This book is a must-read for all concerned citizens of the planet who can contribute something --- be it time, talent, nonfinancial resources, financial resources ---- to lighten the burdens of this time and age. Starting with the Philippine situation and taking a transdisciplinary approach, this book explores the nuances of a strategic link-up between the limited few with wherewithal and the many ordinary people worldwide with limited wherewithal but with unutilized potential. Using one comprehensive framework involving positive composite institutions, this book is a contribution to the work of creating systems of justice, people empowerment, poverty alleviation, grassroots development, saving hijacked democracies, boosting general economic demand, and promoting a more positive world order, while bringing philanthropy to a more efficient, more effective, and more potent level.

This book shows how to reduce out-of-control criminal justice and create greater public safety, justice, and accountability at less cost.

A "searing, searching, and eloquent" (Martha Minow, Harvard Law School) investigation into the role of the legal profession in perpetuating mass incarceration--now in an accessible paperback format from the award-winning civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis doesn't think people who have gone to law school, passed the bar, and sworn to uphold the Constitution should be complicit in the mass caging of human beings--an everyday brutality inflicted disproportionately on the bodies and minds of poor people and people of color, for which the legal system has never offered sufficient justification. Usual Cruelty offers a radical reconsideration of the American "injustice system" by someone who is actively--and wildly successfully--challenging it. Hailed by luminaries from James Forman Jr. and Vanita Gupta to U.S. Circuit Judge Bernice Donald, and MacArthur Award-winning poet and attorney Reginald Dwayne Betts, Usual Cruelty offers a condemnation of the whole deplorable enterprise, starting with profound questions about the specific things our system chooses to criminalize (marijuana plants, low-level gambling, petty theft) versus those we don't (tobacco plants, high-level gambling by bankers, massive wage theft by employers). It calls out a bail system that charges people money to go free despite the lack of any evidence this will make them more likely to show up in court or make anybody safer. And it explores the everyday brutality of our courts, prisons, and jails, and the ways in which the legal profession has allowed itself to become desensitized to the everyday pain these institutions inflict on our most vulnerable populations. Now in an accessible paperback format, Usual Cruelty will cement Karakatsanis's reputation as one of the most inspiring civil rights lawyers of our time.

This book offers a fresh perspective on the policy making process in the criminal justice system offering a detailed overview of both the theory behind it and how it plays out in practice with contemporary policy examples.