Tilted Scales.

• Author: McCarthy, Colman
• Position: Review

In my conversations with juveniles imprisoned at the Oak Hill Youth Center, in Laurel, Md., the names of D.C. Superior Court judges frequently come up. Almost always, inmates vent at the robed men and women who impose sentences on the Oak Hill population that is nearly all African American, poor, and ill-educated.

Anyone who reads David Cole's No Equal Justice will understand why these teenagers have less than cheery opinions about their judges. To them, the beleaguered men and women of the bench symbolize a system that is rigged against them. "The criminal justice system's exploitation of inequality," writes Cole, "creates a discrepancy between the formal rules, under which criminal responsibility is a function of individual culpability and all are equal before the law, and actual practice, in which who you know, how much money you have, and the color of your skin all play an important role in criminal justice outcomes."

Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center (disclosure: I am on the adjunct faculty at Georgetown, but I do not know the author) and an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, lays out the facts of racial and economic inequality. There is little new material here, but the statistics are harrowing just the same: For every black college graduate, 100 are arrested. African Americans comprise more than half the prison population. And as many as 80 percent of criminal defendants are too poor to hire a lawyer.

Cole writes as an advocate for reform, which places him in the company of those mostly anonymous citizens working to protect the powerless from the powerful by creating one standard, not two, in criminal law. Will change come about anytime soon? Cole is too aware, too experienced, and too chastened to conclude anything but the obvious: Reform will be "extremely difficult." First, he says, we must recognize that under our current judicial system every person is not equal before the...