Author: Adam Benforado
There’s plenty of memorable statistics in this book, but this one sums it up quite well. "America accounts for less than 5 percent of the world's population, but almost a quarter of all prisoners.” Clearly we are doing something wrong in this country. In this book, Mr. Benforado takes aim at the US judicial system and highlights the many places where you may think we have a good system, but in reality, it comes up very short.
Take the case where our Sixth Amendment pretty much guarantees that “the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial”. Mr. Benforado points out that in reality fewer than 10 percent of criminal defendants make it to trial. The adervsarial nature of a U.S. trial make it very expensive and the punishments so severe that most criminals end up getting a plea bargain. Mr Benforado points out that in a plea bargain the prosecutor is all powerful. The defendent does not have recourse to due process while the prosecutor takes on the role of accuser, investigator, adjudicator and sentencer. This high concentration of power in a single person is a recipe for unfairness.
The chapter in "throwing Away the key" is very sobering and some of the data there on our prison population and experience is bound to make you reconsider your view on whether American Jails are unduly cruel and inhuman. Putting someone in solitary confinement is tantamount to messing with their mind and we end up creating bigger monsters of people than what they might have been when they were incarcerated. The author praises the prison system in Norway which is all about rehabilitating prisoners rather than punishing them. This Scandinavian country has a 10 times lower rate of incarceration (70 per 100,000) than the US and must be doing something right. The article in Business Insider gives a great description of their system which is summed up well by one of their prison governors, "If we treat people like animals when they are in prison they are likely to behave like animals. Here we pay attention to you as human beings."
Another statistic that stopped me dead in my tracks was learning that there are a greater number of black men in prison in the U.S. today, than there were slaves in 1850! Mr Benforado is unequivocal in criticizing the complex rules that the U.S. judicial system has created that give us the illusion of fairness. In describing procedural technicalities like reading someone his Miranda rights, Mr Benforado declares that in the U.S. "we are now all form, substance be damned".
Read this for an eye-opening lecture on “Unfair" our Criminal Justice System can be in the US.
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