Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal

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 ...