Abstract
We have understood for centuries that crime is both the product of social forces and individual choice. We know now that crime is affected by economic deprivation, addiction, trauma, and mental health issues. But American criminal legal processes hide this reality by coercing defendants into expressing a profoundly simple narrative: crime is solely individual choice to do wrong. This coerced narrative finds defendants during a plea colloquy standing up in court saying that they are pleading guilty because they are guilty and for no other reason. A defendant who goes off-script to tell the judge that they have been repeatedly attacked runs the risk that the judge will refuse to accept the guilty plea and punish them at sentencing. That narrative of pure individual choice plays out throughout the criminal process. This Article focuses on the plea colloquy, sentencing, and parole. It also discusses how trial drives the same narrative but without coercing the defendant’s participation.
Coercing defendants to tell a story that is not their own is troubling in its own right. And it perpetrates epistemic injustice, yielding a damaged public understanding of crime. It hides our own societal failings and lets us distance ourselves from the wrongdoers. It pretends that threatening ever-harsher punishment will keep us safe—prioritizing a cheap illusion of safety over actual safety. And by stifling the stories that could build counternarratives it insulates our system of mass incarceration from this fundamental critique. If crime is driven, at least in significant part, by unaddressed trauma and poverty, better mental health care and an expanded social safety net could promote public safety more effectively than increased threats of cages.
Recommended Citation
Russell M. Gold, Look What You Made Me Do, 82 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 1377 (2025).Available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/wlulr/vol82/iss4/6