Charged Quotes

“Somewhere along the way, the balance of power between the prosecution, the defense, and the judiciary shifted. We have to readjust it. The stakes are so high—the well-being of so many communities and the trajectories of so many lives. Public safety depends on our collective faith in fairness and our view of the law as legitimate.”
― Emily Bazelon, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration

“the "criminal justice system accomplishes nothing we think of as its purpose," Sotomayor told her audience. "We think we're keeping people safe from criminals. We're just making worse criminals.”
― Emily Bazelon, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration

“The unfettered power of prosecutors is the missing piece for explaining how the number of people incarcerated in the United States has quintupled since the 1980s,”
― Emily Bazelon, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration

“Jackson added five years later. In other words, the prosecutor’s job is not to exact the greatest possible punishment. It is not to win at all costs. It’s to offer mercy in equal measure to justice.”
― Emily Bazelon, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration

“And as the movement spreads, it’s beyond the control of Washington and the Trump administration to stop. Local prosecutors handle more than 95 percent of the nation’s criminal docket, and by reinventing how they do their jobs, they can stand up to Trump, on issues surrounding punishment but also on immigration, drug policy, and civil rights.”
― Emily Bazelon, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration

“a democracy, people tend to uphold the law when they believe it is fair. It’s an understanding that’s fundamental to the legitimacy of state power.”
― Emily Bazelon, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration

“Here’s the thing: prosecutors also hold the key to change. They can protect against convicting the innocent. They can guard against racial bias. They can curtail mass incarceration”
― Emily Bazelon, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration

“The power imbalance blew my mind, frankly: I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how prosecutors had so much power with so little accountability,”
― Emily Bazelon, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration

“Writing up the results, the Vera Institute of Justice pointed out that if they don’t sufficiently recover, people who are victimized, especially when they’re young, are more likely to gravitate toward peers they think can protect them and to commit retaliatory violence themselves.”
― Emily Bazelon, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration

“The central point is this: in the vast majority of cases, bail doesn’t make the public safer and it’s not necessary to make sure people come back to court. Its true though unstated function is to keep the wheels of the courthouse—and in the D.A.’s office—turning with quick guilty pleas. In Harris County, people who sat in jail because they couldn’t make bail were 25 percent more likely to plead guilty than those who committed similar offenses but were released. The effect of pretrial detention on conviction was twice as great for first-time defendants, suggesting that they were particularly eager—or desperate—to cut a deal. In the end, it’s not complicated. Jails serve as plea mills. When people are faced with the choice of waiting in jail for months or pleading guilty and getting out, it’s not surprising that they often take the deal.”
― Emily Bazelon, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration