Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing

"An eye-opening account of the criminal justice system’s often overlooked creaky gears."—Sam Roberts, New York Times

In the early 1990s, New York City launched an initiative under the banner of Broken Windows policing to dramatically expand enforcement against low-level offenses. Misdemeanorland is the first book to document the fates of the hundreds of thousands of people hauled into lower criminal courts as part of this policing experiment. Drawing on three years of fieldwork inside and ou...