We’re excited to welcome Jocelyn Simonson and Cook County Public Defender Sharone R. Mitchell, Jr. to the store for an event in celebration of Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration.

From reading books on mass incarceration, one might conclude that the way out of our overly punitive, racially disparate criminal system is to put things in the hands of experts, technocrats able to think their way out of the problem. But, as Jocelyn Simonson points out in her groundbreaking new book, the problems posed by the American carceral state are not just technical puzzles; they present profound moral questions for our time.

Radical Acts of Justice tells the stories of ordinary people joining together in collective acts of resistance: paying bail for a stranger, using social media to let the public know what everyday courtroom proceedings are like, making a video about someone’s life for a criminal court judge, presenting a budget proposal to the city council. When people join together to contest received ideas of justice and safety, they challenge the ideas that prosecutions and prisons make us safer; that public officials charged with maintaining “law and order” are carrying out the will of the people; and that justice requires putting people in cages. Through collective action, these groups live out new and more radical ideas of what justice can look like.

In a book that will be essential reading for those who believe our current systems of policing, criminal law, and prisons are untenable, Jocelyn Simonson shows how to shift power away from the elite actors at the front of the courtroom and toward the swelling collective in the back.

A former public defender, Jocelyn Simonson is professor of law at Brooklyn Law School and the leading national authority on community bail funds. Her work has been cited by the Supreme Court and discussed in The Atlantic, the New Yorker, and the Associated Press, and she has written for the New York Times, The Nation, n+1, the Washington Post, and others. Radical Acts of Justice (The New Press) is her first book. She lives in New York City.

Cook County Public Defender Sharone R. Mitchell, Jr., is a passionate advocate for the rights of everyone represented by the Public Defender’s office and for reform to increase justice in the legal system and to keep communities safe. His six-year appointment began in April 2021.

Mitchell began his legal career as an assistant public defender in Cook County, including assignments in the Civil, First Municipal, and Felony Trial Divisions. He later joined the Illinois Justice Project, one of the state’s leading criminal justice reform non-profits, becoming that organization’s director in 2019.

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