A CounterPunch Best Book of the YearA Lone Star Policy Institute Recommended Book“If you care, as I do, about disrupting the perverse politics of criminal justice, there is no better place to start than Prisoners of Politics.”—James Forman, Jr., author of Locking Up Our OwnThe United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The social consequences of this fact—recycling people who commit crimes thro...

The application of the Political Question Doctrine is at a crucial crossroads as the Supreme Court continues to test new "War on Terrorism" initiatives. Historically, the political question doctrine has held the courts from resolving constitutional issues that are better left to other departments of government, as a way of maintaining the system of checks and balances. However, the doctrine's many ambiguities have allowed a roughly defined juxtaposition of the branches of government during...

An influential legal scholar argues that the Supreme Court played a pivotal role in the rise of mass incarceration in America.With less than 5 percent of the world’s population and almost a quarter of its prisoners, America indisputably has a mass incarceration problem. How did it happen? Tough-on-crime politics and a racially loaded drug war are obvious and important culprits, but another factor has received remarkably little attention: the Supreme Court. The Cons...

Who should police corporate misconduct and how should it be policed? In recent years, the Department of Justice has resolved investigations of dozens of Fortune 500 companies via deferred prosecution agreements and non-prosecution agreements, where, instead of facing criminal charges, these companies become regulated by outside agencies. Increasingly, the threat of prosecution and such prosecution agreements is being used to regulate corporate behavior. This practice has been sharply criti...

The United States has the world’s highest rate of incarceration, a form of punishment that ruins lives and makes a return to prison more likely. As awful as that truth is for individuals and their families, its social consequences?recycling offenders through an overwhelmed criminal-justice system, ever-mounting costs, unequal treatment before the law, and a growing class of permanently criminalized citizens?are even more devastating. With the authority of a prominent legal scholar and the ...