Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration
1.0 ethics credits
The Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School is proud to host a conversation between Jocelyn Simonson, Professor of Law & Associate Dean for Research and Scholarship at Brooklyn Law School and Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at Penn, moderated by Seema Saifee, Assistant Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School.
They will be discussing Professor Simonson’s new book Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration.
From reading books on mass incarceration, one might conclude that the way out of our overly punitive, racially disparate criminal system is to put things in the hands of experts, technocrats able to think their way out of the problem. But, as Jocelyn Simonson points out in her groundbreaking new book, the problems posed by the American carceral state are not just technical puzzles; they present profound moral questions for our time.
Radical Acts of Justice tells the stories of ordinary people joining together in collective acts of resistance: paying bail for a stranger, using social media to let the public know what everyday courtroom proceedings are like, making a video about someone’s life for a criminal court judge, presenting a budget proposal to the city council. When people join together to contest received ideas of justice and safety, they challenge the ideas that prosecutions and prisons make us safer; that public officials charged with maintaining “law and order” are carrying out the will of the people; and that justice requires putting people in cages. Through collective action, these groups live out new and more radical ideas of what justice can look like.
A former public defender, Jocelyn Simonson is professor of law at Brooklyn Law School and a leading national authority on community bail funds.
- Jocelyn Simonson, Professor of Law & Associate Dean for Research and Scholarship, Brooklyn Law School
- Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
- Seema Saifee, Assistant Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School