Justice Abandoned: How the Supreme Court Ignored the Constitution and Enabled Mass Incarceration

With less than 5 percent of the world’s population and almost a quarter of its prisoners, the United States indisputably has a mass incarceration problem. The Constitution contains numerous safeguards that check the state’s power to lock people up. Yet since the 1960s, the Supreme Court has repeatedly disregarded these limits, bowing instead to unfounded claims that adherence to the Constitution is incompatible with public safety.

In Justice Abandoned, Rachel Barkow highlights six Supreme Court decisions that paved the way for mass incarceration. If the Court were committed to protecting constitutional rights and followed its standard methods of interpretation, none of these cases would have been decided as they were, and punishment in America would look very different than it does today.

Barkow shows that sound public policy, fundamental fairness, and the originalist methodology embraced by a majority of sitting justices demands overturning the unconstitutional policies underlying mass incarceration.

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