current affairs

This is a book that needs to be read both by those who are interested in the relations between races in this country and those who think they are not. It is a scholarly but easily readable and compelling description of the insidious effects of race in the administration of criminal justice in this country.

Poor people and people of color suffer systematic injustice and harrassment at the hands of the criminal justice system. David Cole articulates the ways in which each injustice compounds the effect of the next -- from police brutality and racial profiling on the streets to jury selection and racist application of the death penalty. Unlike the average legal scholar, he writes with a style that is accessible and compelling.

When I read the review of this book in the New York Times Book Review, reprinted in the Chicago Law Bulletin (I am an attorney), I ran to several bookstores to find it. Almost at once I was disappointed at the sophomoric analysis and use of sources such as Newsweek and the New York Times. David Cole is pretty much dead on in the premise of each of his chapters, though I agree with the other reader that he may place too much blame on the Supreme Court. What is truely dissapointing is the shallowness and one-sidedness of his arguments along with his use of unreliable sources of information. The writing seems to me to be on the level of a college student, not a Georgetown University law professor. Which is very disappointing, because what he is saying needs to be said.