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- Violent offenders represent 53% of the population of state prisons and 7.9% in federal prisons [1]. So what's everybody else doing there? Also, it's necessary to present evidence that our unheard of incarceration rates are what actually casued violent crime to drop to unheard-of lows. Some people have proposed, for example, that the most compelling reason for the drop in violent crime in the US was attributable to lower levels of lead exposure in children of the 70s and 80s, due to the elimination of lead from gasoline and paint. - [edit: I misread what you were saying here, the point about the death penalty is a non-sequitur on my part] Your second point isn't one I would disagree with but, but I don't think your example is a particularly good one: there is ample evidence indicating that the death penalty does not serve as a particularly strong deterrent. For example, murder rates in the US are actually lower in death penalty states, and have been since the 90s. - "That means changes need to occur with the electorate, not elite legal minds." The author never asserts the legal profession is the only thing that can reform our broken criminal justice system. However he points out that the legal services we have now are vastly inadequate to the job of protecting the rights of most Americans caught up in the criminal justice system, and that part of the reason so many people are incarcerated is that they recieve little-to-no represenatation. Furthermore: "even apart from the millions of pending criminal cases for which people are not being provided a well-resourced and zealous attorney, every one of the thousands of unlawful stops, searches, home raids, beatings, taserings, shootings, and arrests that take place every day forms the basis for a freestanding constitutional civil rights suit. A quiet tragedy of the legal system is that these rampant daily violations are almost never litigated." The broader point he is making is that the criminal justice system is only able to grind through tens of thousands of lives each day becuase those involved in it--and that includes lawyers and judges--are commited to keeping that system well-oiled and functioning. "Imagine a world in which lawyers stood ready, en masse, to use their skills and training and intellects to vindicate these constitutional rights every day. Such a social movement of lawyers would dramatically alter the nature of the legal system and our society. The system of modern policing, which depends on callous indifference to vindicating basic rights, would crumble at our simple willingness to hold it to its own formal rules. We can do it, but only through massive collective action to act on our professional and moral values." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_Sta...
[2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w13097.pdf |