Parsimony and Other Radical Ideas About Justice

A whole new framework for thinking about criminal justice in America, with an all-star cast of contributors

After decades of overpolicing and ever-more punitive criminal justice measures, the time has come for a new approach to violence and community safety. Parsimony and Other Radical Ideas About Justice brings together leading activists, legal practitioners, and researchers, many of them justice-involved, to envision a justice system that combines the least possible punishment with the greatest possible healing to achieve the goal of public safety. Grounded in a new social contract heralding safety not punishment, community power not state power, the book describes a paradigm shift where justice is provided not by police and prisons, but in healing from harm.

A distinguished cast of contributors shows that a parsimonious approach to punishment, alongside a reckoning with racism and affirming human dignity, would fundamentally change how we respond to harm. We would encourage mercy in the face of violence, replace police with community investment, address the trauma lying at the heart of mass incarceration, reduce pre-trial incarceration, close the democracy gap between community residents and government policymakers, and eliminate youth prisons, among other significant changes to justice policy.

As movements to defund the police and abolish prisons tell us what we don't want, parsimony plus reckoning and healing provides a framework for limiting the state's capacity for violence, promoting the responsibility to help heal the wounds of punitive excess and answer for a history of white supremacy. Looking beyond critique, the authors ask us to reckon with racism, affirm human dignity, and imagine justice.