Vol. 139 No. 2 Today, it seems obvious that criminal defendants can waive constitutional rights. Plea bargains make up the vast majority of criminal convictions, and defendants routinely trade their rights — to indictment, to remain silent, to an attorney, to a jury — in exchange for a faster trial or a lesser charge. The modern criminal legal system is a regime of negotiated justice. Rights used to have more force.
Vol. 135 No. 2 In recent years, legal scholars have advanced powerful critiques of mass incarceration. Academics have indicted America’s prison system for entrenching racism and exacerbating economic...
Vol. 133 No. 6 It is tempting to assume that the United States has fifty distinct state prison systems. For a time, that assumption was correct. In the...
Vol. 132 No. 5 For centuries, prisoners in the United States were housed together regardless of their citizenship status. That changed in 1999 when the federal government began...
