Misdemeanors: Why One Lawyer Says They’re Making America More Unequal

| January 17, 2019 | Sentencing

In a story from The Take Away, a podcast supported by New York Public Radio, Alexandra Natapoff of the UC Irvine School of Law discusses the position she presents in her new book Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes American More Unequal. Professor Natapoff says about 13 million misdemeanor cases are filed every year in the United States. That’s compared with just 3 or 4 million felony cases. She argues that we need to start paying attention to how misdemeanors impact our country.

Listen to the full episode.

Share

Tags:


Alexandra Natapoff

Alexandra Natapoff is Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine, and currently a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School.  She is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow; her new book, Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal (Basic Books), is forthcoming in December 2018.  She is also author of Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice (NYU Press, 2009), which won the ABA Silver Gavel Award Honorable Mention for Books, and co-editor of The New Criminal Justice Thinking (NYU Press, 2017), which received a 2017 Choice Academic Title Award.  Professor Natapoff is an Adviser to the ALI Principles of the Law Policing Project.

0 Comments