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Product Description: Paul Butler was an ambitious federal prosecutor, a Harvard Law grad who traded in his corporate law salary to fight the good fight. It was those years on the front lines that convinced him that the American criminal justice system is fundamentally broken--it's not making the streets safer, nor helping the people he'd hoped, as a prosecutor, to protect. In Let's Get Free, Butler, now an award-winning law professor, looks at several places where ordinary citizens interact with the justice system--as jurors, crime witnesses, and in encounters with the police--and explores what "doing the right thing" means in a corrupt system. Butler's provocative proposals include jury nullification--voting "not guilty" in certain non-violent cases as a form of protest, just saying "no" when the police request your permission to search, and refusing to work inside the criminal justice system. And his groundbreaking "hip-hop theory of justice" reveals an important analysis of crime and punishment found in pop culture.… (more)
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The book grew out of a
The book's strongest elements, by far, are when Butler talks about his own experiences as a prosecutor and how -- well-meaning as he was -- his position within the system inevitably caused him to take actions which were fundamentally incompatible with securing either justice or security. Butler writes these sections vividly, and they demonstrate well that Butler is far from some random hippie with a peace-and-flowers approach to dealing with crime. He was a believer in the role prosecutors play in America, and only slowly came upon the realization that his day-to-day activities as a prosecutor not only were not making America safer, but probably couldn't be reformed to do so even if he wanted to. So he left.
The portions of the book where he talks about specific reform provisions (jury nullification, decriminalization of drug possession) drag a bit, not because they're poorly argued but because they've been made before. There is less of an opportunity for story-telling here and more just a rat-a-tat-tat of facts, which can't really sustain a strong narrative flow.
But overall, Let's Get Free is a very solid read, and dare I say an important one -- not just because of the arguments he makes but because of where he comes from making them. Again, Butler is not some airy-headed academic. He's someone with considerable experience in the trenches of criminal law, and someone who makes clear he has precisely zero qualms about putting bad people behind bars. He just wants to make sure they're actually bad people, and that when they do go away the communities they leave behind are left stronger and safer as a result.