Rehabilitating Criminal Justice : Innovations in Policing, Adjudication, and Sentencing

Every aspect of the US criminal legal system, from policing to sentencing, is in disarray. This book proffers a reform agenda that reduces the harms of policing without handcuffing law enforcement, ensures conviction of the guilty while protecting the innocent, and slashes prison populations without undermining public safety.

Rehabilitating Criminal Justice offers bold yet sensible proposals for reforming every major component of the US criminal justice system. The first third of the book explains how existing caselaw can be interpreted to end over-policing, better regulate interrogations, and replace the exclusionary rule with direct sanctions on officers and their departments. The second part of the book, on the post-arrest adjudication process, calls for replacing cash bail with validated risk assessments and proposes to reorient our error-prone, hyper-adversarial system by ending convictions via guilty pleas and giving judges more power over questioning of witnesses and the selection of experts. The final chapters show how the harshness of the system can be leavened by refocusing sentencing on prevention rather than retribution and by creating an independent criminal court system. They also explain why these reforms are preferable to the currently popular movement to defund police departments and abolish prisons.