Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers

By Alec Karakatsanis, Harvard Law Review

Karakatsanis breaks from traditional narratives about mass incarceration, which focus on the role of the police, by discussing how lawyers have perpetuated the system.

“It is the responsibility of lawyers to ensure our fidelity to neutral principles — to ensure that our legal system does not allow practices to develop or to persist because of who they are happening to, and to ensure that the magnitude of grievous harm is witnessed and weighed regardless of the bodies and minds on whom that harm is visited. We have not done that.”

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