Alexandra Natapoff

Insurance companies have spent $17 million to defeat proposals to weaken or abolish the for-profit bail industry in the United States, a system that brings insurers $15 billion in business a year, according to a Reuters analysis of campaign contributions, company financial statements and interviews with more than three dozens experts on criminal justice, campaign finance or bail. The spending has jumped more than 10-fold since 2010 as insurers have led the industry’s lobbying effort, targeting laws in more than a dozen states, the analysis shows. The industry opposition comes as President Joe Biden and other Democrats have renewed calls to dismantle what they describe as a biased system that harms mostly low-income people...The coalition’s most recent success was in California, the nation’s biggest bail market, home to 3,200 bail agents and 21 bail insurers. In 2018, the state passed a law, known as SB-10, to replace cash bail with a system that would give judges - aided by a computer algorithm - discretion to decide which defendants posed a danger or flight risk. Most minor offenses would not require the assessment. Such minor offenses, known as misdemeanors, account for about 80% of U.S. criminal cases filed annually - and thus the bulk of detention and bail decisions, said Alexandra Natapoff, a Harvard Law School professor who has studied the extent and impact of such arrests.

Join the Harvard Law School Library on March 11 for a live screening and panel discussion of “Racially Charged: America’s Misdemeanor Problem,” a new documentary about the racial history and modern discrimination of the American misdemeanor system. The film was inspired by HLS Professor Alexandra Natapoff’s book, “Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal.” The screening is also part of the Policing in America lecture series at HLS.

It seems there’s no end to them. They are the recent videos and reports of Black and brown people beaten or killed by law enforcement officers, and they have fueled a national outcry over the disproportionate use of excessive, and often lethal, force against people of color, and galvanized demands for police reform...Alexandra Natapoff, Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law, sees policing as inexorably linked to the country’s criminal justice system and its long ties to racism. “Policing does not stand alone or apart from how we charge people with crimes, or how we convict them, or how we treat them once they’ve been convicted,” she said. “That entire bundle of official practices is a central part of how we govern, and in particular, how we have historically governed Black people and other people of color, and economically and socially disadvantaged populations.” ... Retired U.S. Judge Nancy Gertner also notes the need to reform federal sentencing guidelines, arguing that all too often they have been proven to be biased and to result in packing the nation’s jails and prisons... “The disparity in the treatment of crack and cocaine really was backed up by anecdote and stereotype, not by data,” said Gertner, a lecturer at HLS. “There was no data suggesting that crack was infinitely more dangerous than cocaine. It was the young Black predator narrative.” ... At Harvard Law School, students have been studying how an alternate 911-response team might function in Boston. “We were trying to move from thinking about a 911-response system as an opportunity to intervene in an acute moment, to thinking about what it would look like to have a system that is trying to help reweave some of the threads of community, a system that is more focused on healing than just on stopping harm” said HLS Professor Rachel Viscomi, who directs the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program and oversaw the research.

Arthur Lange was 100 feet from his driveway when the California patrol officer behind him flipped on his flashing lights. Rather than stop, Lange turned toward his Sonoma County home, pulled into his garage and closed the door. What happened over the next few seconds prompted years of litigation and a case to be argued Wednesday at the Supreme Court with sweeping implications for police power...Lange's case comes to the court at a moment of tension between police and communities of color after the police killing last year of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man. The incident, and others like it, prompted nationwide protests and some riots over the summer, forcing a national discussion about racism and police use of force. One of those incidents was the 2020 shooting death of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor, which occurred after police entered her Louisville, Ky., apartment during a drug investigation. Police had obtained a "no-knock" warrant, allowing them to conduct a search without notification. The city subsequently banned no-knock warrants. Some observers said expanding the circumstances under which a police officer may enter a home without a warrant could exacerbate the fraught relationship. "It wouldn't open the door, it would open the flood gates to police entry into a home," said Alexandra Natapoff, a Harvard Law professor who has written widely on the proliferation of misdemeanor crimes. "It would seem to be exactly the backward response to everything we have learned from George Floyd and Black Lives Matter."

If you were walking the streets of Las Águilas, an upmarket neighbourhood of Mexico City, in the early hours of February 28th 1995, you might have noticed a collection of casually dressed people up on the rooftops. Perhaps you’d have mistaken them for stargazers or late-night revellers. In fact they were a crack team of snipers, settling into place for an extraordinary operation...The target was Raúl Salinas de Gortari, a wealthy businessman and elder brother of Mexico’s former president. Salinas’s alleged crime? Assassinating his one time brother-in-law, a political rival...According to Alexandra Natapoff, a law professor at the Harvard Law School, who studies police informants, “people who are facing the deprivation of their liberty and punishment turn out to be extraordinarily creative, sophisticated and entrepreneurial about fabricating stories.” They frame “other individuals and doing anything they can in order to gain their own liberty.” There are also incentives for those in authority to believe informants, because they need to bring in cases. “This dependence can become so great that it creates a sort of perverse romance: ‘falling in love with your rat’,” Natapoff writes in her book “Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice”. Once agents are invested in a story they may find it difficult to reject that narrative in the face of inconvenient evidence.

An op-ed by Alexandra Natapoff: The novel coronavirus pandemic is making many Americans poorer and hungrier. Parents and children across the country report going to bed hungry. In California, tens of thousands of people now depend on food banks from San Francisco to Los Angeles to San Diego, where the lines of waiting cars stretch for miles. In the face of this global crisis, the state should be protecting the vulnerable, not cracking down on the desperate. But by Nov. 3 in this election, California voters may ratchet up the punishment for stealing food and other necessities. Proposition 20would, among other things, elevate certain types of thefts from misdemeanors into potential felonies with longer sentences. It would create harsher shoplifting penalties for people with criminal records. It would also create harsher penalties for people who shoplift with someone else more than once — for example, if two parents were to steal diapers on two occasions. Prop. 20 is a broad tough-on-crime bill with numerous provisions, and its new theft rules do not explicitly mention food. But grocery retailers clearly expect it to affect people who steal food, diapers and other necessities. Supermarket chains such as Albertsons Safeway, Ralphs and Costco have contributed $100,000, $91,800 and $50,000 to the “Yes on 20” campaign, respectively. High-end gourmet grocery stores like Bristol Farms and Gelson’s contributed $12,600. Prop. 20 represents a kind of punitive backslide for California. For the past few years, the state has been a national leader in working to empty its prisons and reduce penalties for low-level crimes. Prop. 20 would undo some of that progress at a moment of extraordinary social vulnerability.

The Supreme Court agreed to review whether law enforcement can enter a home without a warrant in hot pursuit of someone suspected of committing a misdemeanor...The court has ruled that officers can conduct such pursuits without warrants when investigating felonies but not minor traffic violations. This case presents something in the middle: misdemeanor pursuits. The dispute will be argued later this term and likely decided by sometime in June...Misdemeanors are “by far the most common basis for arrest,” Arthur Lange said in his petition to the justices, filed by the Stanford Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, a successful repeat player at the court. Lange was convicted of DUI after an officer followed him into his Sonoma, Calif., driveway. The officer stuck his foot under the garage door to stop it from closing and entered Lange’s garage. Lange’s motion to suppress was denied. He wants the court to reject a categorical rule allowing such pursuits for misdemeanors, which he said in his petition “contradicts the Court’s exigent-circumstances precedent, ignores traditional common-law limits on warrantless entries, and allows officers investigating trivial offenses to invade the privacy of all occupants of a home even when no emergency prevents them from seeking a warrant.” The case is significant on a number of fronts, said Harvard Law School professor Alexandra Natapoff, whose book on misdemeanors and the criminal justice system was cited in Lange’s petition. “It’s important because the privacy interests at stake are enormous,” she said. “It’s also extremely important because it represents the court turning its attention to an underappreciated area of criminal law enforcement that is enormous.”

According to a 2020 report by the Prison Policy Initiative, 74% of people in American jails have not been convicted of a crime. Sometimes this is because they’re considered a flight risk or danger to society, but the majority of individuals in jail are there because they can’t afford bail. And while inside, they’re often given a choice: plead guilty and get released, or stay in jail until a trial is scheduled, and hope they’re proven innocent. Most people take the plea bargain. The idea that individuals are innocent until proven guilty is supposed to be at the heart of our criminal justice system. But in reality, it’s not, says Alexandra Natapoff, a professor of law at Harvard University. “We are letting the pressures of the criminal system decide who will sustain a conviction,” she says. “So we are already committed, in some terrible sense, to punishing the innocent.”

The mass protests spurred by George Floyd’s killing have been more sustained and widespread than any this country has seen before in response to police abuse. When the initial ones prompted even more police violence—officers driving cars into peaceful demonstrators or beating them with truncheons, using chemical agents and flash grenades to clear crowds for a presidential photo op, pepper-spraying young and old alike—the aggression, much of it captured on video, only inspired more people to join the protests...What police officers spend most of their time doing is enforcing minor offenses, known as misdemeanors. Alexandra Natapoff’s Punishment Without Crime, a damning portrait of the oft-neglected world of misdemeanor enforcement, suggests that changing how we treat such offenses may be the most effective way to reduce unnecessary and costly police–citizen encounters. Scholars, lawyers, and crime-show writers don’t generally pay much attention to misdemeanors. Jaywalking and disorderly conduct don’t make for nail-biting drama or fundamental moral dilemmas. But it’s the misdemeanor system that affects by far the most Americans...Bold reform along these lines is possible—if the political will exists. At the moment, it does. But it often won’t. The politics of crime will far more often favor “tough” over “smart” crime policies. As the Harvard law professor and former deputy attorney general Phil Heyman has remarked, “It takes a little time to explain why one thing’s smart and the other thing isn’t. It doesn’t take any time at all to explain why one thing’s tougher than the next.” The tilt toward toughness is also driven by the fact that the institutional voices on crime policy—police unions, prosecutors, and prison officials—all have a vested interest in promoting longer sentences, more discretion, and more resources for the criminal law–industrial complex.

The police killings of George Floyd, Eric Garner and other black men and women began with allegations of a minor offense, such as passing a counterfeit $20 bill or selling individual, untaxed cigarettes. Misdemeanors — these types of low-level criminal offenses — account for about 80% of all arrests and 80% of state criminal dockets, says Alexandra Natapoff, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine and author of Punishment Without Crime. "It's surprising to many people to realize that misdemeanors — these low-level, often chump-change offenses that many of us commit routinely without even noticing it — make up the vast majority of what our criminal system does," Natapoff tells NPR's Ari Shapiro on All Things Considered. "The offenses can include everything from traffic offenses to spitting, loitering, trespassing, all the way up to more serious offenses like DUI or many domestic violence offenses," she says. "It's ... the vast majority of ways that individuals interact with police." Natapoff says the misdemeanor system has "not gotten its fair share of blame" for the racism of the U.S. criminal justice system and how it disproportionately affects people of color. "This is the beginning of how we sweep people of color, and African Americans in particular, into our criminal system," she says, through over-policing black neighborhoods, racial profiling and practices like stop-and-frisk.