New to the Collection: Books on Criminal Justice Reform
It’s time for us to highlight the second group of recent additions to our collection, focusing on criminal justice reform. We are excited to bring you this and three additional posts about new materials in the library. In our first post, we focused on our new books for legal professionals. Future posts will feature new social justice titles and an overview of new books on miscellaneous subjects.
Books mentioned in this post are available to check out at our temporary location in Tumwater. You can also request them through interlibrary loan at your home library. Contact the reference desk at Library.Requests@courts.wa.gov or 360–357–2136 with questions, or place a hold in our online catalog using your library account.
Criminal justice reform continues to be an important topic for legal professionals and the courts in Washington State. In their June 2020 open letter, the justices of the Washington State Supreme Court challenged members of the judiciary and the legal community to recognize and eliminate racial injustice. Subsequently, the Task Force on Race and Washington’s Criminal Justice System (Task Force 2.0) released a 2021 Report to the Court finding “that race and racial bias continue to matter in ways that are not fair, that do not advance legitimate public safety objectives, that produce disparities in the criminal justice system, and that undermine public confidence in our legal system.”
Of the report and the accompanying 2022 Recommendations to Criminal Justice Stakeholders in Washington, Chief Justice Steven C. González said in his 2023 State of the Judiciary that the Court “learned a great deal from the Task Force 2.0 presentation to the Supreme Court in July 2022 detailing specific recommendations in 14 areas to address this racial disparity.” Some of the areas covered in the 2022 report are policing, prosecutorial decision-making, prisons, sentencing, legal financial obligations, and public defense. Several of our new books focus on the history and reform in these areas.
The Task Force 2.0 makes several recommendations related to policing, including reducing and evaluating compliant hand-cuffing, phasing out military equipment, and banning canine arrests. Another recommendation is that police departments should ban fraudulent representations during investigations and interrogations. Read more about the history of policing in our new books Police Use of Excessive Force Against African Americans and Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable, as well as Duped: Why Innocent People Confess and Why We Believe their Confessions.
The report also discusses prosecutorial decision-making and states that prosecutor’s offices should maintain publicly available guidelines for charging and dispositions. A related new book in our collection is Punishment Without Trial: Why Plea Bargaining is a Bad Deal by Carissa Byrne Hessick. According to Hessick, prosecutors incentivize guilty pleas through “excessive bail, minimum sentencing, and charge stacking”, which undermines justice across socioeconomic and racial divides. An interview with the author is available in this video.
In discussing prisons and sentencing, the report recommends a focus on rehabilitation along with expanding programming opportunities in the prison system, while ensuring “that programming and services are culturally relevant to BIPOC individuals.” Author Cathy Cowling addresses these issues in the book Reducing Recidivism: A Focus on Rehabilitation Instead of Punishment.
According to the Task Force 2.0, legal financial obligations (LFOs) should no longer be used to support court funding. We have added several reports to our catalog that discuss court fines and fees. In The Cost of Justice: Reform Priorities of People With Court Fines and Fees LFOs are described as embodying structural racism and systemic oppression, keeping “generations of families of color ‘shackled’ to the criminal justice system, under lifetime supervision.” This report is a companion to The Price of Justice: Legal Financial Obligations in Washington State from the Washington State Supreme Court and the Minority and Justice Commission. Additional reports on LFOs in Washington State include Legal Financial Obligations in Washington State: Background, Statutes, and 50-State Review and Legal Financial Obligations in Washington State: Final Report, both by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy.
Changes to public defense addressed in the report focus on funding, diversity, and uniform standards, but also address post-conviction representation. The Task Force 2.0 recommends hiring public defenders with diverse backgrounds and training public defenders “on structural racism and implicit racial bias and how it operates in the courtroom and in their own practice of representing their clients.” For an insider’s view, read Everyone Against Us: Public Defenders and the Making of American Justice, written by Allen Goodman, a former public defender working in Chicago, and reviewed here. The author of Fixing Legal Injustice in America: The Case for a Defender General of the United States, Andrea D. Lyon, interviewed here, has written that “[b]ecause due process is a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, implementing an Office of the Defender General of the United States is a crucial step in ensuring that this country upholds the promises it made to its constituency almost 250 years ago.”
Last, we recommend two titles that provide guidance for legal professionals interested in criminal justice reform and equity in criminal courts. In The Crisis in America’s Criminal Courts: Improving Criminal Justice Outcomes by Transforming Decision-Making, author William Kelly hopes to change the culture of the courthouse and how we think about crime and punishment through reform to both pretrial and court procedures. The American Bar Association has published Advancing Equity: At the Intersection of Race, Mental Illness, and Criminal Justice Involvement by Deanna Adams. The author provides guidance for attorneys on both sides of the adversarial system to “improve both health and justice outcomes for people of diverse backgrounds who have mental illness.”
You can always browse our latest new books by checking out the New Books list featured on our library catalog. Just click lists in the top left of the page. We have some new eBooks available for remote access listed there as well.
New Books on Criminal Reform
Advancing Equity: At the Intersection of Race, Mental Illness, and Criminal Justice Involvement (2023) by Deanna Adams.
Change from Within: Reimagining the 21st-Century Prosecutor (2022) by Miriam Aroni Krinsky.
Concrete Mama: Prison Profiles from Walla Walla (2018) by Ethan Hoffman.
Duped: Why Innocent People Confess and Why We Believe Their Confessions (2022) by Saul M. Kassin.
Everyone Against Us: Public Defenders and the Making of American Justice (2023) by Allen Goodman.
Fixing Legal Injustice in America: The Case for a Defender General of the United States (2022) by Andrea D. Lyon.
Legal Financial Obligations in Washington State: Background, Statutes, and 50-State Review (2021) by Devin Bales.
Mass Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became Addicted to Prisons and Jails and How It Can Recover (2023) by Jeffrey Bellin.
Police Use of Excessive Force Against African Americans: Historical Antecedents and Community Perceptions (2019) by Ray Von Robertson and Cassandra D. Chaney.
Profit and Punishment: How America Criminalizes the Poor in the Name of Justice (2021) by Tony Messenger.
Punishment Without Trial: Why Plea Bargaining is a Bad Deal (2021) by Carissa Byrne Hessick.
Queering Law and Order: LGBTQ Communities and the Criminal Justice System (2020) by Kevin Leo Yabut Nadal.
Reducing Recidivism: A Focus on Rehabilitation Instead of Punishment (2023) by Cathy Cowling.
Sex Crimes and Offenders: Exploring Questions of Character and Culture (2022) by Mary Clifford and Alison Feigh.
Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable (2023) by Joanna Schwartz.
Standards for Health Services in Juvenile Detention and Confinement Facilities (2022) from the National Commission on Correctional Health Care.
The Cost of Justice: Reform Priorities of People with Court Fines and Fees (2021) by Deborah Espinosa, Anna Bosch, and Carmen Pacheco-Jones.
The Crisis in America’s Criminal Courts: Improving Criminal Justice Outcomes by Transforming Decision-Making (2021) by William R. Kelly.
The Lifer and the Lawyer: A Story of Punishment, Penitence, and Privilege (2020) by George Critchlow with Michael Anderson.
The Plea of Innocence: Restoring Truth to the American Justice System (2022) by Tim Bakken.
The Transferring of America’s Youth (2021) edited by Sheri Jenkins Keenan.
Time-In-Cell: A 2021 Snapshot of Restrictive Housing Based on a Nationwide Survey of U.S. Prison Systems (2022) from The Correctional Leaders Association & The Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law at Yale Law School.
Who Would Believe a Prisoner?: Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848–1920 (2023) edited by Michelle Daniel Jones and Elizabeth Nelson. (WB)
