The U.S. criminal justice system faces challenges along many lines. Violent police encounters, lengthy sentences, and wrongful convictions have inspired nationwide protests, as well as calls to defund the police and abolish courts, prisons, and law enforcement altogether.
Criminal law expert Christopher Slobogin, one of the five most-cited criminal law and procedure law professors in the country, argues that reform, not abolition, is the answer. In his new book Rehabilitating Criminal Justice: Innovations in Policing, Adjudication and Sentencing, Slobogin offers a multi-pronged approach.
“Our criminal justice system is in free-fall: our police are too aggressive, our court system sends innocent people to prison, and our sentencing practices are draconian,” he says. “This book proposes a reorientation of every major component of the system.
The culmination of a quarter-century of work, Rehabilitating Criminal Justice is broken into three parts.
Part I focuses on policing. Slobogin argues for revamping stop-and-frisk practices, reducing racially-tinged pretextual searches and seizures, and eliminating caretaker searches by the police. He also lays out the constitutional arguments for mandating the recording of interrogations and replacing the exclusionary rule with a new penalty regime for police misconduct.
In Part II, the focus shifts to ways of curtailing the excesses of the “adversarial” trial process, with reforms that would drastically reduce the use of pretrial detention, give judges much more control over the trial process, and significantly curb the power of prosecutors during plea bargaining.
The final section deals with sentencing, which “people on the right and left acknowledge is overly dependent on prolonged incarceration,” Slobogin says. He argues for a heavier emphasis on a preventive justice model that relies on empirical assessments of recidivism risk and intervention needs, as well a shift to specialized criminal tribunals.
Slobogin concludes with an examination of the abolition movement. He contends that getting rid of prisons and police would not only endanger society but delegitimize government institutions, and that a regime based on his recommendations can “radically” reduce our reliance on prisons and the police without losing our capacity for crime prevention.
Rehabilitating Criminal Justice, published by Cambridge University Press, publishes in March and is currently available for pre-order.
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