Outside the South, most cities’ murder rates are a multiple of the rates in those same cities sixty years ago — notwithstanding a large drop in violent crime in the 1990s. Within cities, crime is low in safe neighborhoods but remains a huge problem in dangerous ones, and those dangerous neighborhoods are disproportionately poor and black. Last but not least, we have built a justice system that strikes many of its targets as wildly unjust. The feeling has some evidentiary support: criminal litigation regularly makes awful mistakes, as the frequent DNA-based exonerations of convicted defendants illustrate. Evidently, the criminal justice system is doing none of its jobs well: producing justice, avoiding discrimination, protecting those who most need the law’s protection, keeping crime in check while maintaining reasonable limits on criminal punishment.

It was not always so. For much of American history — again, outside the South — criminal justice institutions punished sparingly, mostly avoided the worst forms of discrimination, controlled crime effectively, and, for the most part, treated those whom the system targets fairly. The justice system was always flawed, and injustices always happened. Nevertheless, one might fairly say that criminal justice worked. It doesn’t anymore.

There are three keys to the system’s dysfunction, each of which has deep historical roots but all of which took hold in the last sixty years. First, the rule of law collapsed. To a degree that had not been true in America’s past, official discretion rather than legal doctrine or juries’ judgments came to define criminal justice outcomes. Second, discrimination against both black suspects and black crime victims grew steadily worse — oddly, in an age of rising legal protection for civil rights. Today, black drug offenders are punished in great numbers, even as white drug offenders are usually ignored. (As is usually the case with respect to American crime statistics, Latinos fall in between, but generally closer to the white population than to the black one.) At the same time, blacks victimized by violent felonies regularly see violence go unpunished; the story is different in most white neighborhoods. The third trend is the least familiar: a kind of pendulum justice took hold in the twentieth century’s second half, as America’s justice system first saw a sharp decline in the prison population — in the midst of a record-setting crime wave — then saw that population rise steeply. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States had one of the most lenient justice systems in the world. By century’s end, that justice system was the harshest in the history of democratic government.

Take these three trends in turn. As drivers on our highways know well, American law often means something other than what it says. Roadside signs define the speed limit, or appear to do so: 65 or 70 miles per hour on well-built highways, 25 or 30 on local roads in residential areas, something in between for local highways and main roads in business districts. But drivers who take those signs seriously are in for a surprise: drive more slowly than the posted speed limit in light traffic and other drivers will race past, often with a few choice words or an upraised middle finger for a greeting. In the United States, posted limits don’t define the maximum speed of traffic; they define the minimum speed. So who or what determines the real speed limits, the velocity above which drivers risk traffic tickets or worse? The answer is: whatever police force patrols the relevant road. Law enforcers — state troopers and local cops — define the laws they enforce.

That power to define the law on the street allows the police to do two things they otherwise couldn’t. First, state troopers can be selectively severe, handing out fines for driving at speeds no higher than most cars on the road. Second, those same state troopers can use traffic stops to investigate other crimes (assuming one can call speeding a crime), stopping cars in order to ask permission to search for illegal drugs. That common practice gave birth to the phrase “racial profiling,” as troopers patrolling state highways stopped black drivers in large numbers, ostensibly for violating traffic rules but actually to look for evidence of drug offenses. Both enforcement patterns lead to the same bottom line. Because nearly all drivers violate traffic laws, those laws have ceased to function on the nation’s highways and local roads. Too much law amounts to no law at all: when legal doctrine makes everyone an offender, the relevant offenses have no meaning independent of law enforcers’ will. The formal rule of law yields the functional rule of official discretion.

So what? Arbitrary enforcement of the nation’s traffic laws is hardly a national crisis. Even discriminatory traffic enforcement is a modest problem, given the far more serious forms race discrimination can and does take. Why worry about such small problems? The answer is because the character of traffic enforcement is not so different from the ways in which police officers and prosecutors in many jurisdictions battle more serious crimes. The consequence is a disorderly legal order, and a discriminatory one.

In the 1920s, Prohibition’s enforcers imprisoned those who manufactured and sold alcoholic beverages, not those who bought and drank them. Today, prosecutions for selling illegal drugs are unusual in many jurisdictions — instead, prosecutors charge either simple possession or “possession with intent to distribute,” meaning possession of more than a few doses of the relevant drug. Those easily proved drug violations are used as cheap substitutes for distribution charges. Worse, in some places, drug possession charges have become one of the chief means of punishing violent felons. Proof of homicide, robbery, and assault is often difficult because it requires the cooperation of witnesses who agree to testify in court. If the police find drugs or an unregistered weapon on the defendant’s person or in his home, those witnesses need not be called and those harder-to-prove offenses can be ignored. The drug and gun charges all but prove themselves, and those charges stand in for the uncharged felonies.

Nor is the phenomenon limited to drug cases. Convicting Martha Stewart of insider trading proved impossible, but no matter: Stewart could be punished for hiding the insider-trading-that-wasn’t. O. J. Simpson skated on the murder charges brought in the wake of his ex-wife’s death. Again, no matter: Simpson now serves a long prison term — he will be eligible for parole nine years after he began serving his sentence — for a minor incident in which he tried to recover some stolen sports memorabilia. The government rarely charges terrorism when prosecuting suspected terrorists; convicting for immigration violations is a simpler task. In all these examples, criminal law does not function as law. Rather, the law defines a menu of options for police officers and prosecutors to use as they see fit.

Discretion and discrimination travel together. Ten percent of black adults use illegal drugs; 9 percent of white adults and 8 percent of Latinos do so. Blacks are nine times more likely than whites and nearly three times more likely than Latinos to serve prison sentences for drug crimes. The racial composition of the dealer population might explain some of that gap but not most of it, much less all. And the same system that discriminates against black drug defendants also discriminates against black victims of criminal violence. Clearance rates for violent felonies — the rates at which such crimes lead to suspects’ arrest — are higher in small towns and rural areas than in suburbs, higher in suburbs than in small cities, and higher in small cities than in large ones. Those relationships correlate both with poverty and with race: the more poor people and black people in the local population, the less likely that victims of criminal violence will see their victimizers punished. Bottom line: poor black neighborhoods see too little of the kinds of policing and criminal punishment that do the most good, and too much of the kinds that do the most harm.

A larger measure of official discretion has also coincided with the rise of pendulum justice. Beginning around 1950, imprisonment rates in the Northeast and Midwest began to fall. By the mid-1960s, the decline had accelerated and extended nationwide. The nation’s imprisonment rate fell by more than 20 percent, while the murder rate — a decent proxy for the rate of violent felonies and felony thefts more generally — doubled. In northern cities, these trends were more extreme. Chicago’s murder rate tripled between 1950 and 1972, while Illinois’s imprisonment rate fell 44 percent. In New York City, murders more than quintupled in those twenty-two years; the state’s imprisonment rate fell by more than one-third. Detroit saw murders multiply seven times; imprisonment in Michigan declined by 30 percent. The combination of those trends meant that the justice system was imposing vastly less punishment per unit crime than in the past. This turn toward lenity was followed by an even sharper turn toward severity. Between 1972 and 2000, the nation’s imprisonment rate quintupled. The number of prisoner-years per murder multiplied nine times. Prisons that had housed fewer than 200,000 inmates in Richard Nixon’s first years in the White House held more than 1.5  million as Barack Obama’s administration began. Local jails contain another 800,000.

The criminal justice system has run off the rails. The system dispenses not justice according to law, but the “justice” of official discretion. Discretionary justice too often amounts to discriminatory justice. And no stable regulating mechanism governs the frequency or harshness of criminal punishment, which has swung wildly from excessive lenity to even more excessive severity.

Why? Two answers stand out: one concerns law, the other democracy. As unenforced speed limits delegate power to state troopers patrolling the highways, so too American criminal law delegates power to the prosecutors who enforce it. That discretionary power is exercised differently in poor city neighborhoods than in wealthier urban and suburban communities. Far from hindering such discrimination, current law makes discriminating easy. That sad conclusion has its roots in a sad portion of America’s legal history. When the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of the “equal protection of the laws” was enacted, one of its chief goals was to ensure that criminal law meant one law alike for blacks and whites — that both ex-slaves and ex-slaveowners would be held to the same legal standards, and that crime victims among both groups received roughly the same measure of legal protection. That understanding of equal protection did not survive Reconstruction’s collapse. Today, the equal protection guarantee is all but meaningless when applied to criminal law enforcement, one reason why both drug enforcement and enforcement of laws banning violent felonies are so different in black communities than in white ones.

The democracy answer likewise has its roots in history: the history of American local government. In most countries, national governments or provincial governments enforce criminal law. Here, local institutions — chiefly city police forces and county prosecutors’ offices — do most of the enforcing, while locally selected juries judge those criminal defendants who take their cases to trial. Likewise, in most of the world prosecutors and judges are civil servants. Here, local prosecutors — the ones who try the large majority of cases — and trial judges (appellate judges, too) are, with few exceptions, chosen by voters of the counties in which they work. At least in theory, these features of the justice system give citizens in crime-ridden neighborhoods a good deal of power over criminal law enforcement in their neighborhoods.

That power is less substantial than it once was, thanks to four changes that happened gradually throughout the twentieth century. First, crime grew more concentrated in cities, and especially in poor neighborhoods within those cities. Historically, crime was not an urban problem in the United States: cities’ murder rates were no higher than the nation’s. In the last sixty years, that has changed. Poor city neighborhoods are more dangerous than they once were, and wealthier urban and suburban neighborhoods are probably safer. Today, a large fraction — often a large majority — of the population of cities and metropolitan counties live in neighborhoods where crime is an abstraction, not a problem that defines neighborhood life. This gives power over criminal justice to voters who have little stake in how the justice system operates. Second, the suburban population of metropolitan counties mushroomed. This shift in local populations matters enormously, because prosecutors and judges are usually elected at the county level. Today, counties that include major cities have a much higher percentage of suburban voters than in the past. This means suburban voters, for whom crime is usually a minor issue, exercise more power over urban criminal justice than in the past.

Third, jury trials, once common, became rare events. The overwhelming majority of criminal convictions, more than 95 percent, are by guilty plea, and most of those are the consequence of plea bargains. This change shifts power from the local citizens who sit in jury boxes to the less visible assistant district attorneys who decide whom to punish, and how severely. Fourth and finally, state legislators, members of Congress, and federal judges all came to exercise more power over criminal punishment than in the past. The details are complicated; how and why this change happened is one of this book’s larger stories. But the bottom line is clear enough: a locally run justice system grew less localized, more centralized.

All these changes limited the power of residents of poor city neighborhoods — the neighborhoods where levels of criminal violence are highest. Residents of those neighborhoods, most of whom are African American, have less ability than in the past to govern the police officers and prosecutors who govern them. As local democracy has faded, the rule of law has collapsed, discrimination has grown more common, and criminal punishment has become prone to extremes of lenity and severity. Here as elsewhere, correlation does not prove causation. But this coincidence seems more than coincidental. If criminal justice is to grow more just, those who bear the costs of crime and punishment alike must exercise more power over those who enforce the law and dole out punishment.

Which leads to an obvious question: How might things be set right? The solution to the system’s many problems has two main ingredients.

The first is a revival of the ideal of equal protection of the laws. Criminal punishment will not control crime at acceptable cost as long as punishment is imposed and the law’s protection is provided discriminatorily. The second ingredient is a large dose of the local democracy that once ruled American criminal justice. That second aspect of wise reform is already happening: the rise of community policing has made local police more responsive to the wishes of those who live with the worst crime rates. That trend needs to go farther. Plus, we need fewer guilty pleas and more jury trials in order to give local citizens — not just prosecutors — the power to decide who merits punishment and who doesn’t. More jury trials in turn require a different kind of criminal law: law that looks more like the criminal law of America’s past, and less like the speed limits that give state troopers unconstrained power over those who travel America’s highways.

William J. Stuntz was Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law at Harvard University.

Electronically reproduced by permission of the publisher from “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice” by William J. Stuntz, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2011.

The Montreal duplex where I grew up was filled with shag rugs and teak shelves overloaded with paperbacks, records and overdue library books. My mother found it impossible to throw out unused parts of Kleenex, packets of Sweet’N Low and food, period. Our kitchen counters supported towers of stale Danish and rotting bananas.

My mother, born in Kirgizia during a stop on my grandparents’ flight from the Nazis, struggled with fears of having everything taken away from her, and understandably saved provisions, protecting herself from reexperiencing deprivation. She’d only had one doll as a child, so I was showered with them. Friends envied my ludicrous Barbie collection — 200 dolls and two three-story fully furnished houses. They did not see the underside: stuffed animals and board games, bought on sale and still wrapped, forming mountains in the closet that left no space for my brother’s and my clothes. I was bombarded with toys and elaborate fantasy worlds – all I wanted was some reality.

Her formative years characterized by loss, my mom built physical barricades around her, making her inaccessible to her children and husband. Credenzas piled next to each other like Tetris blocks, swivel chairs metastasized across both floors of the house. She recorded every movie on cable – thousands of video cassette tapes from “St. Elmo’s Fire” to “Shoah” lined the den like brick walls. Ironically, she was obsessed with organizational material: highlighters and binders choked any remaining room. If I’d had a bad dream, I could not rush to her in the middle of the night – the path was occluded. I never got close enough to smell her. My father slept in a cleared-out area in the basement.

Dad and I took long Sunday walks downtown, where he joked about Mom’s Tower of Babel of grocery circulars and obstacle courses of parkas. I sometimes caught him before dawn on garbage collection days, quietly bagging expired coupons. We’d share a knowing eye-roll: For each item jettisoned, another one – or more – would emerge. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” he whispered, “and a vacuum cleaner.” I giggled, thankful that his sofa bed had an empty side for me to crawl into during the night.

I also cleaned my own pink room, wiping my dusty mattress with wet toilet paper. But hours later, a new pile of ceramic piglets littered my dresser.

“What is this?” I asked.

“For your collection,” Mom said. Her large frame stood in the doorway; she even hoarded calories.

Months earlier, I had shown interest in a pig candle. Where had she gotten these trinkets? How much more would be coming? I could do nothing to control the chaos which made me feel smaller and smaller. She tried hard to give me the things she hadn’t had, yet her gifts were suffocating me, taking up the space in which I needed to grow.

My mom’s piles were always barriers, but as I hit pre-adolescence, they became embarrassments. My classmates lived in neat houses with shiny built-ins and lemon-lime scents. Inviting friends over – especially boys – was an exercise in mad housekeeping. I scrambled to throw cheap suitcases into the cold storage, shut doors, and dust-busted magazine residues, hoping no one would enter the wrong rooms. Then, when she came home, my mother panicked, angry: “Where are my newspapers? Cleaning isn’t your job.”

“I know,” I wanted to say, “it’s yours.” But I didn’t. I sensed my mother’s pain. I didn’t know how to help.

I stopped inviting people.

This hoarding may have made some children rebel, but I projected the ugliness of my house onto my chubby sixth-grade body. I felt shamed, scared to get close to anybody, and I shied away from physical contact. When I finally had my first boyfriend, I was too afraid to even talk to him on the phone. He dumped me, which was a relief. After all, how could I ever bring him home? At 15, when I still hadn’t French-kissed a boy, I went to a friend’s party hoping to flirt with a crush. But his interest overwhelmed me and I ran out, terrified. I spent the night cleaning the kitchen cupboard, throwing out insect-infested flour and moldy tuna cans, desperate to rid this ugly out-of-orderness. When my mother walked in, she commanded me to put every container back exactly as I’d found it. “You can’t throw out things that don’t belong to you.” I had to sift through the garbage to retrieve cereal the same consistency as its cardboard box. I felt trapped.

While my Canadian friends went to local university, I insisted on studying in America. I set off on a search for home – a comfortable, calm place – launching myself into exile, the feeling I had felt in my family, figuring if I could control this experience, I could survive it. After college, I fled to London, where I worked in the visual arts and curated exhibitions, surrounding myself with sparse white-walled galleries and trendy beauty. From dorms to my first tiny flat, I became an increasing neat freak, preferring empty space to sofas, outright banning extraneous items like coffee tables. Through B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. dissertations on domesticity — exploring how dwellings create and mirror the self — and in a job as a curator at a museum of living rooms, I intellectualized to feel in control. In therapy, I struggled to understand that I was not my mother, nor her house. But I still felt uncomfortable having people over. Even at 30, when I met Jon and we developed our candid rapport, I continued to hide my hideous childhood abode from everyone, especially him.

But from the moment I entered the vestibule of his parents’ house that first Hanukkah night and spotted a human-size tower of junk mail, I was astonished. Jon’s family was wealthier than mine, so their hoarding comprised a different class of object. The dining room, bigger than any of my parents’ rooms, had several antique tables stacked on their backs, boxes from Sotheby’s, collector toasters and Tiffany lamps galore. But what surprised me more than the boxed-up Edwardian decanter collection was Jon’s attitude. After lighting the candles, we wandered through their sprawling four-story Victorian residence as he pointed out each library shelf and ceramic tumbler. “Just in case we have 65 guests for dinner,” he joked.

I barraged Jon with questions. I wondered if his mother’s hoarding emerged from her immigrant experience: She had moved from Africa to London; was it easier to attach to objects than to foreign English people? “Your mother is so petite. Is she afraid of losing her husband and being small and alone?” Jon chuckled at my blunt over-analysis. He wasn’t sure about the roots of his mother’s collecting, but what ultimately stood out to me was that he was OK with it. He was aware of his family’s craziness, but he was also aware it wasn’t him.

I could no longer hold myself back. What were the chances that two children of hoarders would find each other? “My mother has stuff too!” I said. “Reams of it. Thumbtacks, onesies, laundry baskets bought on sale. My childhood bed is currently a warehouse for obsolete fax machines and photo-printers. My friends complain that their inheritances are being spent on cruises. Mine is being spent on hole punchers. My mother’s house,” I said, pointing all around me, “is even worse.”

“Worse?” Jon stopped.

“Worse.” I worried that I’d gone too far.

“Wow,” he said after a pause. “I can’t wait to see it!”

As he opened an attic freezer filled with 10-year-old frozen kosher turkeys, I understood: Like me, he had grown up in the pockets of affection, surrounded by record players and hotel-shampoo collections. Our candor together countered our childhoods of hidden secrets. Being open and joking about our past messes could help clean them up. His detachment from his mother’s mishigas might help guide my own. My attraction to Jon was enhanced by his ability to face the ugly and the odd, to accept it without judgment or fear.

But most of all, I understood that after three decades, I had finally found someone I could bring home.

This past April, another full decade later, I watched with anxiety as movers unloaded seemingly endless stacks of boxes to the basement of my new home in Northampton, Mass. Would my books have gathered mold? Would my clothing be moth-infested? Would my sturdy law school bicycle even be functional?

And in fact, there were some disheartening moments — a silk dress passed down from my grandmother that had simply disintegrated — but the main reaction as I unpacked: What a bunch of junk. Here’s some of what I found: a desktop computer circa 1989, with its companion dot-matrix printer. A non-working halogen floor lamp. Cartons of music cassette tapes from bands I’d forgotten existed. Boxes of law school textbooks. (And yes, some of them were dusty with mold, but really, who cared?) The list goes on. And on.

It got me thinking about why I’d stashed all this stuff in the first place — and I had plenty of time to think as I hauled mountains of papers and ancient electronics to the town dump. Over the decades, I’d paid well over $10,000 — $10,000! — to stockpile these motley items, an amount far exceeding their value. I couldn’t stop imagining other uses for this vanished cash. How had I let this happen? To be sure, I was far from alone in this seeming lunacy. There are 51,000 storage facilities in the United States, more than seven times the number of Starbucks, and one in 10 American households now rents a storage unit, according to a 2009 New York Times Magazine report. But far from reassuring me, this just made the phenomenon seem stranger.

I remember shockingly little of what I learned in law school, but one article from my first-year property class has stayed with me over the years, in particular a quirky yet oddly profound observation that we’d be more distressed to return home and find our living room sofa gone than to learn that the value of our home had dropped by a few percentage points. This is because certain possessions are “self-constitutive.” They are intimately bound up with our sense of who we are. “A person cannot be fully a person without a sense of continuity of self over time,” wrote University of Michigan law professor Margaret Jane Radin in her seminal article “Property and Personhood.” “In order to lead a normal life, there must be some continuity in relating to ‘things’.”

If a fulfilling life requires roots as well as wings, my own life has veered decidedly toward the latter. My family of origin has scattered from London to L.A., and we have few remaining ties to the Midwestern city of my childhood. As an adult, I’ve lived in Washington, D.C., Manhattan, Mississippi (the Delta and Jackson), Nashville, Cambridge, Mass. (twice), and western Massachusetts (both the Berkshires and the Pioneer Valley). Single, no kids, I’ve traveled light. (At least, if you don’t count the storage.)

Perhaps holding close to my belongings has been a compensation of sorts, a way of making up for the absence of other enduring ties. Along with utility bills from the 1980s, a broken coffee maker, and a set of wicker window shades, my storage unit also sheltered items rich with personal meaning. The copy-edited manuscript of my first novel. A collection of rare books about the Deep South dating from my years as a vagabond newspaper reporter. The purple and pink neon wall clock bestowed by a once devoted boyfriend.

These things mattered, and I was glad to have them. At the same time, they also evoked a certain uneasiness, an anxious, unsettled sort of feeling that I struggled to make sense of. Buddhist teachings tell us that attachment is the source of all suffering. Everything we love and cherish will eventually be lost; that’s just the way things are. This is why we’re urged to ground our happiness in things beyond change and why Buddhists vow to take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma (teachings) and the Sangha (community) — the so-called Triple Jewel.

The concept of refuge struck a chord with me. In my own life, I’ve tended to invest deeply in objects collected and carried with me from place to place over the decades. The impulse is understandable, natural even. As Radin observes, we count on a certain external stability — for example, the ongoing presence of that aforementioned living room sofa. And yet more and more, for many of us, life is upsetting these expectations, making it difficult if not impossible to keep hold of what we have.

We live in an era of lost homes and lost jobs, of vertiginous stock market swings and careening retirement plans. The ambient surround of loss and fear can make us acutely sensitive to the costs of letting go — so much so that we may lose sight of the costs of holding on. In an era where family homes were paid off and passed on through generations, a sense of connection to place and possessions may well have tended to enhance our collective well-being. But in this time of unpredictable turbo-charged change, such attachments often come at tremendous cost both in dollars and in human pain.

In such uncertain times, it seems wise to think carefully about where we choose to seek refuge, about how we plan to meet our deepest needs for continuity and meaning. We might start with a question that Radin suggests in her book “Reinterpreting Property”: What are the connections that will enable us to flourish? We can do our best to safeguard the things we value while also recognizing we will suffer less if we can look for enduring sources of happiness.

As the ideas for this essay started to come together, I wanted to reacquaint myself with the Radin piece that had made such a strong impression on me more than two decades before. This was precisely the sort of need I’d anticipated in saving my law school files, and even as I reflected on the merits of letting go, I congratulated my foresight. I even knew just where the box was in the jumble that now filled my basement. But when I filed through its contents, Radin’s article was nowhere to be found. To be sure, I had plenty else from that long-ago property class — lecture notes, study outlines, even the syllabus. The only thing I couldn’t find was the one thing I needed.

It finally occurred to me that Radin was a real person with a real email address, and that this information would be readily available on the University of Michigan Law School’s website. She got back to me within an hour, identifying the book in which the essay appeared. For less than 10 bucks, it was on my Kindle, then a quick search, and there it was: the sofa reference I’d been seeking.

I couldn’t help noting that an email had accomplished what more than $10,000 in storage had not.

Then I went back to loading my car for another trip to the dump.

Instead of closets, though, I have stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. I have mountains of clothes, from Yumi Kim silk dresses to winter coats to dozens of pairs of fishnets, which live anywhere they can find a home: over doors, chairs and my couch, strewn across the floor, or crammed haphazardly into a dresser drawer. Don’t get me started on the towering stacks of books that periodically fall over onto me, or the years’ worth of magazine subscriptions, scrap paper, contracts and outdated VHS cassettes.

I’ve never seen the show “Hoarders,” but I always comforted myself with the notion that I wasn’t as bad as the people featured on it. I don’t have dead animals or hundreds of cans of tomato sauce I bought on sale. But while I can easily make that distinction, most anyone who walked into my apartment would be horrified, and rightly so. For a long time, I thought I was just “messy.” Then my mess evolved from something contained to my bedroom to a monster occupying every corner of my home. Food that should be discarded winds up in the freezer, beloved jewelry gets stepped on and broken, and I trip over my 25-pound Kettle Bell more often than I use it to work out. Like a high-functioning alcoholic, I have reached a point where I can no longer live in the hazy glow of denial. When I found that mice had eaten through not just my clothing, but also my cash (apparently they’ll eat anything) I realized I had a problem — a big one. I am a hoarder.

Five years ago, when my last roommate moved out, I let my hoarding freak flag fly … everywhere. Why not share the wealth? There was no one else to see it — I made sure of that. Whereas I used to bring home people I was dating, I’ve only had two guests in the last three years, one a date and one an interviewer, who only saw the neatest of the rooms and even then had to wait for me to tuck aside a pile of clothes so that she could fit herself into a chair. I had a long-distance relationship with a guy in San Francisco, and when he visited New York, I paid for a hotel room rather than let him get a hint of how I live.

Last year, I finally decided to hire a personal organizer. It was a big step, mentally and financially; for $5,000, she and her assistants spent a week sorting, tossing and clearing things out. When I returned home, after crashing elsewhere, there were 15 bags of garbage, not counting the magazines and newspapers for recycling. For the first time in years, I could see the floor.

I was thrilled, but also a little overwhelmed. Everything seemed to have its place, but where was mine? I didn’t know. The wide expanse of floor space, the smooth desk, seemed foreign, reminding me of the apartment’s emptiness when I first moved in. Gradually, so gradually that I barely noticed, my stuff started creeping back where it didn’t belong, until it again reached an unmanageable level.

I’d tried to hire an organizer a few years before, which was a giant failure. I was nervous but ready to make a dent in my disarray. I was quickly disabused of the notion that she could help me; she only dealt with mild clutter, and my mess was too much for her. I cried when she left, utterly ashamed that I was beyond the pale for someone who did this for a living.

Several friends have eagerly offered to help, their eyes lighting up when I describe my plight. They are the anti-me, people for whom the process of sorting and cataloging and discarding belongings makes them come alive, yet I couldn’t bear to have even those closest to me see the nitty-gritty daily reality of the extent of my problem. I was sure our friendships would be forever tainted.

I don’t consider myself materialistic; it’s not that I go on random shopping sprees so much as I have a very low threshold for what I “must” have. If I hear about a book I want to read, I’ll usually order it online rather than put in a library request. Yet once I get whatever item I’m hankering for, I don’t always put it to use (cut to the SodaStream I got as a birthday present last year, or the stereo I won in a contest, both sitting unused in my kitchen). The acquisition, whether it’s free or purchased, is what gives me a rush, not the use of said object.

My hoarding is also a portable activity; on any given day, you can find me carrying two giant tote bags, in addition to my laptop and an oversize purse. New acquaintances almost always comment on my bags, and people have recognized me when I’m out and about because of them. Carrying one bag feels almost dangerous. “Do you need everything in there?” someone will invariably ask, missing the point entirely. It’s not that I need every single item, but their existence, and my knowledge of exactly where they are located, soothes me. It means I am prepared, even if it’ll take me 10 minutes to find my inhaler or tweezers or Us Weekly.

I admit most of my things I don’t actually need, in the strictest sense of the word, but if you were to hold each up in front of me — as my organizer, who I am still working with, sometimes does — I’ll tell you I want to keep whatever it is. Give me the choice, and I’ll choose what feels familiar. As lonely as I may sometimes get, I have these objects to prop me up — sometimes literally. You never know what you might need … and that goes for the weekly Wall Street Journal crossword puzzles I keep in the hopes of someday getting to them.

Ever since I quit my six-liter-a-day Diet Coke habit, I’ve been convinced that we only make major life changes when we want to, not when other people want us to. The toughest part of this situation is acknowledging that, on some level, I enjoy clutter. My dream home isn’t some spartan utopia but one filled with items, treasures, keepsakes, with a place for everything (though not necessarily everything in its place).

There is something about belongings that I value highly, and it has nothing to do with their net worth. The Coco de Mer teacup with “Pussy Lover” in italics I treasure just as much as the giant Hello Kitty pillow I sleep with. The most expensive item in my house is a MacBook Pro. What I’m hoarding most of all are the memories intertwined with each item. The turquoise dress with the zipper I wore for an important first date? The K Records Lois 7-inch? It would feel like a crime to get rid of them. By getting rid of my stuff, I fear I’m getting rid of some essential part of what makes me me.

The rational part of me know that’s ridiculous. I was given a powerful reminder that you can’t take it with you when I attended my friend’s wake recently. We leave behind the legacy of our actions, our feelings, our words and perhaps our spirit, but our belongings are essentially worthless. I don’t want my stuff to be what people remember about me, something my loved ones have to sort through after I’m not here. For that matter, I don’t want it to be something that prevents me from living now — from having friends or lovers over, from having kids because I’m afraid they’d injure themselves amid my mess.

But I find it painful to reckon with this part of myself. I have no problem revealing that I’m into rape fantasies, but admitting that when I enter my apartment, bugs scurry away from me — that is much harder to own up to. At least once a month, I vow to devote myself to cleaning, to purging, to letting go, but it’s amazingly easy for other “urgent” projects to take priority. I want to change. I will change. For now, my home is my dirty, cluttered sanctuary. And I’m sorry, but you’re not invited.

What was worse: wasting paper or wasting space? I was stuck. And paralysis was becoming a familiar repose. I was definitely wasting something — my afternoon.

These days, we’re expected to be environmentally responsible. If you don’t want to be thought of as heartless, ignorant or, even worse, ultra-conservative, then you know the routine: Recycle, eat organic, drive hybrids, reuse metal water bottles, repurpose packaging, save documents in cloud space, compost and grow backyard and rooftop victory gardens. Well, maybe you do that. I actually murder plants.

But at the same time, we get frequent warnings not to let this “saving” and “repurposing” create clutter. The popularity of shows like A&E’s “Hoarders” and Style Network’s “Clean House” — not to mention the entire HGTV network — suggest a culture that desperately needs to get rid of its junk.

And what we do keep — from photographs to scuba gear — must be streamlined, organized or filed, if not digitally, then in recycled cardboard boxes or sustainable wooden cabinets handmade from naturally felled maple trees by blind Peruvian shamans. Our ideal homes resemble modern art museums with an antique touch or two to broadcast our bohemian roots. The message is clear: “Stuff” drags us down. (And “stuff,” by definition, does not include Apple products.)

But how do I make use of old things without living amid clutter? How can I make, say, a creative planter out of an old tire without first storing that tire in my garage? That’s the source of my angst lately: How can I throw something out — and put it to good use, too?

For me, this tug-of-war is nothing new. I was raised in a minimalist home by contemporary art world parents. (And, yes, I’m aware I make that sound like a condition. You would too if you had to sit on such uncomfortable chairs.) The immaculate design was geometric and spare with bursts of Alessi color from fluorescent orange nail clippers to acid green garbage pails. My parents discarded objects without sentimentality. They once threw out my Social Security card and, when confronted, shrugged: “You can always order another.”

My only living grandmother, Nana, was the opposite. She collected antique spoons, model shoes and truly creepy google-eyed baby dolls. Teasingly dubbed “the original flower child” by the family, she hocked knickknacks at flea markets, grew dahlias, picked berries for jam and knit blankets from balls of yarn, inevitably bought on sale. She saved Cool Whip bins in which she froze enough roasted turkey to feed an African village. And I can tell you from experience: There is nothing more disturbing for a child than opening a container with the expectation of whipped cream and discovering meat.

Though I inherited my mother’s discount-free taste, sometimes I related to my grandmother, too: I collected soaps, quarters and Strawberry Shortcake dolls and set them up as art installations to photograph in my childhood bedroom. Even as I derived incomprehensible pleasure from ogling my goods, though, I wondered what in the world was the point of such a collection. Why did I like them?

My grandmother’s health is just now truly failing and, lately, I sit at her bedside considering these lifestyle choices. What’s more beneficial to myself and to the world: a clean, calm, beautiful space or compiling every scrap to use and enjoy? What if I’m not capable of either?

At the supermarket checkout line, I stall for time. Do I choose plastic and enlarge a landfill, paper and kill a tree (while enduring judgmental glares from the Whole Foods checkout guy, who emits his own air pollution thanks to ineffectual natural deodorant) or bring hemp totes from home and accept “nerd!” taunting from my husband. When I clean out my closets, I’m loath to discard objects that might later come in handy. I rationalize: “I’ll eventually use those enormous solar operated headphones from that weird gift bag, right? These ballet flats don’t fit now, but I’m sure they might one day when it’s really cold out and my feet shrink!” Score one for Nana’s team.

My husband Andrew feels so guilty about trashing old items — from tufts of gray contaminated fuzz once known as “pillows” to incomplete decks of cards — that he actually eulogizes them, thanking them for their service as he drops them sadly into the ugly plastic garbage bin. The other day, Andrew displayed a sock-clad foot with massive holes exposing his heel and big toe. He announced: “I need to go to the sock repair man.”

When I gestured toward the garbage, he shook his head. “Have some respect! These socks are vintage. They’re older than you!”

Witnessing Andrew’s pack-rat habits sends me into disposal mode. I regularly throw out his Swiss cheese socks. I gave away those weird solar headphones. After all, I don’t want to live like “Hoarders” subjects, who discover dead pets behind six broken-down stoves. But then I begin to fear the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction: One of my best friends is a professional organizer (code for OCD) who threw away all her skinny jeans after putting on some happy weight in a relationship. Months later, after the breakup — nature’s best diet — she was back to her old size with nothing to wear.

I suppose we are all a product of the time we live in. My grandmother emerged from the Great Depression, when squirreling away items for future use was tantamount to survival. My parents’ generation was rebelling against the chaos of antique collecting and bargain shopping with sharp lines, geometric shapes and clean surfaces. And I suppose my dilemma between tossing and collecting shows the conflict we face today: We’re living in an environment that is fragile and overburdened, in the midst of a recession, no less, but as good American consumers, it’s hard not to just want the latest upgrade.

Me, I want the immaculate home and the wild backyard garden. (I also want this season’s Chanel lip gloss.) So I guess I will just try my best to find a balance. I throw away old socks and don’t feel guilty. I can have garage sales and let other people hoard my junk. I can donate to charity organizations. I’ve decided it’s OK to discard those yellowed envelopes, as long as I do it via the recycling bin.

At least I’m not spending hours stressing about it. Because time is one resource none of us can buy again or recycle. Every generation can agree on that.

Seriously, though. The series started out concentrating on traditional, non-gothic-horror variants of hoarders, the sorts of people who stockpile antiques or dumpster-dive and cram their belongings into every available nook and cranny of their homes until the place becomes an eyesore and a public health hazard. This episode and last week’s — which concentrated on hoarders of chickens and rabbits, respectively — amped up the ick factor. How can they possibly top this? With ferrets? Centipedes? Giant poisonous spiders?

“They’re in furniture, up in ceilings, in the walls, in the mattresses, everywhere,” said Glen, the rat hoarder. “They’re totally out of control. They’d crawl up in a pillow and start pulling my hair out, trying to make nesting material out of it.”

“They just crawl all over him,” Glen’s friend John told the video crew. “He just loves them.”

Hundreds of rats. Thousands. Everywhere.

Lisa the feline hoarder only seemed less disturbing than Glen because rats are innately more revolting than cats (at least to most people). Her place was a disaster, too, as homes on “Hoarders” always are: so much junk all over the place that she couldn’t find a place to sleep; cats crawling over everything; feline waste piled on the floors and tucked into the corners of furniture and in the folds of clothes. (One member of the cleanup crew confessed that the stench in her house was so bad he could barely breathe.)

And yet miraculously “Hoarders” still didn’t feel exploitative, even when Glen’s cleanup gang flushed rats from a decimated mattress while accompanied by playfully jaunty cue music that sounded vaguely like Danny Elfman’s scores for Tim Burton. (I pictured Edward Scissorhands trimming hedges.)

Some articles (at Salon and elsewhere) have wondered if this series isn’t just exploiting mental illness. (“‘Hoarders’ hurts the human spirit,” one claimed.) And it’s true that A&E’s fascination with extreme and upsetting behavior does point to a tabloid mentality, at least on the part of network executives looking to beef up ratings. But I don’t think “Hoarders” can be accused of cynicism. It’s sincerely empathetic. It depicts extreme behavior, but only as a means of finding a colorful analogue for a psychological process that “normal” people go through every day: the struggle to identify obsessive and/or self-destructive behavior and then do something about it.

The series isn’t solely a rubbernecking, voyeuristic freak show — though that’s the main selling point from the marketing department’s standpoint. (RATS!!! THEY’RE ALL OVER!!!!) The recent fixation on animal hoarding drives home the series’ focus on psychology — and its compassion. The hoarders are broken people, but I like how the show insists that (in theory, at least) they’re all fixable, that they can get back to some version of normalcy if they can take responsibility for the mess and clean it up — and in so doing, confront the traumas that are nearly always at the root of hoarding behavior.

Glen’s rat hoarding was a response to his wife’s sudden 1989 death from a heart attack, which he irrationally believed he could have prevented. Lisa’s cat hoarding was a reaction to an ugly divorce and to ongoing tensions with her dad, who helped her buy the house and now held the deed on it.

“I think the mess might be subconscious,” Lisa said. “It might be a passive-aggressive — I mean, doing it that way because of my relationship with my father … He’s a neat freak, and this is my way of getting back at him.”

By the end of the episode, Lisa had dug in her heels and become nearly paralyzed, refusing to join in the decluttering and cat wrangling. But Glen had begun taking control of his life — participating in the cleanup (which entailed knocking out sections of wall to flush out the rats) and talking to hoarding expert Dr. Robin Zazio about the event that triggered it all. Glen’s sudden eruptions of tears were the psychological equivalent of the show’s many close-ups of previously hidden rodents emerging through holes in walls and furniture — Freud’s return of the repressed.