Overview

The United States has the world'Äôs 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 practical insights gained through on-the-ground work on criminal-justice reform, Rachel Barkow explains how dangerous it is to base criminal-justice policy on the whims of the electorate, which puts judges, sheriffs, and politicians in office. Instead, she argues for an institutional shift toward data and expertise, following the model used to set food- and workplace-safety rules. Barkow'Äôs prescriptions are rooted in a thorough and refreshingly ideology-free cost-benefit analysis of how to cut mass incarceration while maintaining public safety. She points to specific policies that are deeply problematic on moral grounds and have failed to end the cycle of recidivism. Her concrete proposals draw on the best empirical information available to prevent crime and improve the reentry of former prisoners into society.

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9781974937196

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Rachel Elise Barkow is the Segal Family Professor of Regulatory Law and Policy and the Faculty Director of the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law at New York University. She served as a law clerk to Judge Laurence H. Silberman on the District of Columbia Circuit and Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court and is the recipient of NYU'Äôs Distinguished Teaching Award. Katherine Fenton has worked on television and radio commercials, voiced the children's cartoons Four Eyes and Knights of the Zodiac, and done podcasts for The Economist, New Scientist, and the science-fiction/fantasy series Transcendent Tales. She has also narrated over eighty audiobook titles in a variety of genres, including titles such as the Morganville Vampire Series, TC Boyles's Sam Miguel, and Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby.

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