THE PRICE OF MERCY

A legal activist chronicles the many ways in which the justice system targets the poor.

It’s not news that judicial outcomes are often tied to the wealth and influence of a defendant: Not only do the well-to-do have the resources to hire good lawyers, but juries themselves tend to be made up of older, wealthier, white people. A predictable result, writes Galvin Almanza, is that defendants of color, represented by appointed public defenders, pull longer sentences and are disproportionate in the populations of jails and prisons. Consider, as she writes, that three miscreant white fraternity brothers are not likely to be branded a gang, but three teenage Black kids are. Shockingly, Galvin Almanza notes, “70 percent of people in jails are being held pretrial, not having been convicted of any crime.” The wealthy and white are not usually among them. The author details the many failings of a system so strongly tied to class and ethnicity, despite the purported equality of law. Merely charge a person with a crime, she writes, and the chances are very good that he or she will soon be out of a job, whether summarily or because of having to miss work for endless court dates. Since much public housing assistance is contingent on a clean record, another consequence is often homelessness—and then, in many jurisdictions, being subject to arrest anew for sleeping on the street or in a park. “Bad rules and regulations and policies got us to this in the first place,” Galvin Almanza urges. She adds that there are plenty of remedies available for them: abolishing three-strikes sentencing laws in favor of judicial discretion; expanding treatment and diversion programs; outsourcing crime labs (most of which are within police departments); and otherwise crafting a more humane process of restitution and rehabilitation over punishment, since “the data leads to an unavoidable conclusion that helping people is good.”

A thoughtful, persuasive call for a truly just system of justice.