Preet Bharara's Willful Blindness: We'll never fix the criminal justice system until liberal" prosecutors recognize how badly it's broken.

• Author: Pfaff, John

Doing Justice: A Prosecutor's Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law

by Preet Bharara

Knopf, 333 pp.

The broad agreement that our criminal justice system is profoundly broken, most recently embodied in a reform bill passed by Congress in December, is a rare contemporary example of genuine bipartisanship. We incarcerate and punish far too many people; we rely on counterproductively punitive sanctions that are often disliked by the very victims in whose name they are imposed; and the system is rife with racial bias at every stage. Thanks to years of work by advocates, academics, and journalists, a broad coalition is now pushing to overhaul how we punish in the U.S.

You would not know any of this, however, from reading Preet Bharara's new book, Doing Justice. Bharara was appointed by President Obama in 2009 as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, perhaps the most prestigious posting a federal prosecutor can get. Although criticized by some for, among other things, not prosecuting the financial fraud underlying the 2008 financial crisis, Bharara aggressively targeted the deep rot of corruption in Albany, convicting both the Democratic head of the assembly and the Republican head of the senate. He was broadly respected by the time President Trump fired him in March 2017. In fact, his abrupt termination, and speculation as to its causes, made him something of a hero to the #Resistance.

In Doing Justice, Bharara explores the criminal justice system by looking at how cases work their way through it, from investigation to trial to punishment. Nearly all the examples and anecdotes come from cases that Bharara's office handled, which often gives the book the feel of a memoir. But it is clearly intended to be a broad discussion of criminal justice--not just of the rarified world of the federal courts, but of the far messier state systems that handle well over 90 percent of all cases.

The closest thing the book has to a thesis comes toward its end, when Bharara describes the process as "an inquiry fairly conducted, an accusation rightly made, a judgment properly rendered." This is a stunningly sunny take on our criminal justice system, optimistic to the point of being dangerously misleading. It's a shame, because Bharara's insider status would give any criticisms significant heft. Yet not only does he celebrate the current system, he does so without even confronting any of the major criticisms that have been leveled...