Mixed Reviews for "Criminal Justice"--The Longest-Running Morality Play in Oakland

The simplest way to sum up my reaction to The Roots of Justice is to say that I wish that I had written it. Basically, this means that I am impressed, perhaps a little jealous. While a number of us historians have dealt with some combination of cops, crooks, courts, custodial institutions, and other constituent elements of criminal justice, no one has described any given system as a whole. This would be an important book even were it badly done; in fact, it is an impressive achievement, lively and insightful. Its materials, the usual criminal records plus the newspapers, are familiar but unusually rich in detail. If few of its concrete observations are startling, a number are original if only because no one has dealt with all of the same phenomena. Either way, I found myself nodding often when some prior opinion was confirmed or when I was brought to see what I had not before. The summary reaction, however, is not meant to convey a wholly unqualified approval. The combined legal expertise of Lawrence Friedman, professor of law at Stanford, and Robert Percival, an attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington, D.C., is a real source of strength. But is it permissible for a professional historian to wish that, with the materials available to them, they had dealt with certain issues in the way that a professional historian would? The Roots of Justice, in any case, is organized with the clarity of a legal brief. Following a general introduction Friedman and Percival go on to acquaint us with Alameda County and Oakland, its principal city, together with the several legal codes-state, local, and federal -which governed it. They then take us step by step through the criminal process, a temporal sequence -arrest, arraignment, adjudication, sentence, appeal, and incarceration -which is also, at several stages, a kind of spatial ascent. That is, as the

CLARITY · Criminal justice · Economic Justice · Morality · Newspaper · Political science · Sociology · Wish · Chemistry · Criminal Law and Evidence · Law · Legal Systems and Judicial Processes