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

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 the us by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on considerable original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the internal workings of a massive petty offense program that produces over 13 million instances every year. People arrested for minor offences are swept about Abuse Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor Program Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal through courts where defendants frequently lack attorneys, judges process situations in mere moments, and everybody pleads guilty. This misdemeanor machine begins punishing people long before they are convicted; it punishes the innocent; and it punishes carry out that never must have been a criminal offense. Because of this, vast amounts of People in america — most of them poor and folks of color — are stigmatized as thieves, impoverished through fines and costs, and stripped of drivers’ licenses, jobs, and housing.

For too much time, misdemeanors have been ignored. However they are necessary to understanding our punitive criminal system and our widening financial and racial divides.

A Publishers Weekly Best Publication of 2018