Punishment Without Crime

From a prize-winning Harvard legal scholar, “a damning portrait” (New York Review of Books) of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminals

Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new perspective on inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over thirteen million criminal cases each year, over 80 percent of the national total. People arrested for minor crimes are swept through courts where defendants often lack lawyers, judges process cases in mere minutes, and nearly everyone pleads guilty. This misdemeanor machine starts punishing people long before they are convicted, it punishes the innocent, and it punishes conduct that never should have been a crime. As a result, vast numbers of Americans-most of them poor and disproportionately people of color-are stigmatized as criminals, impoverished through fines and fees, and stripped of driver’s licenses, jobs, and housing. And as the nation learned from the police killings of Eric Garner, George Floyd, and too many others, misdemeanor enforcement can be lethal.

Now updated with a new afterword, Punishment Without Crime shows how America’s sprawling misdemeanor system makes our entire country less safe, less fair, and less equal.