William Stuntz's posthumous Collapse of American Criminal Justice marks a fine, albeit tragic, end to the career of a superb scholar of criminal law. The book deals with what Stuntz refers to as the “unraveling” of American criminal justice. Stuntz contends that three trends that have emerged in the last 60 years define American criminal justice today: the collapse of the rule of law, manifest in official discretion superseding legal doctrine and jury decisions in determining criminal justice outcomes; the proliferation of racial discrimination, evident in black overrepresentation in incarceration rates; and the pendulum justice of extreme penal appetites from lenity in the mid-20th century to severity since the 1970s.
All three contentions build upon themes Stuntz explored in previous work (e.g., Reference Stuntzsee Stuntz 2001), although this book represents his first attempt to synthesize them in a format appropriate for a general readership. The tone is lucid and engaging. The text has been organized in such a way that all the references appear in endnotes, and although this makes for a more fluid reading experience, it unfortunately renders close scrutiny of Stuntz's meticulous research utterly exhausting and cumbersome.
The book is organized into three sections. The first explains how the American criminal justice system has been configured in such a way that allows the “unraveling” to occur in the first place. Stuntz charts the change of American criminal justice administration from a mode emphasizing local democracy to one characterized by centralized authority and discrimination since the 1840s.
The second section, which forms the main body of the book, explains the origins of the criminal justice system's current arbitrariness, discrimination, and severity. According to Stuntz, in the years following Reconstruction, 14th Amendment equal protection guarantees were repealed, leading the federal government to expand its purview and to centralize justice administration in order to protect newly freed ex-slaves from Ku Klux Klan predation. This ultimately led the Warren court to create due process provisions, such as Miranda and Mapp a century later, to protect blacks from modern forms of racial injustice.
Contrary to expectation, these decisions resulted in modifications that allowed prosecutors and law enforcement personnel to wield much greater discretion than juries and judges in determining just verdicts. Furthermore, as crime began to concentrate in cities, suburban citizens affected less by crime were given a disproportionate share of influence in voting for the prosecutors responsible for adjudicating crimes (see also Reference SimonSimon 2007). Ultimately these factors exacerbated racial inequality and precipitated an exponential increase in public punitivity.
The third and final section, which serves more as a departing wish than as a fully refined analysis, explores what steps might reverse the unraveling. Stuntz emphasizes a decentralization of justice administration to local control, in the hopes that it would facilitate the more sparing use of criminal punishment. Although the chapter is theoretically underdeveloped, it has a profoundly heartening conclusion.
Stuntz adroitly constructs a cogent argument from a wide variety of data sources, ranging from primary legal documents to secondary historical and empirical political science research. However, the original contribution of the book is not to be found in any one particular chapter or analysis; rather, it is the synoptic perspective afforded by looking at all the pieces Stuntz provides in one, coherent vision. In this, he succeeds admirably.
My reservations about the book are slight. First, for a book as thoughtfully considered as this, the titular Collapse is, while inviting for a front cover, somewhat peculiar; this is especially so given the more apt “unraveling” Stuntz offers throughout the rest of the book. Collapse connotes a spontaneity and irreversibility that belie Stuntz's description and his suggestions for improvement offered at the book's end. My other, more substantial, misgiving is that Stuntz's exposition at times seems somewhat too exhaustive: for example, his account of the 1876 decision in U.S. v. Cruikshank, which resulted in the narrowing of federal equal protection provisions, was unnecessarily thorough; the point could have been made in far less detail for equal effect.
These minor issues notwithstanding, this is a tremendous book. In addition to being a compelling read for the interested nonspecialist, Collapse would be suitable as an assigned text in an upper-level elective syllabus for a class on race and criminal justice, or for a course focusing on procedural and substantive criminal law. However, the book's merit extends far beyond these disciplines alone: there is food for thought for political scientists, historians, and sociologists alike. It is a fitting swan song for Stuntz's career.
