... a persuasive indictment of prosecutorial excess ... rich, novelistic prose ... Bazelon interweaves Kevin’s and Noura’s stories with a remarkable amount of academic research by law professors, criminologists and other social scientists. The endnotes, replete with charts and graphs, run to more than 50 pages and acknowledge intellectual debts to such thinkers as Angela J. Davis, Paul Butler, Michelle Alexander and William Stuntz. This combination of powerful reporting with painstaking research yields a comprehensive examination of the modern American criminal justice system that appeals to both the head and the heart.

Charged, though far-reaching in purpose, is above all a study of two cases in which prosecutorial misconduct or overreach put two people through hell. She tells these stories in microscopic detail, analyzing the background of each bizarre stop along the infernal circle—why bail is so hard to get and why it exists at all; why public defenders are often so inadequate—in a way that allows the specific case stories to become general truths. Her book achieves what in-depth first-person reporting should: it humanizes the statistics, makes us aware that every courtroom involves the bureaucratic regimentation of an individual’s life. She has a good ear for talk, and a fine eye for detail ... Yet, though Bazelon’s larger points about the madness of prosecutorial power are all impeccably well taken, the two central cases she uses to illustrate these points are somewhat surprising choices ... The matter of...innocence...may be less certain than Bazelon supposes ... Charged is meant to, and does, provoke pity and terror in us at the sheer inhumanity of all imprisonment ... [the] struggle to make sense of an existence now permanently enclosed within a prison’s walls is one of the more moving accounts in Bazelon’s book.

... reads like two books. Both are crucial to understanding the wretchedness of the American criminal legal process, and both offer something missing from most other books about mass incarceration: hope ... [Bazelon's] prose is so engrossing that even though the defendants’ stories are woven into the other parts of the book, I skipped those sections on my first read because I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen next. Readers who enjoy police procedurals will be gripped by Bazelon’s new genre, the prosecutor procedural, which is even more suspenseful because prosecutors are the most powerful and the most unregulated participants in the U.S. legal system ... the book’s breathless subtitle noting a movement to transform prosecution seems overly optimistic.

In her rigorous, compassionate, and vital book, Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration, [Bazelon] shines light on a critical but under-examined feature of the criminal justice system: the role of prosecutors in America’s crisis-level incarceration rates ... Mass incarceration is such an intractable American problem, but one gets the feeling that Charged could be a game-changer, giving voice and momentum to a growing desire for reform. (The lengthy appendix, which lays out concrete steps to fix the broken system, will surely help) ... To ensure that meaningful criminal justice reform is enacted, as this important and powerful book urges, citizens must begin by paying attention.

... excellently paced ... presents hope in the form of a new way forward, offering insights into reform-minded campaigns from a new generation of lawyers and scholars who prize transparency and fairness in sentencing. Though her evidence is grounded in research and case law, Bazelon’s prose is refreshing, accessible, and bold. Fans of Bryan Stevenson and Matthew Desmond will be rapt with attention and cheering on efforts to rebuild public trust with a prosecution system that aims 'to offer mercy in equal measure to justice.'

Bazelon skillfully illustrates [her thesis] by following the developments in two gripping cases with novelistic intensity ... Bazelon adeptly explains the culture that drives traditional district attorneys and the philosophies of reform-minded district attorneys, then briefly delves into the difficulty of preventing prosecutorial misconduct, the inequities of a bail system that effectively criminalizes poverty, systemic racial disparities, the sociological arguments for diversion, and how severe mandatory sentences distort the criminal justice system. Then, with modest optimism, she presents a road map for the emerging reform movement. This is a powerful indictment of the traditional prosecution model.

The author makes a convincing argument that if there were a larger number of justice-seeking prosecutors, we could reduce incarceration by a substantial percentage in a nation overwhelmed by prison costs ... impressively researched ... A vitally important new entry in the continued heated debates about criminal justice.