William Stuntz, a conservative law professor at Harvard, was suffering from colon cancer and spent the last three years of his life working on a book that aimed to rethink how our justice system has failed:

Stuntz submitted his completed manuscript to his editor at Harvard University Press in January 2011, about three months before he died at age 52. ‘The Collapse of American Criminal Justice‘ was published the following fall. In it, Stuntz describes how America’s incarceration rate came to be the highest in the industrial world; how the country’s young black males came to bear the brunt of its increasingly harsh penal code; and how jury trials became so rare that more than 95 percent of people sent to prison never had their guilt or innocence deliberated in court.

“Where American Criminal Justice Went Wrong.” — Leon Neyfakh, Boston Globe

See also: “The Caging of America.” — Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, Jan. 23, 2012