Harvard Law Review
Gannett House
1511 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge, MA 02138
Editorial Office:
617-495-7889
617-496-5053 (fax)
Business Office:
617-495-4650
617-495-2748 (fax)
|
|
 |
|
THE POLITICAL CONSTITUTION OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE
by William J. Stuntz [ Full Text ] |
|
119 Harv. L. Rev. 780 (2006) |
| The politics of crime is widely seen as punitive, racist, and inattentive to the interests of criminal suspects and defendants. Constitutional law is widely seen as a (partial) remedy for those ills. But in this instance, the cure may be causing the disease. At the margin, constitutional law pushes legislative attention — and budget dollars — away from policing and criminal adjudication and toward corrections. The law also widens the gap between the cost of investigating and prosecuting poor defendants and the cost of catching and punishing rich ones. Overcriminalization, overpunishment, discriminatory policing and prosecution, overfunding of prison construction and underfunding of everything else — these familiar political problems are more the consequences of constitutional regulation than justifications for it. |
Solving these problems requires radical constitutional reform. The Article explains why, and then offers brief sketches of what that reform might look like in four areas: policing, adjudication and crime definition (two fields that are better seen as one), punishment, and federalism. It closes by explaining how reform could happen, and why it probably won’t.
|
Replies in the Harvard Law Review Forum |
Killer Seatbelts and Criminal Procedure
by David Alan Sklansky
|
First Causes and the Dynamics of Criminal Justice
by Robert Weisberg
|
© 2006 The Harvard Law Review Association
webmaster@harvardlawreview.org
|
|
