A useful, bleak exposé of a little-understood legal labyrinth constructed to harm the most vulnerable.
A disheartening exposé of how state and local judicial systems focus on privatization and profit.
Hatcher, a professor of law and advocate for social justice, delivers a well-researched, scholarly, disturbing synthesis of social history and legal treatise, tracking the long-term monetization of the justice system. “Racial and economic inequalities are inextricably intertwined in the profiteering used by each of our foundational institutions of justice,” he writes, offering an ominous reminder: “If justice falls, all else falls with it.” These quiet developments cause immense harm in vulnerable communities, and they contradict both due process and ethical requirements. As Hatcher asserts, “financial incentives must not be part of the justice equation.” In clearly organized chapters, the author delineates a harsh landscape where institutions such as child services, probation, local and state courts, and policing find ways to profit from increasingly punitive, fee-driven law enforcement, a system that frames poverty as a series of costly personal failings. Hatcher unearths distressing narratives from Michigan, Georgia, Ohio, and other states as various agencies collude with private interests to create fee-gathering structures directed toward the poor, many of whom can never climb out of the destructive cycle of debt. “This all seems confusing because it is,” writes Hatcher. “But what is clear is that the revenue strategy violates the separation of powers and judicial independence.” The child support system, notes the author, is no longer about helping children but “has been traded for revenue operations, with vulnerable children and their families being pulled into an industrialization of harm.” The final chapter reiterates the ongoing “racialized commodification” of for-profit justice. Regarding the obvious harmfulness of these machinations, Hatcher concludes, “this concern has largely been ignored because there is significant money to be made.” He writes with justifiable passion, but the discussion is often technical, paraphrasing cases rather than relying on varied evidence, so readership may be limited to specialists.
A useful, bleak exposé of a little-understood legal labyrinth constructed to harm the most vulnerable.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780520396050
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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