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Contributors
Along with Senior Editor Jacob Sullum,
Radley Balko oversaw the editing of this special issue on the
criminal justice system. Balko, 36, joined reason
in 2007 after serving as a policy analyst at the Cato Institute.
Before that he worked for “a string of aborted endeavors,”
including a failed dot-com and a year and a half at “a very
conservative nonprofit.” The latter job made him realize he was a
libertarian. “They scared the hell out of me,” he says. At the
beginning of May, Balko left reason to work for
The Huffington Post, where he will continue to blog, write
a fortnightly column on criminal justice, as well as longer
investigative features.
Julie Stewart argues against
mandatory minimum sentences in “Less Time, Less Crime” (page 44).
Stewart, 54, founded Families Against Mandatory Minimums in 1991
after her brother, a first-time offender, was sentenced to five
years in prison for growing marijuana—a sentence she says even the
judge didn’t agree with. “I couldn’t believe judges no longer
sentenced the individual but instead sentenced the crime,” she
says. Two decades later, her group has several victories under its
belt, winning greater sentencing discretion for judges in certain
drug cases and blocking state and federal bills that would have
imposed more draconian penalties.
In “The Guilt Market” (page 24),
Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los
Angeles, criticizes the use of criminal informants. Natapoff, 45,
says she became interested in the subject while working as a
federal public defender in Baltimore, “where snitching is a common
fact of life for inner-city residents.” Eventually she spent two
years writing Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of
American Justice (NYU Press). The “hardest part” of writing
the book, she says, was trying to do justice to the topic. Its so
broad: spanning law, culture, race, and politics. I was
worried that I wouldnt properly convey the importance.
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