New Criminal Justice Thinking

A vital collection for reforming criminal justiceAfter five decades of punitive expansion, the entire U.S. criminal justice system— mass incarceration, the War on Drugs, police practices, the treatment of juveniles and the mentally ill, glaring racial disparity, the death penalty and more — faces challenging questions. What exactly is criminal justice? How much of it is a system of law and how much is a collection of situational social practices? What roles do the Constitution and the Supreme Court play? How do race and gender shape outcomes? How does change happen, and what changes or adaptations should be pursued? The New Criminal Justice Thinking addresses the challenges of this historic moment by asking essential theoretical and practical questions about how the criminal system operates. In this thorough and thoughtful volume, scholars from across the disciplines of legal theory, sociology, criminology, Critical Race Theory, and organizational theory offer crucial insights into how the criminal system works in both theory and practice. By engaging both classic issues and new understandings, this volume offers a comprehensive framework for thinking about the modern justice system. For those interested in criminal law and justice, The New Criminal Justice Thinking offers a profound discussion of the complexities of our deeply flawed criminal justice system, complexities that neither legal theory nor social science can answer alone.

Atremendous collection of thoughtful essays written by preeminent scholars. . . . a cohesive examination of what is wrong with the American criminal justice system, and how we might go about fixing it., [The book] offers several articles that will challenge the readers thinking and deepen the readers understanding of how the criminal justice works., In a collection of 14 essays that engage criminal law and justice, this volume contains new concepts and deeply interesting ideas by some of today’s most erudite and recognizable scholars in ‘criminal justice system’ thinking., This book can profitably be read by criminal justice practitioners, policy makers, and students at all levels. It is a necessary read., In The New Criminal Justice Thinking, Sharon Dolovich and Alexandra Natapoff take on the ambitious project of understanding what the contemporary American criminal justice system is and what it does at this critical juncture in time. The volume reflects a remarkable willingness to rethink the complex of actors, institutions, laws, and dynamics that operate to police and punish crime. Resoundingly successful at decentering crime from our thinking about the criminal justice system, this book effects an intervention that is crucial to understanding and reforming its injustices.

Sharon Dolovich is a national expert on the law, policy and theory of prisons and punishment. She is Professor of Law at UCLA and founding director of its Prison Law & Policy Program. Her work includes an award-winning ethnography of the LA County Jail’s segregation units. Alexandra Natapoff is the Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow. She is the author of Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal and editor of ​​The New Criminal Justice Thinking.