The Political Economy of Plea Bargaining

Book excerpt: The Political Economy of Plea Bargaining provides the political, economic, and cultural context for understanding the evolution of plea bargaining as a juridical technology implemented to ensure the efficient administration of violations of criminal law. Across two parts, this book contends that the confluence of political, economic, and cultural factors necessary to enhance the legal preservation of the slave system and white supremacy spatiotemporally coincided with burgeoning Northern industrial capitalism and the liberty of contract doctrine, and that each was contextualized within hegemonic liberal republican ideology out of which grew the implementation of an efficient technology of juridical control achieving normative legal status – plea bargaining. It argues that, as with their predecessors, contemporary actors operating within the criminal legal system and who are responsible for administering plea bargaining are perpetuating a system reproducing a steering mechanism that historically constitutes a through line from Reconstruction to the present day. Following Von Mises, these actors serve as useful innocents, modern-day confused and misguided sympathizers. They are juridical actors who inherited and are perpetuating a system of conflict resolution that serves to maintain a form of social control uniquely situated to historically relevant political, economic, and cultural power in the United States. The Political Economy of Plea Bargaining will be important reading for legal and social science academics researching and practicing within the field of criminal law and procedure. It will also act as a valuable guide to the debates surrounding plea bargaining for students with a keen interest in criminal law.