Punishment Without Crime : Basic Books : 9781541603608 : 1541603605 : 11 May 2023 : From a prize-winning Harvard legal scholar, ?a damning portrait? (New York Review of Books) of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminals     Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new perspective on inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over thirteen million criminal cases each year, over 80 percent of the national total. People arrested for minor crimes are swept through courts where defendants often lack lawyers, judges process cases in mere minutes, and nearly everyone pleads guilty. This misdemeanor machine starts punishing people long before they are convicted, it punishes the innocent, and it punishes conduct that never should have been a crime.