Cast Out: A Call for a Forgiving Society in an Age of Incarceration

"There is no them, there is only us."

"Margulies tells the stories of people who have done monstrous things but are not monsters, are not forever defined by their worst acts. He writes beautifully of pain and loss, but also of redemption and transformation....A wonderfully hopeful book about what it means to be human."--Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking

In Cast Out, civil rights lawyer Joseph Margulies insists that those who commit even the most heinous crimes are one of us and should be judged in a spirit of forgiveness. He explains that American society is too often unforgiving, preferring to cast out those we consider irredeemable by fixating narrowly on the question, "What did they do?", and imagining that those who have done great wrongs have no past worth learning and no future worth preserving.

But judgment in a forgiving spirit demands that we ask, "What happened?" What brought a human being to this place. Through intimate interviews, his rich chapters bring to life six men and women, sharing their (sometimes brutal) crimes, the grim but all-too-human paths that led them there, and their evolution and insights.

Eye-opening and unflinching, Cast Out makes us truly see those society locks away--the so-called "worst of the worst". It challenges the reader to see us in them and them in us, and in that way, to recognize the humanity we all share.

Author: Joseph Margulies
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 09/15/2026
Pages: 184
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.70w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9780807021705


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 06/29/2026

About the Author
Joseph Margulies is a writer and litigator, and Professor of the Practice of Government at Cornell University. As a civil rights lawyer, he was Counsel of Record in Rasul v. Bush in 2004, which gave Guantánamo detainees the right to challenge their detention in federal court, and in Munaf v. Geren in 2008, which gave American citizens the right to challenge their detention by the U.S. government.