From an award-winning civil rights lawyer, a profound challenge to
our society’s normalization of the caging of human beings, and the
role of the legal profession in perpetuating it
“We do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not
unusual.” —George Eliot, Middlemarch
Alec Karakatsanis is
interested in what we choose to punish. For example, it is a crime in
most of America for poor people to wager in the streets over dice;
dice-wagerers can be seized, searched, have their assets forfeited,
and be locked in cages. It’s perfectly fine, by contrast, for
people to wager over international currencies, mortgages, or the
global supply of wheat; wheat-wagerers become names on the wings of
hospitals and museums.
He is also troubled
by how the legal system works when it is trying to punish people. The
bail system, for example, is meant to ensure that people return for
court dates. But it has morphed into a way to lock up poor people who
have not been convicted of anything. He’s so concerned about this
that he has personally sued court systems across the country,
resulting in literally tens of thousands of people being released
from jail when their money bail was found to be unconstitutional.
Karakatsanis doesn’t
think people who have gone to law school, passed the bar, and sworn
to uphold the Constitution should be complicit in the mass caging of
human beings—an everyday brutality inflicted disproportionately on
the bodies and minds of poor people and people of color and for which
the legal system has never offered sufficient justification. Usual
Cruelty is a profoundly radical reconsideration of the American
“injustice system” by someone who is actively, wildly
successfully, challenging it.