Description
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
“Usual Cruelty cuts to the core of what is critical to understand about our legal system, and about ourselves.”
—Anthony D. Romero, executive director, ACLU
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 syste
