Criminal Law and the American Penal System: Cases and Context (EPUB)

by Andrew Manuel Crespo, John Rappaport
Teach Criminal Law in a way that centers the core challenges confronting the modern American penal system. This exciting new casebook by Andrew Crespo and John Rappaport encourages students to see how criminal law shapes prosecutorial and police power—and how it is both shaped by and reconstitutes hierarchies of race, class, and gender.

The role of criminal law in shaping a just society is more vital—and more complex—than ever before. This groundbreaking casebook reimagines the traditional framework of how Criminal Law is taught in order to connect core doctrinal concepts to the deeper questions that actually drive American punishment: How does law shape the institutional power of key law enforcement actors—prosecutors and police officers? How is this law shaped by a set of overlapping and interacting social hierarchies, along dimensions of race, gender, and class? How, in turn, do criminal law and the penal system it empowers shape and reconstitute those social hierarchies?

This book tells the story of criminal law’s evolution from a legal framework that defined, cabined, and legitimated law enforcement power to one that has expanded that power in ways that are intimately interlaced with these sociological dynamics. The aims of the book are straightforward: to consider the role that criminal law might serve in a well-functioning and just society, to question how the legitimacy of criminal law might change in societies that are unjust or unequal, to chart the role that law and legal actors played in producing the American penal system’s current pathologies, and to invite students to imagine ways in which law and legal actors might go about addressing and redressing those systemic and institutional failings.

Law, legal analysis, and close reading of doctrinal texts anchor this book, much like they anchor many others. But unlike any other casebook, those conventional materials are situated in a fundamentally different conceptual framework, though one that will be familiar to scholars and practitioners in the field. The course this casebook supports is thus still very much a course about criminal law. But it is a course about the role that body of law has played in producing a penal system increasingly seen as flawed or unjust by large segments of society. The aim, in other words, is not to sever ties with the traditional topics of the criminal law course, but rather to create stronger ties between those topics and the realities of the penal system. As students will see, legal actors—lawyers—have been central players in the evolution of the penal system’s pathology. Likewise, students will see that tomorrow’s legal actors—they themselves—will likely play a significant role in identifying new pathways toward the system’s reform.

Professors and students will benefit from