Yet today, though the US is home to only about 5 percent of the world's population, we hold nearly one quarter of its prisoners. Mass incarceration is now widely considered one of the biggest social and political crises of our age. How did we get to this point?Locked In is a revelatory investigation into the root causes of mass incarceration by one of the most exciting scholars in the country. Having spent fifteen years studying the data on imprisonment, John Pfaff takes apart the reigning consensus created by Michelle Alexander and other reformers, revealing that the most widely accepted explanations - the failed War on Drugs, draconian sentencing laws, an increasing reliance on private prisons - tell us much less than we think. Pfaff urges us to look at other factors instead, including a major shift in prosecutor behavior that occurred in the mid-1990s, when prosecutors began bringing felony charges against arrestees about twice as often as they had before. He describes a fractured criminal justice system, in which counties don't pay for the people they send to state prisons, and in which white suburbs set law and order agendas for more-heavily minority cities. And he shows that if we hope to significantly reduce prison populations, we have no choice but to think differently about how to deal with people convicted of violent crimes - and why some people are violent in the first place.An authoritative, clear-eyed account of a national catastrophe, Locked In transforms our understanding of what ails the American system of punishment and ultimately forces us to reconsider how we can build a more equitable and humane society.

    Today, entitlement spending accounts for a full two-thirds of the federal budget. Drawing on an impressive array of data and employing a range of easy- to- read, four color charts, Eberstadt shows the unchecked spiral of spending on a range of entitlements, everything from medicare to disability payments.  But Eberstadt does not just chart the astonishing growth of entitlement spending, he also details the enormous economic and cultural costs of this epidemic.   He powerfully argues that while this spending certainly drains our federal coffers, it also has a very real,long-lasting, negative impact on the character of our citizens. Also included in the book is a response from one of our leading political theorists, William Galston. In his incisive response, he questions Eberstadt’s conclusions about the corrosive effect of entitlements on character and offers his own analysis of the impact of American entitlement growth.

    This fascinating history of the antitrust movement shows us what led to the present moment and offers achievable solutions to prevent monopolies, promote business competition, and encourage innovation.In a world where Google reportedly controls 90 percent of the search engine market and Big Pharma’s drug price hikes impact healthcare accessibility, monopolies can hurt consumers and cause marketplace stagnation. Klobuchar—the much-admired former candidate for president of the United States—argues for swift, sweeping reform in economic, legislative, social welfare, and human rights policies, and describes plans, ideas, and legislative proposals designed to strengthen antitrust laws and antitrust enforcement.Klobuchar writes of the historic and current fights against monopolies in America, from Standard Oil and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to the Progressive Era's trust-busters; from the breakup of Ma Bell (formerly the world's biggest company and largest private telephone system) to the pricing monopoly of Big Pharma and the future of the giant tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google.She begins with the Gilded Age (1870s-1900), when builders of fortunes and rapacious robber barons such as J. P. Morgan, John Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt were reaping vast fortunes as industrialization swept across the American landscape, with the rich getting vastly richer and the poor, poorer. She discusses President Theodore Roosevelt, who, during the Progressive Era (1890s-1920), "busted" the trusts, breaking up monopolies; the Clayton Act of 1914; the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914; and the Celler-Kefauver Act of 1950, which it strengthened the Clayton Act. She explores today's Big Pharma and its price-gouging; and tech, television, content, and agriculture communities and how a marketplace with few players, or one in which one company dominates distribution, can hurt consumer prices and stifle innovation.As the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights, Klobuchar provides a fascinating exploration of antitrust in America and offers a way forward to protect all Americans from the dangers of curtailed competition, and from vast information gathering, through monopolies.

    Using blood-boiling examples of government regulations run amok, Howard reveals a society in which rules have replaced thinking--allowing law to infiltrate the nooks and crannies of everyday life.

    In this eloquent, trailblazing account, with a new chapter covering Bush v. Gore, Guantanamo, and other recent controversial court decisions, Edward Lazarus, who served as a clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun, presents a searing indictment of a court at war with itself and often in neglect of its constitutional duties. Combining memoir, history, and legal analysis, Lazarus reveals in astonishing detail the realities of what takes place behind the closed doors of the U.S. Supreme Court--an institution that through its rulings holds the power to affect the life of every American.

    From the award-winning poet and novelist—a must-have collection of his four previous books of poetry plus a selection of new, unpublished work.

    . . It is the argument of this important book that until Americans can reimagine rights, there is no path forward, and there is, especially, no way to get race right. No peace, no justice.”—from the foreword by Jill Lepore, New York Times best-selling author of These Truths: A History of the United States An eminent constitutional scholar reveals how our approach to rights is dividing America, and shows how we can build a better system of justice. You have the right to remain silent—and the right to free speech. The right to worship, and to doubt. The right to be free from discrimination, and to hate. The right to life, and the right to own a gun.   Rights are a sacred part of American identity. Yet they also are the source of some of our greatest divisions. We believe that holding a right means getting a judge to let us do whatever the right protects. And judges, for their part, seem unable to imagine two rights coexisting—reducing the law to winners and losers. The resulting system of legal absolutism distorts our law, debases our politics, and exacerbates our differences rather than helping to bridge them.   As renowned legal scholar Jamal Greene argues, we need a different approach—and in How Rights Went Wrong, he proposes one that the Founders would have approved. They preferred to leave rights to legislatures and juries, not judges, he explains. Only because of the Founders’ original sin of racial discrimination—and subsequent missteps by the Supreme Court—did courts gain such outsized power over Americans’ rights. In this paradigm-shifting account, Greene forces readers to rethink the relationship between constitutional law and political dysfunction and shows how we can recover America’s original vision of rights, while updating them to confront the challenges of the twenty-first century.

    Ideal for anyone who wants to read a great work for the first time or revisit an old favorite, these new editions open the door to the stories and ideas that have shaped our world.

    Getting a promotion, finding new friends, learning you are attracted to women…. Nia Toyomoto has worked hard all her life to prove she was the best; she graduated early from high school, college, and got the dream job in Manhattan. Becoming a partner at the tender age of thirty she thought she had it all until the law firm made demands about her personal appearance and a few other things that made her change her life for the promotion. Then she realizes having everything isn’t all that it is cracked up to be without someone to share it with… A successful lawyer in the big city, choices have to made, sacrifices and surprises await this beautiful and talented woman….does she make the right ones though?

    I enjoyed it a lot. —Nick CaveSet in Camden Town, London, during the late 1980s, Junkie Love is a study of addiction and loss, a nihilistic love story for the blank generation. Focusing on the psycho-pathology of addiction, it takes a look at what happens when hope disappears and hedonism turns to despair and self-loathing. The characters in this tale are rootless and adrift, dislocated from their pasts with no belief in the aims and aspirations of a materialistic society. Instead of turning to politics or religion, they embark on a course of self-destructive sex and manically obsessive drug abuse, a journey to the end of the night from which many do not return. Largely autobiographical and leavened with irony and perverse humor, Junkie Love follows the protagonist into the heart of this morass to the point where corruption and dissipation coalesce into something approaching transcendence.

    Little do they know that their road trip will set them on a collision course with a side of American life even darker and weirder than their own.

    The word "Fentanyl" only recently entered common usage, and yet it has become a looming presence in news reports and conversations across Canada. It is an opioid more powerful and pervasive--and deadly--than any previous street drug.Often those suffering are marginalized people. Consider that in 2003, the SARS epidemic killed 44 people in Canada and launched a massive mobilization of public funds and resources to contain the outbreak. Over 100 times that number have been killed between 2016 and 2017 during the opioid crisis in Canada. Yet, the response has been far from proportionate. In fact, our policies are making things worse.The victims are many, and as we learn here, not only who we might expect. They are our neighbours: professionals, students, parents, and even health care workers. Despite the thousands of deaths, these victims remain largely invisible. But not anymore.Benjamin Perrin, a law and policy expert in Vancouver, BC--ground zero for the crisis--shines a light in this darkest of corners. What he finds challenges many assumptions about the people who use opioids, and the factors fuelling the crisis. Why do people use Fentanyl, where does it come from, and why can't we stop it? These questions, and many others being asked by all Canadians, are answered here in this urgent and humane look at the worst health crisis in recent history.

    Friedman tells the whole fascinating story of American law from its beginnings in the colonies to the present day. By showing how close the life of the law is to the economic and political life of the country, he makes a complex subject understandable and engrossing. A History of American Law presents the achievements and failures of the American legal system in the context of America's commercial and working world, family practices, and attitudes toward property, government, crime, and justice. Now completely revised and updated, this groundbreaking work incorporates new material regarding slavery, criminal justice, and twentieth-century law. For laymen and students alike, this remains the only comprehensive authoritative history of American law.

    Granted unprecedented access to the Los Angeles Juvenile Court, including the judges, the probation officers, and the children themselves, This book provides evidence of the system's inability to slow juvenile crime or to make even a reasonable stab at rehabilitating troubled young offenders. Humes draws a portrait of a judicial system in disarray.

    Kennedy Book & Journalism AwardsFinalist for the American Bar Association's 2018 Silver Gavel Book AwardNamed one of the "10 books to read after you've read Evicted" by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel"A powerful investigation into the ways the United States has addressed poverty. . . . Lucid and troubling."--Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted, in The Chronicle of Higher EducationA nationally known expert on poverty shows how not having money has been criminalized and shines a light on lawyers, activists, and policy makers working for a more humane approachIn addition to exposing racially biased policing, the Justice Department's Ferguson Report exposed to the world a system of fines and fees levied for minor crimes in Ferguson, Missouri, that, when they proved too expensive for Ferguson's largely poor, African American population, resulted in jail sentences for thousands of people.As former staffer to Robert F. Kennedy and current Georgetown law professor Peter Edelman explains in Not a Crime to Be Poor, Ferguson is everywhere in America today. Through money bail systems, fees and fines, strictly enforced laws and regulations against behavior including trespassing and public urination that largely affect the homeless, and the substitution of prisons and jails for the mental hospitals that have traditionally served the impoverished, in one of the richest countries on Earth we have effectively made it a crime to be poor.Edelman, who famously resigned from the administration of Bill Clinton over welfare "reform," connects the dots between these policies and others including school discipline in poor communities, child support policies affecting the poor, public housing ordinances, addiction treatment, and the specter of public benefits fraud to paint a picture of a mean-spirited, retributive system that seals whole communities into inescapable cycles of poverty.