Pleading Out: How Plea Bargaining Creates a Permanent Criminal Class

Plea bargaining is a “tool for satisfying the insatiable appetite of the prison-industrial complex,” according to this well-reasoned polemic. Contending that the U.S. justice system serves the wealthy at the expense of the poor and marginalized, civil rights lawyer Canon traces the rise of plea bargaining to 19th-century Boston, where upper-class Brahmins sought to stifle worker solidarity by bringing labor unions under control of the courts (rather than outlawing them altogether) and simultaneously stripping juries of their “law-finding function.” Canon also documents the steady expansion of the criminal code from Prohibition through the war on drugs, contending that the “endless supply of criminal laws”—which require the expediency of plea bargaining to enforce—serves to turn “large swaths of the working class into criminals.” He litters the book with examples of miscarriages of justice, including the story of a man who was given a mandatory life sentence under California’s “three strikes” law for stealing $150 worth of videotapes, and spotlights those who have advocated against the misuse of plea bargaining, including Alaska attorney general Avrum Gross, who banned the practice in the 1970s. Full of persuasive evidence of how the courts are used by those in power to enforce the status quo, this is a cogent call for change. (Mar.)