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Bill Stuntz and the Pathological Politics of Crime Control

By Jonathan Simor

Those of us concerned with mass incarceration, and friends of the rule of law everywhere have lost a great friend and teacher. Harvard Law Professor William Stuntz has died of metastatic cancer at the age of 52 (read the NYTimes obituary here). Bill's crucial 2001 article in the Michigan Law Review, "The Pathological Politics of Criminal Law," (download it from ssrn here) took on the widely held view that excessive punishment in America was a result primarily of electoral politics. Instead, it was the interaction between electoral politics, influencing legislatures, and institutional design problems, primarily the unchecked power of local prosecutors, that combined to produce incentives for over punishment. The correction was crucial for helping us understand why excessive punishment continues even in periods when electoral politics moves on to other issues (as it has mostly since the late 1990s)...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on March 21, 2011 (boomark / email).