14: Altgeld’s Protégé: Clarence Darrow and the Abolition of Prisons and Capital Punishment in the United States

Publication Date:
19 Mar 2025
Pages:
259–275
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529234800.ch014
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This chapter explores Clarence Darrow’s major cases and his classic texts Crime and Criminals: An Address Delivered to the Prisoners in the Chicago County Jail and Crime: Its Cause and Treatment. Darrow had several experiences that transformed and propelled him to become a significant political force for social reform, working to abolish the death penalty and the prison system more generally. In particular, his move to Chicago and his encounter with John Altgeld (1847–1902) were consequential. Darrow was his protégé and then his successor, carrying the mantle of reform and calls for selective abolition. In Chicago, Darrow witnessed firsthand the injustices visited upon the poor and mentally ill as they became entrapped in the maw of the bloody system of policing and incarceration. Darrow lost only one capital case: his first. He spent the next five decades seeking to make the criminal justice system more humane and more restorative, and not about state-sanctioned incarceration and murder. This chapter concludes by exploring how the radical visions and pragmatic proposals of Altgeld and Darrow can provide inspiration for contemporary reformers and penal abolitionists.

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