N*gga Theory. Jody David Armour

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      I will refer to a truly transformational DA committed to rolling back racialized mass incarceration as a “radically progressive prosecutor” because the simpler “progressive prosecutor” is already becoming a hollow buzzword, fashionable in political circles, but too often used to paper over unprogressive prosecutorial pasts. For instance, in her new book, The Truths We Hold, erstwhile 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) touts her record as a “progressive prosecutor,” from the start of her career as a line prosecutor in San Francisco, up through her tenure as California Attorney General. But does a “progressive prosecutor” defend cheating DAs who have been thrown off cases for withholding evidence (Orange County), falsifying evidence (Kern County) or lying under oath, as happened in a Riverside case, Baca v. Adams, involving a corrupt prosecutor chillingly similar to my dad’s DA?7 In Baca, Harris’ office opposed an appeal by a defendant who was convicted after the prosecutor in his case, just like my dad’s DA, lied to the jury about whether an informant received compensation (in the form of leniency) for his testimony. Harris’ office only withdrew its opposition to the defendant’s appeal after a panel of Ninth Circuit judges asked embarrassing questions about why none of the lying DAs were being charged with perjury and threatened to release an opinion that named names if Harris’ office kept up its misguided opposition to the appeal. And does a “progressive prosecutor” fight the release of a wrongfully convicted man, incarcerated based on the testimony of lying cops, as in the case of Daniel Larsen?8 Does a “progressive prosecutor” advocate for and then enforce an anti-truancy policy that arrests and jails mothers of kids who are chronically truant?9 Does a “progressive prosecutor” in 2014 simply laugh in the face of a reporter when asked about her position on marijuana legalization? Does a “progressive prosecutor” refuse to join other states attempting to remove marijuana from the DEA’s list of most dangerous substances? Does she refuse to resist the federal crackdown on weed?10 Of course not! But in every case Kamala Harris did, making her a “progressive prosecutor” only in a Pickwickian sense. To distinguish such so-called progressive prosecutors from truly transformative ones, I will refer to the latter as “radically progressive” or even “revolutionary” prosecutors, labels that incrementalists, centrists, and shape-shifting traditionalists may find harder to misappropriate in furtherance of their political ambitions.

      And true criminal-justice reform requires not only radically progressive prosecutors, but equally radical lawmakers, ones with totally different moral compasses than those guiding centrist Democrats like Joe Biden, who, in an address on live television in 1989 excoriated then-president George H.W. Bush for proposing a billion-dollar investment in the War on Drugs that, in Biden’s view, did “not include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, enough prosecutors to convict them, enough judges to sentence them, or enough prison cells to put them away for a long time.” As recently as April 2016, Biden insisted that he was “not at all” ashamed of his central role in passing the draconian 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, an accelerant for mass incarceration better known as the “Clinton crime bill.” Biden, Bill Clinton, and Kamala Harris are vivid reminders that many leading liberals and “progressives” rose to prominence by pushing carceral policies that treated punishing black people as political currency, in the process separating families, destroying communities, and hobbling whole generations.

      Radical criminal justice reform will also require the involvement of activists, advocates, journalists, commentators, clergy, public defenders, grassroots political organizations, and radically progressive voters, since they, ultimately, decide the political fate of radically progressive elected officials. Radical reform will require all these agents of change to take on the monumental task of redefining this nation’s values and moral norms in matters of blame and punishment. And the urgent question confronting any and all truly progressive reformers is this: Through what moral, legal, and political lenses do radically progressive people committed to making deep and lasting cuts in racialized mass incarceration look at blame and punishment?

      Nigga Theory expounds a radically progressive moral, legal, and political framework for DAs, Public Defenders, lawmakers, activists, and voters to help transform how we think and feel about the disproportionately Black minds, bodies, and souls we currently cage in the name of justice. At the heart of this framework is someone whom liberal critics of mass incarceration too often discount or deny: the violent offender. The widely accepted liberal narrative about racialized mass incarceration, as popularized by Michelle Alexander’s important and influential book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), argues that racist lawmakers responded to the civil rights era triumphs of Blacks over state-sanctioned racialized segregation—Old Jim Crow—by shifting to another institutional mechanism of racial oppression: the criminal justice system. According to Alexander, the federal government launched the War on Drugs, with “low-level nonviolent drug offenses” driving the explosion in US incarceration rates. “The impact of the drug war has been astounding,” Alexander writes. “In less than 30 years, the US penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase.” Recognizing that “violent crime tends to provoke the most visceral and punitive response,” Alexander spells out the most forceful argument of “defenders of mass incarceration” who claim that it is not a form of racial oppression:

      They point to violent crime in the African American community as a justification for the staggering number of black men who find themselves behind bars. Black men, they say, have much higher rates of violent crime; that’s why so many of them are locked up.

      Her go-to response to those who defend racialized mass incarceration as centered on violent offenders, reiterated in no uncertain terms throughout the book, is that “violent crime is not responsible for mass incarceration.” Warning readers not to be “misled by those who insist that violent crime has driven the rise of this unprecedented system of racial and social control,” Alexander proclaims: “the uncomfortable reality is that arrests and convictions for drug offenses—not violent crime—have propelled mass incarceration.”11

      The clear implication, of course, is that the “uncomfortable reality” of racialized mass incarceration might not be so uncomfortable if it afflicted mostly violent offenders rather than nonviolent drug offenders; a core premise of this book is that it should be an intolerably “uncomfortable reality” in relation to both violent and nonviolent offenders. This deep conventional moral distinction between violent and nonviolent offenders drives the liberal New Jim Crow narrative, centering it on the latter and repeatedly making their draconian treatment the touchstone of injustice. As recently as 2015, President Obama publicly propagated this factual cornerstone of the narrative: “Over the last few decades, we’ve also locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before, and that is the real reason our prison population is so high.” It’s infinitely easier to carry a brief for nonviolent than violent offenders in the court of public opinion. Accordingly, Alexander places great rhetorical weight on the distinction, declaring in one passage that “[w]e ought never excuse violence,” while urging in another that we ought to excuse low-level nonviolent wrongdoing because “all people make mistakes,” “all of us are sinners,” “all of us are criminals,” “all of us violate the law at some point in our lives,” and “most of us break the law not once but repeatedly throughout our lives.” For instance, “most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime,” she observes, and “[y]et there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses,” she laments—lost generations of Blacks “rounded up for crimes that go ignored on the other side of town.”12

      The rhetorical force of this language rests entirely on the factual assumption that we are talking about low-level, nonviolent offenses, for from the standpoint of prevailing values and moral norms it sounds preposterous to say all of us are violent criminals or all of us violate laws against robbery, rape, homicide, and assault at some point in our lives. And of course violent crimes are not ignored in privileged predominantly white communities, so it’s hard to say that violent offenders in black СКАЧАТЬ