Punishment Without Crime: A Book Review
“Like education, housing, and welfare policy, the petty-offense process is one of those central collective institutions through which we make big decisions about our democracy, how to allocate and redistribute resources, and how to manage poverty, crime, and community. Although it is not traditionally understood in this way, the misdemeanor process belongs in the pantheon of social institutions that shape the basic contours of organized society.”– Alexandra Natapoff, Punishment Without Crime (pg. 12)
One of today’s central questions in criminal jurisprudence asks, “Is America’s misdemeanor system broken?” University of California law professor Alexandra Natapoff thoroughly examines the issue in her book Punishment Without Crime : How our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal (Basic Books, 2018, 334 p.). The title itself hints at Natapoff’s indictment of a system that “…has earned it some choice nicknames like ‘cattle herding,’ ‘assembly-line justice,’ ‘meet ’em and plead ‘em’ lawyering and ‘McJustice’” (pg. 3).
Punishment Without Crime is wide ranging in its coverage of how America’s justice system addresses petty-offenses. Natapoff not only reports on the impact the misdemeanor system has on those who are processed through it, but also introduces the reader to how the system has purported to change over time while showing not much real progress. From post-civil war minor offense and vagrancy laws designed to extort African-American labor, to the more recent “broken windows” order-maintenance style of policing that over-enforces low-level offenses, ostensibly for the purpose of reducing crime, the resulting “justice” continues to weigh heavily against impoverished populations and people of color.
A key point made in the book is that despite the enormous size of the American misdemeanor system there is a large disparity in the focus of the nation on the felony system and the prison incarceration rate for serious crimes. Natapoff ran into many barriers in her efforts to estimate the size of the system. In all, she estimated that in 2015 there were 13 million misdemeanor cases filed in U.S. courts, which means getting charged with a petty-offense is about as common as attending a four year university. Additionally, wrongful misdemeanor convictions have been completely left out of the national innocence conversation. Given the tendency toward “meet ’em and plead ‘em” justice, there are few facts and records created to make the argument that actual innocence is common in the petty-offense system. With numerous system weaknesses, from inaccurate databases, to arrest quotas, to overworked public defenders, Natapoff writes, “We know that innocent people are being convicted. It is an essential and defining aspect of misdemeanor culture that almost no one cares” (pg. 111).
Punishment Without Crime is a well-researched primer and useful reference for the reader who is hoping to learn about the broad impacts of the American misdemeanor system. Using many examples, Natapoff dives into the details of the misdemeanor process, racial disparities, problematic issues of money such as legal financial obligations, bail and private probation companies, and finally, reform. Most importantly she argues for a more theoretical examination of a system that has escaped scrutiny, writing, “It deserves to be brought into the theoretical fold, to take its place alongside other major public institutions and practices that are routinely subjected to sustained, principled analysis” (pg. 187). (SC)
