The political economy of plea bargaining

by Robert C. Schehr

ISBN: 9781032472157

Published: 2024-12-10

The Political Economy of Plea Bargaining provides the political, economic, and cultural context for understanding the evolution of plea bargaining as a juridical technology implemented to ensure the efficient administration of violations of criminal law. Across two Parts, this book contends that the confluence of political, economic, and cultural factors necessary to enhance legal preservation of the slave system and white supremacy spatiotemporally coincided with burgeoning northern industrial capitalism and the liberty of contract doctrine, and that each was contextualized within hegemonic liberal republican ideology out of which grew the implementation of an efficient technology of juridical control achieving normative legal status - plea bargaining. It argues that, as with their predecessors, contemporary actors operating within the criminal legal system and who are responsible for administering plea bargaining are perpetuating a system reproducing steering mechanism that...