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Prosecution Complex: Persecuting Aaron Swartz and Degrading the Constitution

By Jonathan Simor

There should be a difference between prosecution and persecution The long ?War on Crime,? America?s longest, has gone on a lot longer (?67 to now), and done a lot more damage to American law and society, than most people reckon (at least those who missed my 2007 tome, Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracyand Created a Culture of Fear (Oxford University Press)).  Perhaps the most troubling and persistent feature is not our outsized prison population, what we call ?mass incarceration,? but an institution that arguably lies primarily behind that pathology, the outsized power of American prosecutors.  On a comparative basis, no other democratic society comes close to the discretion and politicization that combine in the American prosecutor...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on June 22, 2013 (boomark / email).