Plea Bargaining: The Everyday Practice that Undermines Working-Class Solidarity
The U.S. criminal legal system is terrible by so many metrics: We lock up more people than anywhere else in the world, our penalties tend to be harsher, our arrest rates are many times higher than other democracies, and so on. Plea bargaining is not often at the top of the list when we think of all harm done by the system, but the U.S. is an outlier in this area as well. Ninety-seven percent of all American criminal cases end in a guilty plea, mostly due to bargained agreements, making our plea-deal rate much higher than that of any other country in the world. In my book Pleading Out: How Plea Bargaining Creates a Criminal Class, I argue that the widespread use of plea bargaining is a chief enabler of our criminal legal system’s ills.
It is relatively easy to see how this country became so mired in plea bargaining: Unlike our common-law cousins in England, Canada or Australia, our courts give prosecutors free rein to use threats, bribes or any other tactics they might like to ensure that a defendant gives up their right to a trial. The question of why we got to this point requires more digging. The answer lies in the efforts to undermine the labor movement in the early 19th century.
Scholars trace the origin of American plea bargaining to Boston in the 1830s. Before that time, the…
