Civil rights attorney Joseph Margulies distills his personal moral philosophy into just eight words: “There is no them, there is only us.”

A professor of the practice in the Department of Government, in the College of Arts and Sciences, Margulies has spent decades getting to know and defending people accused of heinous crimes. Some were imprisoned in the most infamous prisons in the world, including Guantánamo Bay.

Experiences that would have hardened many instead taught Margulies compassion and empathy. His new book, “Cast Out: A Call for a Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration,” opens with a quote from Leo Tolstoy: “If you feel pain, you are alive./If you feel other’s pain, you are a human being.”

The College of Arts and Sciences spoke with Margulies about his book.

Question: You describe American society today as “uncurious, ungenerous, and unyielding” and fundamentally unforgiving. Has it always been this way?

Answer: For me, the distinguishing feature of life in the contemporary United States is a cultural celebration of cruelty. As I write in the early pages of the book, “Yes, as a country we have been cruel many times before, and yes, not everyone behaves this way. But I can’t think of a time when so many people were so enthusiastically cruel, and when this enthusiasm for viciousness had achieved such cultural dominance.” More than anything, it is this celebration of cruelty that has made the country unrecognizable to me.

My book is less about where this cruelty comes from than what we should do about it. The root of this cruelty, as well as its most distinctive public expression, is a particular way of thinking and talking about people who do things we don’t like. We view them as “the other” and do our damnedest to cast them out for as long and as thoroughly as possible. It’s this way of thinking that I target in the book.

Q: You present case studies of people who have committed heinous crimes. What do you hope their stories will teach us?

A: The question people generally ask when they hear about a person serving a life sentence is, “What did they do?” That is the question of an unforgiving society. It imagines that we learn everything we need to know of a human being once we are told what they did to earn their ostracism from society.

But the forgiving society asks, “What happened? What brought a human being to this place?” In “Cast Out,” I tell the story of six people, all of whom took a different path to the worst day of their life. But in their very different stories, I try to reveal a shared truth: In all the ways that matter, I am no different from them, and they are no different from me.

Q: Given the level of violence you describe from both guards and prisoners, how can we make the criminal justice system more humane? 

A: There is no such thing as a good maximum-security prison, though there are certainly some that are less bad. Some, for instance, are less violent than others, which in practice means that life within them is less dominated by scarcity, since scarcity in prison, like everywhere else, encourages violence and brutality.

But when we talk about changes that make prisons better, the solution is not simply to eliminate scarcity. The solution is to eliminate the mindset that produced the scarcity in the first place. That mindset creates more than scarcity. It creates life sentences. It creates death sentences. It creates solitary confinement that endures not for days but for years. It destroys the body and warps the soul.

If you engage in another thought experiment, you’ll see what I have in mind. Close your eyes and ask yourself, “If my child made a terrible mistake and committed a horrific crime, what kind of prison would I want for them?” The answer, of course, is probably that you wouldn’t want them in prison, and that if you did, you would want them in a place that preserved their dignity and humanity even as it helped solve or resolve whatever problem that got them in trouble in the first place.

But I discovered long ago that everyone I have ever met in prison could be my child, and my child could be any of them. And I don’t need a layer of separation; I know, as sure as I know my left from my right, that they could be me and I could be them. That philosophy is on every page of the book.

Linda B. Glaser is news and media relations manager for the College of Arts and Sciences.