Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Punishment Without Crime : How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal, Paperback / softback Book

Punishment Without Crime : How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Out of stock

Description

From a prize-winning Harvard legal scholar, "a damning portrait" (New York Review of Books) of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminals Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new perspective on inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor.

Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over thirteen million criminal cases each year, over 80 percent of the national total.

People arrested for minor crimes are swept through courts where defendants often lack lawyers, judges process cases in mere minutes, and nearly everyone pleads guilty.

This misdemeanor machine starts punishing people long before they are convicted, it punishes the innocent, and it punishes conduct that never should have been a crime.

As a result, vast numbers of Americans-most of them poor and disproportionately people of color-are stigmatized as criminals, impoverished through fines and fees, and stripped of driver's licenses, jobs, and housing. And as the nation learned from the police killings of Eric Garner, George Floyd, and too many others, misdemeanor enforcement can be lethal.

Now updated with a new afterword, Punishment Without Crime shows how America's sprawling misdemeanor system makes our entire country less safe, less fair, and less equal.

Information

Other Formats

Save 12%

£16.99

£14.95

Out of stock
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information