A law professor and former prosecutor reveals how inconsistent ideas about violence enshrined
in law are at the root of the problems that plague our entire criminal justice system--from
mass incarceration to police brutality. We take for granted that some crimes are violent and
others aren't. But how do we decide what counts as a violent act? David Alan Sklansky argues
that legal notions about violence--its definition causes and moral significance--are
functions of political choices not eternal truths. And these choices are central to failures
of our criminal justice system. The common distinction between violent and nonviolent acts for
example played virtually no role in criminal law before the latter half of the twentieth
century. Yet to this day with more crimes than ever called violent this distinction
determines how we judge the seriousness of an offense as well as the perpetrator's debt and
danger to society. Similarly criminal law today treats violence as a pathology of individual
character. But in other areas of law including the procedural law that covers police conduct
the situational context of violence carries more weight. The result of these inconsistencies
and of society's unique fear of violence since the 1960s has been an application of law that
reinforces inequities of race and class undermining law's legitimacy. A Pattern of Violence
shows that novel legal philosophies of violence have motivated mass incarceration blunted
efforts to hold police accountable constrained responses to sexual assault and domestic abuse
pushed juvenile offenders into adult prisons encouraged toleration of prison violence and
limited responses to mass shootings. Reforming legal notions of violence is therefore an
essential step toward justice.
