Getting Away With Murder: How Politics is Destroying the Criminal Justice System.

• Author: DiIulio, John J.

by Susan Estrich Harvard University Press, $19.95

Susan Estrich, the Robert Kingsley Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Southern California, is a prolific public intellectual and an increasingly familiar face on television talk shows. She first came to wide public attention as national campaign manager for Michael Dukakis. In 1989, at a forum at Johns Hopkins University, a young woman asked her, "What should Governor Dukakis have done about Willie Horton?" "Kept him in prison," she quipped. In chapter three of Getting Away with Murder, she answers the "Willie Horton question" once and for all:

What should we do with Willie

Horton? Lock him up. Should a

man who rapes while out on furlough

have been furloughed? Obviously

not. The system failed. It doesn't

matter what race he is ... It is not

the disproportionate impact of punishment

that makes the system racist

but the disproportionate impact of

our failures at prevention -- that is

what renders our politics suspect.

The only way to address racism in

the criminal justice system is to cut

the crime rate among blacks -- to

try to inoculate the children, even

as we punish many of their fathers

and brothers. It is not racist to lock

up Willie Horton. But planning

prisons for preschoolers is.

On matters ranging from the evidence on racial disparities in sentencing (black defendants who go on trial, she notes, are in fact convicted less often for crimes of violence than white defendants) to the need for "Honest Lawyers," Estrich is consistently candid, often convincing, and eminently reasonable without feigning academic condescension.

Still, Getting Away with Murder is bound to be controversial, especially among critical legal theorists, jury nullification fans, and Democratic liberal elites who still have trouble understanding that those who mumble "incarceration" will neither be heard nor heeded when they shout "prevention"

In the book's prologue, Estrich recounts how one "well born"' faculty colleague diagnosed her resistance to the idea that legal process should be taught as ad object lesson in relativism. It resulted, he said, from her "working class, roots." The treatment infuriated her; besides, she grew up "solidly middle class."

Indeed, Estrich studied hard in college, worked her ass off in law school, lost her father, graduated without a dime, earned a tenured professorship at Harvard, bravely published Real Rape (she herself was a rape victim), and has since...