A Colony in a Nation

by Chris Hayes

The beat cop deciding to make an arrest, the local district attorney deciding to charge someone with five crimes carrying a max of forty years rather than one with a max of five—these are the individuals who comprise what we call the criminal justice system. But there’s no such thing as the criminal justice system. “The criminal justice system is not a ‘system’ at all,” Pfaff writes, “and treating it as such can lead analysts to overlook important causes of prison growth.” American criminal law is constructed, maintained, patrolled, and enforced through a highly distributed, at times byzantine and chaotic set of overlapping jurisdictions, interacting awkwardly with one another. No one takes orders from any unified entity. No single actor or group of actors created mass incarceration, and no single group of actors can undo it. We have no single switch to flip. The Colony is an emergent phenomenon.