Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System

A ＂searing, searching, and eloquent＂ (Martha Minow, Harvard Law School) investigation into the role of the legal profession in perpetuating mass incarceration--now in an accessible paperback format from the award-winning civil rights lawyer

＂Usual Cruelty cuts to the core of what is critical to understand about our legal system, and about ourselves.＂
--Anthony D. Romero, executive director, ACLU

Alec Karakatsanis doesn’t think people who have gone to law school, passed the bar, and sworn to uphold the Constitution should be complicit in the mass caging of human beings--an everyday brutality inflicted disproportionately on the bodies and minds of poor people and people of color, for which the legal system has never offered sufficient justification. Usual Cruelty offers a radical reconsideration of the American ＂injustice system＂ by someone who is actively--and wildly successfully--challenging it.

Hailed by luminaries from James Forman Jr. and Vanita Gupta to U.S. Circuit Judge Bernice Donald, and MacArthur Award-winning poet and attorney Reginald Dwayne Betts, Usual Cruelty offers a condemnation of the whole deplorable enterprise, starting with profound questions about the specific things our system chooses to criminalize (marijuana plants, low-level gambling, petty theft) versus those we don’t (tobacco plants, high-level gambling by bankers, massive wage theft by employers). It calls out a bail system that charges people money to go free despite the lack of any evidence this will make them more likely to show up in court or make anybody safer. And it explores the everyday brutality of our courts, prisons, and jails, and the ways in which the legal profession has allowed itself to become desensitized to the everyday pain these institutions inflict on our most vulnerable populations.

Now in an accessible paperback format, Usual Cruelty will cement Karakatsanis’s reputation as one of the most inspiring civil rights lawyers of our time.

A former public defender, Alec Karakatsanis is the founder of the Civil Rights Corps, an organization designed to advocate for racial justice and bring systemic civil rights cases on behalf of impoverished people. He was named the 2016 Trial Lawyer of the Year by Public Justice and was awarded the Stephen B. Bright Award for contributions to indigent defense in the South by Gideon’s Promise. He lives in Washington, DC.