Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal

by Alexandra Natapoff

Overview

A revelatory account of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminals.

Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new interpretation of inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over 13 million cases each year. People arrested for minor crimes are swept through courts where defendants often lack lawyers, judges process cases in mere minutes, and nearly everyone pleads guilty. This misdemeanor machine starts punishing people long before they are convicted; it punishes the innocent; and it punishes conduct that never should have been a crime. As a result, vast numbers of Americans — most of them poor and people of color — are stigmatized as criminals, impoverished through fines and fees, and stripped of drivers' licenses, jobs, and housing.

For too long, misdemeanors have been ignored. But they are crucial to understanding our punitive criminal system and our widening economic and racial divides.

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2018

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465093793
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	12/31/2018
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Alexandra Natapoff is professor of law at Harvard University. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, she is also the author of Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice, which won the 2010 ABA Silver Gavel Award Honorable Mention for Books. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 Impact 19

1 Size 39

1 Process 55

1 Innocence 87

1 Money 113

1 Race 149

1 History 171

1 Justice 187

1 Change 211

Epilogue 247

Appendix 251

Acknowledgments 265

Notes 267

Index 327

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/29/2018
Law professor Natapoff (Snitching) paints a picture of large-scale judicial and police misconduct in this exposé of the misdemeanor system. Drawing on local data from across the U.S. and anecdotes, she shows that many defendants in misdemeanor cases have committed no crimes, are given no legal counsel and no jury trial, and have their fates decided in three minutes or less. Furthermore, she argues, many misdemeanor arrests are unfair: poverty is criminalized and race makes certain people more likely than others to be arrested; in Urbana, Ill., for example, 91% of those ticketed for jaywalking were black despite only 16% of the population being black. Next, grievously overburdened public defenders, daily jail fees that are nigh unpayable for impoverished defendants, and financial incentives for judges to convict lead to overly high rates of conviction. This can have a steep cost for those affected: in addition to driving people further into poverty, a single low-level conviction can render a person ineligible to work for many employers. Intelligently written, tightly argued, and often heartbreaking, Natapoff’s account is a worthy companion to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Agent: Sam Stoloff, Frances Goldman Literary Agency. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2018-09-02

A criminal defense lawyer and law professor uses her knowledge and experience to expose the abuse of tens of millions of individuals charged by police with misdemeanors.

Those who pay attention to the news are well-aware of wrongful convictions in highly publicized domestic assaults, rapes, murders, and other felonies due to flaws within the criminal justice system. Much less visible are the approximately 13 million misdemeanors filed each year across the United States against alleged jaywalkers, trespassers, parking-meter violators, drivers who don't buckle their seat belts, possessors of marijuana in small amounts, and other minor offenses. Through unprecedented research that fills a previously large gap in the literature, Guggenheim Fellow Natapoff (Law/Univ. of California, Irvine; Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice, 2009, etc.) demonstrates how the filing and prosecution in misdemeanor cases often lead to innocent defendants pleading guilty, outcomes that might permanently ruin opportunities for meaningful future employment, housing availability, and income earning potential. Unsurprisingly, the author demonstrates an outsized negative impact on people of color and, more generally, individuals who live in poverty. Natapoff's presentation of her meticulously researched data is impressive, but the most compelling portions of the book are the case studies of individuals across the country, some of whom have been the author's clients. She offers a chapter of history that helps explain how the decentralized U.S. court system broke down in nearly every one of its many jurisdictions. Perhaps the most serious constitutional violation is the huge percentage of defendants appearing before a judge without a defense lawyer appointed. The judges are not always lawyers themselves, and the only appearance on behalf of the government is often the police officer who made the arrest. Natapoff presents common-sense solutions, but some of them will require significant funding, and all of them will require compassion and new ways of thinking from police, prosecutors, and judges.

A searing, groundbreaking study of criminology and sociology.

Kirkus Reviews

A damning portrait of the oft-neglected world of misdemeanor enforcement.”—New York Review of Books

"A sweeping look at the misdemeanor system and its impact on the American people.... Misdemeanor courts wield the bluntest, dumbest and cruelest instruments of the justice system, a host of biased codes called 'order-maintenance' crimes. What Punishment Without Crime makes clear is whose order, exactly, is being maintained."—Paste

"An essential contribution to the fields of criminology and sociology."—CHOICE

"Intelligently written, tightly argued, and often heartbreaking, Natapoff's account is a worthy companion to Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Natapoff's presentation of her meticulously researched data is impressive...A searing, groundbreaking study of criminology and sociology."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"This important book completely upends the criminal justice conversation. Natapoff documents dark truths about the misdemeanor process-how it forces the innocent to plead guilty, how it disregards basic legal rights, and how it inflicts deep injustice. Her insights inspire both outrage and innovation. Punishment Without Crime provides a terrific new understanding of a flawed criminal system, and it offers a much-needed path toward the fair and just criminal system America deserves. A necessary book for our times."—Barry Scheck, cofounder of the Innocence Project

"Punishment Without Crime is a searing indictment of our petty offense system. Through meticulous original research, heartbreaking stories, and pioneering insights, Alexandra Natapoff's book is a masterful critique of an overlooked but essential component of our criminal justice system's punitive machinery. Her account exposes how race and poverty intersect within the misdemeanor system to punish the innocent; create, perpetuate, and reinforce racial inequities; and fuel mass incarceration. Accessible, powerful, and illuminating, Punishment Without Crime will become essential to all future discussions of the criminal justice system's role in shaping the racial and social order of our nation."—L. Song Richardson, dean and chancellor's professor of law, University of California, Irvine School of Law

"This is an indispensable book for understanding the real American criminal courts-emphatically not the version familiar from film and television. The millions processed through our misdemeanor courts every year—overwhelmingly poor and people of color-rarely receive anything like procedural justice and often are burdened with stigma and harsh collateral consequences that lock them into disadvantage. Understanding and repairing this broken system is of the utmost importance if we want to be able to call our criminal courts a system of justice."—Carol S. Steiker, Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law and codirector of the Criminal Justice Policy Program, Harvard Law School

From the Publisher

Narrator Janina Edwards captures the frustration and challenges of the many victims introduced in Natapoff’s exploration of the American criminal justice system. As Edwards’s emotive narration evokes their sympathy, listeners are encouraged to see the inequality the author illuminates. She uncovers deep cracks in the criminal justice system in the ways that it strong-arms individuals into taking guilty pleas or unfairly pits the state against the individual in ways that have long-lasting ramifications. The result is a system that helps to perpetuate crime, inequality, and profiteering. While Natapoff has constructed a compelling argument with numerous voices, Edwards give those voices meaning that may linger with listeners long after the audiobook is finished. L.E. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2019 - AudioFile

Narrator Janina Edwards captures the frustration and challenges of the many victims introduced in Natapoff’s exploration of the American criminal justice system. As Edwards’s emotive narration evokes their sympathy, listeners are encouraged to see the inequality the author illuminates. She uncovers deep cracks in the criminal justice system in the ways that it strong-arms individuals into taking guilty pleas or unfairly pits the state against the individual in ways that have long-lasting ramifications. The result is a system that helps to perpetuate crime, inequality, and profiteering. While Natapoff has constructed a compelling argument with numerous voices, Edwards give those voices meaning that may linger with listeners long after the audiobook is finished. L.E. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2019 - AudioFile