People send me books to review all the time. To some extent, I try to read them. I say try, because most are blog posts spread over a few hundred pages, or personal stories of injustice that are largely the same as the last hundred personal stories of injustice. But over the past couple years, a new genre of book on criminal law reform has emerged. It’s got one singular feature: It’s mostly written in adjectives and adverbs rather than nouns. In other words, it’s filled with passion and devoid of substance.

Which is why I appreciate this book review of “Usual Cruelty,” written by Alec Karakatsanis and reviewed at Slate by Lucy Lang. The subtitle of her review strikes the perfect note.

A new book argues that the “rule of law” is unjust. As a former prosecutor, I agree.

Because a review of one person’s book is all about the reviewer,* as if anyone considering the book was asking themselves, but does Lucy Lang agree? In fairness, it’s a very thorough, if rather long, review, but it does something important.

Usual Cruelty calls upon lawyers to align the values of American law with its practice to end our system of mass incarceration. Those decisions are perpetuated by the “punishment bureaucracy.” This phrase, aptly named by the author, characterizes a set of interlocking systems, many operated by lawyers, that define what and who is “criminal” and when and how severely to penalize those people—all the while obscuring those choices under the guise of neutrality and objectivity.

The name of the book struck me as an orthogonal take-off of Amy Bach’s “Ordinary Injustice,” which was a seminal (can I still use seminal?) work about how the system was a machine grinding out results with, at best, the appearance of viability but none of the substance. Like Karakatsanis, Amy’s descriptions made clear that much of the blame fell on the lawyers who went through the motions of representation, uttered the mantras in the courtroom that lawyers are supposed to utter, while defendant after defendant was thrown away.

Amy was right, of course, in those courts where defendants were treated like cattle and their lawyers were only concerned with disposing of them quickly enough to survive on the paltry indigent defense fees they accepted.

So what does Usual Cruelty have to offer than Ordinary Injustice didn’t?

The book’s subtitle, “The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System” (emphasis mine), gets at the heart of Karakatsanis’ argument: The law has been used by the powerful as a tool to dominate the powerless, leading to the outrageous state of our mass punishment system. This concept is not new, but Usual Cruelty lays out a compelling and damning argument that lawyers play a central role in rendering the criminal legal system unjust.

The law as a tool of oppression has become a mantra, an article of faith that permeates much of the criminal law reform movement. And, indeed, the targets of the criminal law are disproportionately poor and minority. But that correlation doesn’t explain causation. Yet, it leaps over that detail to lay blame at lawyers for “rendering” the system unjust? Okay then, how so?

Karakatsanis describes the banality with which the wheels of law enforcement, the courts, and prison and supervision agencies operate because they must “go along with unspeakable things, … become desensitized to the pain we cause, and to live our lives without the intellectual and moral rigor that should have prevented so much senseless suffering of powerless people in the name of ‘law enforcement.’ ” As a former prosecutor myself, I relate to criminal lawyers—prosecutors, in particular—who may prefer not to engage with the notion that even the most well-meaning criminal law actors cause harm by virtue of their participation in these systems. I would urge my colleagues nationwide to reconsider the instinct to reject this book’s indictment of our work in the system.

Putting aside that three of the four “actors” aren’t lawyers, and trying my best to decipher the hyperbole taken for granted by believers, it would appear the argument is that the courts (which is where the lawyers hand out) have become “desensitized to the pain we cause.” Cite? I don’t “prefer not to engage with the notion that even the most well-meaning criminal law actors cause harm by virtue of their participation in these systems.” I engage with the “notion” all the time, daily, sometimes twice a day.

Is the point that by being a lawyer, by defending the accused, our mere presence lends legitimacy to the system? Is the argument that if we, the lawyers, refused to appear in court, or better yet, spent our day outside the courthouse protesting the suffering caused by the system to the powerless, we would be more virtuous?

Karakatsanis appears to argue that our participation in this system, by defending the accused, creates the gloss of “neutrality and objectivity.” While no one who actually defends people believes such nonsense, we do show up in court to do what we can with the system we have.

Having served as both a public defender and a civil rights lawyer, Karakatsanis has witnessed some of the most troubling aspects of the system, and his book poetically details what he’s seen through the stories of his clients. To Karakatsanis, meaningful change will not come from “reform” of the mechanisms that allow such treatment, but from their complete transformation.

And here’s where it goes off the rails. While much of the “reform” being done at this unusual moment in time when the backlash to political polarization has put progressives in positions to effect changes, we’re struggling to deal with the efficacy of reforms, usually formulated by people who indulge fantasy visions of human nature, people who commit crimes and conflated ideas of the problems such that the solutions may either fail or be worse than before.

Yet, Karakatsanis says these reforms aren’t good enough: we need to be completely transformational. What the hell does that mean?

There can be no doubt that prosecutors will have vital role to play in the slow, messy transformation of a punishment bureaucracy into a true justice system. One of the “progressive prosecutors” with whom Karakatsanis finds fault recently remarked to me, “I go to work every day knowing that I am committing harm by being part of the system. But I am going to keep going to work every day as long as I believe I am doing less harm than whoever else would be in my seat.” I suspect that Karakatsanis would, too, and we are all the luckier for the fact that he keeps working and calling on the rest to be self-critical in our own work. Usual Cruelty’s exposition of “the chasm between the law as it is written and the law as it is lived” should be familiar to all lawyers, as should the pursuit of eliminating that chasm.

When I question the efficacy of reform efforts, given how we now have the opportunity, if not the capacity, to change excesses and rules that have undermined constitutional rights, destroyed lives and failed miserably to produce the “tough on crime” Utopia we were promised, it makes me cringe to see it squandered on the same, but opposite, mindless gibberish from Team Woke.

When you wonder about this opportunity to introduce effective reform into a system that fails to satisfy anyone, remember the “chasm between the law as written and the law as it is lived.” This is the sort of meaningless rhetoric that cost us the opportunity to fix real problems with real answers. On the bright side, it’s one more book I won’t have to read, and one more headache I won’t have to endure.

*To be clear, this is not a review of Alec Karakatsanis’ book, which I haven’t read, but a review of the review of the book, which I did read. It made me sad.