Private Criminal Justice How Private Parties are Enforcing Criminal Law and Transforming Our Justice System

The United States is in the midst of a significant re-evaluation of its criminal justice system, with increasing calls for reforming or defunding the police and efforts to curb mass incarceration. But focusing on the public criminal justice system paints an incomplete picture of how we address criminal activity. In Private Criminal Justice, Ric Simmons shows how significant amounts of criminal activity are detected by private police and how many disputes are settled, not in public courts, but through informal agreements between the victim and the accused or through adjudicative procedures run by private institutions. In this timely and eye-opening book, Simmons examines the vast, diverse, and under-appreciated private criminal justice system, suggesting reforms that can make these private responses more fair and revealing lessons the private criminal justice system can teach reformers of the public criminal justice system.

1. Criminal justice without the state; 2. A brief history of crime; 3. Public failings, private opportunities; 4. Private law enforcement; 5 Private criminal settlements as plea bargains; 6. Private criminal settlements as blackmail; 7. Private adjudications; 8. Private dispositions; 9. Regulating private criminal justice; 10. The verdict on private criminal justice.

Ric Simmons is a Professor of Law at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. He is the author of Smart Surveillance: How to Interpret the Fourth Amendment in the Twenty-First Century (2019) and the co-author of four textbooks on Criminal Procedure and Evidence.