Punishment Without Crime provides a sweeping and revelatory new
account of America's broken criminal justice system from the
perspective of the paradigmatic American crime-the lowly
misdemeanor. While felony trials grab headlines, the petty offense
system is far more representative of criminal justice as most
Americans actually encounter it. Petty offenses make up 80 percent
of state and local criminal dockets; over 13 million misdemeanor
cases are filed every year, four times the number of felony cases.
Misdemeanors are one of the largest and most unappreciated causes
of our criminal system's size and its harshness-and a crucial
source of American inequality. Misdemeanor cases are by definition
"minor," but their impact is not. Each year, the petty offense
process sweeps millions of people from arrest to a guilty plea or
conviction. In effect, police get to decide who will be convicted
of minor crimes, simply by arresting them for offenses like driving
on a suspended licenses, marijuana possession, disorderly conduct,
and loitering. In thousands of low-level courts around the country,
prosecutors do little vetting, most defendants lack lawyers, legal
rules and evidence are often ignored, and judges process cases in
minutes or even seconds. The consequences are serious and lasting:
stigmatizing criminal records, burdensome fines, jail for those who
can't afford to pay bail or fees, and collateral effects including
loss of jobs, housing, and benefits. Punishment Without Crime
offers an urgent new explanation for America's racial and economic
inequalities, showing starkly how misdemeanor arrests and
prosecutions brand vast numbers of disadvantaged Americans as
criminals and punish them accordingly. For the first time,
prize-winning legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff illuminates the full
scale, scope, and workings of the misdemeanor process, drawing on
never-before-compiled data as well as revealing narrative examples.
The misdemeanor system, she reveals, targets and stigmatizes racial
minorities as "criminals," exacerbates economic inequality by
funding its own operation through fines and fees, and produces
wrongful convictions on a massive scale. For too long, misdemeanors
have been ignored as petty. Reckoning with the misdemeanor machine
is crucial to understanding America's punitive and unfair criminal
justice system and our widening economic and racial divides.
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