Justice Abandoned

An influential legal scholar argues that the Supreme Court played a pivotal role in the rise of mass incarceration in America. With less than 5 percent of the world’s population and almost a quarter of its prisoners, America indisputably has a mass incarceration problem. How did it happen? Tough-on-crime politics and the war on drugs are obvious and important culprits, but another factor has received little attention: the Supreme Court. Since the 1960s, the Court has repeatedly disregarded con