Last Friday night, I was out having dinner with my friend Andrew and his wife and family. In the course of hours of conversation, we inevitably came to passionately discuss who we were voting for in the Democratic primaries. With most of the primaries and caucuses looming in the next few weeks, almost everyone who’s paying attention has noted the rift in the Democratic party between progressives, who generally support Warren and Sanders, and moderates lining up to support Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and Biden (I’m leaving Bloomberg out of the math as he is neither progressive nor moderate in any democratic sense, but simply and above all a billionaire trying to buy the nomination).
It seemed, at this table lined with six Democrats who are all struggling to balance who they want to be President and who has the best chance of beating the guy currently occupying the White House, that each of us had one candidate we favor, and one candidate we just can’t get behind as the Democratic nominee. My favorite is Warren and I just can’t get behind Bloomberg; Andrew’s cousin is for Biden, but says she couldn’t vote for Bernie. We all agreed, with some hesitation, that we would vote for the Democratic candidate whoever that might be, but I left the conversation thinking about bail reform and how difficult it’s been to convince typically clear-headed moderates that putting men of color in jail before trial is inherently, systemically racist.
The twofold key to addressing this, more importantly than any other strategy, is to acknowledge that 1) racism persists in supposedly colorblind societies specifically because we don’t acknowledge it, and 2) a vast majority of people who refuse to acknowledge systemic racism, especially in law enforcement, self-identify as moderates. This “moderation” is embodied most prominently as a valuation of our own comfort above all else, and specifically in retaining that comfort above allowing equal justice and due process for people who aren’t living with our comfort level.
Notably, the justice reform that resulted in the First Step Act, enacted by congressional Republicans and signed by Donald Trump, developed slowly on the fringes of the right by politicians like Pat Nolan and Chuck Colson, both of whom learned the horrors of incarceration firsthand after their respective well-earned convictions for corruption. Slowly over the course of decades, Nolan and Colson warmed conservatives in power toward traditionally conservative imperatives to disown mass incarceration, like the tax burden and sheer governmental expense of housing and feeding so many people.
Conservative justice reform, though, has revealed itself to have at least a couple of substantial blind spots. One is many of its’ reformers’ reticence to fully acknowledge the systemic racism fueling our drive to criminalize and incarcerate people of color at such staggeringly disproportionate rates—in other words, the tendencies of conservative moderates. The other, connected blind spot, which I want to address next, is that conservatives, perhaps without exception (I’ve yet to see one), only address the back end. They focus on reentry and recovery from incarceration but don’t address its systemic drivers, like overzealous policing, god-like prosecutorial power, and a bail system that’s developed into a tool of class warfare. Only through addressing front-end issues like these will we ever truly reverse course toward decarceration as, to throw the most obvious cliché in the world at you, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
This type of solution is one that progressive reformers on the far reaches of the left are uniquely suited to address. By this, I mean 1) grassroots political organizations of composed of affected community members, 2) public defenders who are committed to the systemic changes that would even the scales of justice, and 3) progressive allies who are unafraid of public blowback for making the substantial changes that would allow equal justice to make its way into our courts. The third sector, by the way, is all of us who consider ourselves progressives—we just have to make the commitment to substantially hold ourselves and our government accountable to its stated principles.
These changes will provoke—are provoking—backlash. This blowback will come most forcefully and angrily from the near and far ends of the right, who will see this as being soft on crime, dems being dems, racially coded “urban” solutions, or whatever. But this racist and classist blowback will also be—in fact is—tolerated and even embraced by many moderates on the left, who are still susceptible to the racially-coded and tough-on-crime language that led our then-Democratic president and most prominent Democratic congressmen (one of whom is a former Vice President and current presidential candidate) to embrace mass incarceration just twenty-five years ago.
We’ve seen this ad hoc coalition between hardcore conservatives and colorblind moderates come out against the much-needed bail reform legislation in New York State over the past two months, with some of the framers of the legislation already showing signs of backing down from it as comfortable moderates threaten to succumb to fears charged by unacknowledged racial tension. To cite one of the more obvious examples, one former prosecutor running for Queens Borough President is trying to use these racist fears to fuel his campaign:
If we really mean to reverse mass incarceration, we need to recognize the racism in these fears in order to move past them. If there’s anything this Trump presidency has lain bare, it’s that no one is safe from the horrors we can inflict upon ourselves. As James Baldwin wrote to the great prison reformer Angela Davis in 1970 at the advent of our horrific turn toward the drug war and full-scale race-based mass incarceration: If they take you in the morning, they’ll be coming for us that night. We can’t stay in the middle forever, and if we wait too long our strongest voices will be silenced by the time we realize that it’s too late.
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