The Honorable Stephanos Bibas, United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit; Senior Fellow, University of Pennsylvania Law School

Today, criminal justice reformers are divided between those who favor insulated professional expertise and those who advocate more popular self-government. American criminal justice has become too bureaucratized. In the process, it has lost touch with its roots in local self-government and community values. Reformers should make the system more democratic, giving more power to affected communities and more weight to those communities’ values.