Usual Cruelty
The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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 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 troubled by how the legal system works when it is trying to punish people. The bail system, for example, is meant to ensure that people return for court dates. But it 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 money bail was found to be unconstitutional.
Karakatsanis 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—an everyday brutality inflicted disproportionately on the bodies and minds of poor people and people of color and for which the legal system has never offered sufficient justification. Usual Cruelty is a profoundly radical reconsideration of the American "injustice system" by someone who is actively, wildly successfully, challenging it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Former public defender Karakatsanis debuts with a fiery indictment of America's criminal justice system and what he contends is the "basic truth" underlying it: "The powerful have used the law to dominate the powerless." In three essays, Karakatsanis attacks modern policing methods, mass incarceration, and the money bail system; challenges lawyers to fight against the "punishment bureaucracy" that victimizes the poor and protects the rich; and spotlights cases in which he sees the routine application of the law as violating the norms of human decency. In one such instance, an Alabama mother was ordered to stay in jail until she paid off her old traffic tickets at the rate of $50 per day, or $75 if she cleaned the courthouse bathrooms. Defining incarceration as "human caging," Karakatsanis argues that there is "no serious evidence" that imprisonment reduces crime rates. He points out that while it's illegal in most American cities to bet on a dice game, stock market traders earn fortunes for doing essentially the same thing. To correct such imbalances, Karakatsanis calls for "massive collective action" on the part of lawyers to vindicate their clients' constitutional rights. This provocative cri de coeur will challenge readers' fundamental conceptions of the rule of law.
