among the must check blog sites for judges is the Sentencing Law & Policy blog of Professor Doug Berman. The title of a recent post of professor Berman is the title of this new essay appearing in Judicature authored by Jeffrey Bellin. The essaay draws from Bellin’s recent book, “Mass Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became Addicted to Prisons and Jails and How it Can Recover.”  Here is a section from start and from the close of this essay:

While people readily recognize the contributions of legislators, police, and prosecutors to incarceration rates, the role played by judges is obscured by a variety of factors.  One obscuring factor is that the American criminal justice system is not a system at all, but the illusion of a system generated by the interconnected decision-making of a series of independent officials, each with distinct roles.  This independent interdependence makes it hard to hold any single official actor responsible for over-incarceration.  Legislators enact criminal laws, police make arrests, prosecutors charge, and judges sentence; but each actor can point to someone else to explain why any particular individual gets locked up….

While their individual contributions can get lost in the day-to-day bureaucracy of the modern American “system,” judges play a substantial role in how many people are locked up.  And it is helpful to spotlight that role so that judges can be conscientious in assessing their contributions to the country’s incarceration rate and potential role in reducing it….

Of course, judges do not bear sole responsibility for incarceration rates. Mass Incarceration Nation highlights the role of all the officials in the criminal justice system, including legislators, police, and prosecutors, as well as the important role — spanning the book — played by a transient crime spike and the American public’s reaction to that spike. One of the book’s core arguments is that “it takes a village to send someone to prison.”  Every official actor had to cooperate to fill the nation’s prisons.  In a nutshell, that’s what happened.

But the book includes chapters on the important role played by judges.  After all, it is hardly controversial to recognize that judges matter; elevation to a judicial post is a much sought after, and properly celebrated, pinnacle of a legal career.  No one would seek the position if judges didn’t have a substantial influence on the cases that came before them.  Thus, it should be no surprise that judges played an important role in the country’s incarceration explosion.  The good news is that judges can help the country return to its historical norm of low incarceration rates. When that happens, the American criminal justice system will once again be recognized for its best features, not its bloated incarceration rate.