{"id":11715,"date":"2019-04-09T08:00:01","date_gmt":"2019-04-09T12:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/crcl\/?p=11715"},"modified":"2019-04-07T14:41:41","modified_gmt":"2019-04-07T18:41:41","slug":"book-review-charged-the-new-movement-to-transform-american-prosecution-and-end-mass-incarceration-by-emily-bazelon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/crcl\/book-review-charged-the-new-movement-to-transform-american-prosecution-and-end-mass-incarceration-by-emily-bazelon\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration, by Emily Bazelon"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cNumbingly normal.\u201d It\u2019s how Emily Bazelon describes the outcome in Connick v. Thompson<\/a><\/em>, a 2011 Supreme Court case that shielded prosecutors\u2019 offices from liability for Brady<\/em> violations resulting from the offices\u2019 failure to train their attorneys. This immunity from liability applies even when that failure results in wrongful convictions \u2014 even when, as in John Thompson\u2019s case, a person is nearly executed for a crime that the prosecutor\u2019s office had evidence that he didn\u2019t commit. John Thompson spent fourteen years<\/em> on death row for a crime that he did not commit<\/em>, while the prosecutors sat on information capable of exonerating him. Our system is such that this sequence of events can accurately be described as numbingly normal<\/em>. It is a system that has been built deliberately, in large part by two forces: the United States Supreme Court, often through divided decisions like Thompson<\/em>; and prosecutors.<\/p>\n

It is the latter force that is the focus of Bazelon\u2019s latest book, \u201cCharged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration.\u201d Throughout it, she lays out a state of affairs that has become numbingly normal to far too many of the players driving the system, and for those harmed by it.<\/p>\n

For those whose day-to-day lives are not directly affected by the criminal legal system, there is nothing in this book that should seem normal, and there is an obligation on us all to avoid becoming numb. Bazelon\u2019s call to action is not subtle. Its urgency grips the author and jumps off the page, from the opening reflection that \u201cin time, the country\u2019s embrace of mass incarceration . . . will come to seem as shameful as slavery does now,\u201d to the closing thoughts: \u201cSomewhere along the way, the balance of power between the prosecution, the defense, and the judiciary shifted. We have to readjust it. The stakes are so high\u2014the well-being of so many communities and the trajectory of so many lives.\u201d It is a book written to destroy your complacency, and it succeeds.<\/p>\n

Ask nearly any prosecutor what they do for a living, and, in my experience, the answer that you\u2019ll get is some version of the following: \u201cI do justice.\u201d It sounds good. It has, when combined with the power that comes with the position and the springboard it\u2019s seen as providing to higher office, seduced many a young law student into thinking that their career satisfaction lies in being a prosecutor. But as Bazelon brings out through a book that expertly weaves together narrative with historical, legal, and sociological analysis, it\u2019s an intentionally vague statement that raises more questions than answers. Justice for whom? The victims of crime? The individuals who are suspected of committing those crimes? The communities in which the alleged crimes took place? At best, it is a response that is incomplete. At worst, it is a lie.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m left thinking about what justice might mean in the cases of the two individuals whose stories provide the structure for \u201cCharged.\u201d One, Noura Jackson, was convicted of murdering her mother in a trial that seemed to throw the Constitution out the window. The Tennessee Supreme Court ultimately vacated her conviction due to these constitutional violations, nine years after she first entered prison. The state ultimately decided not to re-try the case; Jackson signed an Alford plea (under which the individual maintains their innocence while acknowledging that the state likely had enough evidence to convict them), and was able to walk out of prison on time served. The Innocence Project has since taken up her case.<\/p>\n

The other is Kevin, a young man in Brooklyn charged for picking up a friend\u2019s weapon when the police entered the apartment. It was never alleged that Kevin intended to use the gun; his efforts to hide it were merely an attempt to protect his friends, who he knew faced more serious consequences if they were to be charged with illegal gun possession. Unlike Noura, Kevin did not end up being sentenced to prison. Instead, he entered into a youth diversion program that required regular court appearances, social work visits, and intensive state monitoring for the duration of his participation. Upon successful completion of the program, the felony charges against him were dismissed. But the police surveillance did not end. At the close of the book, we find Kevin contemplating leaving New York, simply to get away from it all. He remains, after all he\u2019s been through, a Black man in America. He might not be behind bars, but it is hard to see him as truly free.<\/p>\n

What does justice look like for Noura? It is not the District Attorney with seemingly no sense of ethics retaining her position of power. What does justice look like for Noura\u2019s late mother? It is not locking up her child while allowing her murderer to go unfound.<\/p>\n

What does justice look like for Kevin? It is not watching police officers tear apart his apartment after he completed the diversion program because they allegedly received a tip that there was a gun inside (a tip that, if it existed at all, was proven to be false). What does justice look like for communities that are disproportionately affected by gun violence? It is not a state of constant surveillance, nor is it placing the futures of young men charged with victimless crimes in the hands of prosecutors whose power is virtually unchecked, and who face no consequences for abusing that power.<\/p>\n

Bazelon, in conjunction with Miriam Krinsky, L. B. Eisen, and Jake Sussman, has created a guiding document for those who want to change the system: \u201cTwenty-One Principles for Twenty-First-Century Prosecutors.\u201d It is what hope looks like \u2014 concrete action items that, given the wave of progressive prosecutors being elected, might actually be implemented in cities around the country.<\/p>\n

But I admit that, while the reform-minded prosecutors highlighted in the book give me some modicum of optimism, I continue to be afraid that we are not learning the true lessons of our mass incarceration crisis. We need to talk about criminal legal reform, and we need to elect people who will give their all to righting decades of wrongs. But once we\u2019re talking about the criminal system \u2014 once we\u2019re talking about prosecutors \u2014 our country has already failed. We might lock up fewer people, we might attempt to reintegrate them more fully upon their release, but we will still be operating in a system in which certain individuals are seen as belonging in cages. As \u201cCharged\u201d makes so perfectly clear, in a system that is so deeply rooted in injustice, we have a very long way to go until prosecutors can truly claim to belong to a profession where they do justice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cNumbingly normal.\u201d It\u2019s how Emily Bazelon describes the outcome in Connick v. Thompson, a 2011 Supreme Court case that shielded 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