“Self-Portrait With Portrait in Pupil” (1942) | Cor van Teeseling / Rijksmuseum / PDM 1.0
Emily Galvin Almanza is a former public defender and the cofounder of advocacy group Partners for Justice. Her legal career boasts impressive accomplishments and accolades, and yet, as Almanza herself recognizes in the opening pages of her debut book, The Price of Mercy (Crown 2026), her life would likely be very different had she not been met with compassion when she first came into contact with the criminal legal system at age 16. While dealing with substance use as a minor, Almanza was arrested. When Almanza was brought to court, however, Judge Leslie Harris, who Almanza describes as someone committed to “seeing potential in children instead of seeing threat,” chose to dismiss her case. Had Almanza’s arrest followed the path of most defendants, she would have lost her college acceptance and been left with limited opportunities as a person with a criminal conviction. Her personal story is one of many in the book that illustrate why our criminal legal system should prioritize reducing harm and recognizing people’s potential for growth instead of focusing on punishment.
A number of celebrated titles in recent years have focused on the criminal legal system; they often advocate for abolition, citing the system’s undeniably racist history or misguided criminalization of drugs. The Price of Mercy’s main aim is to educate the reader on both the realities of today’s failing legal system and the opportunities before us to build one that actually promotes the safety and welfare of society. Almanza does not specifically advocate for prison abolition in direct terms, or for a fix-all set of reforms; instead, she advocates for a variety of broader social efforts that bring us closer to a “world where we have so successfully invested in the well-being of our people and in alternatives to incarceration that incarceration itself becomes obsolete.” She describes this world as an ideal, North Star goal.
The book begins by mapping out each stage of the US criminal legal process, from policing and court proceedings to incarceration and re-entry, so that the reader can better appreciate the reality of our system today and its need for change. Almanza discusses misconceptions about public defense work and the structural imbalances in our adversarial court system. Public defenders, she explains, are often much more than lawyers; they are holistic advocates whose work promotes public health and even economic mobility by helping clients access rehabilitation centers, job opportunities, housing options, family connections, and other forms of support. But public defenders are severely underfunded and underresourced. Defense teams are constantly working on an uneven playing field where prosecutors have more money and institutional backing. For instance, Alamanza writes, “Most crime labs will look at evidence only upon a prosecutor’s request, and much of the time the defense does not even have access to the physical evidence … until trial.” Because the police currently oversee most crime labs, prosecutors act as de facto bosses for crime lab technicians, introducing a likelihood for unconscious biases to affect how forensic evidence is handled and presented. Almanza argues that our court system “cannot even pretend to be fair if just one side gets the vast majority of funding and staffing power.”
The Price of Mercy effectively illustrates how the criminal legal system becomes a trap for defendants without the financial resources to protect themselves. Desperate clients, represented by overburdened defense teams, and often held in inhumane pretrial jail conditions, are forced to take plea deals rather than risk lengthy and potentially unsuccessful trials and hefty sentences. As Almanza reminds her readers, 94 percent of people in state court (and 90 percent in federal) take plea deals instead of having their case tried, but these plea agreements often come with unforeseen consequences that can entrench a person in court fees, imprisonment, and lasting impediments to accessing employment.
Almanza makes clear that our current criminal legal system is built around improper and unproductive incentive structures, which prioritize efficiency over justice and punishment over rehabilitation. “Bad incentives make decent people do awful things,” she writes. Police officers are encouraged to make high numbers of arrests, and prosecutors focus on convictions. And much of how people are treated in jails and prisons, Almanza highlights, amounts to torture internationally. “On any given day in this country,” she writes,
tens of thousands of people are being held in solitary confinement, locked in a cell alone, with limited to no social contact or access to religious chaplains, educators, or treatment personnel, just a correctional officer dropping food through a slot in the wall three times per day. A few times a week, a person may be shackled in leg, arm, and belly chains and taken for one hour of “recreation” in a small caged area, which may or may not even be outdoors … Most people stay in solitary for one to three months, and in some states much longer. In Texas, for example, people in solitary confinement stay there for three years or more.
Simply put, carceral solutions to social problems merely keep prisons full, and “when the system itself takes the view that suffering is justice, it sets us all up for a worse, more crime-ridden future.” Almanza is hardly the first to observe this, but she presents her case with lawyerly precision and clarity.
The book proceeds to outline what can be accomplished by redefining the goals of our systems and implementing already proven methods to accomplish change. Almanza spends significant time showcasing ways we can respond to crime proactively, often by ensuring people have access to basic needs like housing and health care, particularly rehabilitative support for people with substance use issues. Almanza notes that during her time as a public defender, much of the criminal behavior she was addressing “was something the person in question might never have done if substance use had not led them into a deeply problematic situation.”
Recognizing that imprisonment as a form of punishment is an ineffective way to prevent crime, Almanza makes clear that even as we work toward a future where prisons are not needed, we must reconsider how we confine people in the present. Abolition, that is, does not happen overnight. We can, however, recognize that prisons fail to keep society safer and increase the likelihood of recidivism by exacerbating mental and physical health problems, isolating people from support, and setting them up for failure upon reentry. Reducing the time people spend in prison, holding correctional facilities accountable for their inhumane conditions, and implementing occupational licensing reform so that those with prior convictions have more opportunities to work are just a few of the ways Almanza suggests we accomplish incremental reform. Stressing that a better system is profoundly achievable, she notes, “We are not searching for solutions—they’re here, and they’re working.”
One success story Almanza highlights is community violence interruption (CVI), which “takes a public health approach to harm that would otherwise end up in the legal system,” such as treating gun violence like an epidemic rather than a result of interpersonal issues. This gun violence strategy involves identifying high-risk actors in the community and engaging citizen “interruptors,” who are, Almanza stresses, “crucially, from the local community,” to develop relationships and provide social support that steers kids away from gun violence. US cities who have adopted CVIs have seen 20–30 percent drops in homicide, saving lives. This strategy also saves money that would otherwise be devoted to responding to such crime; Almanaza notes that CVIs “can generate about $20 in savings for every $1 spent on the program.”
In March 2026, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani introduced the city’s first ever Office of Community Safety, with the aim of sending social workers, rather than police, to respond to certain nonviolent 911 calls. Almanza’s illuminating and concise study shows why such efforts are indeed a necessary first step towards a system of greater justice.
