Welcome to the newest space on the internet dedicated to the torturous, complex, confusing, and costly world of American criminal justice. If you’ve ever looked at our “justice” system—the one that leads the world in incarceration rates—and thought, “Surely, this can’t be the best we can do,” then you’re in the right place.
We’re kicking things off by diving straight into the deep end with a system designed for rehabilitation but often feels like little more than an endless legal tether: supervised release.
For our inaugural series, we’re asking two simple, and apparently radical, questions. First, from a purely legal standpoint: Is supervised release even constitutional? We’ll be sharing hard-hitting analyses that suggest this system is a breathtaking overreach of state power—a sentence that just keeps on giving, long after the actual sentence was supposed to end. It’s time to stop treating perpetual surveillance as a necessary social amenity and start seeing it for what it often is: an end-run around due process.
Second, because we’re optimists (or maybe just delusional), we’re going to offer a solution. We’ll be publishing a practical blueprint to help courts and probation officers finally answer the question everyone avoids: Who can be safely cut loose? Because let’s be honest, the current standard often feels like, “If we can keep them under our thumb, we will.” We aim to give professionals the tools to make risk assessments based on data, not just bureaucratic inertia, saving taxpayers millions and giving people their lives back.
Once we’ve finished tearing down and rebuilding supervised release, stick around. We’ve got an exciting lineup of sacred cows to challenge, including the constitutionality of plea bargains (the legal equivalent of a gun to the head) and the very basis of our modern sentencing structure with a look at the Sentencing Commission. Oh, and don’t worry, we’ll certainly touch on the breathtaking hypocrisy and cost—in both dollars and human lives—of this multi-billion-dollar American experiment we call “justice.”
Grab your coffee. This is going to be a long, and hopefully infuriating, ride.
