It is easy to privilege certain kinds of “doing” in law. From constitutional law and the courts to statutory mandates and the legislature, these are highly visible examples of law in action. As such, their effect and import are deeply studied, and criminal law is no different. Yet there are so many ways to “do” and interact with criminal law, a key takeaway from Jocelyn Simonson’s book, Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration. Because her book encourages us all to expand our understanding of “doing” law, this book is a must read for scholars of criminal law and beyond.
Simonson’s book critically centers collective action by “everyday” people in and around the criminal legal system. She argues that certain categories of collective action cumulate as examples where groups of people not ordinarily considered to be doing criminal law are “resisting mass incarceration in their neighborhoods, counties, and states.” To understand these collective actions as radical forms of contestation, Simonson describes three key concepts—justice, safety, and the people—as the ideological foundation for mass incarceration in the United States. She defines traditional notions of justice as “finding and punishing individuals who have committed wrongs or engaged in disorderly behavior.” Safety is often construed the removal of those individuals from society by labeling them as criminal. Finally, the people tends to connote a good or neutral public that excludes both those accused of crimes and those resistant to mass incarceration. Together, these concepts constitute a series of ideas and assumptions that run beneath the operation of the criminal process and legitimize mass incarceration as status quo. Though these concepts are not always stated outright, they represent a “worldview” that, according to Simonson, “serves to uphold and disguise a system of oppression.”
The heart of Simonson’s book surveys “everyday acts in courthouses and legislative chambers” across the country that demonstrate “collective energy, care, and radical thought” to contest these conceptions of justice, safety, and the people. She “unearth[s] transformative ideas that are not going away” by laying out four broad categories of collective action by those who are or have been accused of crimes and community activists resistant to mass incarceration. Simonson develops each category as a separate chapter with rich examples drawn from in-depth interviews with activists and organizers. I summarize the categories with minimal reference to the on-the-ground examples due to space limitations.
Two chapters focus on how people interact with criminal court proceedings. For the first example, Simonson considers community bail funds—a pool of money collected to free people who are jailed because they cannot pay the amount of money ordered by a judge during a pretrial bail hearing. The practice whereby the group in charge of the money redirects the funds to post bail for someone else when cases are closed has expanded as a tactic of resistance to mass incarceration from the 2010s forward. Simonson suggests this collective action constitutes a “counter-logic”—“liberty becomes more than an individual interest—it becomes a communal interest,” thus casting doubt on existing assumptions about justice, safety, and the people.
As a second example, Simonson discusses courtwatching—where various people attend or call-in to the criminal court hearings of strangers as a group. Sometimes participants wear T-shirts and often they collect information and document practices. Ultimately, this act of watching can be a form of “wielding power.” For example, a 2017 courtwatching project by the Illinois Coalition to End Money Bail led Chicago criminal courts to release additional information about their bail practices. But even if courtwatching does not change the outcome of individual cases, it contributes to everyday people developing a “collective counternarrative.” Rather than telling the story of the criminal system as a space centered on the alleged bad acts of people arrested, courtwatching gives these groups a language to articulate the violence of the courtroom.
The awareness that comes from interacting with the criminal system contributes to and enhances more involved ways to shape both individual cases and the public’s understanding of criminal law. Simonson demonstrates this point through a chapter on different forms of participatory defense. For example, participatory defense “hubs” bring community members together with the accused to investigate and sometimes create additional evidence—like packets with information about the social background of the accused—for the defense attorney. “Collective defense campaigns” involve committees who work alongside the defense to combine individual advocacy with national political education around larger issues of criminalization. Both interventions harness “the collective force of strangers who support the accused while acting in solidary with them” to build the power to change public conversation about criminal law and policy at a systemic level.
The notion of “Peoples’ Budgets” comprises Simonson’s fourth example. Some of the same groups who organize community bail funds, courtwatching, and participatory defense go a step further to engage with and shape the allocation of money to the criminal legal system vis-a-vis other types of government spending. At times, groups conduct surveys on what safety means in marginalized and criminal law-impacted neighborhoods and thereafter translate their findings to challenge the existing budget. At other times, groups develop competing budget proposals with altogether different categories of government spending. But the value add of these interventions is not simply shifting the budget. Rather, “the groups that put together Peoples’ Budgets engage in public battles over ideas about local governance that would otherwise be taken for granted.” They contest, in a visible way, assumptions about how government should provide safety and security.
Ultimately, Simonson characterizes these acts of justice as critical to challenging mass incarceration. Her project reminds that change can flow from public conversation about the meanings of justice and safety. Further, such public conversations happen over time and, importantly, occur alongside and through collective action. Projects that raise up such important acts in legal academia ensure that such moments of contestation remain vibrant in contemporary society going forward.
