ABSTRACT
The majority of routine felony cases, the day-to-day workload of criminal courts, are settled by guilty pleas. Traditional accounts assume that those actually guilty of criminal acts adopt a cost-efficient method of confronting their guilt, make deals, and plead guilty. Roberto Santiago was arrested as he left his apartment at 1:30 a.m. by police officers engaged in a sweep of the neighborhood. Before the arrest, undercover officers toured Santiago’s neighborhood and radioed descriptions of suspected drug dealers to backup units whose officers swept the street for people they believed fit the descriptions. A long-term secular trend away from reactive police work toward proactive police work has shifted the fundamental institutional assumptions of the criminal justice system. Increasingly, the police work seeks to impose order in areas of the inner city that the police and the wider society view as dangerous.
