CHARGED
The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration
By Emily Bazelon

If you aspired to high office in the 20th and early 21st centuries, this was sound advice: Get thee to a prosecutor’s office. Politicians from both parties, from Democrats like John Kerry to Republicans like Rudolph Giuliani, parlayed prosecutorial perches into political power and nationwide fame.

The basic recipe for using a prosecutor’s post as a springboard into politics required being “tough on crime,” protecting the public by putting criminals behind bars. The vast majority of state and local prosecutors in the United States are elected, and taking a punitive tack was generally considered to be the path to re-election — and, frequently, election to higher office. Prosecutors had strong incentives to be harsh rather than lenient (or merciful) when dealing with defendants, and those incentives helped shape the criminal justice system as we know it today. In the words of the law professor and historian Jed Shugerman, a scholar of prosecutors turned politicians: “The emergence of the prosecutor’s office as a steppingstone for higher office” has had “dramatic consequences in American criminal law and mass incarceration.”

These consequences are on full display in “Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration,” by Emily Bazelon, a lecturer at Yale Law School and staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. In “Charged,” a persuasive indictment of prosecutorial excess, Bazelon argues that the lawyers who work in the more than 2,000 prosecutors’ offices around the country — conducting investigations, filing criminal charges and trying cases (or, much more commonly, striking plea bargains) — bear much of the responsibility for over-incarceration, conviction of the innocent and other serious problems of the criminal justice system.