ABSTRACT
The Supreme Court has contributed to the rise in the incarceration rate because the so-called “criminal procedure revolution” made trials increasingly unworkable and indirectly led to a system in which plea bargaining dominates. Roughly 80 percent of the convictions came from plea bargaining and the rest from trials, but today trials are rare and plea-bargaining rates are usually at 97 or 98 percent. As trials have vanished, the system can process many more cases since the time devoted to each is so short. This is a controversial claim and also a painful one for many of the academics who were educated in the Warren Court years and thought that strengthening the rights of defendants would make for a fairer, more just system, especially for those who are poor and facing a legal system that is intimidating. But the Court was taking risks in what it was doing and this book explains how some of those risks did not pay off.
