A Critical Call to Change the US Criminal Justice System from Below.

• Date: 22 March 2021
• Author: Weis, Valeria Vegh
• Published date: 22 March 2021
• Author: Weis, Valeria Vegh

Today, the United States is the most powerful country, with the White House, Wall Street, and the US Army serving as the political, financial, and military centers of the world. It also preserves, as Platt (2019, 6) exposes, the most irrational, punitive, and biased criminal justice system. Numbers show that, by 2015, 31 states had the highest incarceration rates in the globe--higher even than Turkmenistan, one of the most repressive regimes--whereas 38 states lock up a larger proportion of their residents than El Salvador, a country recovering from a civil war and dealing with one of the highest homicide rates worldwide.

Unfortunately, this is far from all. As the book depicts, prison walls are not the edge of the US carceral state. The unjust and double system of crime control goes way beyond the prisons and absorbs a wide range of areas under state control. As Platt (ibid., 27-28) describes,

It encompasses how criminal justice personnel carries out their mandate, where the police are dispatched, how legislators and prosecutors determine what constitutes social harm, and how criminality becomes politically and culturally identified s the exclusive preserve of the poor. The double system works internally through racial and ethnic profiling and economic biases that permeate criminal justice operations, and it works externally through the diversion of corporate criminals and other perpetrators of large-scale harm to civil and non-criminal resolutions. Following this lead--the book argues--we need to open up our focus from the traditional areas of urban policing, mass incarceration, and sensational felony cases, to also consider the...