weird giving this book only an average/ 3-star review. After all, Alec is one of very few reasons that I think there is a small glimmer of hope that upon graduation – that I could “do something good” with a law degree.
[My first draft was 5 pages (ew); and 2 of those pages were dedicated to the essays “Human Lawyer” and “Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers.” But Human Lawyer is his weakest essay, and “The Punishment Bureau” renders Policing largely redundant. So, my review will be entirely on the essay, “The Punishment Bureau.”]
“The Punishment Bureau” opens strong: The emerging criminal justice reform consensus is superficial and deceptive.
- Superficial because most proposed reforms would still leave the US as the greatest incarcerator in the world.
- Deceptive because [reformers] want to largely preserve the current punishment bureaucracy
But it isn’t long before the topic of reform is abandoned. Instead, Alec seemingly critiques the system at large. Here are what I see as the key points throughout the essay:
- Crimes are not chosen because of some assessment of the amount of harm perceived, and punishments are not selected because of demonstrated penological success… Evidence [of harm/ success] matter so little to the punishment bureaucracy.
- A central paradox of American criminal law: in order to put a person in prison, we must prove by overwhelming evidence that she merits punishment in a narrow factual sense; but in order to put millions of people in prison, we do not need to show that doing so would do any good.
- [Reality is that law enforcement is about making choices, however this is obfuscated by the punishment bureau. Instead of talking about the choices it makes, the punishment bureau talks about rule of law.] “Rule of law” is an important story that the punishment system uses to make its decisions appear to be the natural, inevitable consequences of individual law-breaking rather than distributive choices
- Something important happens before a case appears before a prosecutor: bureaucrats decide where to look for crimes… Where to spend money, which neighborhoods to patrol and with how many officers, and which crimes to prioritize.
- In the past 40 years, [the myth of the rule of law] has convinced a broad range of people that the solutions to their problems were not changes to the political or economic structures, but rather more police “on the streets” and more poor black people in cages
- Many people, including lawyers and judges, want to believe that something like the neutral “rule of law” can exist …. If one breaks the law, one will be investigated and punished. This principle supports a larger idea: our legal system is objective, trying its best to promote well-being, morality, and human flourishing
- Given this history, one of the central tasks for punishment bureaucrats is to push the myth that American legal system at some point became different and more objective than it has been throughout its entire history…. In societies that our culture portrays as primitive, force was thought to have prevailed in all disputes. Stronger people committed crimes at their pleasure, cities sacked, nations conquered. Lords were immune from punishment by the size of their armies. All of this has been replaced by “rule of law.”
I think these points are strong critiques of our criminal justice system: the punishment bureau. While they are strong, I can’t say that there is a contiguous narrative woven between them – other than the Punishment Bureau sucks. I wouldn’t go so far to say that Alec meanders aimlessly, but it doesn’t help that Alec’s style is to write in the form “vignettes.”
And, he frequently gets bogged down in the details of grievances: anecdotes. While the anecdotes are appalling, they are just anecdotes. Even if he included 1,000 of them, it’s not helping him make his point – that the whole system is bad. And when Alec is in anecdote mode, he often switches from writing in prose to bullet points. (There’s 27 of them in Prosecutorial Discretion)
Towards the end of the essay, Alec does get to criminal justice reform. But before he gets to his point he spends quite a bit of energy naming notable, quasi-celebrity reformers, (Kamala Harris, Eric Holder, Sally Yates, Preet Bharara) and telling us why they suck, individually and thoroughly. But once he gets this out of his system that we finally get some great commentary on the criminal justice reform movement:
- Make no mistake: these [“reformers”] are former prosecutors devoted a career to mass human caging
- In this way, punishment bureaucrats echo the modern role of the Democratic Party in normalizing American [bad things] by defining the boundaries of acceptable dissent from bipartisan policy orthodoxies that lead to these evils.
His strongest point is on “how can we tell the difference” between the change we need versus the reforms that are being peddled to us:
- [These reforms are modest at best when there is a real urgency to mass incarceration - modest reforms won’t cut it.] The US would need to empty cages by 80% to return to historical levels / other comparable countries.
- None of [the reformers] are calling for smaller prosecutor offices or fewer police. None of them have prosecuted even one of their own employees. None of them have announced a policy of declining to prosecute all drug possession. None of them have sought to eliminate fines and fees for the indigent.
- All of them do essentially similar things as the offices of their predecessors and the offices of district attorneys around the country: They chose to prosecute a significant majority of low-level misdemeanors… and they inflict brutal forms of punishment under tortuous conditions on a cohort that id disproportionately poor, black, and brown.
Unsurprisingly, the last section is on the change that the Punishment Bureau needs. Alec opens this section with, “people interested in big change must be clear about what changes they want to see as they build power…” But in a tragic irony, Alec is anything but clear on what changes are needed and more importantly how we can achieve them. Instead, he gives us 9 bullet points with corresponding footnotes about some contemporary work on a small scale that he applauds.
Sadly, Alec’s own solutions seem to fall prey to a critical flaw he identified in the reforms he condemns misdiagnosing the problem. None of his bullet points seem to address what I believe is the problem. I don’t have to use my own words to define the problem, because earlier in the essay Alec puts it very well:
- If the function of the modern punishment system is to preserve racial and economic hierarchy through brutality and control, then its bureaucracy is performing well”
If any reform does not directly change this foundation, is it any less superficial or deceptive than the reforms Alec decries?
[My first draft was 5 pages (ew); and 2 of those pages were dedicated to the essays “Human Lawyer” and “Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers.” But Human Lawyer is his weakest essay, and “The Punishment Bureau” renders Policing largely redundant. So, my review will be entirely on the essay, “The Punishment Bureau.”]
“The Punishment Bureau” opens strong: The emerging criminal justice reform consensus is superficial and deceptive.
- Superficial because most proposed reforms would still leave the US as the greatest incarcerator in the world.
- Deceptive because [reformers] want to largely preserve the current punishment bureaucracy
But it isn’t long before the topic of reform is abandoned. Instead, Alec seemingly critiques the system at large. Here are what I see as the key points throughout the essay:
- Crimes are not chosen because of some assessment of the amount of harm perceived, and punishments are not selected because of demonstrated penological success… Evidence [of harm/ success] matter so little to the punishment bureaucracy.
- A central paradox of American criminal law: in order to put a person in prison, we must prove by overwhelming evidence that she merits punishment in a narrow factual sense; but in order to put millions of people in prison, we do not need to show that doing so would do any good.
- [Reality is that law enforcement is about making choices, however this is obfuscated by the punishment bureau. Instead of talking about the choices it makes, the punishment bureau talks about rule of law.] “Rule of law” is an important story that the punishment system uses to make its decisions appear to be the natural, inevitable consequences of individual law-breaking rather than distributive choices
- Something important happens before a case appears before a prosecutor: bureaucrats decide where to look for crimes… Where to spend money, which neighborhoods to patrol and with how many officers, and which crimes to prioritize.
- In the past 40 years, [the myth of the rule of law] has convinced a broad range of people that the solutions to their problems were not changes to the political or economic structures, but rather more police “on the streets” and more poor black people in cages
- Many people, including lawyers and judges, want to believe that something like the neutral “rule of law” can exist …. If one breaks the law, one will be investigated and punished. This principle supports a larger idea: our legal system is objective, trying its best to promote well-being, morality, and human flourishing
- Given this history, one of the central tasks for punishment bureaucrats is to push the myth that American legal system at some point became different and more objective than it has been throughout its entire history…. In societies that our culture portrays as primitive, force was thought to have prevailed in all disputes. Stronger people committed crimes at their pleasure, cities sacked, nations conquered. Lords were immune from punishment by the size of their armies. All of this has been replaced by “rule of law.”
I think these points are strong critiques of our criminal justice system: the punishment bureau. While they are strong, I can’t say that there is a contiguous narrative woven between them – other than the Punishment Bureau sucks. I wouldn’t go so far to say that Alec meanders aimlessly, but it doesn’t help that Alec’s style is to write in the form “vignettes.”
And, he frequently gets bogged down in the details of grievances: anecdotes. While the anecdotes are appalling, they are just anecdotes. Even if he included 1,000 of them, it’s not helping him make his point – that the whole system is bad. And when Alec is in anecdote mode, he often switches from writing in prose to bullet points. (There’s 27 of them in Prosecutorial Discretion)
Towards the end of the essay, Alec does get to criminal justice reform. But before he gets to his point he spends quite a bit of energy naming notable, quasi-celebrity reformers, (Kamala Harris, Eric Holder, Sally Yates, Preet Bharara) and telling us why they suck, individually and thoroughly. But once he gets this out of his system that we finally get some great commentary on the criminal justice reform movement:
- Make no mistake: these [“reformers”] are former prosecutors devoted a career to mass human caging
- In this way, punishment bureaucrats echo the modern role of the Democratic Party in normalizing American [bad things] by defining the boundaries of acceptable dissent from bipartisan policy orthodoxies that lead to these evils.
His strongest point is on “how can we tell the difference” between the change we need versus the reforms that are being peddled to us:
- [These reforms are modest at best when there is a real urgency to mass incarceration - modest reforms won’t cut it.] The US would need to empty cages by 80% to return to historical levels / other comparable countries.
- None of [the reformers] are calling for smaller prosecutor offices or fewer police. None of them have prosecuted even one of their own employees. None of them have announced a policy of declining to prosecute all drug possession. None of them have sought to eliminate fines and fees for the indigent.
- All of them do essentially similar things as the offices of their predecessors and the offices of district attorneys around the country: They chose to prosecute a significant majority of low-level misdemeanors… and they inflict brutal forms of punishment under tortuous conditions on a cohort that id disproportionately poor, black, and brown.
Unsurprisingly, the last section is on the change that the Punishment Bureau needs. Alec opens this section with, “people interested in big change must be clear about what changes they want to see as they build power…” But in a tragic irony, Alec is anything but clear on what changes are needed and more importantly how we can achieve them. Instead, he gives us 9 bullet points with corresponding footnotes about some contemporary work on a small scale that he applauds.
Sadly, Alec’s own solutions seem to fall prey to a critical flaw he identified in the reforms he condemns misdiagnosing the problem. None of his bullet points seem to address what I believe is the problem. I don’t have to use my own words to define the problem, because earlier in the essay Alec puts it very well:
- If the function of the modern punishment system is to preserve racial and economic hierarchy through brutality and control, then its bureaucracy is performing well”
If any reform does not directly change this foundation, is it any less superficial or deceptive than the reforms Alec decries?
March 29, 2023
everyone should read this. its both fantastic and absolutely crushing. public defenders are doing gods work, as are the rest of the “human lawyers” out there.
September 26, 2019
A book you will be happy you have read.
Alec Karakatsanis is a civil rights lawyer and former public defender. This book is a product of his dedication to exposing and eradicating constitutional violations, human rights abuses and systematic brutalization of people (particularly the poor and people of color) that go on in the American legal system. I am not sure how endangered of a character such a passionate lawyer is, but the value of his work is evident from the brief mentions of some cases he has brought.
“Usual Cruelty” is a short read composed of three separate essays Karakatsanis wrote at different points in his professional life. He is upfront about that, which is refreshing. The essays focus on different aspects of the American legal system and law enforcement, highlighting the normalization of inhumane practices in prison and in the courtroom, complicity of the legal profession and the society as a whole in the perpetuation of such abuses, inadequacy of existing laws and cavalier attitudes towards upholding constitutional rights of defendants etc.
Karakatsanis unflinchingly lists the horrible conditions prisoners face, the duplicitous legal process the accused are forced to go through, and the hypocritical attitudes towards the current state of affairs displayed even by those in the profession who are hailed as “progressive”. He makes sharp, morally, and factually consistent arguments. Among the crucial points he underlines is the idea that law enforcement standards (what constitutes a crime and what crimes committed by whom and where are worth prosecuting) are a choice, that the system as currently set up makes it easy for us and direct participants to lose our ability to see other as human, that it does not accomplish its stated goals (that shoddily conceal the actual objectives) and really, many know it and are fine with it. The subtitle of the book is “the complicity of lawyers in the criminal justice system”, but really it is about everyone's complicity, because our silent acceptance allows the defective system currently in place to persist.
Fortunately, Karakatsanis point at some necessary remedies throughout the book: advocating for “prison reform” that reduces the amount of resources available to law enforcement, rather than increases them, eliminating the conflict of interest many law enforcement and judicial agencies that depend on bail and fine money for income face, keeping in mind the humanity of accused or convicted individuals at all times, and, most importantly, reconsidering what purpose we as a society want our legal apparatus to serve, and holding our judges, prosecutors and leaders to that standard.
This is a good book on an important topic, and I hope Karakatsanis and like-minded lawyers put out more such work, reaching more people and advancing these topic in public discussion.
Thanks to NetGalley for a digital ARC of the book.
Alec Karakatsanis is a civil rights lawyer and former public defender. This book is a product of his dedication to exposing and eradicating constitutional violations, human rights abuses and systematic brutalization of people (particularly the poor and people of color) that go on in the American legal system. I am not sure how endangered of a character such a passionate lawyer is, but the value of his work is evident from the brief mentions of some cases he has brought.
“Usual Cruelty” is a short read composed of three separate essays Karakatsanis wrote at different points in his professional life. He is upfront about that, which is refreshing. The essays focus on different aspects of the American legal system and law enforcement, highlighting the normalization of inhumane practices in prison and in the courtroom, complicity of the legal profession and the society as a whole in the perpetuation of such abuses, inadequacy of existing laws and cavalier attitudes towards upholding constitutional rights of defendants etc.
Karakatsanis unflinchingly lists the horrible conditions prisoners face, the duplicitous legal process the accused are forced to go through, and the hypocritical attitudes towards the current state of affairs displayed even by those in the profession who are hailed as “progressive”. He makes sharp, morally, and factually consistent arguments. Among the crucial points he underlines is the idea that law enforcement standards (what constitutes a crime and what crimes committed by whom and where are worth prosecuting) are a choice, that the system as currently set up makes it easy for us and direct participants to lose our ability to see other as human, that it does not accomplish its stated goals (that shoddily conceal the actual objectives) and really, many know it and are fine with it. The subtitle of the book is “the complicity of lawyers in the criminal justice system”, but really it is about everyone's complicity, because our silent acceptance allows the defective system currently in place to persist.
Fortunately, Karakatsanis point at some necessary remedies throughout the book: advocating for “prison reform” that reduces the amount of resources available to law enforcement, rather than increases them, eliminating the conflict of interest many law enforcement and judicial agencies that depend on bail and fine money for income face, keeping in mind the humanity of accused or convicted individuals at all times, and, most importantly, reconsidering what purpose we as a society want our legal apparatus to serve, and holding our judges, prosecutors and leaders to that standard.
This is a good book on an important topic, and I hope Karakatsanis and like-minded lawyers put out more such work, reaching more people and advancing these topic in public discussion.
Thanks to NetGalley for a digital ARC of the book.
June 26, 2021
This is really a 3.5 but we all know Goodreads hasn't added that functionality.
I really struggled with this book. I've really enjoyed hearing Karakatsanis on various legal podcasts I listen to (for example, one of my favorite episodes of 5-4 of all-time San Antonio ISD v. Rodriguez) and all the ideas in here are really good and worth reading. That being said, the text frequently came off as weirdly self-important and self-aggrandizing. The best essay of the three is categorically the last one and I do think that's also because it's the shortest. The first two would I think have benefited from a more active editor. I'm glad I've read it, it wasn't bad, but my annotations definitely devolved from anger at the system into annoyance at the author.
Also, Karakatsanis, my dude, "they/them" pronouns exist. I get the goal of referring to every hypothetical lawyer with "she/her" pronouns but when you're addressing lawyers as a profession it's real weird to only use she/her.
I really struggled with this book. I've really enjoyed hearing Karakatsanis on various legal podcasts I listen to (for example, one of my favorite episodes of 5-4 of all-time San Antonio ISD v. Rodriguez) and all the ideas in here are really good and worth reading. That being said, the text frequently came off as weirdly self-important and self-aggrandizing. The best essay of the three is categorically the last one and I do think that's also because it's the shortest. The first two would I think have benefited from a more active editor. I'm glad I've read it, it wasn't bad, but my annotations definitely devolved from anger at the system into annoyance at the author.
Also, Karakatsanis, my dude, "they/them" pronouns exist. I get the goal of referring to every hypothetical lawyer with "she/her" pronouns but when you're addressing lawyers as a profession it's real weird to only use she/her.
March 2, 2021
One of the greatest myths in the United States is that our criminal justice system works. By default, we're trained to believe that anyone who ends up in a courtroom must be some type of bad person, and it completely strips away their humanity and the nuance of their story. This is why I read books like Usual Cruelty, and it's one of my new favorite books on the injustices in America.
What I loved about this book from Karakatsanis is that he takes a somewhat philosophical perspective and asks, "Do you think this is fair?" and "Do you think this is justice?". By simply getting the reader to ask questions, it gets your wheels turning and you start to realize how screwed up the whole system is. Typically, a book like this would leave me bummed out, but it actually gave me hope. The fact that this author wrote this book lets me know that there are those out there in the field of law who care and are trying to make a difference.
What I loved about this book from Karakatsanis is that he takes a somewhat philosophical perspective and asks, "Do you think this is fair?" and "Do you think this is justice?". By simply getting the reader to ask questions, it gets your wheels turning and you start to realize how screwed up the whole system is. Typically, a book like this would leave me bummed out, but it actually gave me hope. The fact that this author wrote this book lets me know that there are those out there in the field of law who care and are trying to make a difference.
December 28, 2023
Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System was by far one of the greatest books I’ve ever read! The author address what is wrong with the criminal (in)Justice system, from the abuse inflicted daily upon marginalized communities, to the vindication of politicians and corporations that have murdered civilians through pollution, torture, etc. The US holds the largest number of human imprisonment in the world, yet lawyers are not running towards the issue of mass caging and trying to fix it. It brings forth the question “is our punishment system working? Is it truly necessary?” It also addresses the complacency of lawyers and legal scholars whilst highlighting ways we, including legal scholars, can push back against mass caging.
Please pick up this book and read it! All of the proceeds go to the Essie Justice Group, a woman-led prison abolition group!
Please pick up this book and read it! All of the proceeds go to the Essie Justice Group, a woman-led prison abolition group!
June 12, 2020
Pros 1. This lawyer has a knack for “preaching moments” where he goes off in an intelligent and passionate way in various passages throughout the book.
2. The author shows that the criminal justice system is the product of politics, not the constitution. Various lobbyists decide what crimes are enforced by lobbying politicians... these lobbyists include private prisons themselves. They also lobby for how severely each crime is punished. Moreover, prosecutors have so much power to determine who ends up in jail, what punishment they receive, whether or not the defendant can receive a plea bargain, yet this immense power is utilized selectively... and they are often influenced by political decisions.
3. The author saves the best portion of this book for last... the portion I wish was longer “the human lawyer”... I'm, not someone who cries but I... I just felt something reading that section... it was an intelligent, emotional, and compelling read that reminds us what not only a lawyer should be but who we all should be as humans. We should all love our neighbors as ourselves.
Cons 1. The author tends to ignore the fact that some protest historically speaking were violent... which in a way warranted drastic measures to a degree ( the Floyd protest in Atlanta fit that category).
Almost Con 2: It’s easy to criticize this book for not being organized or being repetitive but you have to remember this book is a series of essays so I decided not to penalize the book for those things. Just be aware that because it’s 3 essays (written at different times in this lawyer's career/life compiled into a book it will be disorganized to a degree/repetitive to a degree.
2. The author shows that the criminal justice system is the product of politics, not the constitution. Various lobbyists decide what crimes are enforced by lobbying politicians... these lobbyists include private prisons themselves. They also lobby for how severely each crime is punished. Moreover, prosecutors have so much power to determine who ends up in jail, what punishment they receive, whether or not the defendant can receive a plea bargain, yet this immense power is utilized selectively... and they are often influenced by political decisions.
3. The author saves the best portion of this book for last... the portion I wish was longer “the human lawyer”... I'm, not someone who cries but I... I just felt something reading that section... it was an intelligent, emotional, and compelling read that reminds us what not only a lawyer should be but who we all should be as humans. We should all love our neighbors as ourselves.
Cons 1. The author tends to ignore the fact that some protest historically speaking were violent... which in a way warranted drastic measures to a degree ( the Floyd protest in Atlanta fit that category).
Almost Con 2: It’s easy to criticize this book for not being organized or being repetitive but you have to remember this book is a series of essays so I decided not to penalize the book for those things. Just be aware that because it’s 3 essays (written at different times in this lawyer's career/life compiled into a book it will be disorganized to a degree/repetitive to a degree.
August 9, 2025
“Putting a human being in a cage is brutal business - one that every lawyer should study in meticulous detail for herself. Lawyers must understand and communicate what it does to a person to strip from the person almost every form of humanity that we take for granted every day: to prevent him for years from eating at a restaurant, going on a date, making love, visiting a museum, traveling to a new place, having walls between his bed and his toilet, hugging his mother, seeing his grandfather before he dies.”
"Just as we should be wary of throwing one person in jail if the evidence against her is unsound, so too should we worry about throwing millions in jail if the evidence supporting the connection between massive incarceration and a better society is unproven."
"Just as we should be wary of throwing one person in jail if the evidence against her is unsound, so too should we worry about throwing millions in jail if the evidence supporting the connection between massive incarceration and a better society is unproven."
November 30, 2020
The content of this book is so important. This is a modern crisis that we as a society need to pay attention to. Much of the information in this book is stuff that I've already known or felt to be true but Karakatsanis puts it all into a nice and concise package. I truly feel like this should be required reading for high school kids. This information is nearly priceless for the underprivileged.
March 11, 2021
Full disclosure: Although he likely doesn't remember, I had breakfast with the author at a SPLC conference in New Orleans. I admire his work as a civil rights attorney and as a champion against money bail. Anywhere there is injustice in the US, mention Alec's name, and chance's are that someone has heard of him. The guy must never sleep. With that said, here's my review.
This book includes three essays written by Alec that mostly focus on the role of lawyers in the criminal justice system. The first essay (the lengthiest and strongest of the three) addresses what Alec calls the Punishment Bureaucracy; The second is an almost "Jordan Peterson"-type didactic passage that prescribes moral lessons for the "human lawyer;" and the last argues that lawyers quietly accept or ignore atrocities of mass incarceration, and that they fail to question the efficacy of locking people away.
I'll first describe the strengths of Alec's book (there are many). I believe he makes many strong points in book, particularly when he's discussing the lack of individuality in sentencing for most defendants. He provides many of examples of where courts have exercised discretion in cases where the defendant was wealthy or influential, yet 90 percent of defendants are like members of a perverse game show where get probation and jail time. He's also effective in pointing out just how unfair (and unconstitutional) our current policing and justices systems are. His personal experience shines in these arguments, and make the book worth reading in my opinion.
Yet, the book is definitely uneven and unconvincing in other areas. Here are my critiques of the book:
1. His terms - I respect that Alec wishes to remove the veil of injustice by attempting to move away from common euphemisms and jargon by using terms such as "Punishment Bureaucracy" and "human caging." Yet, this wears thin over time and is sometimes clunky and annoying. Also, his own terms come off as more euphemistic than more commonly used terms. For example, he describes someone breaking and entering as a "physical breach of another person's physical property." I believe the former term works just fine. The use of these terms are intentional and bears critique.
2. His assumptions - What's wrong with our current justice system? White supremacy. Evidence? None needed. While that strategy may work in an argument in a student union or twitter spat, one expects more evidence to supports such claims as this from a written work on "usual cruelty." He also follows up that premise with critiques of former prosecutors who are all (except for one) people of color. Were Kamala Harris, Preet Bhahara, and Eric Holder punishing poor people in order to further white supremacy? Perhaps unknowingly?
He also claims that our justice isn't working because it doesn't promote the well-being of people, and he believes that people mistakenly believe that our justice system is based on that principle. I think it would be fair to call this a "strawman." Our justice system does not and has never focused on the well-being of people. Our justice system has always been based on one of accountability and retribution. Every other goal has always played second fiddle. While Alec provides accurate points on the failure of the justice system to deter and/or prevent crime, he ignores accountability as a goal. The truth is that many want our justice system to cause pain, and those folks are also unhappy that justice system comes off as "too lenient."
3. His flippant views on violence - Imagine someone has a gun to your head. Are you frightened? Scared for your life? Well, you shouldn't be. Instead you should be more concerned about the lead in your water and salt in your diet.
Sound absurd? Of course it does. While environmental or health concerns are definitely worth being concerned about, violence tends to generate attention because of the visceral and personal impact it has on people. Violent crime is always the elephant in the room in these types of discussions. Alec barely touches on the costs and impact of violent crime, and instead attempts to minimize it by pointing out how dangerous other things are. Yet, most people incarcerated in state prisons were convicted of violent charges, and violent crime disproportionately affects the poor and people of color. His views here come off as elitist and out of touch.
4. His solutions - When it comes to solutions, Alec provides little to no guidance. He offers up such suggestions as reparations for impacted people, first dibs on marijuana dispensaries, art collectives, as the right way forward. He does not offer any evidence or arguments on how this could rectify our current state of injustice. He also promotes a strict adherence to the constitution. I find it ironic that he holds the constitution, a relic written by slaveholders, as infallible. Yet, he has effectively weaponized in his civil rights litigation on pretrial detention.
The bottom line is that his solutions are weak and unconvincing.
Most of my review is focused on the lead essay. The other two come off as "elite lecturing the elite," and I found little value in reading them.
This book includes three essays written by Alec that mostly focus on the role of lawyers in the criminal justice system. The first essay (the lengthiest and strongest of the three) addresses what Alec calls the Punishment Bureaucracy; The second is an almost "Jordan Peterson"-type didactic passage that prescribes moral lessons for the "human lawyer;" and the last argues that lawyers quietly accept or ignore atrocities of mass incarceration, and that they fail to question the efficacy of locking people away.
I'll first describe the strengths of Alec's book (there are many). I believe he makes many strong points in book, particularly when he's discussing the lack of individuality in sentencing for most defendants. He provides many of examples of where courts have exercised discretion in cases where the defendant was wealthy or influential, yet 90 percent of defendants are like members of a perverse game show where get probation and jail time. He's also effective in pointing out just how unfair (and unconstitutional) our current policing and justices systems are. His personal experience shines in these arguments, and make the book worth reading in my opinion.
Yet, the book is definitely uneven and unconvincing in other areas. Here are my critiques of the book:
1. His terms - I respect that Alec wishes to remove the veil of injustice by attempting to move away from common euphemisms and jargon by using terms such as "Punishment Bureaucracy" and "human caging." Yet, this wears thin over time and is sometimes clunky and annoying. Also, his own terms come off as more euphemistic than more commonly used terms. For example, he describes someone breaking and entering as a "physical breach of another person's physical property." I believe the former term works just fine. The use of these terms are intentional and bears critique.
2. His assumptions - What's wrong with our current justice system? White supremacy. Evidence? None needed. While that strategy may work in an argument in a student union or twitter spat, one expects more evidence to supports such claims as this from a written work on "usual cruelty." He also follows up that premise with critiques of former prosecutors who are all (except for one) people of color. Were Kamala Harris, Preet Bhahara, and Eric Holder punishing poor people in order to further white supremacy? Perhaps unknowingly?
He also claims that our justice isn't working because it doesn't promote the well-being of people, and he believes that people mistakenly believe that our justice system is based on that principle. I think it would be fair to call this a "strawman." Our justice system does not and has never focused on the well-being of people. Our justice system has always been based on one of accountability and retribution. Every other goal has always played second fiddle. While Alec provides accurate points on the failure of the justice system to deter and/or prevent crime, he ignores accountability as a goal. The truth is that many want our justice system to cause pain, and those folks are also unhappy that justice system comes off as "too lenient."
3. His flippant views on violence - Imagine someone has a gun to your head. Are you frightened? Scared for your life? Well, you shouldn't be. Instead you should be more concerned about the lead in your water and salt in your diet.
Sound absurd? Of course it does. While environmental or health concerns are definitely worth being concerned about, violence tends to generate attention because of the visceral and personal impact it has on people. Violent crime is always the elephant in the room in these types of discussions. Alec barely touches on the costs and impact of violent crime, and instead attempts to minimize it by pointing out how dangerous other things are. Yet, most people incarcerated in state prisons were convicted of violent charges, and violent crime disproportionately affects the poor and people of color. His views here come off as elitist and out of touch.
4. His solutions - When it comes to solutions, Alec provides little to no guidance. He offers up such suggestions as reparations for impacted people, first dibs on marijuana dispensaries, art collectives, as the right way forward. He does not offer any evidence or arguments on how this could rectify our current state of injustice. He also promotes a strict adherence to the constitution. I find it ironic that he holds the constitution, a relic written by slaveholders, as infallible. Yet, he has effectively weaponized in his civil rights litigation on pretrial detention.
The bottom line is that his solutions are weak and unconvincing.
Most of my review is focused on the lead essay. The other two come off as "elite lecturing the elite," and I found little value in reading them.
July 4, 2021
This should be mandatory reading for lawyers & law students.
Karakatsanis offers very helpful analysis and vocabulary, which is still too often missing from discussions about our criminal legal system.
Karakatsanis offers very helpful analysis and vocabulary, which is still too often missing from discussions about our criminal legal system.
May 31, 2020
damn. wish this were required reading for all lawyers. as someone who's been (relatively) engaged on these topics, there was still a ton to chew on. plus - short.
August 5, 2021
Really enjoyed this read, and felt my thoughts reflected particularly in the Human Lawyer essay. It was a little repetitive at times but I took that as drilling home the main failings of our legal system, specifically the criminal legal system
January 28, 2023
Was given 6 copies of this by the author Alex Karakatsanis to be read with students. Asked several of my more thought high school students to read the first section,coincidently they are reading Fahrenheit 451 in English… should be a good conversation next week.
August 11, 2023
Passionate author that was clearly a subject expert and able to make a gigantic issue more understandable to the regular person. It served as an easy to read (as in accessible, the content was quite heavy) and powerful introduction to the subject that I will definitely keep close to my heart as I go forward in my professional journey.
My main critique is that this book purported to introduce you to the cause, then tell you what you could do to help. Unfortunately, the action item was pretty much just become a lawyer, and represent those who cannot afford representation. As a soon-to-be law student, I was clearly his intended audience, but even I was left feeling like he could have done more in this area. Once an injustice this cruel is demonstrated (which he did very well), the readers automatically have a desire to help, but his call to action of you must dedicate your life to this specific profession despite all the hardship is unattainable to most… I think more could’ve been done in this area to maximize the impact of this book
My main critique is that this book purported to introduce you to the cause, then tell you what you could do to help. Unfortunately, the action item was pretty much just become a lawyer, and represent those who cannot afford representation. As a soon-to-be law student, I was clearly his intended audience, but even I was left feeling like he could have done more in this area. Once an injustice this cruel is demonstrated (which he did very well), the readers automatically have a desire to help, but his call to action of you must dedicate your life to this specific profession despite all the hardship is unattainable to most… I think more could’ve been done in this area to maximize the impact of this book
November 11, 2019
A must read for anyone interested in ending mass incarceration. This book highlights the imperative need for recognition of the ways in which the entire system has evolved in a manner contrary to basic American values and the Constitution. This evolution has had a disparate impact on poor communities and communities of color. The author has extensive experience in the trenches. He personalizes these issues with the stories of real people, his clients and others. Another important aspect that must be understood is the profit motive underlying many components of the "system" and how that is likely to morph (e.g., bail reform may lead those involved in bail bonds to move into other ways to extract money (private probation, ankle monitors). This book is eye-opening in its focus on the harm to families that should offend all of us. It is too easy for everyone who works in the system to hide behind procedures that have not been revisited in many years. The author also points out that "reform" efforts are too weak and may result in superficial steps that may prolong fundamental change.
October 14, 2019
Eye-opening and important read about our criminal justice system. Alec Karakatsanis does a great job of using personal experience and expertise as a civil rights attorney and former public defender to illustrate the issues with the system. Regardless of your level of knowledge of the criminal justice system, you will gain some insight from this book.
I received an ARC of this book via NetGalley in exchange for my honest opinion.
I received an ARC of this book via NetGalley in exchange for my honest opinion.
November 6, 2019
Very difficult but enlightening, important read. Learning about the cruelties of our world, we cannot turn a blind eye to. How can we fix this? How do we solve this? I don’t know. But perhaps with books like these we can start to figure it out.
November 10, 2019
This book reveals how unjust practices still occur in courts of the United States. It is an important read for all Americans as well as people around the world who are looking for ways on how to diagnose fairness in their respective countries.
November 20, 2019
This book really appeared to me at a good time because I've been talking a lot lately about how the justice system in America is just so completely broken and is in desperate need of a complete reform. Loved this.
Want to read
November 19, 2019added to my list on the strength of this review. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2...
January 7, 2024
It’s really tough for me to get through books about US’s criminally un-just system. Luckily this book is short. It lacks any filler. I like to highlight passages as I read but it would have resulted in highlighting every page. This is just jam packed with valuable insight in how our criminal justice system works and how it fails to achieve its directly intended goal.
The author offers heartbreaking stories of the systematic cruelty that runs rampant. It is not objectively possible for the United States of America to call itself the “leader of the free world” while detaining 25% of the world’s prisoners, and doing so in the most needlessly cruel and horrible conditions on earth. We are not a “free” nation. This is propaganda to keep us complacent. We are an authoritarian regime that endlessly throws poor people and people of color into a bottomless pit.
Our system does not exist to “reform.” It exists to make people suffer. There is no rational basis to how the system operates other than “it’s how we’ve always done it” or “criminals should pay”. When you take a step back and look at it rationally, the brutality is truly horrifying.
The author writes from the point of view as a lawyer and to an audience of lawyers in order to convince enough of them to try and fight for systematic changes. Lawyers have a unique role as those with power and enough agency to make systematic change, as long as they recognize their power and are willing to actually fight for the people rather than maintain their status as a cog in the “punishment bureaucracy” as he puts it.
A civilized society would not base their system of laws around how to most effectively brutalize and punish its citizenry. Every law that is broken, every crime committed is not an individual failure, it is a societal failure. Resolving these failures require societal solutions to things like: poverty, addiction, homelessness, white supremacy, poverty, poverty, and also poverty. But we don’t live in a civilized society. We live in a society that has to be “tough on crime”. So we toss black bodies into the open maw of this hellworld we call a “justice system”.
I could go on forever about this. It really upsets me how broken this system is. I would recommend this book to anyone who thinks we live in a “nation of laws” or anyone associated with criminal justice, or any lawyer, or just anyone at all.
The book ends with this call to action:
“Legal academics, judges, and lawyers of conscience must take up this two-pronged challenge: we must bring intellectual rigor to legal discourse and doctrine that shape the punishment system, and we must use the energy that animates our bodies to ensure that the legal system looks in practice as it appears in our scrolls and on our marble monuments.”
Here are some other good quotes I found, they’re all very long because they’re so incredibly good:
“A lot of people are talking about ‘criminal justice reform.’ Much of that talk is dangerous. The conventional wisdom is that there is an emerging consensus that the criminal legal system is ‘broken.’ But the system is ‘broken’ only to the extent that one believes its purpose is to promote the well-being of all members of our society. If the function of the modern punishment system is to preserve racial and economic hierarchy through brutality and control, then its bureaucracy is performing well.”
“[I]n 2015, more people were handcuffed and caged for marijuana offenses than for all ‘violent’ crimes combined. In many jurisdictions, the single most common criminal prosecution is for driving with a suspended license, and about forty percent of suspended American drivers’ licenses were taken away not for any reason related to driving, but because a person was too poor to pay court debts.”
We supposedly abolished indentured servitude and debtors prison. But not really. We just better bureaucratized it.
Also this shows why the state would oppose more public transportation: it would result in them having less control over its citizenry. If you have to drive, then the state has an exceptionally effective weight to hold over your head in the event you step out of line. And they have an exceptionally effective tool to criminalize poverty.
“A major achievement of the punishment bureaucracy is that it has retained mainstream respect even though its “law enforcement” choices crush unprecedented numbers of people with no evidence of any unique social benefit while simultaneously allowing enormous amounts of lawlessness that cause massive harm. Why are these choices still viewed as legitimate?
First, the groups who wield power in our society benefit from the punishment bureaucracy. It privileges their private property, their racial supremacy, their jobs, their voting rights, and their segregated neighborhoods.
Second, the growth of the punishment bureaucracy itself changes our culture and economy. As the bureaucracy expands, it employs larger and larger numbers of police officers, prosecutors, probation officers, defense attorneys, prison guards, contractors, and equipment manufacturers. People working in the system become dependent on its perpetuation for their livelihoods and even their identities. The path of least resistance is to grow more. Jobs are created, local political power is consolidated, and “law enforcement” activities are normalized and then rendered economically essential—such as roadblocks, prison guards, home raids, drug interdiction teams, neighborhood patrols, armed police in schools, SWAT teams, stop-and-frisk practices, social media monitoring, video surveillance, probation drug testing, and ‘intelligence’ divisions.”
“[T]he punishment bureaucrats who created the contemporary ‘criminal justice system’ are broadly comfortable with the way that our society looks. They market a crime problem in need of ‘law enforcement’ in order to keep our society looking the way that it does. They do not want to solve the ‘crime’ problem if that means a society that looks much different—say, more equal and with less private profit. Hence they both construct and respond to ‘crime’ with strategies that increase inequality and control, but do little to stop the same problems they purport to care about—and that often make those problems worse, thereby justifying a circular call for more (selective) punishment. And that is why courts do not enforce the rules of law that are intended to make our society more equal when those rules conflict with the goals of the punishment bureaucracy.
The ‘law enforcement’ religion is hostile to the view that a society that is more equal would have less crime, not because that idea is untrue, but because the very goal of the criminal legal system is to preserve certain elements of an unequal social order even if that inequality creates ‘crime.’”
“[F]ew ideas have caused more harm in our criminal system than the belief that America is governed by a neutral ‘rule of law.’ The content of our criminal laws […] and how those laws are carried out […] are choices that reflect power. The common understanding of the ‘rule of law’ and the widely accepted use of the term ‘law enforcement’ to describe the process by which those in power accomplish unprecedented human caging are both delusions critical to justifying the punishment bureaucracy. ”
“No matter what one’s views on drugs, there is one thing that all agree on: these laws were never based on empirical evidence about the best way to create a society with less use of harmful substances.”
“No government in any jurisdiction in the United States has proven that human caging is a way to reduce drug use at all, let alone the least intrusive way. Instead, a mountain of evidence suggests that the punishment approach to drugs has actually increased drug use and the harms associated with it, including by diverting funds from evidence-based alternatives.”
Decriminalization is objectively a more rational way to handle drug use. Anyone who says otherwise is merely sadistic.
The punishment disparity for crack vs powdered cocaine possession was once 100:1. This is one example of laws with a very clearly racist intent behind them. “For decades, even the cautious U.S. Sentencing Commission wanted to remove this disparity because there is no legal or scientific basis for it. And when Congress did reduce the disparity after a unanimous Senate vote in 2010—and millions of years in prison later—no one offered a justification for why it had existed. But for reasons that were never articulated, the government did not remove the disparity; it chose to lower the disparity from 100:1 to 18:1. And for more than eight years after that ‘Fair Sentencing Act’ passed, the government chose not to make even these limited ‘fair’ changes retroactive to help the thousands of human beings already in prison because of a law that everyone agreed had no basis.”
Yeah we sure do live in a “country of laws”: The country of AmeriKKKa.
There’s lots more but this is getting too long. Every line is worth quoting. The book is fantastic but also very depressing.
The author offers heartbreaking stories of the systematic cruelty that runs rampant. It is not objectively possible for the United States of America to call itself the “leader of the free world” while detaining 25% of the world’s prisoners, and doing so in the most needlessly cruel and horrible conditions on earth. We are not a “free” nation. This is propaganda to keep us complacent. We are an authoritarian regime that endlessly throws poor people and people of color into a bottomless pit.
Our system does not exist to “reform.” It exists to make people suffer. There is no rational basis to how the system operates other than “it’s how we’ve always done it” or “criminals should pay”. When you take a step back and look at it rationally, the brutality is truly horrifying.
The author writes from the point of view as a lawyer and to an audience of lawyers in order to convince enough of them to try and fight for systematic changes. Lawyers have a unique role as those with power and enough agency to make systematic change, as long as they recognize their power and are willing to actually fight for the people rather than maintain their status as a cog in the “punishment bureaucracy” as he puts it.
A civilized society would not base their system of laws around how to most effectively brutalize and punish its citizenry. Every law that is broken, every crime committed is not an individual failure, it is a societal failure. Resolving these failures require societal solutions to things like: poverty, addiction, homelessness, white supremacy, poverty, poverty, and also poverty. But we don’t live in a civilized society. We live in a society that has to be “tough on crime”. So we toss black bodies into the open maw of this hellworld we call a “justice system”.
I could go on forever about this. It really upsets me how broken this system is. I would recommend this book to anyone who thinks we live in a “nation of laws” or anyone associated with criminal justice, or any lawyer, or just anyone at all.
The book ends with this call to action:
“Legal academics, judges, and lawyers of conscience must take up this two-pronged challenge: we must bring intellectual rigor to legal discourse and doctrine that shape the punishment system, and we must use the energy that animates our bodies to ensure that the legal system looks in practice as it appears in our scrolls and on our marble monuments.”
Here are some other good quotes I found, they’re all very long because they’re so incredibly good:
“A lot of people are talking about ‘criminal justice reform.’ Much of that talk is dangerous. The conventional wisdom is that there is an emerging consensus that the criminal legal system is ‘broken.’ But the system is ‘broken’ only to the extent that one believes its purpose is to promote the well-being of all members of our society. If the function of the modern punishment system is to preserve racial and economic hierarchy through brutality and control, then its bureaucracy is performing well.”
“[I]n 2015, more people were handcuffed and caged for marijuana offenses than for all ‘violent’ crimes combined. In many jurisdictions, the single most common criminal prosecution is for driving with a suspended license, and about forty percent of suspended American drivers’ licenses were taken away not for any reason related to driving, but because a person was too poor to pay court debts.”
We supposedly abolished indentured servitude and debtors prison. But not really. We just better bureaucratized it.
Also this shows why the state would oppose more public transportation: it would result in them having less control over its citizenry. If you have to drive, then the state has an exceptionally effective weight to hold over your head in the event you step out of line. And they have an exceptionally effective tool to criminalize poverty.
“A major achievement of the punishment bureaucracy is that it has retained mainstream respect even though its “law enforcement” choices crush unprecedented numbers of people with no evidence of any unique social benefit while simultaneously allowing enormous amounts of lawlessness that cause massive harm. Why are these choices still viewed as legitimate?
First, the groups who wield power in our society benefit from the punishment bureaucracy. It privileges their private property, their racial supremacy, their jobs, their voting rights, and their segregated neighborhoods.
Second, the growth of the punishment bureaucracy itself changes our culture and economy. As the bureaucracy expands, it employs larger and larger numbers of police officers, prosecutors, probation officers, defense attorneys, prison guards, contractors, and equipment manufacturers. People working in the system become dependent on its perpetuation for their livelihoods and even their identities. The path of least resistance is to grow more. Jobs are created, local political power is consolidated, and “law enforcement” activities are normalized and then rendered economically essential—such as roadblocks, prison guards, home raids, drug interdiction teams, neighborhood patrols, armed police in schools, SWAT teams, stop-and-frisk practices, social media monitoring, video surveillance, probation drug testing, and ‘intelligence’ divisions.”
“[T]he punishment bureaucrats who created the contemporary ‘criminal justice system’ are broadly comfortable with the way that our society looks. They market a crime problem in need of ‘law enforcement’ in order to keep our society looking the way that it does. They do not want to solve the ‘crime’ problem if that means a society that looks much different—say, more equal and with less private profit. Hence they both construct and respond to ‘crime’ with strategies that increase inequality and control, but do little to stop the same problems they purport to care about—and that often make those problems worse, thereby justifying a circular call for more (selective) punishment. And that is why courts do not enforce the rules of law that are intended to make our society more equal when those rules conflict with the goals of the punishment bureaucracy.
The ‘law enforcement’ religion is hostile to the view that a society that is more equal would have less crime, not because that idea is untrue, but because the very goal of the criminal legal system is to preserve certain elements of an unequal social order even if that inequality creates ‘crime.’”
“[F]ew ideas have caused more harm in our criminal system than the belief that America is governed by a neutral ‘rule of law.’ The content of our criminal laws […] and how those laws are carried out […] are choices that reflect power. The common understanding of the ‘rule of law’ and the widely accepted use of the term ‘law enforcement’ to describe the process by which those in power accomplish unprecedented human caging are both delusions critical to justifying the punishment bureaucracy. ”
“No matter what one’s views on drugs, there is one thing that all agree on: these laws were never based on empirical evidence about the best way to create a society with less use of harmful substances.”
“No government in any jurisdiction in the United States has proven that human caging is a way to reduce drug use at all, let alone the least intrusive way. Instead, a mountain of evidence suggests that the punishment approach to drugs has actually increased drug use and the harms associated with it, including by diverting funds from evidence-based alternatives.”
Decriminalization is objectively a more rational way to handle drug use. Anyone who says otherwise is merely sadistic.
The punishment disparity for crack vs powdered cocaine possession was once 100:1. This is one example of laws with a very clearly racist intent behind them. “For decades, even the cautious U.S. Sentencing Commission wanted to remove this disparity because there is no legal or scientific basis for it. And when Congress did reduce the disparity after a unanimous Senate vote in 2010—and millions of years in prison later—no one offered a justification for why it had existed. But for reasons that were never articulated, the government did not remove the disparity; it chose to lower the disparity from 100:1 to 18:1. And for more than eight years after that ‘Fair Sentencing Act’ passed, the government chose not to make even these limited ‘fair’ changes retroactive to help the thousands of human beings already in prison because of a law that everyone agreed had no basis.”
Yeah we sure do live in a “country of laws”: The country of AmeriKKKa.
There’s lots more but this is getting too long. Every line is worth quoting. The book is fantastic but also very depressing.
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