In this post last year, I was pleased to spotlight a new essay series unveiled by the Brennan Center for Justice, titled “Punitive Excess.” Today, I received an email noting that the series in concluding in an exciting way (links from the original):
Today the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law published the final essay plus a new video (90-second version here) in its Punitive Excess series. The video includes voices from the essay collection, each showing a different way that the American legal system takes punishment to the extreme. Asia Johnson and Shon Hopwood speak from personal experience with being behind bars. In the last essay for the series, criminal justice experts Jeremy Travis and Bruce Western propose an “honest reckoning” with the harms of punitive excess as the path to a “new vision of justice that promotes community well-being, not oppression, and celebrates democracy, not racial domination.”…
The series will be published as a book by Columbia University Press. Lauren-Brooke Eisen, director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program, co-edited the series with Daniel Okrent.