This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, May 25th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

In Criminal Justice Reform focusing all or most of our attention on mandatory minimums or absurdly long

sentences for nonviolent crimes obscures an important element of the system.

In Alexandra Natopov's new book, Punishment Without Crime, she takes a deep dive into the misdemeanor

system, how it punishes behavior, and what it should exist to accomplish.

So a misdemeanor is essentially a low-level offense.

The legal definition tends to be any offense for which you can serve no more than one year incarceration,

although even that definition

varies. There are three, four year misdemeanors where people serve longer

periods of time than that and often low-level felonies are sentenced much like misdemeanors but the

technical definition doesn't really capture the variety and depth of the phenomenon

in effect we have an enormous world of low-level offenses.

Sometimes we call them misdemeanor.

Sometimes we call them violations.

Sometimes we call them ordinances.

Sometimes we call them petty offenses. They go by all kinds of names. They can be punished by a maximum of a year, six months, a few months, weeks, days. Sometimes people go to jail for them up front. More often they don't.

They're punished more frequently by probation and a fine.

And the idea is that there's this enormous world of low-level conduct that we punish criminally

through all these different vehicles that we will collectively call misdemeanors that permits the criminal law system, the criminal

law apparatus to extend enormous influence over millions of people every year

for relatively unremarkable conduct.

...