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I think of this following list of books as a syllabus — the kind of reading sequence I’d build for a class on the first 250 years of the U.S. justice system.
The point is not to list the best or most important books about criminal justice, or that any or every book is the final word on the system, or the endorsement of any particular claims. Indeed, that would be impossible, as some of these texts disagree in ways large and small.
Like any syllabus, this one is shaped by judgment, accident, taste and limitations. This list comes from my attempt to consider the breadth of the U.S justice system over key time periods, and to see how a series of books could lean into one another to reveal an evolving set of practices, probing questions, and diverse perspectives about punishment, power, race, reform, mercy and the meaning of justice in American life. These issues remain critical 250 years after the signatories of the Declaration of Independence made a revolutionary decree against any government that would infringe upon the rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
WEEK 1: LAWRENCE M. FRIEDMAN, “CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN AMERICAN HISTORY”
This work is a remarkably comprehensive entry point to the history of the criminal justice system. Friedman begins the book with a line that resonated with me in simply trying to curate this list: The history of the U.S. justice system is a subject so vast that it “has to be approached with a certain amount of fear and trembling.”
The book is recommended here primarily for the early chapters, which offer a glimpse at what justice looked like in the American colonies before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Here you’ll learn about the English common-law traditions that merged with Puritan notions of morality to shape justice in the 13 colonies. Criminal punishment was often corporal, almost always public, and could include anything from fines to humiliation and time in the stocks, to caning and whipping.
And from that system, “what is most obviously missing,” from our modern standpoint, “is imprisonment,” Friedman writes.
WEEK 2: BENJAMIN RUSH, “AN ENQUIRY INTO THE EFFECTS OF PUBLIC PUNISHMENTS” & PETER MOSKOS, “IN DEFENSE OF FLOGGING”
Rush’s “Enquiry” is the text of a speech he delivered at Benjamin Franklin’s home in 1787. The good news here is that the text is available for free online from the Library of Congress. The bad news is that the typography of the day used a long “s” that looks to the modern English reader like an “f,” and it takes the eyes a while to adjust to words like “punifment” and “fuffering.”
“Enquiry” is among the most direct known texts from a signatory to the Declaration of Independence — on what punishment in the new nation ought to look like, and on the norms the signers sought to reject. Rush argued that humiliating public punishment both failed to work on the punished, and, more importantly from his perspective, created titillating public theater more than clean moral messaging.
Rush blamed “indolence, prejudice, ignorance,” and a “defect of culture” that society continued to use public punishment, given ample proof of its “inefficacy to reform bad men, or to prevent the commission of crimes.” And he imagined a place of private punishment instead: “a large house … erected in a remote part of the state,” with doors of iron, where the punished would be subject to “bodily pain, labour, watchfulness, solitude, and silence.”
As companion reading, reflecting on this experiment in punishment 224 years later, Peter Moskos, John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor and former Baltimore police officer, issues a single provocative thought experiment. What’s more cruel? To be beaten for five minutes (perhaps publicly), or to lose freedom for years of your life? And can the latter really “reform bad men” any better than the punishments that Rush railed against?
WEEK 3: DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON, “SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME”
Until the conclusion of the Civil War, most of the early debate about what the U.S. criminal justice system would look like primarily had White people in mind. Enslaved Black Americans were not immune to the reach of the justice system under slavery, nor, certainly, were free Blacks. But for the most part, enslaved Black people were subject to the discipline and punishment of slaveholders and White vigilantes.
The end of legal slavery and the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments set forth the promise of racial equality under the law, but also set the stage for the functional re-enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Black people through the establishment of the Black Codes in Southern states. Under this new set of criminal laws for vague, often made-up charges, Black people could be arrested, tried in kangaroo courts and quickly have their labor leased out to White-owned businesses — often in mines — but sometimes on the very same plantations they had been “freed” from.
Blackmon offers not only a detailed account of how that practice emerged and how it worked, but also of the lesser-known ways that the justice system was leveraged as a tool to control Black people and labor. In one representative case, John Davis, who was Black, was falsely accused of owing a White store owner $40. Promptly convicted of a crime and assessed restitution and fees in the amount of $75, local farmer John Pace paid the amount upon coercing Davis to sign a contract obligating him to work any task Pace demanded for a period of 10 months.
“For all practical purposes,” Blackmon wrote, “[John Pace] owned John Davis.”
WEEK 4: MAURICE CHAMMAH, “LET THE LORD SORT THEM”
It’s impossible to understand the U.S. criminal justice system without understanding the death penalty. Not because it’s frequently administered — even at its height, “it played a role in only a tiny fraction of murder cases,” my colleague Maurice Chammah writes in his 2021 book. Rather, “executions were the ultimate symbol of a national culture that favored retribution,” and the punishment would have the effect, as prison sentences began to balloon in the 1980s, of rendering “sentences of twenty, forty, or sixty years in prison less extreme by comparison.”
It is a vital book for understanding how actors on both sides of the debate over capital punishment marshalled deeply held moral intuitions, law and bureaucracy to their advantage in the long tug-of-war that saw the death penalty wane, end, restart and then rapidly accelerate during the 20th century.
WEEK 5: HEATHER ANN THOMPSON, “BLOOD IN THE WATER”
Thompson’s book lets us shift from the state’s power to kill — to its power not only to confine, but to manage the narrative of that confinement. The 1971 uprising at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York began after years of neglect, abuse, racial discrimination and dehumanizing conditions. Incarcerated people took 38 hostages and engaged in several days of negotiations with prison officials for improved conditions, including more education, more nutritious food, better medical treatment and religious freedom.
Thompson’s account offers a riveting hour-by-hour reconstruction of the four-day stand-off. She recounts the state’s vicious operation to retake the prison, and the political and bureaucratic efforts to spin false claims about that morning’s violence, which killed 29 incarcerated people and 10 hostages, all of whom died from law enforcement gunfire.
Attica marks, for this reading list, what could have been one kind of turning point, but turned out to be another entirely. At the time, public opinion fractured: Many wanted harsh retribution for the men who participated, especially after the state broadcast false and incomplete stories about guards being castrated and having their throats slit by prisoners. But other Americans saw Attica as a moment to take stock of a clearly broken, failing and racist prison system.
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