Cornell civil rights attorney Joseph Margulies argues that the United States should replace social exclusion and punishment with a more humane understanding of people who commit serious crimes.
His new book, “Cast Out: A Call for a Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration,” draws on decades of work representing people accused of severe offenses, including prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay.
Looking beyond the worst act
Margulies, a professor of the practice in Cornell's Department of Government, frames his philosophy in the phrase, “There is no them, there is only us.”
In an interview with Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences, he described contemporary American culture as unusually accepting of cruelty and said that tendency is most visible in the way society treats people whose conduct it condemns.
The book presents six case studies of people who took different paths to what Margulies calls the worst day of their lives. Rather than asking only what a person did, he argues that a forgiving society should ask what happened and what circumstances brought that person to the offense.
Margulies said focusing exclusively on a crime can reduce an entire life to a single act. His case studies are intended to show common humanity without minimizing the harm caused by serious crimes.
Rethinking the purpose of prison
Margulies also challenges the conditions and assumptions behind maximum-security incarceration. He said some prisons are less violent than others, often because scarcity is less severe, but argued that reducing scarcity alone does not address the underlying approach.
That punitive mindset, he said, also produces life and death sentences and prolonged solitary confinement. He contends that a humane system should preserve dignity while addressing the conduct and conditions that led to incarceration.
Margulies asks readers to imagine the kind of prison they would accept for their own child after a horrific crime. He said that exercise exposes the distance people create between themselves and those in custody.
His work as a lawyer taught him that people in prison could be members of any family and that no fundamental boundary separates them from people outside prison, he said.
“Cast Out” develops that claim as both a moral argument and a critique of American incarceration. The book's central question is how accountability can coexist with empathy rather than permanent social banishment.
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