Justice Abandoned: How the Supreme Court Ignored the Constitution and Enabled Mass Incarceration - Hardcover

Barkow, Rachel Elise

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067429422X ISBN 13: 9780674294226

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2025

Synopsis

An influential legal scholar argues that the Supreme Court played a pivotal role in the rise of mass incarceration in America.

With less than 5 percent of the world’s population and almost a quarter of its prisoners, America indisputably has a mass incarceration problem. How did it happen? Tough-on-crime politics and a racially loaded drug war are obvious and important culprits, but another factor has received remarkably little attention: the Supreme Court. The Constitution contains numerous safeguards that check the state’s power to lock people away. Yet since the 1960s the Supreme Court has repeatedly disregarded these limits, bowing instead to unfounded claims that adherence to the Constitution is incompatible with public safety.

In Justice Abandoned, Rachel Barkow highlights six Supreme Court decisions that paved the way for mass incarceration. These rulings have been crucial to the meteoric rise in pretrial detention and coercive plea bargaining. They have enabled disproportionate sentencing and overcrowded prison conditions. And they have sanctioned innumerable police stops and widespread racial discrimination. If the Court were committed to protecting constitutional rights and followed its standard methods of interpretation, none of these cases would have been decided as they were, and punishment in America would look very different than it does today.

More than just an autopsy of the Supreme Court’s errors, Justice Abandoned offers a roadmap for change. Barkow shows that the originalist methodology adopted by the majority of the current Court demands overturning the unconstitutional policies underlying mass incarceration. If the justices genuinely believe in upholding the Constitution in all cases, then they have little choice but to reverse the wrongly decided precedents that have failed so many Americans.

About this title

About the Author

Rachel Elise Barkow is the Charles Seligson Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Zimroth Center on the Administration of Criminal Law at NYU School of Law. A past member of the United States Sentencing Commission, she is the author of Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 067429422X
• ISBN 13: 9780674294226
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320