Plea Bargaining: The Everyday Practice that Undermines Working-Class Solidarity

A 1912 cartoon depicting the Lawrence Textile Strike in Massachusetts. Source.

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…