The Jurisprudence of Consent

The Jurisprudence of Consent argues that the modern criminal legal system is sustained less by proof than by coercion. Jawanna Dean examines how plea bargaining has become the dominant engine of conviction and how the system uses pretrial detention, procedural delay, charge stacking, and the threat of harsher post-trial punishment to pressure defendants into surrendering rights. The resulting plea is then treated as voluntary agreement, even when the choice was shaped by fear, time, and unequal access to defense resources.
The analysis treats this structure as a legitimacy failure because a system that depends on pressure to function cannot credibly claim to be truth-finding, consent-based, or equally applied. The book also confronts the public cost of the prison pipeline and the downstream harm it produces. Taxpayers finance the housing of human beings inside institutions that rarely deliver meaningful reform, while collateral consequences impose lifelong penalties that continue after a sentence ends through employment exclusion, housing barriers, surveillance, and stigma.
Dean argues that this enduring punishment functions as a second sentence imposed outside the courtroom and that it deepens the legitimacy crisis by converting a finite judgment into a permanent condition. As a remedy, the book advances a redesign that ends punishment-prison as the default response to social harm and sharply narrows confinement authority. Confinement is reserved for proven predation or serious violence under strict due process, independent oversight, and time-bounded review, with explicit rejection of profit incentives and warehousing logic.
All other harms are redirected into enforceable repair mechanisms that prioritize victim remedies through restitution, compensation, protective orders, and structured accountability, rather than punishment theater. Prevention becomes the central public safety strategy through investment in housing stability, mental health care, addiction treatment, domestic violence intervention, and child protection capacity, funded by moving resources out of cages and into systems that measurably reduce victimization.
Written as a systems critique and policy doctrine, The Jurisprudence of Consent provides a disciplined vocabulary for evaluating legitimacy and a clear blueprint for replacing a coercion-driven pipeline with an architecture that proves, protects, repairs, and prevents.