A professor of criminal law at the University of Chicago, Bernard Harcourt regularly takes his classes to prison, where many are traumatized by what they see. But his students are privy to only the tip of the iceberg. Before going to graduate school, Harcourt worked as an attorney with Death Row inmates in Alabama. In between motions and arguments, he recalls the dehumanizing grind of the administration of justice: “They would bring in twenty-five to thirty guys to be processed. And it was usually twenty-five African American young men, chained to each other in jumpsuits. Chained around the waist, arms chained to the waist, shackles on their legs… And I remember sitting in these courtrooms and thinking, it was as if the slave ship had just come into port.”
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