10 Affirmative Criminal Justice

West Coast Publishing Criminal Justice 2020-21 AFFIRMATIVE Page 1
West Coast Publishing

Criminal Justice Reform
2020-21
Affirmative
Edited by Jim Hanson
Researchers
Alex McVey, Angie Tinker, Eric Robinson, Jonathan Shane, Kinny Torre, Matt Stannard,
Serena Fitzgerald, Shelby Pryor, Tyler Durbin, William James Taylor
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AFFIRMATIVE EVIDENCE FILE INTRO

CRIMINAL JUSTICE 2020-2021
WEST COAST AFFIRMATIVE
Resolved: The United States federal government should enact substantial
criminal justice reform in the United States in one or more of the following:
forensic science, policing, sentencing.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
AFFIRMATIVE EVIDENCE FILE INTRO............................................................................................................2
TABLE OF CONTENTS...................................................................................................................................3
Topic Overview..........................................................................................................................................13
Resolved: The United States federal government should enact substantial criminal justice reform in the
United States in one or more of the following: forensic science, policing, sentencing..............................14
Topic Analysis........................................................................................................................................15
Affirmative Strategies............................................................................................................................17
Impacts: Crime overstated........................................................................................................................19
Crime Declining.....................................................................................................................................20
Incarceration Doesn’t Deter Crime........................................................................................................23
Majority Crime Non-Violent..................................................................................................................27
Violent Crime Decreasing......................................................................................................................29
Impacts: Responses to Circumvention Solvency........................................................................................33
Officer Agency / Stakeholders solves.....................................................................................................34
DOJ/Consent Decrees............................................................................................................................35
Use of Force Rules.................................................................................................................................38
A2 Discretion.........................................................................................................................................41
A2 Backsliding........................................................................................................................................44
A2 Police Unions....................................................................................................................................46
A2 CJS resilient......................................................................................................................................47
Aff Broken Window Policing......................................................................................................................48
1AC........................................................................................................................................................49
Inherency...........................................................................................................................................50
Plan....................................................................................................................................................51
Advantage One: Punishment.............................................................................................................52
Advantage Two: Black Lives Matter...................................................................................................57
Advantage Three: Sex Work..............................................................................................................61
Extensions.............................................................................................................................................64
Inherency Extensions.........................................................................................................................65
Punishment – Ideology......................................................................................................................67
Punishment – Police Abuse Impacts..................................................................................................73

Punishment – Poverty Impacts..........................................................................................................75
Black Lives Matter – Eric Garner........................................................................................................81
Black Lives Matter – Racial Profiling..................................................................................................83
Black Lives Matter – Violence Impacts...............................................................................................87
Sex Work – Profiling...........................................................................................................................91
Sex Work – Sexual Violence Impact...................................................................................................92
Add-on Advantage: Trans Rights........................................................................................................94
Add-on Advantage: Gentrification.....................................................................................................97
Answers.................................................................................................................................................99
Answers to Crime DA – No Link.......................................................................................................100
Answers to Crime DA – Evidence Press............................................................................................101
Answers to Capitalism K..................................................................................................................103
Answers to Security K......................................................................................................................105
Answer to Decarceration K..............................................................................................................106
Aff Mandatory Minimums.......................................................................................................................107
Introduction.....................................................................................................................................108
1AC......................................................................................................................................................109
Inherency.........................................................................................................................................110
Plan text...........................................................................................................................................111
AD1 – Racial Inequality........................................................................................................................112
A) Uniqueness..............................................................................................................................113
B) Links............................................................................................................................................114
C) Impacts........................................................................................................................................115
AD2 – Prosecutorial discretion............................................................................................................117
A) Uniqueness..................................................................................................................................118
B) Links............................................................................................................................................119
C) Impacts........................................................................................................................................120
Impact Framing....................................................................................................................................121
AFF Extensions.....................................................................................................................................124
Inherency.........................................................................................................................................125
Solvency...........................................................................................................................................127
AD1 – Racial Inequality........................................................................................................................128
Mandatory minimums lead to racial inequality...............................................................................129

Higher minimum sentences for re-offenders exacerbate racial inequality......................................132
Mass incarceration hurts Black communities..................................................................................135
AD2 – Prosecutorial discretion............................................................................................................139
Prosecutorial discretion encourages guilty pleas.............................................................................140
Prosecutorial discretion targets racial minorities............................................................................142
Prosecutorial discretion leads to mass incarceration......................................................................147
Additional AFF arguments...................................................................................................................149
Economic cost of incarceration........................................................................................................150
Privatization of policing...................................................................................................................152
Answers to NEG arguments.................................................................................................................154
“Crime rates” answers.....................................................................................................................155
“Drug Trafficking” answers..............................................................................................................156
“Prison Abolition” answers..............................................................................................................158
“Antiblackness” answers.................................................................................................................159
“Safety valve solves” Answers.........................................................................................................160
Aff Prison Abolition..................................................................................................................................162
1AC CARDS...........................................................................................................................................163
Inherency.........................................................................................................................................164
Advantage 1: Profit Over People.....................................................................................................165
Advantage 2: Intersectional Violence..............................................................................................170
Solvency...........................................................................................................................................174
2AC Extensions....................................................................................................................................176
Prisons Bad: Dehumanization..........................................................................................................177
Private Prisons Bad..........................................................................................................................180
Prisons Cause Disease......................................................................................................................183
Prisons Cause Racial Incarceration..................................................................................................188
Prisons Bad: Anti-Queer Violence....................................................................................................195
Prisons Bad: Economy......................................................................................................................203
Social Spending Trade off................................................................................................................206
Solvency...........................................................................................................................................208
AT: Crime.............................................................................................................................................212
Aff Qualified Immunity............................................................................................................................213
1AC......................................................................................................................................................214
Advantage 1 Civil Rights......................................................................................................................215
Advantage 2 Accountability.................................................................................................................221
Affirmative Files...................................................................................................................................227
Over policing extension.......................................................................................................................228
Police lawsuits extension.....................................................................................................................230
Police training extension.....................................................................................................................232
QI standards bad.................................................................................................................................235
Democracy extension..........................................................................................................................236
Race extension....................................................................................................................................240
Rights innovation extension................................................................................................................242
Rights chilling extension......................................................................................................................245
Prison reform add-on..........................................................................................................................246
QI unconstitutional..............................................................................................................................248
A2 Depolicing/Over-Deterrence..........................................................................................................249
A2 Courts capital/politics.....................................................................................................................252
A2 Backlog DA......................................................................................................................................255
A2 Congress CP....................................................................................................................................257
A2 QI is precedent...............................................................................................................................260
A2 QI is common law...........................................................................................................................262
A2 Grand juries provide accountability...............................................................................................263
A2 State courts should interpret.........................................................................................................264
A2 Helps complainants........................................................................................................................265
A2 Deters new public officials..............................................................................................................266
Aff Voting Enfranchisement.....................................................................................................................267
End Felon & Prisoner Disenfranchisement......................................................................................268
1AC 1 of 7........................................................................................................................................269
1AC 2 of 7........................................................................................................................................270
1AC 3 of 7........................................................................................................................................271
1AC 4 of 7........................................................................................................................................272
1AC 5 of 7........................................................................................................................................273
1AC 6 of 7........................................................................................................................................274
1AC 7 of 7........................................................................................................................................275
Topicality "Sentencing" Answers.....................................................................................................276

Topicality "Sentencing" Answers.....................................................................................................277
Topicality “Criminal Justice Reform” Answers.................................................................................278
Inherency Extensions.......................................................................................................................279
Solvency Extensions.........................................................................................................................280
Solvency Extensions.........................................................................................................................281
Racism Links.....................................................................................................................................282
Racism Links.....................................................................................................................................283
Racism Impacts................................................................................................................................284
International Human Rights Links....................................................................................................285
International Human Rights Links....................................................................................................286
Democracy Links..............................................................................................................................287
Democracy Links..............................................................................................................................288
Democracy Impacts.........................................................................................................................289
14th Amendment Links....................................................................................................................290
14th Amendment Links & Impacts...................................................................................................291
14th Amendment Impacts................................................................................................................292
War on Drugs Links..........................................................................................................................293
Answers to States Counterplan: States Will Roll Back.....................................................................294
Answers to States Counterplan: States Will Roll Back.....................................................................295
Answers to Movements...................................................................................................................296
Prison Abolition Counterplan/Kritik Answers: Permutation Solvency.............................................297
Released Felons Only PIC Answers..................................................................................................298
Released Felons Only PIC Answers..................................................................................................299
General Kritik Answers....................................................................................................................300
General Kritik Answers....................................................................................................................301
Capitalism Kritik Answers................................................................................................................302
Capitalism Kritik Answers................................................................................................................303
Deterrence Answers........................................................................................................................304
2AC Case Offense/Extensions..........................................................................................................305
2AC: Case Offense/Extensions.........................................................................................................306
2AC: General Case Answers.............................................................................................................307
2AC: General Case Answers.............................................................................................................308
Responses to States Counterplan............................................................................................................309

States Counterplan Affirmative Answers.............................................................................................310
States Counterplan Doesn't Solve....................................................................................................311
States Bad on CJS.............................................................................................................................312
States Bad on CJS.............................................................................................................................313
Permutation: Do Both......................................................................................................................314
Permutation Solves: Cooperative Federalism..................................................................................315
Permutation Solvency: Cooperative Federalism..............................................................................316
Permutation Solvency: Stops Race to the Bottom...........................................................................317
Permutation Solvency: Federal Oversight Good..............................................................................318
Responses to Supreme Court Counterplan..............................................................................................319
A2: Death Penalty CP...........................................................................................................................320
A2: Juvenile Life w/o Parole CP...........................................................................................................324
A2: Mandatory Minimums CP..............................................................................................................328
A2: Net Benefit....................................................................................................................................333
Generic A2: SCOTUS CP.......................................................................................................................341
Responses to Depolicing Disadvantage...................................................................................................345
Depolicing isn’t real.............................................................................................................................346
Public distrust turn..............................................................................................................................350
Depolicing doesn’t increase crime.......................................................................................................355
Depolicing good...................................................................................................................................358
A2 Recruiting crisis..............................................................................................................................361
Policing doesn’t matter........................................................................................................................362
A2 Reforms solving distrust now.........................................................................................................363
Social justice turns economic growth..................................................................................................364
Strong department culture key...........................................................................................................367
Crime does not stop economic growth................................................................................................368
Slowdowns don’t matter.....................................................................................................................369
Body cameras don’t link......................................................................................................................370
Responses to Fear of Crime Disadvantage...............................................................................................372
Non Unique—Fear of Crime High Now – Media..............................................................................373
Non Unique—Fear of Crime High Now—Polls.................................................................................374
Non Unique—Fear of Crime High Now—A/T Crime Rates Dropping...............................................375
Non Unique—Fear of Crime High Now............................................................................................376

Non Unique—COVID........................................................................................................................377
Non Unique—COVID........................................................................................................................378
Non Unique—Authoritarianism High Now – Global Practices.........................................................379
Non Unique—Authoritarianism High Now—COVID.........................................................................380
Non Unique—Authoritarianism High Now – Right Wingers............................................................381
No Link—Fear of Crime Thesis Wrong.............................................................................................383
No Link—Sentencing Reform...........................................................................................................387
No Link—Sentencing Reform...........................................................................................................388
No Link—Ending Mass Incarceration Popular..................................................................................389
No Link—Ending Mass Incarceration Popular..................................................................................390
No Link—Forensic Reform Popular..................................................................................................391
No Link—Forensic Reform Popular..................................................................................................392
No Link—Reforms............................................................................................................................393
No Link—Don’t Seek Legal Protection and Like the Plan.................................................................394
No Link—Bipartisan Support............................................................................................................395
Link Turn—Policing Reform—Authoritarianism...............................................................................396
Impact Denied – Authoritarianism on the Rise Now........................................................................397
Impact Denied—Data/Statistics.......................................................................................................398
Impact Denied—A/T Democratic Peace Theory..............................................................................399
Impact Turn—Fear of Crime Good...................................................................................................400
States Counterplan and Federalism Disadvantage..........................................................................403
Responses to Federalism Disadvantage...................................................................................................404
No Link: Flawed Interpretation........................................................................................................405
Non-Unique--Cyclical.......................................................................................................................406
Non-Unique--Policies.......................................................................................................................407
Federalism Impact Answers.............................................................................................................409
Localism Turn: Federalism Undermines Cities.................................................................................410
Localism Turn: Empowering State Governments Destroys Localism...............................................411
Localism Turn: Cities Impacts...........................................................................................................412

Localism Turn: Cities Impacts...........................................................................................................413
Corporate Control Turn...................................................................................................................414
Corporate Control Turn—Racism Impact.........................................................................................416
Pandemics Turn...............................................................................................................................417
Racism Turn.....................................................................................................................................418
Racism Turn.....................................................................................................................................419
Racism Turn.....................................................................................................................................420
Responses to Abolition Kritik...................................................................................................................421
Perm................................................................................................................................................422
No Alternative Solvency...................................................................................................................427
DA’s to the Alt..................................................................................................................................433
Link Turn – State Reform Good........................................................................................................438
Link Turn – Decarceration................................................................................................................440
Link Turn – Decriminalization..........................................................................................................442
Link Turn – Parole............................................................................................................................444
Link Turn – Bail................................................................................................................................445
Link Turn – Community Mediation..................................................................................................446
Link Turn – Policing..........................................................................................................................447
Responses to Biopolitics Kritik.................................................................................................................448
Responses to framing......................................................................................................................449
Perm................................................................................................................................................450
No Solvency.....................................................................................................................................452
Impact turns........................................................................................................................................453
State power is good.........................................................................................................................454
Rehabilitation is good......................................................................................................................459
Science is good................................................................................................................................461
Surveillance is good.........................................................................................................................463
DNA evidence is good......................................................................................................................465
Productivity is good.........................................................................................................................466
Responses to Capitalism Kritik.................................................................................................................469
Perms...................................................................................................................................................470
Afropessimism.................................................................................................................................471
Anti-Racism......................................................................................................................................472
Feminism.........................................................................................................................................474
Prison Abolition...............................................................................................................................476
Answers to Links..................................................................................................................................478
Prison Abolition...............................................................................................................................479
Private Prisons.................................................................................................................................480
Prison Slavery..................................................................................................................................482
Broken Windows.............................................................................................................................484
Critical Race.....................................................................................................................................486
Answers to Impacts.............................................................................................................................487
No War............................................................................................................................................488
Cap Solves Poverty..........................................................................................................................489
Answers to Alts....................................................................................................................................491
Revolution.......................................................................................................................................492
Prison Strike.....................................................................................................................................494
Empirics...........................................................................................................................................495
Local Politics....................................................................................................................................496
Responses to Feminist Kritik....................................................................................................................497
Permutation Evidence.........................................................................................................................498
Permutation – Do Both....................................................................................................................499
Permutation – Do Both....................................................................................................................500
Permutation – Do Both (double bind).............................................................................................501
Link Answers........................................................................................................................................502
No Link: The State...........................................................................................................................503
Link Turn – Reforms Can Challenge Patriarvhy................................................................................504
Alternative Answers............................................................................................................................505
No Solvency - Policymaking.............................................................................................................506
No Solvency – Restorative Justice Fails............................................................................................507
Intersectional Feminism Bad / Fails.................................................................................................508
Intersectional Feminism Bad – General Turns.................................................................................509
Intersectional Feminism Bad - Identity Conflation..........................................................................511
Intersectional Feminism Bad - Western...........................................................................................512
Intersectional Feminism Bad - Essentialism.....................................................................................514
Intersectional Feminism Bad – Black Feminism...............................................................................515

Intersectional Feminism Bad – Black Feminism...............................................................................516
Intersectional Feminism Bad – Legal Protections............................................................................517
Gender Binaries Turns.....................................................................................................................518
Carceral Feminism Turns.................................................................................................................519
Impact Answers...................................................................................................................................520
Patriarchy Answers – No Root Cause...............................................................................................521
Topic Overview
Resolved: The United States federal

government should enact substantial
criminal justice reform in the United States
in one or more of the following: forensic
science, policing, sentencing.
Topic Analysis
Overview of Words
The heart of this debate is the creation of an ethical criminal justice system. Central themes include the
role of state institutions in relation to non-state actors, unpacking criminality, and the role of
punishment/justice/rehabilitation. In other words, while this debate may be about criminal justice
reform, its implications extend far beyond prison walls.
Criminal Justice Reform

In every debate, whether it is about forensic science, policing, and/or sentencing, the aff must garner
offense by using these methods to institute sound criminal justice reform. In other words, regardless of
the means, all affs must be in pursuit of this goal. The discourse surrounding criminal justice reform has
changed throughout time but the most common patterns, both in the 70s as well as today, is the
insistence on decreasing incarceration rates and increasing the accountability (or even questioning the
necessity) of state institutions. “Accountability” does provide the affirmative increased flexibility
because administrators have various obligations e.g. inmate safety, reducing recidivism, etc. Finally,
debates on criminal justice reform presuppose a conception of criminality which also means that there is
ample Kritik ground for unpacking how the fear of the ontological criminal is utilized as a vehicle to
expand various structures of power as well as the role of retribution/justice.
Forensic Science
Forensic science is fundamentally the analysis process of pattern identification (the evidence at the
crime e.g. bullet holes, blood splatter, etc.) and DNA. When evidence is gathered at a crime, it goes to
forensics labs in attempt to gather more information; however, the research standards in labs are
woefully subpar and highly susceptible to bias due to the in-house relationship to the rest of the police
department. Moreover, the Judge, whom has the final say on the admission of evidence, does not have
the scientific qualifications to accurately render a verdict. All 3 problems primarily stem from the fact
that the field of forensic science does not have people with the proper academic expertise or
background as well as the need for the police to look effective and tough-on-crime.
The field of forensic science emerged mostly outside of universities in the 1920s and are still part of the
structure of law enforcement. As a result, the majority of forensic science researchers even to this day,
do not have more than an undergraduate degree—an incredibly small portion have Ph.D. leveling
training in the field. Over last decade, there has been critique of forensic science process. In fact, two of
the most authoritative bodies in the field, the National Academy of Sciences and the President's Council
of Advisors on Science and Technology, have forcefully expressed concerns about the reliability and
evidence of forensic science techniques. The aff as impacts related to justice/democracy, police
accountability, as well as community organizing.
Policing
Policing, in its simplest sense, is the enforcement of laws to maintain order. The police are the actor but
there is a lack of accountability on the law’s enforcement. Due to the ubiquity of police violence that has
gathered attention from the Black Lives Matter movement, the Harvard Implicit Bias test, as well as the
various racial flashpoints that have and are happening across the country, there is a renewed mass
discussion of the role of police institutions and policing itself.
Fundamentally, this topic explores the bounds of ethical policing. For instance, how can we best
increase the accountability of state-based institutions? Moreover, is there a possibility for the general
community to become more active in the very structure of police institutions? How do we best equip (or
demilitarize) police officers to best serve their communities and who do we even conceptualize as part
of the community in the first place?
There is a belief that police were created to protect society from those who would harm others so if we
were to decrease the role of state-based policing, the question remains: how do we hold criminals
accountable? Moreover, there is ample literature that proves that police and the prison system were
created after the emancipation of slaves in order to lock black folx into a place a servitude. In other
words, if our conceptions of justice are based in a history of anti-black capitalist violence, how does the
affirmative create a new ideal of justice?
Sentencing
Sentencing can be understood as the punishment that one receives for being found guilty of a crime.
This can range from court fines and fees, to community service and rehabilitation, to jail and prison
sentences. One of the biggest ways that the War of Drugs was able to exponentially increase the US
prison populations were through policies such as mandatory minimums (minimum sentences the judges
would be required to issue regardless of individual circumstance or opinion) and three strikes laws
which are the ground for life imprisonment. Both of which served to the incarceration of millions of
people—primarily people of color.
Sentencing debates are therefore concerned with discussions of punishment/justice as well as

rehabilitation. As a result, these debates are concerned with the transition away from mass
incarceration and the reintegration of former inmates back into society. This also means that the aff has
the privilege of parametrizing to not sentencing people for certain crimes e.g. non-violent victimless
crimes or conspiracy charges, as well as offense for why certain forms of prison practice are unethical.
Affirmative Strategies
Specific Plans
Please note that this section is not an all-encompassing encyclopedia—debate would be in a sorry state
if that were true! Instead, I wrote this section with the intent of providing salient and specific
background knowledge to be used as a springboard for your own inquiry and analysis. Regardless of the
particular plans, the affirmatives will be moving in the direction of increasing accountability and/or
decreasing incarceration rates.
Abolish Mandatory Minimums
Mandatory minimums limit judge discretion on sentencing. Many organizations such as the ACLU as well
as the NAACP have criticized federal policy because these policies are a major cause of the swelling of
the prison population. More insidiously, the majority of those effected were people of color and are
imprisoned in cages for non-violent offenses. Moreover, under the Violent crime Control and Law
Enforcement Act of 1994, the “Three Strikes” imposes mandatory life imprisonment if a convicted felon
has been convicted of a violent felony and 2 other offense 1 of which must also be a serious violent
felony. In other words, as stated is US V. Lulzim Kupa, by US District Court Judge John Gleeson, “no one
— not even the prosecutors themselves — thinks are appropriate.”
Ban the Death Penalty
Capital punishment for federal crimes was reinstated in July 2019 after a 16-year gap. Currently, there
are more than 60 prisoners on death row and the last federal execution was of Louis Jones Jr. in 2003.
Many advocacy groups such as the Amnesty International, the ACLU, as well as reports from the US
General Accounting Office, have found the death penalty be racist because controlling for all other
factors, the single best indicator of being sentenced to death to be the race of the victim. People of color
in general, and black folks in particular, are disproportionately impacted by the death penalty because
while there may have been more executions of white inmates, the national death-row population of
black inmates is about 300% higher than the US general population. Beyond arguments about race,
there is also space for a discussion of state power and the ethicality of it being an arbiter of death. There
are also economic arguments: a 2017 independent study of 15 states from 2000-2016 and found that
seeking the death penalty imposes an average additional cost of $700,000 per death row inmate.
Qualified Immunity
Qualified Immunity is a legal doctrine that is the chief way for law enforcement and public officials to
avoid accountability for misconduct and constitutional violations. Originally, in 1967 SCOTUS described a
modest exception for public officials that act in “good faith” but due to the evolution of case law,
Qualified immunity can be summarized as when SCOTUS ruled in Malley v. Briggs in 1986: “As the
qualified immunity defense has evolved, it provides ample protection to all but the plainly incompetent
or those who knowingly violate the law.” In other words, it permits law enforcement officers and
government officials (such as prosecutors or judges) to violate people’s rights with impunity. Qualified
immunity is therefore the defense that is used to insulate officers from police brutality and
discrimination. As well as advantages on democracy, judicial integrity, and community relations.
End Felon/Prisoner Disenfranchisement
The felony status that is imposed upon released inmates is a major cause of increased recidivism
because it legally enables employers to discriminate against applicants and thus furthers the
criminalization of poverty. Moreover, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, and Virginia, disenfranchise former
inmates by restricting felons voting rights. Florida recently implanted an amendment to restore voting
rights to 1.4 million felons, but this is currently being contested in the Appeals Courts. Regardless of the
particulars of states, since incarceration is a mechanism of power, the aff also has much critique ground.
As a result, the affirmatives have ample room for discussing recidivism, democracy, economic impacts,
as well as intersectional oppressions.
Impact Areas
Democracy/Community Relations
The prison industrial complex requires the disenfranchising of particular groups in order to maximize
profits through labor extraction. Mass incarceration fragments communities and leads to an increase in
recidivism, the destruction of local economies, the rendering of these populations as invisible. If we
were to enact criminal justice reform, then communities can start to rally and create social movements
that become the framework for large scale democratic reforms. Moreover, increasing accountability of
police officers can increase trust between the state and its constituents which can lower rates of
violence and crime.
Intersectional Oppression
Unpacking who gets criminalized as guilty by virtue of their existence i.e. criminality, leads the
affirmative to a discussion of the ways that criminal justice gets implemented through a racialized,
queered, and capitalist system and how its particularly effects those on the margins. Moreover, there is
substantial evidence that discusses the ways that prison policies inform our conceptions of security as
well as the fear of the other so there is sizable perm and solvency ground.
Economy/Social Spending
The expansion of the prison system has been enabled by the gutting of the social spending. So while
prisons cost billions of dollars annually, the government foots the immediate bill by defunding the
education system. Moreover, as prisons continue to incarcerate people, poverty becomes spatialized,
racialized, as well as cyclical. As a result, the affirmative has arguments related to resolving poverty and
wealth inequality as well as promoting long term change in other social programs.
Impacts: Crime overstated
Crime Declining
Crime rates in American cities are declining and are at historic lows.
The Brennan Center for Justice, The BCJ is part of the NYU Law school, June 12, 2018, “Crime
Remains at Historic Lows in America”, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-
opinion/crime-remains-historic-lows-america (accessed: 05/23/20)
“Crime rates in American cities once again declined in 2017, and remain near historic lows,” said Ames
Grawert, senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Justice program. “Contrary to President Trump’s
rhetoric using the threat of rising violent crime to stoke anti-immigrant sentiment, our data show low
rates of crime across the country. There are still communities like Chicago and Baltimore struggling to
control violence, but rather than resorting to fearmongering, leaders should instead embrace and
promote smart policing and real reforms that make all our communities safer.” Some key findings from
this analysis include a 2.1 percent decline in the overall crime rate of America’s 30 largest cities since
2016, as well as a 1 percent decline in violent crime and 3.4 percent decline in the 2017 murder rate.
Chicago and Houston saw some of the largest decreases in murder rates, which fell by 12.3 percent and
nearly 17 percent respectively. Chicago’s decline partially offsets its recent increase in homicides. Cities
including Baltimore and Philadelphia saw a rise in murder rates for 2017.
Crime rates have fallen across the board for the last quarter century
John Gramlich, Gramlich is a Senior Writer for the Pew Research Center, October 17, 2019, “5 facts
about crime in the U.S.”, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/17/facts-about-crime-in-the-
u-s/ (accessed: 05/23/20)
Violent crime in the U.S. has fallen sharply over the past quarter century. The two most commonly cited
sources of crime statistics in the U.S. both show a substantial decline in the violent crime rate since it
peaked in the early 1990s. One is an annual report by the FBI of serious crimes reported to police in
more than 18,500 jurisdictions around the country. The other is a nationally representative annual
survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which asks approximately 160,000 Americans ages 12 and
older whether they were victims of crime, regardless of whether they reported those crimes to the
police. Using the FBI numbers, the violent crime rate fell 51% between 1993 and 2018. Using the BJS
data, the rate fell 71% during that span. The long-term decline in violent crime hasn’t been
uninterrupted, though. The FBI, for instance, reported increases in the violent crime rate between 2004
and 2006 and again between 2014 and 2016. Violent crime includes offenses such as rape, robbery and
assault. Property crime has declined significantly over the long term. Like the violent crime rate, the U.S.
property crime rate today is far below its peak level. FBI data shows that the rate fell by 54% between
1993 and 2018, while BJS reports a decline of 69% during that span. Property crime includes offenses
such as burglary, theft and motor vehicle theft, and it is generally far more common than violent crime.
Crime has been steadily decreasing since 1991

Tim Lau, Lau is a staff writer for The Brennan Center for Justice, June 12, 2019, “Crime Rates in Largest
U.S. Cities Continue to Drop” https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/crime-rates-
largest-us-cities-continue-drop (accessed: 05/19/20)
Crime in the 30 largest U.S. cities is estimated to have declined in 2018, with decreases in the rates of
violent crime, murder, and overall crime, according to a new Brennan Center analysis of the available
data. Murder rates in particular were down by 8 percent from 2017, a significant drop. 2018 marks the
second straight year that murder rates have fallen, too, after increases in 2015 and 2016. Overall,
however, U.S. crime rates have dropped dramatically since peaking in 1991. “These continuing declines
show that increases in 2015 and 2016 were not the start of a new crime wave,” said Ames Grawert,
senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Justice Program. “If final estimates hold when the FBI releases its
data in September, 2018 crime rates will remain near record lows. However, even with these drops it’s
clear that some cities, like Baltimore and Chicago, still suffer from high rates of violence. Amid the broad
declines, addressing the violence in these areas must be a key priority for policymakers.” Crime rates in
the United States have fallen dramatically Crime has dropped precipitously in the past quarter century.
After the overall national crime rate peaked in 1991 at 5,856 crimes per 100,000 people, it fell for 14
years in a row to less than half of its peak level, according to a 2017 Brennan Center analysis of FBI data
on crime trends at the national and city level.
COVID-19 is suppressing crime by up to 42%

Marley Coyne, Coyne is a writer for Forbes, April 11, 2020, “Crime Rates Across U.S. Drop Amid The
Coronavirus Pandemic” https://www.forbes.com/sites/marleycoyne/2020/04/11/crime-rates-across-us-
drop-amid-the-coronavirus-pandemic/#6f76a5e1311e (accessed: 05/19/20)
Would-be criminals may be heeding stay-at-home orders, as major cities across the United States report
significant dip in major crimes like burglary, assault, murder, robbery and grand larceny, a drop likely
influenced by a lack of opportunity as businesses close and streets empty. In Chicago, drug arrests have
dropped by 42% in the weeks since the city shut down, the Associated Press reports, while in Los
Angeles, the rate of key crimes plummeted 30% after March 15. New York City—the nation’s hard-hit
epicenter, where nearly 20% of the city’s police force reported sick this week—is also experiencing a
double-digit decrease in crime. “In some sense, it’s like a giant blizzard has hit and there’s 10 feet of
snow on the ground,” a former police officer and criminal justice professor told the Washington Post. In
a study by USA Today, 19 out of 20 police agencies recorded a lower number of criminal incidents since
March 15, and the agencies studied also reported a significant decrease in traffic stops, down as much
as 92% in some areas.
The fear of crime is not supported by the data; crime rates have been declining but hat
hasn’t been due to harsh criminal justice policies
Tim Lau, Lau is a staff writer for The Brennan Center for Justice, June 12, 2019, “Crime Rates in Largest
U.S. Cities Continue to Drop” https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/crime-rates-
largest-us-cities-continue-drop (accessed: 05/19/20)
Despite these overall declines, the Trump administration has often cited the 2015 and 2016 murder rate
upticks out of context, as justification for its rhetoric supporting policies that would worsen or entrench
mass incarceration. For example, during his tenure, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions suggested
that a violent crime wave was sweeping the nation, while advocating policies such as tougher policing
practices, reinstating mandatory minimum sentences, and intensifying immigration enforcement.
However, the latest 2018 data reinforce the longer-term trend of a continued decline in crime rates. This
is consistent with the position of criminologists, who have suggested that the 2015 and 2016 numbers
might not have been indicative of a significant crime trend. In addition , a 2015 Brennan Center report
found that overly harsh criminal justice policies, such as increased incarceration, were not the main
contributors to declines in crime. There isn’t a broader crime wave emerging Although the 2018 data
suggests that crime rates are expected to decrease nationwide, some cities continue to struggle with
violence. “We’ve seen that cities that are poorer, more segregated, and more unequal are more
vulnerable to increases in crime rates,” said Grawert. Nonetheless, the overall trends continue to
undercut any claims about the emergence of a new nationwide crime rate.
Crime rates are decreasing at historic rates

Associated Press, April 11, 2020, “Crime falls sharply in even the most violent US cities”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/11/crime-falls-sharply-in-even-the-most-violent-us-
cities (accessed: 05/19/20)
In Chicago, one of the most violent places in the US, drug arrests in the weeks since the city shut down
are down by 42% compared with the same period last year. Some criminal lawyers say part of the
reason for that decrease is that dealers have no choice but to wait out the economic slump. “The
feedback I’m getting is that they aren’t able to move, to sell anything anywhere,” said Joseph Lopez, a
lawyer in Chicago who represents reputed drug dealers. Overall, Chicago’s crime declined by 10% after
the pandemic struck, a trend that is playing out globally. Fewer people are being killed and fewer
robberies are taking place. Still, law enforcement officials worry about a surge of unreported domestic
violence, and what happens when restrictions are lifted or go on too long. It’s rare for a city to see a
double-digit drop in crime, even over a much longer period. During New York’s 1990s crime decline, one
of the biggest turnarounds in US history, crime dropped by about 40% over three years.
Incarceration Doesn’t Deter Crime

Tough-on-Crime tactics have conclusively failed; community trust and reform is
needed to fix the broken criminal justice system
Nathan Dicamillo, Dicamillo is a staff writer for Newsweek, March 12, 2017, “Sessions' Tough-on-
Crime Tactics Have a History of Failure, Scholars Say”, https://www.newsweek.com/sessions-tough-
crime-tactics-fail-scholars-566765 (accessed: 05/23/20)
Sessions released a memo Wednesday that directs federal prosecutors to partner with local authorities
to target violent offenders and "use the substantial tools at their disposal to hold them accountable"
under federal law when "appropriate." The effort seems to be a part of the new administration's tough-
on-crime approach, but longer sentencing for violent offenders under federal law has already been tried
and failed, says Jeffrey Fagan, professor of law at Columbia University and senior research scholar at
Yale Law School. Laws related to violent crime vary state-to-state, and federal laws usually include
longer sentences than state laws. For instance, the criminal possession of a firearm can get you up to
seven years in New York, while the punishment under the federal statute for the same offense can get
you up to 10 years. "What offenders respond to is the threat of being caught and punished, not the
severity of the punishment," Fagan says. "The empirical evidence is quite conclusive, and [Sessions] is
ignoring it." Fagan likened Sessions' memo to a crime deterrence effort between federal and local
authorities launched in 1997 in Richmond, VA, called Project Exile. The project was "not terribly
effective," Fagan says. In 2007, Fagan co-authored a report on the effectiveness of a predecessor of
Project Exile called Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) in Chicago. With a "stick and carrot" approach, this
project was aimed at gun offenders who were released from state custody or placed on probation. The
program combined incentives such as social and economic services with the threat of surveillance to
remind offenders that they were being watched. "The stick without the carrot is what [Sessions] is
proposing now," Fagan says. The lead author of the PSN report, associate professor of sociology at Yale
University, Andrew Papachristos, explained via email that the number of prosecutions or sentence
length mattered little in determining the success of federal involvement in local crime. Rather, "the ways
the feds help lead and sustain legitimacy and trust [in] enhancing programs" is critical to the programs'
success, says Papachristos.
It is impossible for the Criminal Justice System to reduce recidivism; being tough on
crime doesn’t address the criminal’s motivation
William R. Kelly, Kelly is sociology professor at UT Austin, June 09, 2015, “Why 'Tough on Crime'
Failed”, https://thecrimereport.org/2015/06/09/2015-06-why-tough-on-crime-failed/ (accessed:
05/23/20)
The Crime Report: You write that the United States spends about $260 billion a year on criminal justice.
What do we get for our money? William R. Kelly: An undeniably poor return on investment. The
recidivism rate of inmates released from prison is well over 65 percent. Over 35 percent of probationers
fail to successfully complete their period of supervision, and approximately 40 percent of those who
successfully complete supervision reoffend. To be fair, some crime is averted, or at lease delayed, while
offenders are in prison or on community supervision. However, our focus on punishment and control is
in many, many cases only a temporary reprieve from crime. If we fail to address the reasons individuals
engage in crime in the first place, how can we realistically expect anything to be different when
someone is released from prison or discharged from probation? TCR: You suggest that Americans slept
through this expensive disaster. How could we have been so wrong about so much? Kelly: Punishment
made perfect sense when crime control was launched in the 1960s and 1970s. Crime was rampant,
disorder was commonplace, and the obvious answer was 'get tough.' Punishment is intuitive and logical,
it is something that most of us grew up with; it is part of the socialization process; and it generally
works…We got it so wrong because we assumed that criminal offenders would respond to punishment
or its threat the same way we do. The problem is that criminal offenders are not us. They differ in
fundamental ways, and those differences often render punishment inert. Policymakers missed that.
Policymakers continued to miss it well after the evidence of its ineffectiveness was obvious.
Being tough on crime is a failure; prisons force people to be dependent on the public
services instead of being productive
William R. Kelly, Kelly is sociology professor at UT Austin, June 09, 2015, “Why 'Tough on Crime'
Failed”, https://thecrimereport.org/2015/06/09/2015-06-why-tough-on-crime-failed/ (accessed:
05/23/20)
Criminologist William R. Kelly pulls no punches in his assessment of the grim state of America's churning
criminal justice machine. “Our criminal justice policies have failed to effectively reduce crime and
recidivism; they have needlessly placed hundreds of thousands of individuals at risk of criminal
victimization each year, ” says Kelly, author of Criminal Justice at the Crossroads: Transforming Crime
and Punishment, recently published by Columbia University Press. “And they have facilitated a large
segment of the population cycling in and out of the justice system and becoming permanently
dependent on public services, rather than being productive citizens.,” he adds. Kelly is a University of
Texas-Austin sociology professor and the founding director of the school's Center for Criminology and
Criminal Justice Research. In a conversation with David J. Krajicek, contributing editor of The Crime
Report, Kelly explains why he believes the system is a “massive failure” and why Americans are not as
vengeful as some politicians believe. He also offers some ideas about where we go from here.
Crime has been declining for decades; however, mass incarceration’s contribution to
crime reduction is almost 0%
Oliver Roeder, Lauren-Brooke Eisen and Julia Bowling, Roeder s an economics fellow in the Justice
Program with a PhD in economics from UT Austin, Eisen is legal counsel in the Justice Program at the
Brennan Center for Justice with a J.D. from Georgetown, and Bowling is a research associate in the
Justice Program, February 12, 2015, “What Caused the Crime Decline?”,
https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2019-
08/Report_What_Caused_The_Crime_Decline.pdf (accessed: 05/23/20)
As more low-level offenders flood prisons, each additional individual’s incarceration has, on average, a
consecutively smaller crime reduction effect. The incarceration rate jumped by more than 60 percent
from 1990 to 1999, while the rate of violent crime dropped by 28 percent. In the next decade, the rate
of incarceration increased by just 1 percent, while the violent crime rate fell by 27 percent. To be clear,
this report does not find that incarceration never affects crime. Incarceration can control crime in many
circumstances. But the current exorbitant level of incarceration has reached a point where diminishing
returns have rendered the crime reduction effect of incarceration so small, it has become nil. To
isolate the effect of incarceration on crime, the authors considered the effects of 12 other leading
theories of crime reduction, as noted in Table 3. These theories were chosen because of their frequency
in media and research studies. The authors attempted to secure state-by-state data from 1980 to 2013
in all states for each theory and ran the data through a multi-variable regression that controls for the
effect of each variable on crime, and each variable on other variables. The findings are consistent with
the most respected studies on these theories. The authors could not secure state-by-state national data
for every year 1980 to 2013 for five variables: inflation, consumer confidence, waning crack use,
decrease of lead in gasoline, and legalization of abortion. Data for these variables were not collected at
the state level for all the years needed and therefore could not be incorporated into the state-level
regression. In those instances, the authors analyzed past research and provided a summary.
Crime rates have been decreasing for decades but it isn’t due to high incarceration
rates; states that reduced their prison population experience decreased rates of crime
Oliver Roeder, Lauren-Brooke Eisen and Julia Bowling, Roeder s an economics fellow in the Justice
Program with a PhD in economics from UT Austin, Eisen is legal counsel in the Justice Program at the
Brennan Center for Justice with a J.D. from Georgetown, and Bowling is a research associate in the
Justice Program, February 12, 2015, “What Caused the Crime Decline?”,
https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2019-
08/Report_What_Caused_The_Crime_Decline.pdf (accessed: 05/23/20)
Increased incarceration at today’s levels has a negligible crime control benefit: Incarceration has been
declining in effectiveness as a crime control tactic since before 1980. Since 2000, the effect on the crime
rate of increasing incarceration, in other words, adding individuals to the prison population, has been
essentially zero. Increased incarceration accounted for approximately 6 percent of the reduction in
property crime in the 1990s (this could vary statistically from 0 to 12 percent), and accounted for less
than 1 percent of the decline in property crime this century. Increased incarceration has had little effect
on the drop in violent crime in the past 24 years. In fact, large states such as California, Michigan, New
Jersey, New York, and Texas have all reduced their prison populations while crime has continued to fall.
2. One policing approach that helps police gather data used to identify crime patterns and target
resources, a technique called CompStat, played a role in bringing down crime in cities: Based on an
analysis of the 50 most populous cities, this report finds that CompStat-style programs were responsible
for a 5 to 15 percent decrease in crime in those cities that introduced it. Increased numbers of police
officers also played a role in reducing crime. 3. Certain social, economic, and environmental factors also
played a role in the crime drop: According to this report’s empirical analysis, the aging population,
changes in income, and decreased alcohol consumption also affected crime. A review of past research
indicates that consumer confidence and inflation also seem to have contributed to crime reduction.
Majority Crime Non-Violent

Prison incarceration is driven by the war on drugs; most federal inmates are convicted
for non-violent drug offenses
The Sentencing Project, 2016, “Fact Sheet: Trends in U.S. Corrections”,
https://sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Trends-in-US-Corrections.pdf (accessed:
05/23/20)
Sentencing policies of the War on Drugs era resulted in dramatic growth in incarceration for drug
offenses. Since its official beginning in the 1980s, the number of Americans incarcerated for drug
offenses has skyrocketed from 40,900 in 1980 to 452,900 in 2017. Furthermore, harsh sentencing laws
such as mandatory minimums keep many people convicted of drug offenses in prison for longer periods
of time: in 1986, people released after serving time for a federal drug offense had spent an average of
22 months in prison. By 2004, people convicted on federal drug offenses were expected to serve almost
three times that length: 62 months in prison. At the federal level, people incarcerated on a drug
conviction make up nearly half the prison population. At the state level, the number of people in prison
for drug offenses has increased ninefold since 1980, although it has begun declining in recent years.
Most are not high-level actors in the drug trade, and most have no prior criminal record for a violent
offense.
Violent crime statistics are inflated; marijuana possession and trespassing are
classified as violent crime
Bill Barton, Barton is a lawyer and a prison policy expert writing for Prison Legal News, December,
2019, “Many “Violent Offenders” Actually Committed Non-Violent Crimes”,
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2019/dec/10/many-violent-offenders-actually-committed-non-
violent-crimes/ (accessed: 05/23/20)
According to a survey of laws in all 50 states by The Marshall Project, there are more than a dozen states
where people can be charged and convicted as a violent criminal if they enter a dwelling that is not
theirs. Burglary is deemed a violent crime. In North Carolina, trafficking a stolen identity and selling
drugs within 1,000 feet of a school or playground are both considered violent offenses. A July 2018
analysis by The Marshall Project found that a significant portion of prisoners – 7,532 of approximately
35,700 total – were incarcerated for crimes deemed violent under North Carolina’s habitual violent
offender law. In Minnesota, aiding an attempted suicide and marijuana possession (depending on the
quantity) are classified as violent crimes. The July 2018 analysis found that about 3,092 prisoners out of
9,849 in Minnesota’s prison system were locked up for crimes that might not seem violent to an
objective observer. Other “violent” crimes in various jurisdictions include purse snatching,
embezzlement, theft of drugs and, in New York, possession of a gun with bullets.
“Violent offenders” are often convicted for non-violent crimes like drug dealing
or trafficking a stolen identity
Eli Hager, Staff writer for The Marshall Project, April 03, 2019, “When “Violent Offenders” Commit
Nonviolent Crimes”, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/04/03/when-violent-offenders-commit-
nonviolent-crimes (accessed: 05/23/20)
Yet in reality, many of the “violent offenders” in U.S. prisons are there for crimes that not everyone
would classify as violent. According to a Marshall Project survey of all 50 states’ laws, you can get
charged and convicted as a violent criminal in more than a dozen states if you enter a dwelling that’s not
yours. That might seem like a property crime, but it’s often deemed a violent one: burglary. Similarly,
purse snatching is considered a “violent” offense in several states. So are the manufacture of
methamphetamines and theft of drugs. Our survey of statutes yielded even more surprising examples.
In Kentucky, committing “Possession of Anhydrous Ammonia in an Unapproved Container with Intent
to Manufacture Methamphetamine” a second time puts you in a “violent” category under the law—
and you’ll face 20 to 50 years in prison. In Minnesota, aiding an attempted suicide is listed as violent, as
is marijuana possession (depending on the amount). In North Carolina, trafficking a stolen identity and
selling drugs within 1,000 feet of a school or playground are both violent crimes, according to the state’s
“habitual violent offender” statute.
Violent Crime Decreasing

Violent offenders have amongst the lowest rates of recidivism
Alexi Jones, Jones is a Policy Analyst and graduate of Wesleyan University, April 2020, “Reforms
without Results: Why states should stop excluding violent offenses from criminal justice reforms”,
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/violence.html (accessed: 05/23/20
People convicted of violent offenses have among the lowest recidivism rates People convicted of violent
offenses have among the lowest rates of recidivism, illustrating again that people who have committed a
violent act are not inherently violent and can succeed in the community. An act of violence represents a
single moment in someone’s life, and shouldn’t be the only factor that determines their freedom. A
growing body of research finds that people convicted of violent offenses do not “specialize” in violence,
and are not inherently dangerous people. The Bureau of Justice Statistics recently released two studies
on 400,000 people released in 30 states in 2005. It found that while re-arrest rates are high for all
people released from prison, people convicted of violent offenses are less likely to be re-arrested within
3 years for any offense than those convicted for nonviolent offenses. Moreover, they were only
marginally more likely to be re-arrested for a violent offense than people convicted of public order and
property offenses. Finally, only 2.7% of the estimated 7,500 people who had served time for homicide
were re-arrested for a homicide; they were much more likely to be subsequently re-arrested for
nonviolent property offenses (24.4%), drug offenses (26.1%), or public order offenses (45.8%, which
includes violations of probation and parole).
Violent crime rates are at a 30-year low

Samuel Stebbins and Evan Comen, Stebbins is the Assistant Managing Editor and Comen is a staff writer
for 24/7 Wall Street, October 27, 2019, “Safe cities: California, Texas are home to many of towns with
lower violent crime rates”, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/10/27/crime-rates-lower-in-
these-us-safest-cities/40406533/ (accessed: 05/23/20)
There were 369 violent crimes reported for every 100,000 Americans in 2018, nearly the lowest violent
crime rate in the United States in more than three decades. In an interview with 24/7 Wall St., John
Roman, a senior fellow with NORC at the University of Chicago, an independent social research
institution, explained that the latest crime statistics reflect an encouraging continuation of a long-term
trend. “If you are under the age of 40, you’ve never been safer than you are today,” Roman said. While
the United States is safer than it has been for as far back as many Americans can remember, some cities
are even safer, with violent crime rates less than half the current national rate. Using data from the FBI,
24/7 Wall St. reviewed violent crimes rates – a population-adjusted measure of incidents of rape,
robbery, homicide, and aggravated assault – to identify America’s safest cities. Only the 294 midsize and
large cities tracked by the FBI with populations of at least 100,000 were considered.
Violent crime has been decreasing for the last 2 years

FBI National Press Office, September 30, 2019, “FBI Releases 2018 Crime Statistics”
https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-releases-2018-crime-statistics (accessed:
05/23/20
For the second consecutive year, the estimated number of violent crimes in the nation decreased when
compared with the previous year’s statistics, according to FBI figures released today. In 2018, violent
crime was down 3.3 percent from the 2017 number. Property crimes also dropped 6.3 percent, marking
the 16th consecutive year the collective estimates for these offenses declined. The 2018 statistics show
the estimated rate of violent crime was 368.9 offenses per 100,000 inhabitants, and the estimated rate
of property crime was 2,199.5 offenses per 100,000 inhabitants. The violent crime rate fell 3.9 percent
when compared with the 2017 rate; the property crime rate declined 6.9 percent.
The US violent crime rate has been decreasing for decades; violent crime rates
have decreased by 50% since the historic levels in the early 1990s
James Lartey and Weihua Li, Lartey is a staff writer and Li is a data fellow for The Marshall Project,
September 30, 2019, “New FBI Data: Violent Crime Still Falling”,
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/09/30/new-fbi-data-violent-crime-still-falling (accessed:
05/23/20)
FBI data released Monday suggests that the violent crime rate in the U.S. remains on a decades-long
downward trend, falling by 3.9 percent in 2018. Overall, the violent crime rate has plunged by more
than 50 percent since the highwater mark of the early 1990s.The drops came across categories of
violent offenses, including murder, non-negligent manslaughter and robbery, and property crimes like
burglary, larceny and vehicle thefts, while aggravated assault numbers remained about flat. The rate for
rape bucked this trend however, up slightly for 2018, and in each of the last six years. The overall
numbers, recorded by police departments across the country and compiled annually by the FBI, are
welcome news for crime researchers like Ames Grawert, who closely monitored an uptick in violence in
2015 and 2016.“That's a really good sign that the long term trend towards greater safety is not in fact
reversed, and that we’re moving past whatever happened in 2015 and 2016,” said Grawert, senior
counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice, a research institute at New York University’s School of Law.
“It’s a reminder that two years isn’t a trend, and two years doesn’t break a trend.”
Be skeptical of their evidence; the was a brief spike in homicides in 2015 and 2016 was
due to a lack of policing credibility—only the aff can solve
James Lartey and Weihua Li, Lartey is a staff writer and Li is a data fellow for The Marshall Project,
September 30, 2019, “New FBI Data: Violent Crime Still Falling”,
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/09/30/new-fbi-data-violent-crime-still-falling (accessed:
05/23/20)
Mostly fueled by a spike in homicides in a handful of large cities, the nation’s violent crime rate
increased by 3.3 percent in 2015 and 3.5 percent in 2016 before dropping. Some opponents of criminal
justice reform seized on the two-year uptick as proof of what they called a new cresting crime wave.
Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in early 2017 that his “best judgment” was that these data
represented a “dangerous permanent trend. ”That spike also fueled the emergence of the so-called
“Ferguson Effect” hypothesis, that the Black Lives Matter protest movement had prompted demoralized
police officers to cut back on proactive policing strategies in response to scrutiny from the general
public. Then-FBI director James Comey described it as “a chill wind blowing through American law
enforcement. ”University of Missouri-St. Louis criminologist Richard Rosenfeld, who authored several
studies on the spike, has found that something akin to a “Ferguson Effect” likely did contribute to
increased murder rates in a handful of cities, like Chicago and Baltimore, but that the “demoralized
cops” explanation was unsupported by the data. A study he co-authored in March found “no evidence”
that arrest rates had any effect on homicide rates in the cities and time period examined, a correlation
one would expect to see if a dip in proactive policing was really to blame. “The uptick in homicide was
more likely associated with a crisis in police legitimacy: People, especially in disadvantaged minority
communities, drawing even further back from the police,” Rosenfeld told The Marshall Project. “There
is an avalanche of research right now in criminology pointing in that direction, that declining
legitimacy is associated with increases in crime.” Predatory violence might increase, for example,
because offenders believe victims and witnesses will not contact the police to report incidents.
Violent crime offenders are the least likely to be repeat offenders and most victims
want violence prevention and not punishment
Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, Sawyer is the research Director at the Prison Policy Initiative and
Wagner is an attorney and Executive Director of the Prison Policy Initiative , March 24, 2020, “Mass
Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020” https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html (accessed:
05/23/20)
Recidivism data do not support the belief that people who commit violent crimes ought to be locked
away for decades for the sake of public safety. People convicted of violent and sexual offenses are
actually among the least likely to be rearrested, and those convicted of rape or sexual assault have
rearrest rates 20% lower than all other offense categories combined. More broadly, people convicted of
any violent offense are less likely to be rearrested in the years after release than those convicted of
property, drug, or public order offenses. One reason: age is one of the main predictors of violence. The
risk for violence peaks in adolescence or early adulthood and then declines with age, yet we incarcerate
people long after their risk has declined. Despite this evidence, people convicted of violent offenses
often face decades of incarceration, and those convicted of sexual offenses can be committed to
indefinite confinement or stigmatized by sex offender registries long after completing their sentences.
And while some of the justice system’s response has more to do with retribution than public safety,
more incarceration is not what most victims of crime want. National survey data show that most victims
want violence prevention, social investment, and alternatives to incarceration that address the root
causes of crime, not more investment in carceral systems that cause more harm.
Impacts: Responses to Circumvention

Solvency
Officer Agency / Stakeholders solves

Empirical examples prove – it’s possible to change police culture, but you have to
involve police officers as stakeholders.
Ryan Cohen, Harvard Law School, J.D., Class of 2017; Harvard Kennedy School, M.P.P., Class of 2017,
THE FORCE AND THE RESISTANCE: WHY CHANGING THE POLICE FORCE IS NEITHER INEVITABLE, NOR
IMPOSSIBLE, 20 U. Pa. J.L. & Soc. Change 105 (2017). . Available at SSRN:
https://ssrn.com/abstract=3055401 Accessed May 11 2020
Kegan and Lahey advocate a more holistic, individualized process, in which leaders facilitate employees’
“honest introspection and candid disclosure” of their “competing commitments.”126 Competing
commitments, as Kegan and Lahey define them, arise from the “big assumptions—deeply rooted beliefs
about themselves and the world around them”127 that hold people back from adapting and
growing.128 They argue that leaders cannot change organizations without “guiding [employees] through
a productive process to bring their competing commitments to the surface, and helping them cope with
the inner conflict that is preventing them from achieving their goals.”129 The Oakland Police
Department’s Peer Review Panel, born in the 1970s, exemplifies the power of this process.130 The
brainchild of an officer previously identified as prone to excessive use of force, the program was
modeled after a substance-abuse treatment program run by former addicts that took a “therapeutic
approach designed to break down obdurate defenses.” 131 The panel consisted of seven officers—all
identified as “problem officers”—reviewing the behavioral patterns of other officers.132 Panelists
encouraged the participating officer to read his own arrest reports and engage in self-reflection.133 As
the officer who created the program explained, “You know, after he reads [some of his own arrest
reports] somebody asks the questions. . . . And [he] would have to stop and think, ‘Do I do that very
often?’”134 The department later institutionalized this program as the Conflict Management Section,
which ran studies, action reviews, and other interventions to reduce conflict in police-citizen
interactions.135 These programs mirror the process proposed by Kegan and Lahey in the way that they
involve fellow members of the force communicating helpful intentions and facilitating the subject’s own
thinking and honest disclosure.136 As Kegan and Lahey would predict, the programs were highly
effective. During the years the program was in place, the department met its goals regarding the review
subjects’ performance and reduced its overall number of police-citizen confrontations.137 The
program’s effectiveness lay in its ability to prove to both the subjects and participants on the panel that
they were important change agents, a demonstration that “enhance[d] their self-esteem and
commitment to the project.”
DOJ/Consent Decrees
Consent decrees solve – they lead to significant reform efforts and also leverage
public, political, and financial support, which checks rollback.
DOJ Civil Rights Division Report 2017, Civil Rights Division U.S. Department of Justice, January
2017, “The Civil Rights Division’s Pattern and Practice Police Reform Work: 1994-Present”
https://www.justice.gov/crt/file/922421/download Accessed May 11 2020
In 2010,the Department of Justice convened a roundtable of law enforcement officials, policing

experts, and advocates to discuss the Division’s pattern-or-practice work. The report from that
convening noted that, “[w]ithout exception, everyone providing comments during the roundtable
meeting acknowledged the efficacy of pattern-or-practice litigation to reforming policies and
practices in local police organizations.”20Earlier, in 2002, a conference convened to examine the
Division’s model of independent monitoring reached a consensus that “monitoring, if done
correctly, can bring about rapid and responsible police reform without an undue challenge to
the authority and autonomy of the police chief.”21In2013, the Police Executive Research Forum
(PERF) issued a comprehensive review of DOJ’s role in monitoring local law enforcement noting some
of the challenges of reform and prompting calls for re-examining some aspects of the work. The
review also quoted“ many police chiefs who have been through the process of a DOJ
investigation” as saying “that the end result was a better police department—with improved policies on
critical issues such as use of force, better training of officers, and more advanced information
systems that help police executives to know what is going on in the department and manage
their employees.”22 It further noted that, in many places, the reform agreement provided essential
leverage to obtain the funding and political support necessary for reform.
Pittsburgh’s consent decree lead to immediate and lasting reforms, improvement in

accountability, police-community relations, and organizational management structure
changes.
Davis et al 2005 Robert C. Davis Nicole J. Henderson Christopher W. Ortiz “CAN FEDERAL
INTERVENTION BRING LASTING IMPROVEMENT IN LOCAL POLICING? The Pittsburgh Consent Decree”,
VERA Institute for Justice, April 2005, https://www.vera.org/publications/can-federal-intervention-
bring-lasting-improvement-in-local-policing-the-pittsburgh-consent-decree Accessed May 11 2020
The overarching question in Pittsburgh was whether a reform process that relies on legitimacy not from
local sources, but from a federal court, could succeed and continue after the federal court withdrew.
The simple answer to that question is “yes.” There is no question that the implementation of the
consent decree requirements in Pittsburgh dramatically changed the culture of the Bureau of Police.
Since 2001, we have documented the improvements in accountability: tracking of use of force, traffic
stops, searches and seizures, and subject resistance; development of a comprehensive early warning
system; centralized review of all data tracked in the early warning system; creation of a management
meeting to review officers who might be headed for trouble, and improved training in use of force and
cultural awareness. We found that the sweeping management changes went a long way towards helping
the Bureau regain the trust of the community. Community leaders who believed that the police had
been undisciplined and out of control were willing to give the chief and the reforms he backed the
benefit of the doubt. Our first survey of community residents found that about half of whites and a
quarter of blacks believed that police dealings with citizens had improved and that police use of
excessive force had decreased since the decree was instated.
LA’s consent decree increased officer accountability during stops.

Stone et al 2009 Christopher Stone Todd Foglesong Christine M. Cole, Harvard Kennedy School
Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, “Policing Los Angeles Under a Consent Decree”,
May 2009 http://assets.lapdonline.org/assets/pdf/Harvard-LAPD%20Study.pdf Accessed May 11 2020
A pedestrian stop in 2008 was also less likely to produce a warning and much more likely to generate a
field interview record than in 2002. As Figure 16 illustrates, the changing use of stops between 2002 and
2008 is complex, but in general police officers were more accountable for their stops in 2008, as arrests
and field interviews trigger greater scrutiny from colleagues, supervisors, and the district attorney than
do warnings and citations. In sum, not only does the growth of stops belie any assertion that Los Angeles
has seen de-policing under the consent decree, the changing pattern of stops suggests an increase both
in the quality of the stops and in officer accountability for them.
Empirical evidence from New Jersey’s consent decree suggests police reform efforts
induces internal department accountability and training, which makes reform
sustainable.
Public Management Resources et al 2007 – This is the report of the external monitor of New
Jersey’s Consent Decree, “Monitors’ Sixteenth Report Long-term Compliance Audit Civil Number 99-
5970(MLC)” In the United States District Court, for the District of New Jersey United States Department
of Justice Civil Rights Division State of New Jersey Submitted by: Public Management Resources San
Antonio, Texas and Lite, DePalma, Greenberg and Rivas Newark, New Jersey August, 2007,
https://www.state.nj.us/lps/monitors-report-16.pdf Accessed May 11 2020
The New Jersey State Police appear to have reached a watershed moment during the last two reporting
periods. Ample evidence exists to suggest that the agency has become self-monitoring and self-
correcting to a degree not often observed in American law enforcement. In January and February 2006,
agency training pre-delivery monitoring processes “slipped,” allowing unapproved training to be
delivered by two outside vendors unfamiliar with the New Jersey State Police consent decree. These two
trainings created a serious spike in the number of consent search requests observed during the fifteenth
and sixteenth reporting periods. In addition, they created a substantial spike in the number of
problematic law enforcement procedures observed by the monitors, jumping from approximately 17 per
reporting period to 84 this reporting period. The response of the New Jersey State Police was anything
but typical. In March 2006 the Office of State Police Affairs was tasked to develop a special study relating
to the spike in consent requests. By May 2006, the Office of State Police Affairs and the New Jersey State
Police developed a field supervisors’ checklist for managing consent requests in the field. By June 2006,
OSPA had worked with legal advisors to develop corrective processes to control many of the issues
identified by the monitors during their May site visits related to the “tone and timbre” of the consent
requests observed during the site visit. By July 2006, enhanced troop-level (executive) and OSPA review
systems had been implemented. By August 2006, in-service field supervisor training was modified to
address issues raised by the drug interdiction training. By October 2006 global supervisory and
managerial reviews began to note and correct problematic consent requests by field personnel using a
“best practices” remedial policy. The New Jersey State Police response to the unapproved training
depicts an agency that has become self-monitoring and adaptive, able to note, analyze and correct
problems with the delivery of field services in real time. The essential characteristic designed into the
current crop of consent decrees strives for just that type of self-awareness and adaptivity on the part of
American law enforcement agencies. It appears the ultimate goal has been attained.
Use of Force Rules

Quantitative data shows that changing police use of force rules reduces police use of
deadly force with minimal officer circumvention.
Samuel Walker, Professor of Criminal Justice, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Lifetime Achievement
Award by the Division on Policing of the American Society of Criminology, “Police Accountability:
Current Issues and Research Needs,” Paper presented at the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) Policing
Research Workshop: Planning for the Future, Washington, DC, November 28-29, 2006,
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/218583.pdf Accessed May 11 2020
formal
The first accountability procedure to be considered involves the direction and control officer use of police authority through
agency policies. This approach, generically known as administrative rulemaking, is a basic feature of modern
police management, if not all public and private sector organizations. Administrative rulemaking consists of three elements:
specifying approved and forbidden actions in written policies ; requiring officers to file written reports on specific actions;
requiring administrative review of officer reports (Davis, 1975; Goldstein, 1977:93-130; Walker, 1993). The discussion that follows examines a
few selected aspects of police discretion that are covered by administrative rulemaking. They are selected in part because they are particularly
relevant to this discussion. A comprehensive review would include all critical incidents where the exercise of police authority poses some
potential danger to the life, liberty, or safety of citizens. Administrative
rulemaking first developed with regard to the
use of deadly force. Over the last three decades it has extended to the use of non-lethal force, vehicle pursuits, domestic violence
incidents, the deployment of canines, and other actions. Deadly Force Administrative rulemaking in policing is most highly
developed in the area of police use of deadly force. Departmental policies on this subject are arguably the most detailed of
any area of police conduct. Despite some variations, a rough national consensus currently exists on the best policy, specifically that the use of
deadly force should be limited to the defense of the life of the officer or other citizens. At the same time, the literature on the effectiveness of
deadly force policies is arguably larger than any other area of police conduct (Fyfe, 1979; Geller and Scott, 1992). In the pioneering study on the
subject, Fyfe (1979) found that a new policy restricting the use of deadly force in the New York City Police
Department was effective in reducing the overall number of firearms discharges. Additionally, the new
policy did not result in any unanticipated adverse consequences such as officer deaths or injuries or an
increase in the crime rate. Finally, Fyfe’s data indicated only minimal attempts by officers to evade the
requirements of the policy. Fyfe later played an important role in the Supreme Court case of Tennessee v. Garner (1985), and that
decision spurred the adoption of restrictive shooting policies by agencies across the country (Geller and Scott, 1992). Additional
evidence supports Fyfe’s original study. Sparger and Giacopassi (1992) found a reduction in the overall rate of
shootings by the Memphis Police Department following the adoption of a restrictive deadly force policy.
Most notably, the policy completely eliminated all reported shootings in the most questionable shooting
category of unarmed and non-assaultive persons. Finally, the Memphis data indicated a significant
reduction in the racial disparity among persons shot and killed –primarily as a result of eliminating the
shooting of unarmed and non-assaultive persons. National data on persons shot a killed between 1976 and 1998, meanwhile,
support the latter finding. The disparity between African Americans and whites shot killed by the police was cut in half. This period coincided
with the adoption of restrictive deadly force policies across the country (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2001). No study to date has identified
adverse unwanted consequences of restrictive deadly force policies.
Use of force reforms lead to measurable progress and shifts in police organizational
culture
Sacramento Bee Editorial Staff, Reform works, so why do police groups continue to resist necessary
change? March 31, 2019, https://www.sacbee.com/article228554799.html Accessed May 11 2020
Reformed use-of-force policies make everyone safer. Last week, Bee reporter Hannah Wiley wrote
about the “culture shift” in three California cities that adopted use-of-force reforms: “In Los Angeles,
police can’t always shoot at moving vehicles. San Francisco banned choke holds. Stockton officers are
required to intervene if their colleagues use excessive force.” All three cities reformed their policies after
losing community trust or suffering major scandals involving police brutality. Contrary to the
overwrought claims of AB 392’s opponents, reform did not cause the sky to fall. In fact, reform resulted
in progress and improvement for both police and the communities they serve. Stockton, for example,
pursued reform “after years of topping the list of deadly force rates and having collected a litany of
egregious force allegations against it,” according to The Bee. Stockton police worked with the Urban
Institute to create a procedural justice strategic plan that “puts fairness, transparency and impartiality at
the forefront of every enforcement action.” Police in Los Angeles and San Francisco also pursued wide-
ranging reforms. The results? ▪ In Stockton: “Murder rates and non-fatal shootings are down by more
than 30 percent, and an increase in anonymous tips helped clear 67 percent of open homicide cases in
2018, the department said.” ▪ In San Francisco, where police asked the United States Department of
Justice to analyze its policing and make suggestions.: “Use-of-force incidents are down 30 percent and
the department has already implemented more than 100 of the DOJ’s 272 recommendations.” ▪ In Los
Angeles: “A 2009 Harvard study determined that reducing force had no impact on crime rates in L.A.,
which decreased under the new policy.” When Seattle police adopted more stringent rules as part of a
federal consent decree, police use of force dropped “without officer injuries going up,” according to the
United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington. Reform works.
Use of force reforms result in increased training, crisis intervention, and reduced
complaints of excessive force. DC Proves.
Kelly et al 2015 Kimbriell Kelly, Sarah Childress, Steven Rich, “Forced Reforms, Mixed Results,”
Washington Post November 13, 2015
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/11/13/forced-reforms-mixed-results/?
utm_term=.deb229eae612 Accessed May 11 2020
In the District, police agreed in 2001 to a long list of reforms sought by the Justice Department. The
federal intervention was prompted by a Post investigation that found D.C. officers had fatally shot more
people per capita in the 1990s than officers at any other large city police department nationwide. “The
city was bankrupt. And the police department was in shambles,” said Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier, who
assumed leadership of the department in 2007 during the seventh year of the reforms. Lanier said the
reforms have led to better training, improved policies and the use of less-lethal options in
confrontations, including pepper spray and rubber bullets. Since the agreement ended in 2012, police
have reported a steady decrease in the use of force and civilian complaints, the review found. The
number of fatal shootings by police has decreased slightly.
LA’s consent decree lead to substantial quantitative reduction in use-of-force

incidents, especially against black and Hispanic people.
Stone et al 2009 Christopher Stone Todd Foglesong Christine M. Cole, Harvard Kennedy School
Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, “Policing Los Angeles Under a Consent Decree”,
May 2009 http://assets.lapdonline.org/assets/pdf/Harvard-LAPD%20Study.pdf Accessed May 11 2020
Since 2004, the first year for which we have consistent information on all incidents of the use of
categorical force, including the race and ethnicity of the suspects and officers involved, the total number
of categorical force incidents declined by almost 30 percent. We found a reduction in the use of all types
of categorical force in those years, including officer-involved shootings. There was a reduction in the
shootings in which a suspect was hit as well as those in which no one was hit. The number of in-custody
deaths, carotid-restraint choke holds, head-strikes, and “law-enforcement related injuries” (uses of
force that require hospitalization) also fell at roughly equal rates. As Figure 23 shows, the only types of
categorical force which increased in this period were K-9 contacts, and three kinds of force grouped
together as “other”: the negligent discharges of weapons, the shooting of animals, and the use of lethal
force by other law enforcement agencies. Over these years, so far as we can tell, the incidence of
categorical force used against Blacks and Hispanics decreased more than such force used against
Whites. As Figure 24 shows, the number of suspects identified as Black involved in categorical force
incidents fell from 35 in 2004 to 20 in 2008. The number of suspects identified as Hispanic involved in
such incidents fell from 47 to 27 over the same period, while the number of suspects identified as White
decreased negligibly, from 12 to 11. The racial and ethnic identities of persons subject to categorical
force are not always recorded in the LAPD data, especially for certain kinds of force, such as accidental
and negligent firearm discharges.
A2 Discretion
Strict rules on police discretion are capable of checking police abuse.
Sarah Lustbader and Vaidya Gullapalli Feb 04, 2019 The Appeal, The limitations of trainings for
ending police abuse https://theappeal.org/the-limitations-of-trainings-for-ending-police-abuse/
Accessed May 11 2020
The other problem is that “implicit-bias trainings” on their own cannot address the systems and policies
that allow, even encourage, police misconduct and brutality. “Instead of targeting police officers’
feelings and beliefs, law enforcement agencies should limit the types of situations that facilitate biases,”
Goff and other policing scholars argue. They note “the extreme difficulty of changing internal beliefs and
motivations.” The good news, though, is that “effective reform does not require altering the beliefs or
feelings of law enforcement personnel. It requires changing behaviors.” To do this, the Center for
Policing Equity focuses on “bias-inducing situations.” For example, given that many recent Black civilian
deaths at the hands of police officers happened during traffic stops for minor infractions, the
appropriate response would be to limit the circumstances under which police are authorized to make
traffic stops. Studies have shown that “simply limiting police authority to stop motorists substantially
reduces biased incidents.” Essentially, constraining police discretion can reduce police abuse. A CityLab
article last year pointed to “strict policing rules” that “have shown the ability to significantly reduce
police violence.” The Campaign Zero-affiliated Police Use of Force Project found that police departments
reduced their killings by 15 percent by eliminating just one ground for using force from their policies.
Increasing officer agency in the reform process increases compliance.

Ryan Cohen, Harvard Law School, J.D., Class of 2017; Harvard Kennedy School, M.P.P., Class of 2017,
THE FORCE AND THE RESISTANCE: WHY CHANGING THE POLICE FORCE IS NEITHER INEVITABLE, NOR
IMPOSSIBLE, 20 U. Pa. J.L. & Soc. Change 105 (2017). . Available at SSRN:
https://ssrn.com/abstract=3055401 Accessed May 11 2020
In other words, by focusing on the participation of those who will be affected by the change, these
interventions cultivated a sense of identity and a “growth mindset”139 that prepared participants to not
only accept the change, but to orchestrate it.140 This element of change management is particularly
important in the policing context, where those subject to the proposed change are often aware of a
negative public image of themselves, which can “deflate [their] pride and self-esteem.”141 A recent
study about the so-called “Ferguson effect,” or reduced police motivation caused by negative publicity,
confirms the impact of self-esteem on willingness to change in the context of policing.142 The study
shows that while the Ferguson effect is associated with a decreased willingness to adopt a community
partnership ethic, the effect disappears when organizational justice and self-legitimacy are taken into
account.143 In other words, “officers who have confidence in their authority or perceive their agency as
fair are more willing to partner with the community to solve problems, regardless of the effects of
negative publicity.”144 Even prior to this research, the Seattle Police Department implemented a
program that can serve as a model for how to incorporate this insight into change management efforts.
In 2004, the department’s Office of Professional Accountability (OPA) launched an “unprecedented”
internal outreach program, which involved OPA personally presenting the department’s policies around
investigations of citizen complaints to over 400 officers.145 The presentations allowed officers to ask
questions and raise concerns with OPA, which made them feel more involved in the department’s
accountability effort. While quantitative evaluations of this program are unavailable,146 the results of
the “Ferguson effect” study suggest that programs like Seattle’s would increase officers’ willingness to
collaborate with the community, taking them one step away from the warrior mentality and one step
towards that of a guardian. As social psychologist Hans Toch explained, citing founder of social
psychology Kurt Lewin and echoing Kegan and Lahey’s findings, “The way to change people is to work
through their resistances. It is here that participation becomes important, because participation is a way
of making people face their hang-ups, so that they can give them up after they have worked them
through.”147 In sum, “when people work hard on something, they get a stake in it.”148
Positive arrest policies in domestic violence cases prove it’s possible to use policy to
check police discretion.
Dr. Mike Rowe, Associate Professor, Institute of Criminology, Victoria University, Rendering Visible the
Invisible: Police Discretion, Professionalism and Decision-making, Policing & Society 17:3, September
2007, 279-294 Accessed May 11 2020
What is clear from this study is that the positive arrest policy did limit officers’ discretion. In many of the
cases of domestic violence attended, one or more officers indicated that they would not have affected
an arrest had the positive arrest policy not strongly influenced them to do so. While some were
influenced by the policy in the sense that it had convinced them that the police needed to act more decisively
against perpetrators of domestic violence, others were influenced in the negative sense that they were fearful
of the sanctions that might follow if they did not comply. This suggests that from the perspective of
police managers and policy-makers, an intervention of this kind can limit or shape the discretion of
police officers. The traditional scope of police officers to selectively interpret and apply the law was
curtailed by a policy that required certain steps to be taken that could be monitored readily by
supervisors with the aid of information technology and the requirements of the report-writing regime.
A2 Backsliding
Quantitative data disproves backsliding – even after monitors leave, police reform
leads to lasting change in police culture, training, and use-of-force.
DOJ Civil Rights Division Report 2017, Civil Rights Division U.S. Department of Justice, January
2017, “The Civil Rights Division’s Pattern and Practice Police Reform Work: 1994-Present”
https://www.justice.gov/crt/file/922421/download Accessed May 11 2020
These studies also provide some insight into the durability of the Division’s reform agreements. For
example:In a study conducted 15 years after the initiation of reforms in Washington, D.C., the monitor
appointed to oversee that agreement revisited the department and found that “in large measure, the
D.C. police department’s use of force policies remain consistent with best practices in policing, and the
data show that there has been no surge in any type of use of force, including firearms. The number of
officer-involved shootings has remained low, and there is no evidence that excessive force has
reemerged as a problem within the department.”30The monitor for the New Jersey State Police, in his
final compliance report concluded that as a result of the consent decree, “[a]mple evidence exists to
suggest that the agency has become self-monitoring and self-correcting to a degree not often observed
in American law enforcement.”31A recent academic study of reforms in both Pittsburgh and Cincinnati
found that while there was evidence that advances in Pittsburgh had eroded since the implementation
of that first police reform agreement, the reforms in Cincinnati accomplished “significant and lasting
change within the CPD”and that “[s]ix years removed from DOJ and monitor oversight, [CPD] has
experienced little or no backsliding, a finding supported by consistent reductions in undesirable
outcomes, including use of force incidence and allegations of abusive or unlawful behavior.”32 A
different study of the Pittsburgh consent decree concluded that years after the termination of that
decree, and despite personnel changes and budget pressures, “reforms remain firmly in place today,
and both community leaders and citizen surveys reflect significant improvements in service” and “there
is no question that the implementation of the consent decree requirements in Pittsburgh dramatically
changed the culture of the Bureau of Police.”33
Longitudinal studies of Cincinatti’s DOJ reforms proves no backsliding – significant

lasting reforms were made on use of force, accountability, and discrimination.
Joshua M. Chanin, School of Public Affairs, San Diego State University, “Examining the Sustainability of
Pattern or Practice Police Misconduct Reform,” Police Quarterly, 2015, Vol. 18(2) 163–192 Accessed
May 11 2020
Six years removed from DOJ and monitor oversight, the Department has experienced little or no
backsliding, a finding supported by consistent reductions in undesirable outcomes, including use of force
incidence and allegations of abusive or unlawful behavior . In short, the reform effort in Cincinnati
appears to have transformed the CPD. Longitudinal data show significant and lasting change within the
CPD. As documented in Figure 8, police use of force in Cincinnati was fairly volatile during the MOA
implementation period but has dropped by an average of11% per year since 2005. In fact, between 2002
and 2012, as crime rates have remained relatively stable, use of force has declined by 46%.12Figure 9
shows similar decline in injuries sustained by CPD officers: Between2001 and 2007, officer injury totals
dropped by an average of 10% per year; the post termination period from 2008 to 2010 saw an average
of 122 CPD officers injured while on duty, a stunning 209% difference from the average number of
officers injured during the implementation years (Figure 10). Data from Cincinnati’s CCA show a similar
downward trend. According to annual reports filed by the CCA between 2005 and 2012, complaints
against CPD officers continued to decline even after the department was released from formal oversight.
The 56 allegations of excessive force investigated by the CCA in 2012 represent a 36% drop in the
number of similar allegations made in 2006 the last full year that CPD was under federal control.
Allegations of discrimin-ation and improper pointing of a service weapon dropped over that period as
well. Further, the percentage of complaints against CPD officers found by the CCA to have some merit
(i.e., sustained), continued to fall in the years following MOA termination.
Pittsburgh consent decree produced immediate reform with minimal backsliding.

Davis et al 2005 Robert C. Davis Nicole J. Henderson Christopher W. Ortiz “CAN FEDERAL
INTERVENTION BRING LASTING IMPROVEMENT IN LOCAL POLICING? The Pittsburgh Consent Decree”,
VERA Institute for Justice, April 2005, https://www.vera.org/publications/can-federal-intervention-
bring-lasting-improvement-in-local-policing-the-pittsburgh-consent-decree Accessed May 11 2020
Community leaders acknowledged that a qualitative change in accountability had taken place and that
the relationship between the community and police had become less antagonistic. We heard no
indication from civic leaders that any backsliding had occurred since many of the decree’s requirements
had been lifted. The survey of Pittsburgh residents found that, with a few exceptions, improvements
accompanying the decree that we had noted in the 2002 survey still held a year later after the policing
provisions of the decree had been lifted. Similarly, we noted no change in the proportion of people who
had contact with the police or in their satisfaction with those interactions. The Office of Municipal
Investigations, which had lagged in adopting reforms under the consent decree, finally came into
compliance. Under the guidance of a new director, a new information system was installed, case review
procedures were streamlined, and the backlog disappeared. So it appears that the Justice Department
was correct in betting that pattern or practice suits could engender substantial accountability reforms in
a short time and that the reforms would survive the life of the decree intact. Pittsburgh did undergo
major change and, so far, the changes have remained in place.
A2 Police Unions
Police and Prison Unions and lobbyists aren’t enough to stop criminal justice reform –
rollback efforts are failing across the country.
Katherine Beckett Department of Law, Societies & Justice and Department of Sociology, University of
Washington, Annual Review of Criminology The Politics, Promise, and Peril of Criminal Justice Reform in the
Context of Mass Incarceration, Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2018. 1:235–5,
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-criminol-032317-092458 Accessed May 11 2020
Yet it is also true that these groups do not always achieve their anti-reform goals . Certainly,some reform initiatives falter in
the face of opposition from organized groups that benefit frommass incarceration. For example, as Page (2011a,b) shows, the uniquely
powerful California prisonguards’ union [California Corrections Peace Officers Association (CCPOA)] served for many years as an effective
obstacle to legislative reform. More generally, prison officers’ unions represent a powerful vested interest group that actively works to resist
what Page (2011b) calls prison downsizing: the closure of prisons and the laying off of correctional staff. And yet some prison
downsizing
has occurred, even in California.2In New York State, for example, the recent closure of nine prisons was staunchly
opposed by the prison officers’ union (Porter 2016). Nationally,“...at least 22 states have closed or
announced closures for 94 state prisons and juvenile facilities, resulting in the elimination of over 48,000
state prison beds and an estimated cost savings of over$345 million” since 2011 (Porter 2016, p. 1). Although
some of these facilities have been reopened or repurposed to serve alternative carceral purposes, many have not. Vested opponents of
penal reform have lost other battles as well. Recently, for example,California voters adopted
Propositions 47, which reduced many felony offenses to misdemeanors ,and 57, which renders people serving time
for nonviolent offenses eligible for parole, despite the opposition of most law enforcement groups, district
attorneys, and the CCPOA. In Maryland and New Jersey, bail reform advocates have made significant
progress toward eliminating cashbail for most defendants, the opposition of the bail bond industry and
other law enforcement groups notwithstanding (Hernandez 2017, Wiggins 2016). And although legislators from
rural communities that house prisons often seek to obstruct proposed criminal justice reforms
(Thorpe2015), many such reforms have been enacted . In fact, since 2008, at least 48 states and the District of
Columbia have undertaken some type of progressive criminal justice reform aimed at reducing reliance
on incarceration; more than half the 50 US states adopted significant drug law reforms(Beckett et al. 2016, Subramanian & Moreno
2014). Until about 2011, such measures were also op-posed by ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), which represents about one-
thirdof all state legislators (Green 2015). In short, although vested penal interests clearly exist and often attempt to block reform, they
sometimes lose. Evidence that powerful private interests with a stake in mass incarceration exist and
attempt to influence policy debates is not, therefore, evidence that change is impossible or even
unlikely. Penal pessimists might counter that recently enacted reforms tend to be limited to nonserious and nonviolent offenses, and that
their potential impact on the scale of incarcerationis therefore limited (Beckett et al. 2016, Gottschalk 2015, Tonry 2016). Although accurate,
this observation does not negate the fact that many recent reforms were enacted over and against the opposition of
vested and powerful interest groups. In the future, comparative case studies wouldhelp researchers develop and evaluate
hypotheses regarding the circumstances and tactics that favor or disfavor reform under such circumstances. In the meantime, evidence of
the existence of vested interests should not be construed as evidence that change is impossible.
A2 CJS resilient
Major oppressive systems always seem resilient til they collapse – pressure coming
now against the carceral state – reform is possible and good.
Marie Gottschalk, Professor of Poli Sci at U Penn, B.A. in history from Cornell University, an M.P.A.
from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from
Yale University, interviewed by Sasha Abramsky, August 9, 2007, “Reforming a Prison Nation,” The
American Prospect https://prospect.org/article/reforming-prison-nation/ Accessed May 11 2020
Gottschalk: I take solace in some important recent victories, like the enormous strides against the
disenfranchisement of former felons, and in what I see as the stirrings of a major social movement
against the carceral state, as local community groups, women's groups, human rights organizations, and
some civil-rights groups begin to embrace this issue. In my more pessimistic moments, I remind myself
of what the Norwegian criminologist Thomas Mathiesen once said about how major repressive systems
have succeeded in looking extremely stable almost until the moment they have collapsed.
Aff Broken Window Policing
1AC
Inherency
Broken window policing is a tactic that prioritizes reducing disorder to prevent serious
crime
Adam J. McKee, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Arkansas at Monticello,
December 14, 2018, “ Broken windows theory,” Encyclopedia Britannica,
https://www.britannica.com/topic/broken-windows-theory#ref310130 (accessed 3/30/20)
Prior to the development and implementation of various incivility theories such as broken windows, law
enforcement scholars and police tended to focus on serious crime; that is, the major concern was with
crimes that were perceived to be the most serious and consequential for the victim, such as rape,
robbery, and murder. Wilson and Kelling took a different view. They saw serious crime as the final result
of a lengthier chain of events, theorizing that crime emanated from disorder and that if disorder were
eliminated, then serious crimes would not occur. Their theory further posits that the prevalence
of disorder creates fear in the minds of citizens who are convinced that the area is unsafe. This
withdrawal from the community weakens social controls that previously kept criminals in check. Once
this process begins, it feeds itself. Disorder causes crime, and crime causes further disorder and crime.
Scholars generally define two different types of disorder. The first is physical disorder, typified by vacant
buildings, broken windows, abandoned vehicles, and vacant lots filled with trash. The second type is
social disorder, which is typified by aggressive panhandlers, noisy neighbours, and groups of youths
congregating on street corners. The line between crime and disorder is often blurred, with some experts
considering such acts as prostitution and drug dealing as disorder while many others classify them as
crimes. While different, these two types of disorder are both thought to increase fear among citizens.
Plan
The United States Federal Government should enact substantial criminal justice
reform in the United States by ending Broken Windows style policing.
Advantage One: Punishment

Broken Windows essentializes crime as being the result of individual moral failure,
requiring social control to restore order by targeting people of color
Alex S. Vitale, associate professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, August 1, 2014, “The
Neoconservative Roots of the Broken Windows Theory,” Gotham Gazette,
https://www.gothamgazette.com/index.php/opinion/5199-neoconservative-roots-broken-windows-
policing-theory-nypd-bratton-vitale (accessed 4/6/20)
The Broken Windows theory magically reverses the well understood causal relationship between crime
and poverty, arguing that poverty and social disorganization are the result of, not the cause of, crime
and that the disorderly behavior of the growing "underclass" threatens to destroy the very fabric of
cities. Wilson, following Banfield, believed strongly that there were profound limits on what government
could do to help the poor. Financial investment in the poor would be squandered, new services would
go unused or be destroyed, and the poor would continue in their slothful and destructive ways. Since
the root of the problem was either an essentially moral/cultural failure or the lack of external controls to
regulate inherently destructive human urges, then the solution had to take the form of punitive social
control mechanisms to restore order and neighborhood stability. This is why police are arresting people
for grilling on the sidewalk, drinking on their front stoop, and, yes, selling loose cigarettes. The result of
this approach has been the mass criminalization of the poor, who in New York City are overwhelmingly
people of color. Hundreds of thousands of mostly young black and Latino men are put into the criminal
justice system for mouthing off in class, taking up two seats on the subway, and possessing marijuana. In
some neighborhoods over 50% of young men are caught up in the criminal justice system. It is a system
that drives them from school, undermines future employment prospects, and immerses them in a world
of gangs and violence.
Broken Windows is the ideological justification that allows aggressive policing as the
solution for all problems, reinforcing and maintaining social exclusion and iniquity
Ben Bowling, professor of criminology and criminal justice at King’s College London, and James
Sheptycki, professor of criminology at York University, 2011, “Policing Globopolis,” Social Justice Vol.
38 No. 1/2 : Policing the Crisis—Policing in Crisis, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23345531 (accessed
4/13/20)
Empire City also provided the centerpiece of global policing rhetoric in the form of the “New York
Miracle.” Zero tolerance policing (ZTP) subsequently set the benchmark for urban policing around the
world. Making the miracle possible was James Q. Wilson and George Kelling’s famous parable of “fixing
broken windows,” which was first told in the Atlantic Monthly in 1982. Briefly, Wilson and Kelling asked
the reader to consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, they
suggested, the evident neglect attracts the attention of vandals who wreak further damage. Squatters
may move in. The locale in which the building sits begins to suffer. Increasing incidents of minor crime
send signals that delinquent behavior is tolerated and the incidence of more serious crimes escalates.
Social malaise sets in followed by a downward spiral of decline. The cure is to “fix the broken windows”
and crack down on the low-level “quality of life offenses.” This made suitable dinner party conversation
in Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights when William Bratton took command of the New York police
Department in 1994. It was a polite way of talking about tearing up the social contract. The metaphor of
fixing broken windows covered up the reality of the practical idea being pursued. A closer reading of
Bratton’s policing philosophy reveals that it was the subcultural “common sense” of the rank-and-file
police themselves. Bratton’s policing philosophy was that of the enforcer. The broken windows
metaphor made polite talk about hard-fisted policing possible. By making plausible a “developmental
link” between minor disorder and serious crime, its logic mandated sweeping and aggressive law
enforcement as the most appropriate one for all societal ills. In a society ostensibly dedicated to
democratic and egalitarian ideals, it requires persistent, systematic, and widespread cultural and
institutional hypocrisy in order that policing reinforce and maintain an existing exclusionary and
iniquitous social structure. That about sums up the New York Miracle. The plausibility granted to zero
tolerance policing and war on crime rhetoric reveals a fundamental repression of democratic political
ideals in the service of particular interests. The parable of broken windows is a self-serving fantasy that
benefits the few at the expense of the many. Further, likening Globopolis to a person, we would suggest
that this act of repression is the source of a variety of psychosocial tensions, about which more
momentarily.
The ideology of punishment behind Broken Windows forecloses poverty alleviation

Bernard E. Harcourt, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia University, 1998,
“Reflecting on the Subject: A Critique of the Social Influence Conception of Deterrence, the Broken
Windows Theory, and Order-Maintenance Policing New York Style,” University of Chicago Law School,
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2471&context=journal_articles
(accessed 4/7/20)
Foucault's genealogy of the prison addresses both strands of Durkheim's analysis. With regard first to
the categories, Foucault's discussion of the role of the delinquent in the modern carceral society
illuminates, by analogy, the role of the disorderly in the social influence conception of deterrence. The
delinquent and the disorderly have much in common and it is, for this reason, crucial to rehearse
Foucault's analysis. But the categories are also different in important ways. Whereas delinquency
correlates with treatment, psychotherapy, and correction, the category of the disorderly is more closely
associated with a militaristic method of rectification. The broken windows theory by no means
advocates the more rehabilitative or psychotherapeutic remedies that characterize certain of the
institutions described in Discipline and Punish. The broken windows theory borrows instead from the
classical method of deterrence through excessive punishment, as well as the drill sergeant model of
discipline. For this reason, the category of the disorderly offers an opportunity to refine Foucault's
diagnosis of the modem carceral society. Insofar as we are living today -inescapably, at present -within a
paradigm of the penitentiary, the differences between the delinquent and the disorderly open a window
into the different subtypes of possible disciplinary practices. The social influence theory attempts to
normalize the offender along the axis of order and disorder. However, if there is no evidence to support
this axis of normalization, then it might be better to reform along a different axis, such as, for instance,
poverty or stability. By refining Foucault's analysis, we may be able to draw its policy implications.
Poverty limits agency, multiplying the impact of all rights losses. We control the
internal link to oppression.
Kathleen Ho, masters scholar in human rights at the University of Essex, September 2007, “Structural
Violence as a Human Rights Violation,” Essex Human Rights Review vol. 4 no. 2, p. 9 (accessed 6/14/17)
Poverty consists of a systematic or structural denial of basic freedoms, as articulated by Sen, resulting in
agency constrained to the extent that individuals are unable or lack the ‘capability’ to meet their basic
needs. The denial of one freedom amplifies or multiplies the denial of other freedoms, rendering the
poor disproportionately vulnerable to a whole array of violations. Poverty not only means lack of
money; it means a concomitant impairment of access to adequate healthcare, water, shelter, etc. In
terms of de facto and de jure rights, the poor clearly experience a different de facto realization of
human rights…those living in poverty, on balance, have less access to the kind of economic resources
that are necessary for adequate healthcare, education and welfare services, which may in turn effect the
degree to which they enjoy their civil and political rights.34 Poverty, therefore, constitutes a structural
violation of human rights. There are systemic reasons that explain why the poor bear a disproportionate
burden of rights violations. In this sense, Farmer’s assertion rings eerily true: Human rights violations are
not accidents; they are not random in distribution or effect. Rights violations are, rather, symptoms of
deeper pathologies of power and are linked intimately to the social conditions that so often determine
who will suffer abuse and who will be shielded from harm.35 Furthermore, poverty, although it has an
irreducible economic connotation does not necessarily imply the primacy of economic factors in the
causation of poverty. For example, when discrimination based on gender, ethnicity or any other ground
denies a person access to health-care resources, the resulting ill-health is clearly a case of capability
failure that should count as poverty because the lack of access to resources has played a role.36 The
social factors, such as sexism and racism, also represent additional instances of structural violence that
constrain agency.
Moving away from Broken Windows style policing opens up alternatives to arrests
(accessed 4/7/20)
The mayor of Bogota, Columbia, Antanas Mockus, hired mimes to follow and imitate jaywalkers crossing
the street in an effort to curb jaywalking.377 Mockus also gave motorists "cards with a thumb-downs
sign that they could hold up, like soccer referees, to signal that another driver had committed a foul.'
378 It's a different approach, but the point is, even if we set out to create order, we should consider how
we are going to go about it. We need to critically examine what effect the policies will have on
individuals in society, how the policies construct the subject and how that construction reinforces the
very strategies we are justifying.379 The issue is not just social influence on behavior. The pertinent
questions are, first, how do our strategies of policing and the mechanisms of punishment transform the
subject? Second, how does our under-standing of the subject influence the policing strategy under
consideration? And third, how do these effects relate to the goal of reducing crime? The answer, in the
context of order-maintenance policing is that the quality-of-life initiative creates the disorderly, which in
turn reinforces the policing strategy and overshadows the costs of that strategy, without sufficient
evidence that the order-disorder axis affects crime.
Advantage Two: Black Lives Matter

Broken Windows conditions police see broad swaths of the population as inherently
criminal along racial lines
Sarah Childress, Senior Editor & Director of Local Projects, June 28, 2016, “The Problem with “Broken
Windows” Policing,” PBS Frontline, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/the-problem-with-
broken-windows-policing/ (accessed 3/30/20)
Some policing experts say that Broken Windows is a flawed theory, in part because of the focus on
disorder. Kelling argues that in order to determine how to police a community, residents should identify
their top concerns, and police should — assuming those issues are legitimate — patrol accordingly. But
disorder doesn’t look the same to everyone, Harcourt said. “Definitions about what is orderly or
disorderly or needs to be ticketed, etc., are often loaded — racially loaded, culturally loaded, politically
loaded,” he said. He cited New York’s recent decision to crack down on subway performers, who are
often young black men, as an example. Giving police discretion to enforce public order laws, he added,
“becomes extraordinarily problematic because of racial, ethnic and class-based biases, and including
implicit biases” that can come into play. Linking disorder and crime can also change the way officers
perceive residents, by creating the assumption that those committing minor offenses may do something
worse if they’re not sanctioned, said David Thacher, a criminologist and professor at the University of
Michigan. “Broken Windows frames trivial misbehavior as the beginning of something much more
serious,” Thacher said. “And I worry that that encourages the police to see a broader and broader swath
of the people they’re policing as bad guys.”
Broken Windows gives police unlimited license to stop, ticket, and arrest people of
color
Andrea J. Ritchie, Black lesbian police misconduct attorney and organizer, July 6, 2016, “Black Lives
Over Broken Windows,” Political Research Association,
https://www.politicalresearch.org/2016/07/06/black-lives-over-broken-windows-challenging-the-
policing-paradigm-rooted-in-right-wing-folk-wisdom#sthash.AbQkjVoW.dpbs (accessed 4/2/20)
Key to implementing broken windows policing is the proliferation of “quality of life” regulations, which
criminalize an ever-expanding range of activities in public spaces, including standing or walking (recast
as “loitering”), sitting, lying down, sleeping, eating, drinking, urinating, making noise, and approaching
strangers, as well as a number of vaguer offenses, such as engaging in “disorderly” or “lewd” conduct.
This broad range of potential offenses gives police almost unlimited license to stop, ticket, and arrest.
According to one researcher, enforcement of such low-level offenses has become the “most common
point of contact between the public and the criminal justice system.”35 Of course, what conduct is
deemed “disorderly” or “lewd” is more often than not in the eye of the beholder, informed by deeply
racialized and gendered perceptions. Where offenses are more specific, they criminalize activities so
common they can’t be enforced at all times against all people. When I speak publicly about broken
windows policing, I often ask how many members of the audience have ever fallen asleep on a train or
ridden a bicycle on a sidewalk at some point in their lives. Dozens of hands shoot up. When I ask how
many have ever been ticketed or arrested for it, almost all hands come down—that is, unless I am at a
drop-in center for homeless youth or adults, or in a low-income Black neighborhood. There, many hands
remain in the air. As former Yale law professor Charles Reich notes, “Laws that are widely violated…
especially lend themselves to selective and arbitrary enforcement.”36 As a result, both vague and
specific “quality of life” offenses are selectively enforced in particular neighborhoods and communities,
or against particular people, by officers wielding an extraordinary amount of discretion, largely
unrestrained by constitutional protections. As legal scholar Dorothy Roberts notes in “Race, Vagueness,
and the Social Meaning of Order-Maintenance Policing,” over the last several decades, conservative
commentators have called for a relaxation of legal doctrines disfavoring vague offenses and reining in
police discretion in the name of “law and order” agendas.37
Broken Windows is social cleansing that has created a lost generation of young men of
color to enact a racist revenge policy
Corey Dolgon, professor of sociology at Stonehill College, 2017, “Junk Freedom, Broken Windows, and
Black Lives Matter,” Kill it to save it: An autopsy of capitalism’s triumph over democracy, Bristol
University Press, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1t89656.15 (accessed 4/9/20)
This description suggests a collaborative effort between police and residents to maintain order while
acknowledging certain liberties and even allowing small transgressions. Over time, however, these
collaborations devolved into practices that encouraged beat cops to arrest primarily young men of color
for the most minimal infractions. Exported around the country, a war on “quality of life” crimes
combined with the 1980s and 1990s War on Drugs and effectively sent what some have called a “lost
generation” of young men of color to prison. How did this happen? With great fanfare, New York City
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and top cop William Bratton adopted “broken windows” in 1993. But as
geographer Neil Smith (2001) explained, operationalizing “broken windows” became a “zero-tolerance”
policy driven by a revanchist (revenge) and racist framework regarding who did and didn’t belong in 21st
century America. He wrote: The founding document of the new U.S. revanchism is undoubtedly the
innocuously named Police Strategy No. 5 bearing Giuliani’s and Bratton’s names. … “A decent society is a
society of civility,” it begins, and then lists a litany of people and “behaviors” that have stolen the city
[emphasis added] from its rightful citizens: street peddling, panhandling, prostitution, squeegee
cleaners, boom boxes, graffiti, public drinking, loud clubs, speeding cars, litter louts, public urination,
street artists, and “dangerous mentally ill homeless people.” (The latter euphemistic convolution was
forced by the fact that although homelessness is not a crime, homeless people, number perhaps
100,000 in the early 1990s, were the first targets of the new revanchism). The documents subtitle tells
the strategy: “Reclaiming the Public Spaces of New York.” Less formally, Giuliani and Bratton vowed to
“clean the city” of the “scum” that apparently “threatened” decent people walking down the street.
Zero tolerance was passed off as an anticrime program. Actually, it is a social cleansing strategy.
Ending Broken Windows is crucial to combat and dismantle structural racism

Increasingly though, Black communities across the country are speaking for themselves, loudly and
clearly, demanding safety from all forms of violence—including the violence of profiling, discriminatory
enforcement, and police violence intrinsic to broken windows policing. They are resisting the false
choices presented by broken windows proponents, demanding both authentic safety and an end to
police violence, harassment, and surveillance, along with respect for rights and dignity. As the Malcolm
X Grassroots Movement of New York City stated in the wake of Eric Garner’s killing, the “’broken
windows’ philosophy of policing, which purports that focusing resources on the most minor violations
will somehow prevent larger ones, has consistently resulted in our rights being violated.”57 They
emphatically state that safety cannot come at the price of daily harassment, violation, and the taking of
Black lives. Black voices and communities are articulating their own visions of safety through Black Youth
Project 100’s Agenda to Keep us Safe 58 and Agenda to Build Black Futures, Campaign Zero, and
demands articulated by Black Lives Matter59 and Ferguson Action.60 What ties many of these agendas
together is the notion that the best strategy to promote safety in Black communities is to divest from
policing and punishment and instead invest in and support Black communities, leaving no one behind.
Together, they issue a clarion call to combat and dismantle systems of structural discrimination that
foster violence while limiting opportunities and life chances of Black people—including “broken
windows” policing.
Advantage Three: Sex Work

Broken Windows policing targets sex workers for arrest
ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union, September 12, 2016, “Part of increase in aggressive enforcement
of low-level offenses in Newark,” https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/newark-arrests-targeting-sex-
work-encourage-over-policing-and-threaten-public-health (accessed 4/2/20)
“The Newark Police Department’s 13 arrests on charges related to prostitution over the weekend raise
concerns yet again about Newark’s embrace of failed and destructive 'Broken Windows' policing
strategies. Using our criminal justice system to harass, arrest and incarcerate consenting adults who
agree to exchange sex for money is a poor use of the NPD’s limited resources. “These arrests harm
public health by stigmatizing sex workers and making their lives more difficult and dangerous. These
crackdowns harm public safety by stoking fear of police among sex workers, dissuading vulnerable
communities from reaching out to police to report abuses. "The NPD’s renewed focus on aggressive
enforcement of low-level offenses runs counter to community-oriented policing, which should rely on
alternatives to arrest and prosecution for low-level offenses like these. We urge the City to explore harm
reduction in the interest of public health and to reject failed approaches of criminalization.
Broken Windows policing enforces the dehumanization and disposal of sex workers –
abuse that is linked to other oppressions
Penelope Saunders, coordinator of the Best Practices Policy Project, and Jennifer Kirby, member of
the Alliance for a Safe and Diverse D.C., 2011, “Move Along: Community-based Research into the
Policing of Sex Work in Washington, D.C.,” Social Justice Vol. 37 No. 1: Sexuality, Criminalization and
Social Control Action Research, pp. 107-127, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41336938 (accessed 4/9/20)
To understand the policing of sex work, especially in public spaces, two key issues clarify patterns. First,
for police to act with impunity, societal perceptions must stigmatize and dehumanize the “prostitute” as
a kind of trash, social blight, and/or threat to public safety and order. Second, the patterns of police
abuse are not random. Rather, they depend on social tensions cohering to social groups that are
relentlessly targeted (Ritchie, 2006). The dehumanization of the “prostitute” is linked to other social
inequalities relating to class, race, migrant status, gender, sexual orientation, and age. Street sex
workers, and people profiled by the police as prostitutes on the street, become evidence of social
disorder in gentrifying communities policed by law enforcement bodies driven by the “broken windows”
and “zero tolerance” approaches (Scraton, 2004). The professional and managerial middle class that is
moving into working-class and low-income neighborhoods (Hamnett, 2003) view street sex workers as
urban dirt that must be removed to protect their property values and safety. Along with business
interests, they pressure local politicians and the police to act on the problem. Fears about the
“prostitute” are often augmented by hysteria over the presence of people of color in public space who
may be simultaneously eroticized, considered “dirty,” and security threats (e.g. “loitering” Latinos)
(McArdle, 2001; Cleaveland and Kelly, 2008). Profiled as prostitutes with alarming frequency,
transgender women of color are targets for arrest and harassment by police who act out societal stigma
against gender-nonconformity (Amnesty International, 2005). Different frameworks can drive policing
and surveillance of other forms of sex work, such as massage parlors. Police raids may be framed as
“rescues” of trafficked women (Sex Workers Project, 2009), or they may be based on similar fears of
congregating “illegal immigrants” who challenge public safety.”
Criminalization of sex workers makes them more vulnerable to exploitation, sexual

trafficking and violence
Sonja Dolinsek, policy analyst, September 13, 2013, “The German Prostitution Model: Reducing
Violence Against Sex Workers,” Fair Observer, https://www.fairobserver.com/region/europe/german-
prostitution-model-reducing-violence-against-sex-workers/ (accessed 7/8/19)
Second, abolitionism does not solve the problem of violence which, more often than not, stems from
the criminalization of sex workers and migrants, and the lack of rights that goes with it. In fact, research
has shown that criminalization of sex workers makes them more vulnerable to instances of abuse and
exploitation, including human trafficking. Treated as criminals, victims of human trafficking for sexual
exploitation risk remaining undetected and even further victimized by prison sentences. This has been
the case in the recent FBI sting operation in the US where minors were arrested for prostitution. In the
name of abolition, feminist and abolitionist organizations have supported police raids and police action
in the fight against human trafficking. This is true even for those countries where the police is
infamously corrupt and prone to abuse and sexually assaulting vulnerable populations such as sex
workers, without ever being punished. Such policies hurt sex workers and victims of human trafficking
alike. And, most certainly, they should not be called “feminist.” By contrast, countries that treat sex
work as legal labor have lower incidences of violence against sex workers. In these countries, sex
workers’ working and living conditions have generally improved. The best example is New Zealand,
where even migrant sex workers are protected by law and where a liberal approach has neither
increased the number of sex workers or victims of human trafficking. With the recognition of sex work
as labor come many rights, such as access to health services, the social system and, in New Zealand,
access to residence permits for migrant sex workers. Most importantly, decriminalization grants access
to the legal system in case of rape or abuse by clients or the police.
Ending Broken Windows policing is the first step to full decriminalization of sex work
Melissa Gira Grant, senior staff reporter, September 7, 2018, “How decriminalizing sex work became a
campaign issue in 2018,” The Appeal, https://theappeal.org/senate-candidate-julia-salazar-sex-workers-
rights-campaign/ (accessed 4/10/20)
“What is sex work?” That was the question sex worker rights activists were expecting to hear often as
they canvassed Brooklyn voters one drizzly August Sunday. At a gathering of about two dozen
canvassers in a Williamsburg park, after the pizza and before knocking on doors, the activists circled
under some trees to talk through how to answer that question. It was the first time this group had
canvassed voters on sex workers’ rights, to talk with voters about the enforcement of prostitution laws,
like anti-loitering policing that targets women of color and raids on massage businesses predominantly
staffed by immigrants. It was the first time these activists had a candidate they could canvass on these
issues for. Julia Salazar, who is running for a New York state Senate seat representing north Brooklyn,
arrived a few minutes later to send them off. She said sex workers—“my constituents”—are
disproportionately criminalized in her district. Bushwick, for example, was among the top five New York
City neighborhoods where police made “loitering for prostitution” arrests as of 2015. She referenced the
Brooklyn courts, where 94 percent of those facing loitering for prostitution charges were Black. “That
should disturb all of us,” she said. Salazar argued that sex work policing was a central part of a bigger
problem with Brooklyn’s approach to criminal justice. “Criminalizing sex work is a form of broken
windows policing,” she said. “We shouldn’t tolerate it when it is used against sex workers.” If police gave
out tickets for prostitution-related offenses instead of arresting people, she said, “this would actually go
a long way in New York state toward decriminalization—toward full decriminalization.”
Extensions
Inherency Extensions
Broken Windows policing targets small crimes of social disorder to prevent major
crime
Eric Klinenberg, professor of sociology and the director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New
York University, August 23, 2018, “The Other Side of “Broken Windows”,” The New Yorker,
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-other-side-of-broken-windows
Of course, social scientists have long influenced crime policies. Consider the “broken windows” theory,
which the Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson and the Rutgers criminologist George Kelling
introduced, in a piece in The Atlantic, in 1982. According to Wilson and Kelling, criminals perceive
broken windows and other forms of disorder as signs of weak social control; in turn, they assume that
crimes committed there are unlikely to be checked. “Though it is not inevitable,” Wilson and Kelling
argue, “it is more likely that here, rather than in places where people are confident they can regulate
public behavior by informal controls, drugs will change hands, prostitutes will solicit, and cars will be
stripped.” “Broken Windows” is one of the most cited articles in the history of criminology; it’s
sometimes called the Bible of policing. Since the nineteen-eighties, cities throughout the world have
used Wilson and Kelling’s ideas as motivation for “zero tolerance” policing, wherein officers monitor
petty crimes, such as graffiti, loitering, public intoxication, and even panhandling, and courts severely
punish those convicted of committing them. “If you take care of the little things, then you can prevent a
lot of the big things,” the former Los Angeles and New York City police chief William J. Bratton has said.
(Bratton has also applied the theory in overseas consulting work.) In practice, this meant stopping,
frisking, and arresting more people, particularly those who live in high-crime areas. It also meant a spike
in reports that police were unfairly targeting minorities, particularly black men.
Broken Windows is an unproven theory of crime that suggests policing disorder and
minor offenses prevents violent crime
The broken windows theory, brilliantly summarized in a recent video created by Molly Crabapple,17
goes something like this: if signs of disorder—like broken windows—and minor offenses—like loitering,
panhandling, and graffiti—are left unchecked, then it’s only a matter of time before a community
descends into chaos and violence. According to Kelling and Wilson, the only way to prevent this from
happening is through aggressive enforcement and prosecution of minor offenses. At its core, broken
windows relies on fear-mongering, stoked by familiar right-wing themes about the need for increased
“security” and a compulsion to root out certain groups of people as embodied threats to a particular
way of life . But even Kelling and Wilson acknowledged back in 1982 that it is “not inevitable that serious
crime will flourish or violent attacks on strangers will occur” if signs of disorder are left unchecked.
Indeed, the two wrote that their entire premise is admittedly drawn from what they themselves call
“folk wisdom” rather than objective data, based on the belief that perceived disorder somehow renders
an area more “vulnerable to criminal invasion” such that “drugs will change hands, prostitutes will
solicit, and cars will be stripped.”18 It’s a theory, they implicitly admitted, based more on people’s fears
and beliefs than on hard evidence. The theory later evolved to advance the premise that individuals who
commit minor offenses—like fare evasion in public transit—will, if not caught and punished, eventually
commit more serious offenses: a sort of slippery slope of criminality. The new logic of broken windows,
according to Tanya Erzen, a scholar of American conservatism, writing in Zero Tolerance: Quality of Life
and the New Police Brutality in New York City, is that “graffiti taggers, turnstile jumpers and kids in a
public park are either already criminals, or simply criminals in the making.”19>
Punishment – Ideology
Broken Windows is a racist ideology stating that crime is the product of individual and
cultural predispositions, not socioeconomics
What does broken windows policing have to do with the Right? In part, the answer lies in where it came
from: an outgrowth of the conservative “law and order” agendas of the early 1980s. Neoconservatives
George Kelling and James Q. Wilson outlined the theory underlying broken windows policing in a 1982
Atlantic Quarterly article. 8 Kelling is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and Wilson, before his
death in 2012, was a board member at the American Enterprise Institute, both right-wing think tanks.9
According to Wilson and his colleagues, liberal concessions to civil rights movements and protest
cultures of the 1960s and ‘70s were significant contributing factors to the urban chaos broken windows
policing purports to address.10 In 1985 Wilson co-wrote a book, Crime and Human Nature, with Richard
J. Herrnstein, a co-author of The Bell Curve, which notoriously advanced a theory of racial differences in
intelligence. Wilson’s own 1975 book, Thinking About Crime, argued that crime is the product of
individual and social “predispositions,” rather than socioeconomic conditions.11 His theories echoed
those of his mentor, Edward Banfield, who theorized about a “culture of poverty,” which Wilson
believed required a punitive response,12 and those of The Bell Curve’s other co-author, Charles Murray,
whose arguments suggest that crime is the result of individual mental and moral deficiencies.13 Wilson
decried single parenthood, claiming “illegitimacy was eroding the nation’s values,”14 and, as Pam
Chamberlain wrote in PRA’s Defending Justice: An Activist Resource Kit, argued for “returning to a path
where religion is influential and where families remain intact.”15 New York City became the first
municipality to aggressively implement broken windows policing theories rooted in these right-wing
intellectual traditions in the early 1990s. Under the leadership of former Republican Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani, and bolstered by right-wing media like the New York Post and right-wing think tanks like the
Manhattan Institute, the city put Kelling and Wilson’s theories into practice with an internal police
memorandum, “Reclaiming the Public Spaces of New York,” citing both the pair’s Atlantic article and the
infamous 1965 Moynihan Report, which blamed social dysfunction on Black families, and particularly,
Black mothers.16
Broken Windows serves to emphasize the imbalance of power between the subject
and the state and serve as the quintessential penal mechanism at the core of the
disciplinary process
(accessed 4/7/20)
It is within this framework that we can begin to assess New York City's quality-of-life initiative. The policy
of aggressive misdemeanor arrests bears a close resemblance to the juridical model in a number of
respects. First, it bears the mark of sovereign excess. The idea of subjecting someone who has been, for
instance, drinking in a public space to several hours in a cramped police van, to a strip search, to
overnight detention, and to a criminal record bears the trappings of that imbalance between the subject
and the sovereign that marked the more brutal punishments of the seventeenth century. The theory of
punishment mirrors the early seventeenth century reliance on dissymmetry. Second, it has the trappings
of the juridical -rather than normalizing -judgment: an all or nothing, guilty or innocent dichotomy.
Discipline and normalization operate by creating a spectrum of comparison along which individuals can
be differentiated, classified, and compared. In contrast, the classical juridical model was binary. As
Foucault explains, the essential function of classical juridical penalty “is to refer, not to a set of
observable phenomena, but to a corpus of laws and texts that must be remembered; [it] operates not
by differentiating individuals, but by specifying acts according to a number of general categories; not by
hierarchizing, but quite simply by bringing into play the binary opposition of the permitted and the
forbidden; not by homogenizing, but by operating the division, acquired once and for all, of
condemnation.”29 The quality-of-life initiative is, in this sense, the quintessential penal mechanism at
the core of the disciplinary process. It is the juridical element in the panoply of disciplinary techniques,
the juridical model embedded in a cluster of discipline. Foucault writes, "At the heart of all disciplinary
systems functions a small penal mechanism.”2 9 3 The quality-of-life initiative is precisely that
mechanism.
Broken Windows policing is based on enforcing social exclusion

Ben Bowling, professor of criminology and criminal justice at King’s College London, and James
Sheptycki, professor of criminology at York University, 2011, “Policing Globopolis,” Social Justice Vol.
38 No. 1/2 : Policing the Crisis—Policing in Crisis, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23345531 (accessed
4/13/20)
Our aim in this article has been to evoke a new understanding of global policing by nurturing the
theoretical notion of Globopolis. We have reviewed literature that describes the socially polarizing
effects of policing around the world and raised issues about the psychosocial impact. Our tour of
Globopolis began in Empire City, which we envisage as rising about the other global citadels of power,
first among equals perhaps, although the view from the rising mega-cities of Asia may look rather
different. We began here partly for opportunistic reasons because it allowed us to keep two important
issues of criminological concern in the frame at the outset: political crime and economic crime. But New
York City is also the home of ZTP. It is the scene of the crime, so to speak, and our rendition of the fable
of broken windows showed it up as a fantasy and the source of the inversion of thinking about the
proper role of policing. Instead of regulating general social order, community welfare, and the
maintenance of a state of prosperity, its role is now becoming based on enforcing social exclusion. Our
interest in this has been to generalize to something we call Globopolis. Subsequently, we described the
socially alienating effects of policing as it divides populations and enforces social exclusions. We further
contextualized these practices by reference to broader patterns of alienation. The focus of our analysis,
the security-control paradox (the more police and security you have, the more insecure people feel),
was then discussed in terms of observed psychosocial affects.
Broken Windows creates the subject of the disorderly person – a subject that must be
surveilled, controlled, relocated, and excluded through aggressive arrest and
detention
(accessed 4/7/20)
Foucault's contribution is to shed light on how the techniques of punishment associated with the
quality-of-life initiative create the category of the disorderly. The quality-of-life initiative focuses on the
biography of the disorderly, rather than on the criminal act. It too judges the soul of the disorderly. It
shapes the subject not simply by giving the individual a criminal record, and not simply by convicting the
person. It shapes the subject by turning the individual into someone that needs to be policed, surveyed,
watched, relocated, and controlled. It is in this sense that Foucault writes, regarding the analogous
delinquent, that[i]t is said that the prison fabricated delinquents; it is true that it brings back, almost
inevitably, before the courts those who have been sent there. But it also fabricates them in the sense
that it has introduced into the operation of the law and the offence, the judge and the offender ...the
non-corporal reality of the delinquency that links them together and, for a century and a half, has
caught them in the same trap.298 To say that the quality-of-life initiative shapes the disorderly subject is
not to say that it promotes more disorderly conduct by labeling the individual as disorderly -whether or
not that is true. It is, instead, to suggest that the theory of deterrence and punishment focuses on the
whole biography of the disorderly person, rather than the criminal act, and thereby facilitates a policy of
surveillance, control, relocation, and exclusion of the, disorderly.299 In other words, the category of the
disorderly is the product of the quality-of-life initiative and it promotes and facilitates a policy of
aggressive arrest and detention.
Broken Windows defines youth, people of color, homeless people, sex workers, and
LGBT people as inherently criminal
Given all of this, it’s easy to predict who gets targeted by broken windows policing. Despite proponents’
contention that the approach targets specific behaviors, not specific people, the article on which the
theory is premised explicitly names particular types of people—youth, homeless people, people
perceived to be engaged in prostitution—as embodied signs of disorder.38 According to Pete White of
Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN), a community organization that has been fighting the
effects of broken windows policing on Los Angeles’ homeless population for decades, the inspirations for
Kelling and Wilson’s 1982 article were much more explicit about the racial and gender make up of signs
of neighborhood disorder: “young Black men, young women in short shorts hanging out on corners,
interracial couples, and gay folks.”39 The result: dramatically increased frequency and intensity of police
interactions with Black and Brown youth, low-income and homeless people, public housing residents,
people who are—or who are perceived to be—engaged in street-based prostitution, street vendors
(many of whom are immigrants), and anyone else who is hyper-visible in public spaces, including
lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and gender nonconforming people.
Broken Windows policing makes the power to punish seem natural and legitimate in
response to inherently criminal populations
(accessed 4/7/20)
This reading of Foucault challenges us to rethink the social influence conception of deterrence. I will
summarize here in brute simplicity the concrete implications. First, the quality-of-life initiative may
create the category of the disorderly. Second, the category of the disorderly may facilitate a policy of
aggressive arrests, with the possibility of attendant brutality, even though such a policy is unlikely to
have the slightest effect on crime rates. Third, the inter-play of the norm of orderliness (discipline) and
the ideals of justice(law) may succeed in blinding us to the disorder that accompanies the quality-of-life
initiative. The social influence theory of deterrence concentrates on the construction of social
meaning,309 but fails to pay enough attention to the way that social meaning constructs the subject and
to the way that our understanding of the subject fosters certain forms of disciplinary strategies. It does
not pay enough attention to the way that social meaning allows us to treat the disorderly as deviant and
outside the realm of our legal ideals, or to the way that social meaning allows us to implement a policy
of aggressive misdemeanor arrests without noticing it. This reading of Foucault explains how. In
discussing modern society, Foucault writes:[P]erhaps the most important effect of the carceral system
and of its extension well beyond legal imprisonment is that it succeeds in making the power to punish
natural and legitimate, in lowering at least the threshold of tolerance to penalty. It tends to efface what
may be exorbitant in the exercise of punishment.310This may explain why we so easily ignore what it
would actually be like to be arrested, handcuffed, booked, transported, strip-searched, jailed, and given
a criminal record for a minor misdemeanor offense. We have so internalized the norm of orderliness
that even those among us who favor social norms and seek alternatives to incarceration disregard the
fact that the quality-of-life initiative re-lies so extensively on law enforcement, arrest, and incarceration.
We are blinded because, after all, the people being arrested are dis-orderly -they have committed
crimes.3 11
Punishment – Police Abuse Impacts

Broken Windows policing gives power to police to violate democratic and
constitutional principles for repression
(accessed 4/7/20)
Clyde Haberman of the New York Times recently asked, slightly facetiously, "a humble question" on the
quality-of-life initiative: “Whose life is it, anyway, that we're talking about?"368 Referring to the
campaign against squeegee men, Haberman remarked to himself, “Wait a minute, dummy, you don't
own a car. No squeegee man ever ruined your day. And you know what? The same is true for most New
Yorkers, since the city's Transportation Department says that 56 percent of them do not have access to a
car, let alone even occasional contact with curbside window washers.”369Haberman's amusing
comments must be taken in perspective; the quality-of-life initiative has also targeted the subway
system and other pedestrian venues. But the humble question is still an important one. How do we
define minor disorder? Clearly, we are not talking about arresting those who pay their house keeper in
cash to knowingly benefit from IRS underreporting, or who pay their nannies under the table. The
quality-of-life initiative focuses instead on the type of minor offenses -loitering, fare-beating, and
panhandling -that affect the poorer members of society, which, tragically, include a disproportionate
number of minorities. Who gets to define disorder? By handing over the informal power to define
deviance to police officers and some community members, we may be enabling the repression of
political, cultural, or sexual outsiders in away that is antithetical to our conceptions of democratic theory
or constitutional principles.370
Broken Windows is a form of discipline that is exclusively punitive – it does not seek to
reform or even examine the disorderly, only to punish and exclude
(accessed 4/7/20)
At the same time, however, the quality-of-life initiative feeds into the disciplinary project by producing a
subject to normalize -the disorderly. By normalizing along the axis of disorder, the quality-of-life
initiative breaks down and blends together the line be-tween disorder and crime. Disorder becomes a
degree of crime: breaking a window, littering, jumping a turnstile become grades along a spectrum that
leads to homicide. The analogy, from Foucault, is to the penitentiary technique: “This vast mechanism
established a slow, continuous, imperceptible gradation that made it possible to pass naturally from
disorder to offence and back from a transgression of the law to a slight departure from a rule, an
average, a demand, a norm.... You will end up in the convict-ship, the slightest indiscipline seems to say;
and the harshest of prisons says to the prisoners condemned to life: I shall note the slightest irregularity
in your conduct.”294 Just like the category of the delinquent, the category of the disorderly breaks
down the lines between minor infraction, minor disorder, and major offense. Moreover, as we saw
earlier, the quality-of-life initiative also feeds into the disciplinary project of surveillance. To say,
however, that the quality-of-life initiative is part of the disciplinary project is to say too little -everything
is today, since we live, according to Foucault, in a disciplinary society. Until such time as another
paradigm presents itself, what we have to do today is compare the different genres of discipline. It is
here that we can refine Foucault's analysis for there are many things that the quality-of-life is not. It is
not modeled on the rehabilitative ideal central to many disciplinary projects, especially that of the
mental hospital, welfare, and social work institutions. It does not feed into the psychotherapeutic. It
does not coddle the disorderly. It does not aim so much to reform the disorderly as it does to punish
them and to exclude them in the sense of getting them off the street. Insofar as the strategy does seek
to influence their behavior, it does not employ the traditional rehabilitative methods. Nor does the
quality-of-life initiative incorporate the concept of examination -the calling card of school discipline.
These are different subtypes of disciplinary techniques.
Punishment – Poverty Impacts

Poverty leads to higher risk of death, shorter lifespan, and lost opportunities. Inaction
is complicity in structural violence.
Steven Lee, peace scholar, 1999, “Is Poverty Violence?” Institutional Violence, p. 10 (accessed 6/13/17)
One of the primary injustices of a bad social order is poverty. Poverty results in a whole range of serious
physical and psychological harms: higher risks of disease, shortened life spans, stunted mental and
emotional development, and inadequate opportunity to lead a meaningful life. These are primarily
institutionally imposed harms, because they are the result of the enforcement of systems of social,
political, legal, and economical rules. But, though the harms are institutional, they are caused by
individuals, in the sense that the acts of other individuals could avoid them. It is individuals who enforce
the unjust legal norms of the social order and refrain from seeking to change these norms to achieve a
fairer redistribution of wealth and power. It is the radical critique of a social order which calls to our
attention these harms, the injustice they involve, and our individual and collective responsibility for
them. But my point is that the radical critique does more than this. It implies that, if violence involves
the transgression of a norm, then institutional violence may occur even in the absence of vigorous force.
In pointing out the harms of social order, harms other than those of social disorder, the radical critique
demonstrates the mere contingency of the link between the causing of harm and the application of
vigorous force. This allows an extension of the notion of violence to cover such harms, and so reveals
that vigorous force is not a necessary condition for violence.
Poverty is the expression of oppression as structural violence

Paul Farmer, doctor of anthropology from Harvard, 2003, “On Suffering and Structural Violence,”
Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, University of California
Press, p. 9-10 (accessed 6/13/17)
We have to observe that the socioeconomically oppressed (the poor) do not simply exist alongside other
oppressed groups, such as blacks, indigenous peoples, women—to take the three major categories in
the Third World. No, the "class-oppressed"—the socioeconomically poor—are the infrastructural
expression of the process of oppression. The other groups represent "superstructural" expressions of
oppression and because of this are deeply conditioned by the infrastructural. It is one thing to be a black
taxi-driver, quite another to be a black football idol; it is one thing to be a woman working as a domestic
servant, quite another to be the first lady of the land; it is one thing to be an Amerindian thrown off your
land, quite another to be an Amerindian owning your own farm. 49 This is not to deny that sexism or
racism has serious negative consequences, even in the wealthy countries of North America and Europe.
The point is simply to call for more honest discussions of who is likely to suffer and in what ways. The
capacity to suffer is, clearly, a part of being human. But not all suffering is equivalent, in spite of
pernicious and often self-serving identity politics that suggest otherwise. Physicians practice triage and
referral daily. What suffering needs to be taken care of first and with what resources? It is possible to
speak of extreme human suffering, and an inordinate share of this sort of pain is currently endured by
those living in poverty. Take, for example, illness and premature death, the leading cause of extreme
suffering in many places in the world. In a striking departure from previous, staid reports, the World
Health Organization now acknowledges that poverty is the world's greatest killer: "Poverty wields its
destructive influence at every stage of human life, from the moment of conception to the grave. It
conspires with the most deadly and painful diseases to bring a wretched existence to all those who
suffer from it." 50 Today, the world's poor are the chief victims of structural violence—a violence that
has thus far defied the analysis of many who seek to understand the nature and distribution of extreme
suffering. Why might this be so? One answer is that the poor are not only more likely to suffer; they are
also less likely to have their suffering noticed, as Chilean theologian Pablo Richard, noting the fall of the
Berlin Wall, has warned: "We are aware that another gigantic wall is being constructed in the Third
World, to hide the reality of the poor majorities. A wall between the rich and poor is being built, so that
poverty does not annoy the powerful and the poor are obliged to die in the silence of history." 51
Poverty invisibly removes individual agency – the poor are the chief victims of
structural violence
Barbara Rylko-Bauer and Paul Farmer, peace scholars, May 2016, “Structural Violence, Poverty,
and Social Suffering,” The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty,
http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199914050.001.0001/oxfordhb-
9780199914050-e-4 (accessed 6/12/17)
The Haitian epidemic also demonstrates why structural violence is so often hard to describe. It is distant.
In our postmodern world of global connections and instant images, “being a spectator of calamities
taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience” (Sontag 2003:18). Nevertheless,
while the suffering of individuals whose lives and struggles recall our own tends to move us, the
anonymous suffering of those more remote, geographically, culturally, or socially is often less affecting
(Farmer 2006a). It is largely invisible. Physical violence shows, whereas “structural violence is silent …
[and] may be seen as about as natural as the air around us” (Galtung 1969:173). Many structural
inequities are long-standing; they seem a natural part of the social order. But as anthropologist Nancy
Scheper-Hughes reminds us (1996:889), “invisible” does not mean “secreted away and hidden from
view, but quite the reverse…. [T]‌he things that are hardest to perceive are often those which are right
before our eyes and therefore simply taken for granted.” Haiti’s extreme poverty and
underdevelopment has certainly been visible for decades (Farmer 1997a; 2006b). Another factor is the
preoccupation of politicians and the media with dramatic forms of violence. “Injustice—in either deed or
word—is never linked to violence but rather interpreted in an economic, symbolic, or psychologist
register…. [P]hysical violence … is never related to that other violence—of exclusion, discrimination, and
humiliation” (Fassin 2009:117). It is massive. The sheer weight and enormity of suffering is not easily or
effectively conveyed by statistics or graphs. Economist Amartya Sen (1998:2) has argued for moving
beyond “cold and often inarticulate statistics of low incomes” to look in detail at the various ways in
which agency—“the capabilities of each person”—is constrained. In other words, we need individual
case studies that are embedded in the larger matrix of culture, history, and political economy. While no
single axis of inequality—gender, race, ethnicity, immigrant status, sexual orientation, class—can fully
define extreme human suffering, we argue for the primacy of poverty, which is often linked with other
structures of inequity. “Today, the world’s poor are the chief victims of structural violence—a violence
that has thus far defied the analysis of many who seek to understand the nature and distribution of
extreme suffering” (Farmer 2003:50).
Poverty is systemic violence

Johan Galtung, peace scholar, 1969, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace
Research, p. 171 (accessed 6/12/17)
Resources are unevenly distributed, as when income distributions are heavily skewed,
literacy/education unevenly distributed, medical services existent in some districts and for some groups
only, and so on.14 Above all the power to decide over the distribution of resources is unevenly
distributed.15 The situation is aggravated further if the persons low on income are also low in
education, low on health, and low on power - as is frequently the case because these rank dimensions
tend to be heavily correlated due to the way they are tied together in the social structure.16 Marxist
criticism of capitalist society emphasizes how the power to decide over the surplus from the production
process is reserved for the owners of the means of production, who then can buy themselves into top
positions on all other rank dimensions because money is highly convertible in a capitalist society - if you
have money to convert, that is. Liberal criticism of socialist society similarly emphasizes how power to
decide is monopolized by a small group who convert power in one field into power in another field
simply because the opposition cannot reach the stage of effective articulation. The important point here
is that if people are starving when this is objectively avoidable, then violence is committed, regardless of
whether there is a clear subject-action-object relation, as during a siege yesterday or no such clear
relation, as in the way world economic relations are organized today.17 We have baptized the
distinction in two different ways, using the word-pairs personal-structural and direct-indirect
respectively. Violence with a clear subject-object relation is manifest because it is visible as action. It
corresponds to our ideas of what drama is, and it is personal because there are persons committing the
violence. It is easily captured and expressed verbally since it has the same structure as elementary
sentences in (at least Indo- European) languages: subject-verb-object, with both subject and object
being persons. Violence without this relation is structural, built into structure. Thus, when one husband
beats his wife there is a clear case of personal violence, but when one million husbands keep one million
wives in ignorance there is structural violence. Correspondingly, in a society where life expectancy is
twice as high in the upper as in the lower classes, violence is exercised even if there are no concrete
actors one can point to directly attacking others, as when one person kills another.
Poverty is structural violence that kills 50,000 daily

Violence as a Human Rights Violation,” Essex Human Rights Review vol. 4 no. 2, p. 7-8 (accessed
6/12/17)
Having established a very basic outline of the structural nature of poverty, the next issue to address is
how exactly poverty constitutes structural violence. As Pogge states, his ‘criticism is not that they [the
poor] are worse off than they might be, but that we and our governments [of developed countries]
participate in depriving them [the poor] of the objects of their most basic rights’. 25 Moreover, the
aggregate gap between the amount needed for those under the $1/day poverty line to reach that line is
0.16 per cent of the gross national incomes of the high-income economies. Therefore, ‘for the first time
in human history it is quite feasible, economically, to wipe out hunger and preventable diseases
worldwide without real inconvenience to anyone’. 26 The conditions of global inequality that result in
severe poverty are certainly avoidable. Moreover, poverty creates conditions where the actual ability to
meet one’s fundamental human needs are obstructed. There are clear indicators that poverty effectively
constitutes the violence that creates the disparity between actual and possible abilities to meet
fundamental human needs. Again, statistics provide a lucid picture: 815 million persons are
undernourished; 1.1 billion lack access to safe water; more than 880 million lack access to basic health
services; roughly one third of all human deaths, some 50,000 daily, are due to poverty-related causes,
easily preventable through better nutrition, safe drinking water, vaccines, cheap rehydration packs and
antibiotics.27 Poverty clearly places individuals at a much higher risk of malnourishment, disease and
death. It is clear from these indicators that ‘severe poverty causes massive underfulfillment of social and
economic human rights, such as the “right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being
of oneself and one’s family, including food, clothing housing and medical care.”’28 While this causal link
is evident, what makes poverty itself a violation of human rights? Amartya Sen’s approach provides an
answer to this question. Sen lays out a new understanding of poverty that is no longer premised solely
on income; rather, he conceives of poverty as a nonfulfillment of basic human rights where inadequate
command over economic resources are involved. 29
Poverty is a structural violation of human rights

Violence as a Human Rights Violation,” Essex Human Rights Review vol. 4 no. 2, p. 15 (accessed 6/13/17)
Paul Farmer posits, ‘human rights can and should be declared universal, but the risk of having one’s
rights violated is not universal’.62 This observation is at the heart of structural violations of human
rights. There are systemic and structural causes that place some populations at a greater risk of human
rights violations than others. This inequality in risk can be traced to uneven distributions of power. This
central tenet of structural violence reveals the pattern of human rights violations that manifest
themselves as economic and social inequalities. Structural violence, as this essay has shown, exists when
there is an avoidable gap between actual and potential abilities to meet human needs. This framework is
applicable to human rights violations in that constrained agency plays a pivotal role in how individuals
experience this gap between the actual and the potential. When economic and social structures
conspire to limit one’s agency to the extent that fundamental human needs cannot be met then
structural violence becomes a structural violation of human rights. This essay used poverty to exemplify
how structural violence is a useful theory to locate the origins of structural violations of human rights.
After an examination of the nature of poverty distributions and how structures are responsible for the
persistence in poverty, it was shown that poverty not only causes human rights violations, but, under
the formulation of Amartya Sen, also itself constitutes a violation of human rights as it exemplifies
constrained agency. Finally, applying structural violence to the human rights discourse, there emerges a
clear emphasis on social and economic rights. The centrality of the principle of equality in structural
violations resonates with the focus on equality in the foundations of social and economic rights (as
distinct from freedoms and liberties in civil and political rights). The recent formulation of the right to
development fully captures the implications of the structural violence theory. The emphasis on
international assistance and cooperation and the integration of all the human rights into the concept of
a vector indicates a holistic approach to addressing global inequality that the human rights regime
lacked before. However, the puzzle presented at the start of this paper, how to attribute responsibility
for widespread disease and poverty, remains. Chapman’s violations approach provides a preliminary
answer. States which sign international human rights covenants have a legal obligation to uphold these
rights. However, changing the ‘pathologies of power’ to which Farmer refers requires seriously
committing to international assistance and cooperation and, among many other changes, adjusting the
rules of international financial institutions, as outlined by Arjun Sengupta in his Fourth Report. The
rigorous accountability of these rights lies in the human rights regime’s ability to address the
shortcomings of enforcement mechanisms for states and creating incentives for other actors in the
international community to participate in its efforts.
Black Lives Matter – Eric Garner

Broken Windows led to the death of Eric Garner
Justin Peters, correspondent, December 3, 2014, “Broken Windows Policing Doesn’t Work,” Slate,
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/12/broken-windows-policing-doesnt-work-it-also-may-have-
killed-eric-garner.html (accessed 4/1/20)
Why was Garner approached at all? Because of the emphasis on “broken windows policing” under NYPD
Commissioner Bill Bratton. As Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s police commissioner in the 1990s, Bratton
presided over a surge in petty-crime law enforcement, on the theory that vigorously enforcing the small
laws in some way dissuades or prevents people from breaking the big ones. There’s little evidence that
theory is correct. Nevertheless, mayor-elect Bill de Blasio brought Bratton back as New York’s police
commissioner last December. Bratton’s return meant the return of broken windows policing. “If you
take care of the little things, then you can prevent a lot of the big things,” Bratton said in March,
spouting the broken windows gospel. It’s that philosophy as much as anything else is to blame for Eric
Garner’s death. Bratton was a popular figure during the Giuliani era because crime rates fell on his
watch. While observers were quick to credit his policies for that decline, there’s no reason to think the
drop in violent crime had anything to do with broken windows or Bratton’s vaunted Compstat, a
computer program that tracks crime statistics citywide.
Broken Windows policing kills Black people like Eric Garner and Michael Brown
When protesters developed a platform to end police violence in the wake of the 2014 police shooting of
18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the first of their 10 demands was to end “broken
windows” policing, the law enforcement paradigm marked by aggressive policing of minor offenses and
heavy police presence in low-income Black communities.1 Broken windows policing is what led Ferguson
police officer Darren Wilson to approach Michael Brown simply for walking in the middle of the street. It
is what motivated police to repeatedly harass Eric Garner, a 43-year-old Staten Island resident who was
killed earlier that summer by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, using a banned police chokehold during an
encounter initiated over Garner’s alleged sale of loose cigarettes. And in 2015 it was what brought
Baltimore police into contact with Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Baltimore man who was initially stopped
while allegedly fleeing from police officers in his low-income Black community—and who died after his
spinal cord was severed while he was in police custody. The role of broken windows policing in each
death quickly became the focus of protesters from the Black Lives Matter movement and other civil
rights advocates. Just days after Brown’s death, national president of the NAACP Cornell William Brooks
said, “The death of Michael Brown strikes me as the latest, sad chapter in an ongoing national narrative
about a form of policing, broken windows policing, that is simply not right for the country.”2 In New
York City, This Stops Today—an ad hoc coalition taking its name from Eric Garner’s words on the day he
died to the officers who had repeatedly harassed him—made ending broken windows one of their 11
demands. (The 11 demands were issued in honor of the 11 times that Garner was seen on video telling
the officers who killed him, “I can’t breathe.”3)
Broken Windows policing killed Eric Garner, poisoning relations between police and
black communities
NPR, National Public Radio, November 1, 2016, “How A Theory Of Crime And Policing Was Born, And
Went Terribly Wrong,” https://www.npr.org/2016/11/01/500104506/broken-windows-policing-and-
the-origins-of-stop-and-frisk-and-how-it-went-wrong (accessed 3/30/20)
And just seven months after taking over again as the head of the New York Police Department, Bratton's
broken windows policy came under fresh scrutiny. The reason: the death of Eric Garner. In July 2014, a
bystander caught on cellphone video the deadly clash between New York City police officers and Garner,
an African-American. After a verbal confrontation, officers tackled Garner, while restraining him with a
chokehold, a practice that is banned in New York City. Garner died not long after he was brought down
to the ground. His death sparked massive protests, and his name is now synonymous with the distrust
between police and African-American communities. For George Kelling, this was not the end that he had
hoped for. As a researcher, he's one of the few whose ideas have left the academy and spread like
wildfire. But once politicians and the media fell in love with his idea, they took it to places that he never
intended and could not control. "When, during the 1990s, I would occasionally read in a newspaper
something like a new chief comes in and says, 'I'm going to implement broken windows tomorrow,' I
would listen to that with dismay because [it's] a highly discretionary activity by police that needs
extensive training, formal guidelines, constant monitoring and oversight. So do I worry about the
implementation about broken windows? A whole lot ... because it can be done very badly."
Black Lives Matter – Racial Profiling

Racist views determine who police see as a “Broken Window”
Even more problematic, in order to be able to go after disorder, you have to be able to define it. Is it a
trash bag covering a broken window? Teenagers on a street corner playing music too loudly? In Chicago,
the researchers Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush analyzed what makes people perceive social
disorder. They found that if two neighborhoods had exactly the same amount of graffiti and litter and
loitering, people saw more disorder, more broken windows, in neighborhoods with more African-
Americans. George Kelling is not an advocate of stop and frisk. In fact, all the way back in 1982, he
foresaw the possibility that giving police wide discretion could lead to abuse. In his article, he and James
Q. Wilson write: "How do we ensure ... that the police do not become the agents of neighborhood
bigotry? We can offer no wholly satisfactory answer to this important question."
Broken Windows is racial profiling

Ken Auletta, journalist, August 31, 2015, “Fixing Broken Windows,” The New Yorker,
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/07/fixing-broken-windows (accessed 4/2/20)
Bratton is at pains to emphasize that broken-windows policing is not stop-and-frisk. With stop-and-frisk,
he said, “an officer has a reasonable suspicion that a crime is committed, is about to be committed, or
has been committed. Quality-of-life policing is based on probable cause—an officer has witnessed a
crime personally, or has a witness to the crime. It’s far different.” The difference is irrelevant to many
critics, who see an approach that presumes guilt and unfairly targets minorities. Broken-windows theory
and stop-and-frisk “have the same ideology,” Josmar Trujillo, a co-founder of New Yorkers Against
Bratton and a member of the Coalition to End Broken Windows, told me. Trujillo added that he’d happily
see the N.Y.P.D.’s force reduced by half. “We live in a place where police are constantly in our lives,
acting as if they expect crime.” Joo-Hyun Kang, the director of Communities United for Police Reform, a
citywide umbrella group comprising dozens of organizations, said that, at least anecdotally, far more
summonses are issued to people “in Bedford-Stuyvesant who may be on their stoop enjoying a can of
beer” than to, say, picnickers in Central Park sharing a bottle of champagne. Broken-windows invites
“the N.Y.P.D. to go on a fishing expedition,” Kang said. “It’s basically racial profiling for people under the
assumption that they have outstanding warrants.”
Broken Windows targets communities of color for the enforcement of low-level

offenses
Justin Peters, correspondent, December 3, 2014, “Broken Windows Policing Doesn’t Work,” Slate,
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/12/broken-windows-policing-doesnt-work-it-also-may-have-
killed-eric-garner.html (accessed 4/1/20)
With the decline of stop-and-frisk and the return of broken windows, the NYPD has traded one dubious
tactic for another. When Bratton was appointed in December 2013, de Blasio positioned him as the
opposite of his predecessor as police commissioner, Ray Kelly, saying in a press conference that “public
safety and respect for the public aren’t contradictory ideas.” Bratton, for his part, promised policies of
“mutual respect and mutual trust,” and vowed that “I will get it right in this city once more”—implying,
of course, that he had gotten it right the first time. Three months later, the New York Times reported
that arrests of subway panhandlers had tripled since Bratton took over, and that there had been “a
noticeable spike in arrests for low-level violations in public housing developments.” This renewed
emphasis on misdemeanor “quality of life” arrests has sparked renewed criticisms from community
members who are tired of being hassled. These criticisms spiked after Garner’s death in July. Six
members of New York’s congressional delegation sent Attorney General Eric Holder a letter noting that
“Mr. Garner’s death has taken place in the context of a broken windows policing strategy that appears
to target communities of color for the enforcement of minor violations and low-level offenses.” Two
weeks after Garner’s death, de Blasio held a press conference to address these criticisms and defend
broken windows. “Breaking a law is breaking a law, and it has to be addressed,” said de Blasio.
Broken Windows leads to stop-and-frisk policing

Harcourt says there was another big problem with broken windows. "We immediately saw a sharp
increase in complaints of police misconduct. Starting in 1993, what you're going to see is a tremendous
amount of disorder that erupts as a result of broken windows policing, with complaints skyrocketing,
with settlements of police misconduct cases skyrocketing, and of course with incidents, brutal incidents,
all of a sudden happening at a faster and faster clip." The problem intensified with a new practice that
grew out of broken windows. It was called "stop and frisk," and was embraced in New York City after
Mayor Michael Bloomberg won election in 2001. If broken windows meant arresting people for
misdemeanors in hopes of preventing more serious crimes, "stop and frisk" said, why even wait for the
misdemeanor? Why not go ahead and stop, question and search anyone who looked suspicious?
Broken Windows inevitably targets people of color, upholding white privilege across
America
Christopher Mathias, senior reporter, October 9, 2015, “This Is What Broken Windows Policing Looks
Like,” Huffington Post, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/broken-windows-policing-new-
york_n_5617f428e4b0082030a2573f (accessed 4/2/20)
This, of course, is all done in the name of public safety. It’s NYPD Commissioner William Bratton’s
“broken windows” theory of policing — the idea that, by aggressively targeting low-level crime in high-
crime neighborhoods, police can deter more serious crime. But in reality, targeting petty crimes in this
way inevitably means targeting minorities. As such, broken windows policing creates two cities. And in
one of those cities, an uncle and a nephew playing dominoes outside on a cool autumn night are
criminals. “I think they just want us, basically, to stop coming around or stay in the house,” Stroy told
DNAinfo after getting his ticket, adding that he’d been playing dominoes outside in the neighborhood
“for years.” And he’s right: That is what broken windows is designed to do. (Former NYPD Commissioner
Ray Kelly has basically said as much.) It’s not only in New York. It’s in Ferguson. It’s in Baltimore. Across
the country, white Americans enjoy a privilege when it comes to policing that, for minorities, is still far
away.
Broken Windows is a police response to a white fear of poor people, Black people, and
people of color
Like so many policies of the Right, broken windows policing is rooted in fear: fear of poverty, fear of
youth, fear of unregulated sexuality and gender nonconformity, and deeply, at its core, a fear of
Blackness. According to George Kelling’s recent defense of the theory in Politico, published a year after
Michael Brown’s death, “The goal is to reduce the level of disorder in public spaces so that citizens feel
safe, are able to use them, and businesses thrive.”23 Kelling concedes that it is, in essence, an approach
based on public perception—that is, on feelings—rather than proof. In the end, fear—of crime, yes, but
also, as the original article explains, of “being bothered by disorderly people,” like panhandlers,
“addicts” or people living with mental illness—is the moving force behind the theory.24 As Bratton once
put it, “Aggressive panhandling, squeegee cleaners, street prostitution, ‘boombox cars,’ public
drunkenness, reckless bicyclists, and graffiti have added to the sense that the entire public environment
is a threatening place.”25 Although not explicitly stated, given that the communities described in Kelling
and Wilson’s original article and others that followed are Black, it is clear that the “disorderly people,”
the people driving “boombox cars,” and the graffiti taggers are also imagined as Black. As gentrification
of New York City proceeded through the 1990s, “disorderly people” came to mean those displaced into
public spaces in the context of neoliberal devolution and cuts to social programs.26 In other words,
broken windows policing isn’t about reducing crime, it’s about assuaging white fear of poor people,
Black people, and people of color—no matter how irrational or racialized.*
Broken Windows is a form of racial profiling

Dan O’Brien, associate professor in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the School of
Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University, May 26, 2019, “Break the ‘broken
windows’ spell: The policing theory made famous in New York City under Giuliani and Bratton doesn’t
hold up to scrutiny,” New York Daily News, https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-break-the-
broken-windows-spell-20190526-ulwcdd7fnjg4fgv6dnskls6vhi-story.html (accessed 3/31/20)
In recent years, prevailing wisdom has soured. We have seen many cases in which aggressive tactics
create antagonistic relationships between police and the communities they serve. Likewise, we’ve come
to understand that efforts to police the precursors of crime as much as crime itself leads to racial
profiling. As such, many cities have broken away from broken windows policing. But others, including
New York City, have not. In fairness, prompted by an activist City Council, the NYPD has partially relaxed
its approach in recent years, moving away from criminal consequences and instead issuing civil tickets
for many infractions. But even de Blasio, paragon of progressivism, has continued to assert his belief
that policing disorder is an effective technique for preventing crime.
Black Lives Matter – Violence Impacts

Broken Windows makes racist violence inevitable – men of color are imprisoned or
killed to save the city for whiteness
The mistake would be to blame these social phenomena on “a few bad cops.” As Slate columnist Jamell
Bouie writes: In this environment, where police are empowered to stop anyone for the faintest cause,
violence is inevitable. Last month, Eric Garner was the victim, but it could have been anyone, because
senseless deaths are a predictable cost of broken windows policing. It’s the trade-off. We’ll stop petty
“disorder,” but at the price of dead bodies. And given what we know about our biases, those bodies will
almost always be brown. It has become an epidemic inexorably linked to the operationalizing of “broken
windows” as zero-tolerance policy of social cleansing. Young men of color are imprisoned or killed to
“save” the streets and city of the rest of “us.” Even Kelling, one of the original authors of “broken
windows,” recently asked people not to “blame my theory for poor policing,” for zero-tolerance
practices and the mass arrests and shootings of young Black and Brown youth. He explains that, “Broken
windows was never intended to be a high-arrest program. Although it has been practiced as such in
many cities, neither Wilson nor I ever conceived of it in those terms. And to Kelling’s credit, he and
Wilson did carry the following disclaimer in their original 1982 Atlantic Monthly piece: The concern
about equity is more serious. We might agree that certain behavior makes one person more undesirable
than another but how do we ensure that age or skin color or national origin or harmless mannerisms will
not also become the basis for distinguishing the undesirable from the desirable? How do we ensure, in
short, that the police do not become the agency of neighborhood bigotry? We can offer no wholly
satisfactory answer to this important question. We are not confident that there is a satisfactory answer
except to hope that by their selection, training, and supervision, the police will be inculcated with a clear
sense of the outer limit of their discretionary authority. That limit, roughly, is this – the police exist to
help regulate behavior, not to maintain the racial or ethnic purity of a neighborhood.
Broken Windows is a policy of state terrorism of Black and Latino communities

This seemingly throwaway disclaimer eventually undermined the entire theory and has ended in both
failure and tragedy. For most, the implementation of “broken windows” policing has been discredited;
contemporary criminologists, sociologists, and economists write overwhelmingly about its flawed
assumptions and poor applications. But, as Bouie reminds us, “If broken windows were just a waste of
resources, it wouldn’t be a huge concern. But as a policy, broken windows has also had the effect of
terrorizing Black and Latino communities.” The recent turn towards social cleansing, towards terrorizing
communities of color, is of course the dark underside of “kill it to save it.” Part of this nation’s rewired
cognitive functioning graduated from welfare queens in the 1980s, to gangbangers in the 1990s, to any
person of color driving, walking, shopping, or simply waiting in a shopping mall in the 2000s. As we “kill”
public institutions and any real semblance or conception of “the public” in order to “save” the nation,
what is left to save remains this toxic blend of hyper-individualism and corporate hegemony, often
woven together with the historically strong thread of racism. When Michelle Alexander wonders why we
can’t treat Black and Brown youth “like one of us,” the answer may be that white America (and the non-
white parts of America with enough class privilege to “pass”) no longer knows or care to know (or
perhaps knows all too well) what “us” means. This dynamic has been at the heart of the Black Lives
Matter movement. While some, predominantly white, politicians, and pundits claim “All Lives Matter”
and cry reverse racism about “special” attention to African American deaths by police, the last three
decades of intensified and militarized policing in urban communities of color has resulted in movements
challenging the ways in which white supremacy and neoliberalism have devastated poor, non-white
neighborhoods. The degradation of education and local economies, combined with mass incarceration
and unindicted police homicides, has inspired a mass movement.
Broken Windows policing builds off a legacy of antiblackness – it is about defending an

idealized white community based on heteropatriarchy and hatred of the poor
Scratching the surface of broken windows policing reveals that, in the end, the paradigm is simply a
repackaged and sanitized version of the ways age-old “vagrancy” laws were enforced. These laws were
explicitly created to criminalize and control the movements of people deemed undesirable throughout
U.S. history: Indigenous peoples, formerly enslaved people of African descent, immigrants, women, and
homeless and poor people. In his recent defense of broken windows, Kelling himself directly
acknowledged the lineage, stating in reference to his 1982 essay, “Given the subject of our article, the
Black Codes—vague loitering and vagrancy laws passed in the South immediately after the Civil War—
were of special concern for us. Under these laws police arrested African Americans for minor offenses
and, when they could not pay the fines, courts committed them to involuntary labor on farms—in a
sense, extending slavery for many into the 20th century.”27 Without offering a means of distinguishing
present-day broken windows policing from these practices, Kelling simply submits that he and Wilson
were just arguing for “doing a better job at maintaining order.”28 The question though, is whose order?
In their 1982 article, Kelling and Wilson acknowledge that there are “no universal standards…to settle
arguments over disorder…” and that charges of being a “suspicious person” or of vagrancy have
“scarcely any legal meaning.”29 Ultimately, they wrote, “These charges exist…because [society] wants
an officer to have the legal tools to remove undesirable persons from a neighborhood when informal
efforts to preserve order in the streets have failed.”30 This is to say that, since its inception, broken
windows policing has self-consciously been about promoting a particular type of community,
maintaining particular structural relations of power, and policing the borders of “desirability.” Delving
deeper into its theoretical premise, a desirable community, as described by Wilson and Kelling, is one of
“families who care for their homes, mind each other’s children, and confidently frown on intruders.”31
Broken windows policing is posited as the last bulwark against a “frightening jungle”—a term fraught
with racial meaning—in which “unattached adults”—that is, single people—replace traditional families,
where teenagers gather in front of the corner store, litter abounds, and panhandlers stalk
pedestrians.32 In this framework, conservative values with deep racial overtones ultimately drive how
an individual’s presence will be perceived and valued,33 and promote disregard for youth, adults living
outside of hetero-patriarchal families, and low-income and homeless people who live in this idealized
community.34
Broken Windows policing is the blueprint for a racist police state and tyranny
And how, why, and for whom would this cleansing take place? Smith continues: The language of
decency and civility in Police Strategy No. 5 was heavily overwritten by class and race norms. It was
generally clear to poor New Yorkers and especially people of color and many immigrants that these
norms expressed particular middle-class, white, often-suburban interests, ambitions, and identities. … In
fact, zero tolerance policing has led to an increase in police brutality and abuse, with a rash of police
murders, shootings, beatings, sexual assaults, wrongful arrests, and various forms of corruption,
suggesting a police force out of control. … In two years, the Street Crimes Unit, a centerpiece of zero
tolerance policing, made 45,000 street searches of disproportionately minority youths and made 10,000
arrests. Zero tolerance policing has encourage race and class profiling that places a premium on street
arrests of suspects while minimizing concerns about evidence. … Operation Condor was another zero-
tolerance social cleansing program. It stipulated arrest quotas for narcotics detectives working overtime,
and officers would cruise the streets looking for people to pick up on petty infractions, or simply on
suspicion. In March 2000, two undercover Condor officers with their quotas almost filled approached
Patrick Dorismond, a Haitian immigrant and off-duty security guard, and asked to buy marijuana. When
Dorismond retorted angrily that he was not a drug dealer, the officers got in a fight with him, drew a
gun, and killed him. The media criticized these units and their tactics. Referring to “the Mussolini of
Manhattan” and the “Hitler on the Hudson,” some jouranlists questioned the racial and class intentions
of zero tolerance. After Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo was shot dead by four police officers and 41
bullets, even police officers themselves complained that “zero-tolerance tactics” have become a
“blueprint for a police state and tyranny.” As Neil Smith (2001) conclude, “When the police are exercised
about an imminent police state, we should presumably take notice.”
Sex Work – Profiling

Broken Windows targets sex workers – San Francisco proves
Melissa Gira Grant, freelance journalist, August 11, 2014, “What everyone gets wrong about sex
work,” Vox, https://www.vox.com/2014/8/11/5989069/what-everyone-gets-wrong-about-sex-work
(accessed 4/6/20)
Two things I name in the book are police sweeps and broken-windows style policing that targets so-
called "quality of life" violations; prostitution is considered one of those violations. You see people
getting picked up for misdemeanor offenses for prostitution on the street or in a massage parlor, where
people who have the resources to work at a hotel or out of their own home are largely left alone. That
creates a kind of gentrification within the sex industry. I think a lot of this is still shaking out as the
characters of our cities are changing. I'm not sure where that's going to leave sex workers, but
crackdowns definitely target people who don't have the resources to work indoors, in a place where the
public can't otherwise see them. This explicitly happened in San Francisco in the 1990s and 2000s,
tracking with the tech boom and the influx of wealth into the city and the desire for the city to become
kind of a playground for people with money to spend. There, we saw the movement of "undesirable
people" off the street. That didn't just include sex workers, but also the homeless, trans individuals —
anybody that reminded people, I think, of the great poverty and inequality in the city.
Broken Windows is the aggressive policing of street-based prostitution, which

disproportionately harms Black women
Broken windows policing is also a driving force behind aggressive policing of street-based prostitution,
which has been documented to have racially disparate impacts. These are rooted both in profiling of
Black women and women of color—trans and not trans—as being engaged in prostitution based on age-
old stereotypes, and also in the makeup of sex work which, like every other industry, concentrates Black
women and transgender people in its most visible and risky sectors (such as street-based prostitution,
which more Black women are pushed into, versus legal strip clubs, which frequently discriminate against
women of color).50 Gay and gender nonconforming men, for their part, are profiled and discriminatorily
targeted for enforcement of lewd conduct laws in public bathrooms and public parks. The broad
discretion allowed in enforcement is fueled by perceptions of Black and Brown men—and particularly
those who are gender nonconforming or perceived to be queer—as hypersexual uncontrolled
manifestations of sexual deviance, with predictably racially disparate impacts.51
Sex Work – Sexual Violence Impact

Sex workers are vulnerable to sexual violence from police due to criminalization
Lizzy Starr, sex worker, February 23, 2018, “When Will It Be #TimesUp For Rapist Cops? #MeToo And
Sex Workers,” Tits and Sass, http://titsandsass.com/when-will-it-be-timesup-for-rapist-cops-metoo-and-
sex-workers/ (accessed 7/2/19)
Confronting this police abuse is next to impossible for sex workers. Some of us have been arrested after
police engaged in sexual activities with us. Some of us have been raped by cops who threatened us with
arrest if we spoke out. Some of us have been assaulted and bullied by men posing as police officers.
Police harassment can literally ruin our lives. Early last November, a migrant Brooklyn sex worker died
jumping out of a window in order to avoid being re-arrested and deported during a brothel raid, after
local cops carried out a campaign of terror to pressure her into becoming a confidential informant. The
police are major perpetrators of violence against sex workers, whether as abusive individuals or as an
oppressive system of state violence, and most of us are not in a position to speak out against them.
Judges also hold prejudices against sex workers. In Philadelphia, Judge Teresa Carr-Deni reduced a gang
rape charge to “theft of services”, leaving the sex worker victim without justice. Several states make sex
workers ineligible to receive rape victim compensation funds due to the criminalization of our work. In
Indiana, for example, “a victim who was injured while committing, attempting to commit, participating
in or attempting to participate in a criminal act” is ineligible for victims’ compensation. When the entire
apparatus of law enforcement and criminalization contributes to sexual violence against sex workers, it’s
difficult to understand how an individualized, neoliberal movement like #metoo has become can help.
Standing up against specific abusers, however powerful they are, cannot do much when an even more
powerful system continues to create the conditions of our abuse. While the Time piece does devote a
few paragraphs to police sexual abuse of sex workers—most notably, referencing the results of a 2016
Department of Justice report on the Baltimore police which found that the department ignored sexual
assault reports made by sex workers and many officers raped sex workers after threatening
incarceration—what it and other mainstream media reports on the topic miss is that criminalization and
state violence are responsible for the particularly vicious rape culture we sex workers live with. When
will it be #timesup for rapist cops—or for a criminal justice system which legitimizes that rape as an
investigation technique and would rather jail us and reward our abusers?
Fear of arrest pushes sex workers underground – enables sexual violence

Jillian Keenan, freelance journalist, April 14, 2017, “Sex Workers Don't Deserve to be Raped,” The
Daily Beast, https://www.thedailybeast.com/sex-workers-dont-deserve-to-be-raped (accessed 7/8/19)
For many, the fundamental problem remains that as long as sex workers fear they might be arrested for
doing their jobs — or merely for trying to report an assault — they are driven even deeper underground,
where violence and rape thrive unchecked. Hawk Kinkaid, the president of HOOK, the nation’s only
grassroots organization that specifically supports male sex workers, said that in most parts of the United
States, former prostitutes can be fired for having previously worked in the sex industry. In other words,
the criminalization of prostitution makes it difficult for sex workers to change jobs — even when they
want to. A recently leaked policy document from Amnesty International agreed that the criminalization
of prostitution leaves sex workers vulnerable to “violence and abuse by police and clients.” Even the
criminalization of sex workers’ clients — the so-called “Nordic Model,” which decriminalizes prostitutes
but criminalizes their customers — has been “proven to drive those engaged in sex work underground,
increasing the risk of violence and abuse.”
Threat of arrest and criminalization keeps sex workers from reporting sexual assaults
Samantha Cooney, content strategy editor, February 13, 2018, “'They Don't Want to Include Women
Like Me.' Sex Workers Say They're Being Left Out of the #MeToo Movement,” Time,
https://time.com/5104951/sex-workers-me-too-movement/ (accessed 7/2/19)
“There’s no HR department in the strip club… You think we’re going to go to the cops? Hell no,” said
Brantly, who also works as an alternative sexuality advisor for advocacy group SOAR Institute. “You have
to out yourself, and you lose your credibility — now we’re not the perfect victim anymore.” Sex workers
also say they’re reluctant to report sexual violence to the police because they could be arrested for
prostitution — or assaulted. A 2014 report submitted to the United Nations by three sex worker
advocacy organizations documented a pattern of abuse by police towards sex workers that includes
“assault, sexual harassment, public ‘gender searches’ (police strip searches for the purpose of viewing
genitalia) and rape.” A 2016 Department of Justice report, launched after the April 2015 police custody
death of Freddie Gray, found indications that the Baltimore Police Department disregarded reports of
sexual assault from people in the sex industry, and some officers targeted people in the sex industry “to
coerce sexual favors from them in exchange for avoiding arrest, or for cash or narcotics.” (The Baltimore
Police Department did not respond to TIME’s request for comment.) “We don’t know how big the
problem is,” said Philip Stinson, a former police officer and a criminologist at Bowling Green State
University who runs the Police Crime Database, which tracks state and local law enforcement arrests
based on news reports. “It’s very easy to discount this as just a few bad apples, but I don’t think that’s
the case… But I don’t want to paint with such a broad brush that we’re talking about every cop and
every police department.”
Add-on Advantage: Trans Rights

Broken Windows polices the of trans people – especially black people of all genders
Black people of all genders and sexualities come within the crosshairs of broken windows policing. In
fact, one of the less frequently discussed realities is that it facilitates racialized policing of gender and
sexuality.46 According to Tanya Erzen, broken windows policing “enables officers to act upon racial and
gender biases they may have when they enter the police department—under the guise of enforcement
of ‘unified guidelines.’”47 All too often, officers read actual or perceived gender disjuncture as
inherently out of order, resulting in stops, harassments, and arrests of transgender, gender
nonconforming, and queer people of color—along with anyone perceived to deviate from racialized
“rules” of gender or sexuality—for “disorderly” or “lewd” conduct offenses.48 Stereotypes framing
gender nonconforming people as inherently violent and deviant also lead gender nonconforming young
women to be profiled and targeted in the context of “gang policing.”49
Trans people are seen inherently as disorderly

Jordan Flaherty, journalist, October 2016, “Are police profiling transgender Americans?” Al Jazeera,
http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/america-tonight-blog/2013/10/16/rise-in-
transgenderharassmentviolencebypolicelinkedtoprofiling.html (accessed 4/14/17)
Andrea Ritchie, an attorney specializing in police misconduct, told us that law enforcement sees policing
gender roles as part of their work. “I think most people are familiar with racial profiling,” she told us.
“But I think people are less familiar with how gender is really central to policing in the United States.
That includes expectations in terms of how women are supposed to look, how men are supposed to
look, how women are supposed to act and how men are supposed to act.” When people look or act
queer or gender nonconforming, she said, police “often read that as disorder and they often perceive
that person as already disorderly, as already suspicious, as already prone to violence.” Dean Spade, a
lawyer and founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a poverty law center that represents transgender
people, agrees. “That's part of what policing is – is this kind of generalized suspicion,” he said. “Does
something look out of place? And transgender people are often that thing that looks out of place.”
Trans prisoners are dehumanized, rendered disposable as social death

Joshua M Price, professor, 2015, Prison and Social Death, p. 57
Most people would probably agree with the assertion that imprisonment in the United States is a
humiliating experience, regardless of how much they know about prison life. The prison is humiliating
and not just shaming, where a sense of shame may be an appropriate response to honest reflection on
one’s past actions. The prison exposes people to sheer, overwhelming institutional power. Many feel
dehumanized. Prisons are cruel places. Sexual harassment is pervasive. Indeed, some harassment is part
of everyday prison procedure. Criminal justice personnel and even some prison procedures (such as
debriefing) are used to try to break the will. Incarceration casts a person into a structure where he or
she is vulnerable, and risks being turned into a disposable self, a dispensable subject, a thing. On
occasion, that person-turned-into-an-object is also sexualized (see Spillers 2003). Social death captures
this condition of being cast simultaneously as an object, even a sexualized object, and a piece of
garbage, a throwaway body (Mignolo 2009; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004, 19, 21). The prison
thrusts people to the other side of the abyssal line, where they are treated abjectly. Any cruelty, small or
large, can be visited upon them. Women, transgender people, the mentally ill, and other marginalized
populations are particularly vulnerable.
Prisons are systemic violence to control gender, race, and sexuality

Elias Walker Vitulli, doctoral candidate in American studies at the University of Minnesota, 2014,
“Prison-Industrial Complex in the United States,” Transgender Studies Quarterly vol. 1 no. 1, p. 162-163
McDonald’s experiences stitch together a web of racialized, gendered, and sexualized violence and
criminalization that many trans people, especially trans women of color, experience daily. Her story is
emblematic of the experiences of trans people whose lives come in contact with the prison-industrial
complex. Over the past decade, some scholars and activists have begun to use the term prison-industrial
complex to describe the mutually beneficial and far-reaching relationship between state and private
interests that promotes the prison system as a central response to social, economic, and racial problems
(see, e.g., Davis 2003; Gilmore 2007; Rodriguez 2006). The prison-industrial complex is a dynamic and
productive web of white supremacist, neoliberal, heteropatriarchal, and gender-normative power that
targets social deviance for criminalization and imprisonment and secures normativity. In practice,
certain populations marked as racially, sexually, gender, and/or class deviant—such as low-income
African American men, trans women of color, and gender-nonconforming queer women of color or
aggressives—are criminalized, portrayed as suspicious and dangerous, disproportionately incarcerated,
and subjected to violence, while whiteness, heterosexuality, and non-trans status are decriminalized. In
other words, policing, prisons, and punishment are organized by and help construct race, gender,
sexuality, and class in the United States. While throughout its history the prison system has been a
central site of social, racial, gender, and sexual formation and control, it has taken on new importance
since the 1970s. Responding to the needs of globalization and deindustrialization and as part of the
backlash against racial justice movements of the 1950s to 1970s, the United States began to rapidly
grow its prison population from an average daily population of about 300,000 at the beginning of the
1970s to nearly 2.3 million today. This rise in prison population has been fueled by racialized law
enforcement, prosecution, and sentencing that have produced a prison population that is approximately
70 percent people of color. The new mass scale of the prison system has been termed ‘‘mass
incarceration’’ to mark how certain populations are targeted for systematic imprisonment and to
describe its devastating impacts on targeted communities, most centrally low-income black
communities but also many trans and queer communities.
Add-on Advantage: Gentrification

Broken Windows is an ideological justification for police to work as real estate
developers
Even the theory’s biggest proponent, New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton—who
spearheaded its implementation in New York City under Mayor Giuliani, actively promoted its spread
around the country both as a consultant and as Los Angeles Police Commissioner, and pursued it with
renewed vigor in his second tenure in New York City under current Mayor Bill de Blasio—concedes that
neither premise has ever been conclusively proven.20 In fact, several studies undermine the theory’s
claims.21 In a comprehensive review of the literature and a summary of his own research, Columbia law
professor Bernard Harcourt concludes that, “Taken together, the wealth of research provides no support
for a simple disorder-crime relationship as hypothesized by Wilson and Kelling in their broken-windows
theory…. What I have come to believe is that the broken windows theory is really window dressing, and
it masks or hides more profound processes of real estate development and wealth redistribution.”22
Broken Windows fuels gentrification by hiding the homeless from developers – this in
turn increases homelessness
Ben Holtzman, academic historian, May 2015, “Gentrification’s First Victims,” Jacobin,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/05/gentrification-homeless-broken-windows-police-de-blasio
(accessed 4/9/20)
Rudolph Giuliani, who took office as mayor in 1994, appointed William Bratton as New York’s Chief of
Police. Bratton brought broken windows policing out of the subway tunnels and onto every street in the
city. The vast acceleration of these punitive measures did reduce the visibility of homelessness. But the
total number of homeless people rose over twenty percent to nearly thirty thousand. Today — just
fifteen years later — the number of homeless New Yorkers has doubled. Ironically, the broken windows
policing that was first applied to evict, hide, and shame the homeless population has helped drive its
continued growth by contributing to the city’s ongoing affordability crisis. Broken windows policing has
not only reinforced the long history of criminalization and aggressive policing against African Americans,
but also buttressed municipal development policies — tax abatements, rezoning, developer incentives
— that aid gentrification. The history of broken windows reveals that these policies work in tandem.
They disproportionately harass and imprison people of color, while simultaneously remaking
neighborhoods for the city’s affluent. And despite de Blasio’s “tale of two cities” message, he favors the
unabashedly pro-gentrification policies of prior administrations and — as his appointment of Bratton as
police commissioner makes clear — aggressive policing tactics. As Picture the Homeless recently pointed
out, “if we’re going to truly address homelessness,” politicians will need “the courage to challenge the
NYPD and the real estate interests that control so much of city politics.” Until then New York City’s
growing homelessness crisis will continue unabated.
Broken Windows figuratively and literally dehumanizes homeless people as broken,

undermining their agency, autonomy, and dignity
Randall Amster, director of the Program on Justice and Peace at Georgetown University, 2003,
“Patterns of Exclusion: Sanitizing Space, Criminalizing Homelessness,” Social Justice Vol. 30 No. 1 (91):
Race, Security & Social Movements, pp. 195-221, https://www.jstor.org/stable/29768172 (accessed
4/9/20)
A final objection to “broken windows” as social policy is suggested by Waldron (2000) in the implicit
derogation that comes when human beings are compared “even figuratively to things.” Waldron
wonders what would have ensued if Wilson and Kelling’s article had been titled “Broken People.” The
central premise of the theory thus rests on a blatant form of dehumanization, figuratively in its
principles, but literally in its widespread deployment as the cutting edge of urban social policy. This is
another way of expressing the tired and dangerous characterization of the homeless as pathological
deviants or structural victims and serves to undermine their agency, autonomy, and dignity. However,
the impressive adaptability, social solidarity, and inherent resistance often demonstrated by street
people and their communities of coping (see Amster, 1999( effective rebut such dominant conceptions,
as Mitchell Duneier (1999: 315) implies in Sidewalk: “Because Americans ruthlessly use race and class
categories as they navigate through life, many citizens generalize from the actual broken windows to all
the windows that look like them – and assume that a person who looks broken must be shattered, when
in fact he is trying to fix himself as best he can. Only by understanding, the rich social organization of the
sidewalk, in all its complexity, might citizens and politicians appreciate how much is lost when we accept
the idea that the presence of a few broken windows justifies tearing down the whole informal structure.
Duneier goes on to suggest that allowing survival activities such as panhandling can actually prevent
more serious crimes, implying a sort of “reverse broken windows theory” that Tempe’s “Kevin”
(interview, 2000) intuitively grasps: “Would you rather have me spare-changing – or selling drugs to your
kids or breaking into your house?”
Answers
Answers to Crime DA – No Link

Turn - Police stops of black and Latino youth increases the likelihood of criminal
behavior
Juan Del Toro et al, professor at the department of applied psychology at New York University, April
23, 2019, “The criminogenic and psychological effects of police stops on adolescent black and Latino
boys,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/17/8261 (accessed 4/1/20)
Proactive policing, the strategic targeting of people or places to prevent crimes, is a well-studied tactic
that is ubiquitous in modern law enforcement. A 2017 National Academies of Sciences report reviewed
existing literature, entrenched in deterrence theory, and found evidence that proactive policing
strategies can reduce crime. The existing literature, however, does not explore what the short and long-
term effects of police contact are for young people who are subjected to high rates of contact with law
enforcement as a result of proactive policing. Using four waves of longitudinal survey data from a
sample of predominantly black and Latino boys in ninth and tenth grades, we find that adolescent boys
who are stopped by police report more frequent engagement in delinquent behavior 6, 12, and 18
months later, independent of prior delinquency, a finding that is consistent with labeling and life course
theories. We also find that psychological distress partially mediates this relationship, consistent with the
often stated, but rarely measured, mechanism for adolescent criminality hypothesized by general strain
theory. These findings advance the scientific understanding of crime and adolescent development while
also raising policy questions about the efficacy of routine police stops of black and Latino youth. Police
stops predict decrements in adolescents’ psychological well-being and may unintentionally increase
their engagement in criminal behavior.
Broken windows policing does not solve crime

But in cities where Broken Windows has taken root, there’s little evidence that it’s worked as intended.
The theory has instead resulted in what critics say is aggressive over-policing of minority communities,
which often creates more problems than it solves. Such practices can strain criminal justice systems,
burden impoverished people with fines for minor offenses, and fracture the relationship between police
and minorities. It can also lead to tragedy: In New York in 2014, Eric Garner died from a police chokehold
after officers approached him for selling loose cigarettes on a street corner. Today, Newark and other
cities have been compelled to re-think their approach to policing. But there are few easy solutions, and
no quick way to repair years of distrust between police and the communities they serve.
Answers to Crime DA – Evidence Press

Broken Windows has no statistical backing – no link between disorder and crime
Dan O’Brien, associate professor in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the School of
Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University, May 26, 2019, “Break the ‘broken
windows’ spell: The policing theory made famous in New York City under Giuliani and Bratton doesn’t
hold up to scrutiny,” New York Daily News, https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-break-the-
broken-windows-spell-20190526-ulwcdd7fnjg4fgv6dnskls6vhi-story.html (accessed 3/31/20)
Two colleagues (Chelsea Farrell and Brandon Welsh) and I recently sought to conclusively answer the
questions raised by these apparent weaknesses. Many, many studies over the years have examined
whether neighborhood disorder predicts aggression and crime, as well as fear of crime and other
measures of neighborhood attachment. We gathered all of them — about 100 in total — and assessed
the full body of evidence. We found definitively that the premise of broken windows theory does not
hold. Although some found an association between disorder and behavior, there were many others that
didn’t. For example, a study of around 1,000 male juvenile offenders in three cities found that those
living in disorderly neighborhoods were more likely to reoffend, but a more expansive study of 280,000
parolees in California found no such effect. Consequently, the consensus across the literature is that the
relationships proposed by the broken windows theory are untrue. Disorder in a neighborhood does not
in fact lead to people living there being more likely to commit crimes, either violent or not. Neither does
it cause residents to express a greater fear of crime or less attachment to their neighborhood. Possibly
more concerning, our analysis revealed that those studies that did find support for broken windows
theory tended to use weaker methodologies. Many failed to account for critical variables, like
socioeconomic status. We know that disorder, crime and poverty are inextricably correlated, and good
science needs to disentangle these relationships, not ignore them.
Broken Windows does not work – correlation not causation with decreased crime
Critics say, however, that broken-windows is not nearly as successful as it claims to be. The crime rate in
New York fell in the nineteen-nineties—but it also fell in San Diego, Houston, Dallas, and other cities that
were not using the same strategy. “There’s no good scientific evidence that broken-windows works or
has much to do with crime,” Fagan said. “And the few claims for it that people try to make have been
contested. None of them stand up to really close examination. So what’s left? Bratton can say all he
wants that broken-windows works, and he can look at large correlations between misdemeanor arrests
and declines in crime, but there’s no plausible connection between the two. Marijuana smokers are not
criminals on their day off.”
No evidence that Broken Windows reduces crime

In practice, Broken Windows has come to be synonymous with misdemeanor arrests and summonses. In
New York, the largest city to implement the practice, between 2010 and 2015, police issued 1.8 million
quality of life summonses for offenses like disorderly conduct, public urination, and drinking or
possessing small amounts of marijuana. Felony crime rates, meanwhile, declined. But a report released
last week by the New York Police Department’s inspector general’s office found “no evidence” that the
drop in felony crime during those six years was linked to the quality of life summonses or misdemeanor
arrests, which also declined during that time. “That’s basically what we’ve been finding for years — a
lack of any evidence of an effect,” said Bernard Harcourt, a Columbia Law School professor who has
conducted two major studies on the impact of Broken Windows in New York and other cities. The NYPD,
led by Police Commissioner William Bratton, an early supporter of Broken Windows, said in a statement
that the inspector general’s study was “deeply flawed” because it only examined arrests and
summonses, not the agency’s broader quality-of-life efforts. Kelling, who has used misdemeanor arrests
to evaluate the theory, wouldn’t comment on the study, saying he’s still a consultant to the department.
New York example is bad statistics – crime rates fell equally in places without Broken
Windows
Right from the start, there were signs something was wrong with the beautiful narrative. "Crime was
starting to go down in New York prior to the Giuliani election and prior to the implementation of broken
windows policing," says Harcourt, the Columbia law professor. "And of course what we witnessed from
that period, basically from about 1991, was that the crime in the country starts going down, and it's a
remarkable drop in violent crime in this country. Now, what's so remarkable about it is how widespread
it was." Harcourt points out that crime dropped not only in New York, but in many other cities where
nothing like broken windows policing was in place. In fact, crime even fell in parts of the country where
police departments were mired in corruption scandals and largely viewed as dysfunctional, such as Los
Angeles. "Los Angeles is really interesting because Los Angeles was wracked with terrible policing
problems during the whole time, and crime drops as much in Los Angeles as it does in New York," says
Harcourt. There were lots of theories to explain the nationwide decline in crime. Some said it was the
growing economy or the end of the crack cocaine epidemic. Some criminologists credited harsher
sentencing guidelines.
Answers to Capitalism K
No link – Broken Windows policing is designed to aggressively repress and hide the
role of class and capitalism in urban decay
(accessed 4/7/20)
Order-maintenance policing is extremely popular these days. With crime rates plummeting in New York
City, few if any are foolish enough to take issue with the quality-of-life initiative. Most people praise it,
especially elected officials and policy-makers who, by doing so, can take full credit for the decline in
crime.382 But the new policing in New York City overestimates the role of disorder in the production of
crime. By overestimating disorder, it creates a false choice between the police and the disorderly -a
choice that may facilitate a policy of aggressive arrests despite the lack of empirical evidence supporting
the claim of deterrence. The ironic consequence is that the social influence conception of deterrence
-touted as an alternative to "the severe punishments that dominate contemporary criminal law"383 and
presented as an application of social norm theory -falls back on a law enforcement strategy that relies
principally on arrest and incarceration. What then is hidden beneath the new path of deterrence? I think
we see it best in the Broken Windows essay. The text suggests that reducing crime is simply a question
of minor details, of fixing broken windows, of sweeping up litter, of hiding the street people. It neglects
the numerous and complex factors that contribute to crime. Recall the description in the Broken
Windows essay about neighborhood decline: ”A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a
window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more
rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the comer store. The
merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates.”384 This description may tell
us a few things about litter and public drinking. But there is also lurking in that description a much more
complex story about urban decay, with complicated race, wealth, class, and ethnic dimensions, to name
only a few. The more complex story would raise questions about property values, the quality of
neighborhood public schools, racial demographics, environmental pollution, public transportation,
access to business loans and mortgages, and zoning laws. The life cycle of a neighborhood is not as
simple as the essay suggests.38 5
Perm: Do Both. Broken Windows policing is crisis-management for neoliberalism, the

aff is key to oppose capitalism
Jordan T. Camp, postdoctoral fellow in Race and Ethnicity and International and Public Affairs at
Brown, and Christina Heatherton, assistant professor of American Studies at Trinity College, October
12, 2016, “Policing the Crisis, Policing the Planet: an Interview with Christina Heatherton and Jordan T.
Camp,” Viewpoint Magazine, https://www.viewpointmag.com/2016/10/12/policing-the-crisis-policing-
the-planet-an-interview-with-christina-heatherton-and-jordan-t-camp/ (accessed 4/14/20)
Broken windows policing was produced as a political response to the worst economic crisis since the
Great Depression that took hold in the 1970s. We argue that it helped facilitate major shifts in the urban
political economy as well as the consolidation of the U.S. carceral state. As Christina Hanhardt describes
with regard to the gentrification of Times Square, this policing strategy further exacerbated racist moral
panics about gender and sexuality in order to “prime the city for private investment.” We also follow
geographer Neil Smith’s lead in suggesting that broken windows was used primarily to render cities
more “secure” for neoliberal regimes of capital accumulation. By neoliberalism, we mean a political and
ideological project with long historical and geographic roots that includes features such as: the
deliberate shrinkage of the social functioning of the state (and the privatization of many of those
functions); deindustrialization and diminishing capacity of U.S. cities to operate as centers of social
reproduction for laboring populations; deregulation and the crushing of public sector unions and
organized labor; and the expansion of the punitive capacities of the state to manage, warehouse, and
discipline surplus populations (the unemployed and underemployed, the homeless, those without
proper health or mental health care, etc.). Furthermore, in our book, we interrogate how racial
ideologies have been deployed to naturalize these transformations. Broken windows is an ideological
project that justifies and sustains a neoliberal social order. It helps to render people simultaneously less
worthy of the state’s shrunken largesse and more deserving of its expanded punitive capacities. Through
such policing measures, “people with problems” (lack of housing, job security, food, services, etc.) have
been socially constructed “as problems” (i.e. criminals) as George Lipsitz puts it. By entrenching notions
of “criminality” it enables the state to manage surplus populations. The global production of surplus
populations is a problem for capital. As another contributor to Policing the Planet, geographer Don
Mitchell and his colleagues put it, broken windows policing is “one means of management.”
Answers to Security K
Broken Windows policing the US is the launching pad for US counterterrorism
Jordan T. Camp, postdoctoral fellow in Race and Ethnicity and International and Public Affairs at
Brown, and Christina Heatherton, assistant professor of American Studies at Trinity College, October
12, 2016, “Policing the Crisis, Policing the Planet: an Interview with Christina Heatherton and Jordan T.
Camp,” Viewpoint Magazine, https://www.viewpointmag.com/2016/10/12/policing-the-crisis-policing-
the-planet-an-interview-with-christina-heatherton-and-jordan-t-camp/ (accessed 4/14/20)
Seemingly “new” models of counter-terrorism policing were not spun from whole cloth. They fortified
already existing forms of counterinsurgency and legitimated the intensified policing of racialized and
criminalized segments of the poor and working class in U.S. cities. We argue that the intimate and
seemingly micro-scale policing of poor communities of color have become central to understanding the
circulation of securitization on a global scale. Poor communities in U.S. cities have become laboratories
in which new military and counterinsurgency practices and technologies have been tested. As organizer
Hamid Khan of the Stop LA Spying Coalition explains in, “The New Urban Counterinsurgency,” the
application of Bratton-style broken windows policing in U.S. cities has set the stage for counterterrorism
policing globally. The deep success of broken windows policing in Los Angeles, for example, enabled the
city to be the launching pad of a major post-9/11 counter-terrorism initiative, implemented by the
Department of Homeland Security. According to Khan, such measures would not be possible without the
already existing surveillance, pre-emptive criminalization, and authorization of force granted by broken
windows policing. Other contributors to Policing the Planet, such as Mizue Aizeki of the Immigrant
Defense Project, echo this point. In analyzing the current crisis of mass deportation, she traces the
“preemptive policing logic” of broken windows to measures that configure immigrants as “perpetual
threats to public safety.”
Answer to Decarceration K
Perm: Do Both - The aff is key to any movement against prisons – policing is the engine
that drives the carceral regime
Michelle Brown, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee,
January 9, 2017, “Punishment and Policing in the Trump Era,” Social Justice,
http://www.socialjusticejournal.org/punishment-and-policing-in-the-trump-era/ (accessed 4/10/20)
The engine that drives criminalization in a carceral regime is the police. Trump promises the return of
the most authoritarian and criminologically disproven forms of policing in modern history—policing with
no connection to crime. Against scientific evidence and moral and ethical appeal, his obsession with
stop-and-frisk/broken windows policing demonstrates his larger principle: racial control. As my
colleague Victor Ray writes, “The singular accomplishment of stop-and-frisk was the worsening of racial
inequality: 85 percent of those stopped were innocent black and Latino men.” Policing in the Trump era
is, as it has always been, about the lowering of thresholds for the violent interruption of specific groups
of people’s lives. It is likely to be revalidated as rightfully predatory, explicitly biased, and highly
discretionary, thereby allowing for the elimination of police oversight mechanisms and federal
investigations. Trump-era policing is emblematic of a militarized culture of war that is foundational to
the prison-industrial complex, situating itself in an intoxicating form of deadly self-pity. From watch lists
to registries, the Trump administration promises a shifting of political focus away from state violence
and its attendant structural inequalities and toward the criminalization and destabilization of social
movements that are naming alternative ways forward to social goods. In particular, we must anticipate
and plan for an open attack on the most transformative justice policy platform of our era, the
Movement for Black Lives.
Aff Mandatory Minimums
Introduction
The AFF focuses on the benefits of reducing mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, falling
under the sentencing section of the resolution. While drug offenders don’t make up a majority of those
incarcerated overall, they are a very substantial portion of the federal prison population. The primary
justification for eliminating these policies is their role in promoting mass incarceration, and specifically
the racialized nature of the impacts that it has on communities and individuals – because of the
relatively limited impact diversity of the topic literature on this policy, it is strategic to read impact
framing. One of the other primary benefits of this AFF is that it is relatively small and has fairly
consolidated bipartisan support, so while there aren’t many extinction-level impact scenarios to solve,
there also are very few substantial disadvantages. Generic impact framing mechanisms such as systemic
violence and structuralism frameworks would increase the strategic value of this AFF, especially in later
rebuttal speeches.
1AC
Inherency
Mandatory minimum drug sentencing has exploded the federal prison population
Charles Doyle, Senior Specialist in American Public Law, January 11, 2018. “Mandatory Minimum
Sentencing of Federal Drug Offenses.” Congressional Research Service.
https://www.novapublishers.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/4-44-pages.pdf (accessed 4/10/20)
Be that as it may, sentencing in drug cases, particularly mandatory minimum drug sentencing, has contributed to an
explosion in the federal prison population and attendant costs. This, the federal inmate population at the end of 1976 was
23,566, and at the end of 1986 it was 36,042.5 On January 4, 2018, the federal inmate population was 183,493. As of September 30, 2016,
49.1% of federal inmates were drug offenders and 72.3% of those were convicted of an offense carrying
a mandatory minimum.7 In 1976, federal prisons cost $183.914 million; in 1986, $550.014 million; and in 2016, $6.751 billion (est.).
Plan text
The United States Federal Government should abolish mandatory minimum sentences
for drug offenses.
AD1 – Racial Inequality
A) Uniqueness
Hispanic and Latin American drug offenders are most likely to receive mandatory
minimum charges
United States Sentencing Commission, October 2017. “Mandatory Minimum Penalties for
Federal Drug Offenses.” https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-
publications/research-publications/2017/20171025_Drug-Mand-Min.pdf (accessed 4/16/20)
In fiscal year 2016, Hispanic offenders continued to represent the largest group of offenders (51.9%) convicted
of an offense carrying a drug mandatory minimum penalty, as they did in fiscal year 2010 (44.0%). As set forth
in Table 2, the 2016 percentage is nearly equal to their proportion of the total federal drug offender population (50.2%) . Black offenders
(23.6%), White offenders (21.9%), and Other Race offenders (2.6%) accounted for the remaining
offenders convicted of an offense carrying a drug mandatory minimum penalty.
Mandatory minimums substantially increase sentence length

The Commission compared the average sentence imposed for all drug offenders, offenders convicted of an offense carrying a drug mandatory
minimum penalty, offenders relieved from application of a drug mandatory minimum penalty, and offenders who remained subject to the drug
mandatory minimum penalty at sentencing. In fiscal year 2016, the
average sentence for offenders convicted of an
offense carrying a drug mandatory minimum penalty was 94 months of imprisonment, more than
double the average sentence for drug offenders not convicted of an offense carrying a drug mandatory
minimum penalty. Recognizing that this difference in average sentence length could be explained in part by the quantity of drugs
involved in the offense, the Commission also analyzed average sentence lengths, controlling for the base offense level (BOL), looking specifically
at offenders at BOL 24, which corresponds to a five-year mandatory minimum, and 30, which corresponds to a ten-year mandatory minimum.
As demonstrated in Figure 22, while quantity might be one factor contributing to the longer average sentence length, the
existence of a
drug mandatory minimum penalty still had a significant impact on the average sentence length even
when controlling for base offense level. For offenders with a BOL of 24, those who were convicted of an offense carrying a drug
mandatory minimum had sentences 18 months longer than those not convicted of an offense carrying a drug mandatory minimum (57 months
compared to 39 months), while the sentences for those subject to a drug mandatory minimum were twice the length (80 months). Similarly, for
offenders with a BOL of 30, those who were convicted of an offense carrying a drug mandatory minimum had sentences 35 months longer than
those not convicted of an offense carrying a drug mandatory minimum (94 months compared to 59 months), while the sentences for those
subject to a drug mandatory minimum were more than twice the length (131 months). As set forth in Figure 21, the
average sentence
length for offenders who remained subject to a drug mandatory minimum penalty at sentencing was
almost twice as high at 126 months compared to offenders who ultimately received relief from such
penalty at sentencing (64 months). For those relieved of the drug mandatory minimum penalty, the average sentence imposed
also varied depending on the type of statutory relief. Offenders who provided substantial assistance to the government received longer average
sentences (81 months) than offenders who qualified for the safety valve provision (57 months). Offenders who qualified for both received the
lowest average sentence of 41 months.
B) Links
Without mandatory minimums, judges would impose shorter sentences
JELANI JEFFERSON EXUM Professor, University of Toledo College of Law. February 2016. “A
Commentary on Judicial Discretion, Mandatory Minimums, and Sentencing Reform.” Federal Sentencing
Reporter. https://fsr.ucpress.edu/content/ucpfsr/28/3/209.full.pdf (accessed 4/10/20)
Although it might be obvious that removing or reducing mandatory minimum sentencing laws would increase judicial discretion, it is worth
stressing that the sentencing reform efforts should make room for the development of alternative resources to inform judicial discretion. This is
especially significant in the case of drug crimes—a category of offenses for which reform calls are the loudest. If
mandatory minimum
sentencing laws were no longer an issue in many cases, judges would be left with the Federal Sentencing
Guidelines as their sole source of formalized sentencing information. However, in this decade post-Booker, judges are slowly
increasing their discretion to sentence outside of the Guidelines range. In 2013, 51.2 percent of all
cases were sentenced within the applicable Guidelines range. 19 This number dropped to 46 percent in
2014.20 Whereas most (78.5%) of the sentences imposed in 2014 were in accord with requests from the
Government, the Sentencing Commission reported that, ‘‘[i]n fiscal year 2014, 21.4 percent of the sentences imposed
were departures or variances below the guideline range other than at the government’s request , compared to
18.7 percent in fiscal year 2013.’’21 Apparently, judges are (slowly) becoming more willing to impose sentences
that neither the prosecution nor the Sentencing Guidelines recommend.
C) Impacts
The length of prison sentences are an important factor in racial inequality
Cody Tuttle, professor of economics at the University of Maryland. October 19th, 2019. “Racial
Disparities in Federal Sentencing: Evidence from Drug Mandatory Minimums.” University of Maryland.
http://econweb.umd.edu/~tuttle/files/tuttle_mandatory_minimums_main_text.pdf (accessed 4/10/20)
Racial differences in sentencing are a persistent concern in America. In recent federal cases, black offenders face sentences that
are 20 percent longer than the sentences handed down for white offenders (United States Sentencing Commission
(USSC) 2017). These added years are costly for society at large and for the people incarcerated. The Bureau of
Prisons (BOP) estimates the direct care cost of incarcerating a person is about $11,000 (in 2015 dollars) per year (Department of Justice (DOJ)
2011). Mueller-Smith (2015) estimates an
additional year in prison causes a 30 percent decrease in formal earnings
post-release and significant lost wages while incarcerated. Even more, those incarcerated must confront
serious physical and psychological costs of prison, in addition to the more intangible cost of their lost
freedom (Haney 2001; The Hamilton Project 2016; BOP 2018). Due to racial sentencing disparities, these costs are
disproportionately borne by black and Hispanic offenders.
Mass incarceration destroys black community networks

Dorothy E. Roberts, professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, 2004. “The Social and Moral
Cost of Mass Incarceration in African American Communities.” University of Pennsylvania.
http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1582&context=faculty_scholarship
(accessed 4/10/20)
Social scientists like Clear and Rose have demonstrated that imprisoning
many individuals from a single neighborhood
adversely affects the entire community because of the cumulative impact of straining multiple social
networks to which inmates belong. The damage to social networks starts at the family level and
reverberates throughout communities where the families of prisoners are congregated. Locking up someone
places an immediate financial and social strain on the rest of the family. 60 An ethnographic study of male incarceration in the District of
Columbia found that families "lose income, assistance with child care, and bear expenses related to
supporting and maintaining contact with incarcerated family members." Dealing with an incarcerated relative causes
stress, both from worry about the inmate's well-being and from tension among relatives as they struggle to survive the ordeal. These
enormous burdens fall primarily on the shoulders of women caregivers, who customarily shore up
families experiencing extreme hardship-"women struggling to manage budgets consumed by addictions; women trying to hold
families together when ties are weakened by prolonged absence; women attempting to manage the shame and stigma of incarceration; and
women trying to prevent children from becoming casualties of the war on drugs."62 Mass
incarceration strains the extended
networks of kin and friends that have traditionally sustained poor African American families in
difficult times, weakening communities' ability to withstand economic and social hardship. 63 Although
deprivation of family contact may be seen as part of an individual offender's deserved punishment, the damaging consequences to families,
social networks, and communities must be added to the social costs of mass incarceration. The injury to social networks is also a
counterbalance to claims that removing criminals may benefit their relatives by relieving the families of problems caused by the offenders'
antisocial behavior.64 The type of offender has changed as a result of sentencing reforms that impose harsh prison terms for relatively minor
drug offenses.65 Increasing incarceration of first-time, nonviolent offenders, who are likely to have valuable
ties to community networks and institutions, means the loss to communities is great er today in terms of the
quality as well as quantity of inmates. Sociologists have explained the damage to social networks in terms of
impeding the formation of social capital. While human capital refers to an individual's own talents, social capital is the
capacity of individuals and groups to achieve important goals through their connections to others. 66 Social
capital flourishes most in broad networks that include "weak ties" that enable people to interact with numerous other networks in simple
ways.67 Mass incarceration not only overwhelms the small, isolated kin networks prevalent in poor
communities, but also makes it harder for residents to form expansive networks that are most adept
at producing social capital.68 Some of the most devastating consequences fall on children with parents
in prison.69 A recent special report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics on "Incarcerated Parents and Their Children" reveals the startling
dimensions of prisons' disruption of family tiesJO In 1999, a majority of state and federal prisoners reported having a child under age eighteen,
and almost half lived with their children prior to incarceration. About 2% of the nation's children – close to 1.5 million children – had a parent in
prison that year, an increase of a half-million children in less than a decadeJ2 Seven percent of blackchildren had a parent in prison in
1999, making them nearly [were] 9 times more likely to have an incarcerated parent than white children. 73
Even if incarcerated parents are able to maintain contact with their children, imprisonment has a disrupting effect. Inmates can no
longer take care of their children either physically or financially, placing extra economic and emotional
burdens on the remaining family members. 74 Mass incarceration deprives thousands of children of
important economic and social support from their fathers. 75 Separation from imprisoned parents has
serious psychological consequences for children, including depression, anxiety, feelings of rejection,
shame, anger, and guilt, and problems in schoolJ6 Incarcerating mothers tends to upset family life even more because
inmate mothers were usually the primary caretakers of their children before entering prison. While judges used to show mothers leniency,
they are now often compelled by mandatory sentencing laws to give mothers long prison terms. 77 As a
result, the number of children with a mother in prison nearly doubled between 1 990 and 2000. 78
AD2 – Prosecutorial discretion
A) Uniqueness
Mandatory minimums increase prosecutorial power
Cynthia Alkon, Associate Professor of Law, Texas A&M University School of Law, Spring 2014. “The
U.S. Supreme Court's Failure to Fix Plea Bargaining: The Impact of Lafler and Frye,” Hastings
Constitutional Law Quarterly Vol. 41:3 https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1096&context=facscholar (accessed 4/10/20)
In the context of plea bargaining, power imbalances are built into the structure of the system.
Prosecutors decide what charges to file. As discussed above, given the current structure of penal codes,
this is no small exercise of discretion and one that has a defining impact on each case."' In addition,
prosecutors can decide, almost without limit, to add additional charges or enhancements after the
case has been filed, as long as the additions are at least arguably supported by the evidence. Moreover,
the more mandatory minimums or sentencing enhancements built into the structure of the code, the
more power the prosecutor holds. Prosecutors also have the power to decide not to make a plea
offer. In effect, the prosecutors hold all the cards; defendants only have the power to throw a monkey
wrench into the system by demanding a jury trial.
B) Links
Sentencing guidelines do not have the same “sentencing cliffs” as mandatory
minimums
Daniel Wodak, professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, 2018. “Mandatory
Minimums and the War on Drugs.” The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy.
https://philpapers.org/archive/WODMMA-2.pdf (accessed 4/19/20)
Unlike the guidelines, mandatory minimums are insensitive to a long list of individualized mitigating factors: they guarantee
that some low-level offenders will receive severe sentences. And unlike the guidelines, mandatory
minimums involve “sentencing cliffs”: they guarantee major differences in sentences for minor
differences between offenses. Plenty of examples can illustrate these points. Like many individuals during the opioid epidemic,
William Forrester became addicted to pain medication after six years of treatment for cancer. He used a fake prescription to obtain oxycodone
and in 2009 was sentenced to a mandatory minimum 15-year prison term in Florida for “drug trafficking”: this was required because he
possessed 15.6 grams of oxycodone. In sentencing Forrester, Judge McDonald noted that Florida’s mandatory minimums require him
to treat “the addicted” and “organized crime” the same way : “we can’t carve exceptions that don’t exist”.17 In 2003,
Terrance Lavar Davis pled guilty to felonious possession of 26 grams of cocaine in a school zone and delivery of 0.5 grams of cocaine in a school
zone. He was subject to a mandatory minimum sentence of 22 years without parole because he sold cocaine at 11 pm inside his own apartment
in a gated community in Nashville, Tennessee, and his apartment was 900 feet from a school; if it were 101 feet further away, his sentence
would have been 10 years shorter, and he would be eligible for parole after 4 years .
Mandatory school zone enhancements are
a prime example of sentencing cliffs: minimal differences in the location of crimes generate major
differences in sentencing. They also result in significant racial disparities because racial minorities are far
more likely to live in dense cities, and in dense cities few areas are not within 1000 feet of a school.
C) Impacts
Prosecutors use the discretion afforded by mandatory minimum laws to increase the
severity of charges against nonwhite defendants
I test for racial disparities in the criminal justice system by analyzing abnormal bunching in the distribution of crack-cocaine amounts used in
federal sentencing. I compare cases sentenced before and after the
Fair Sentencing Act, a 2010 law that changed the 10-
year mandatory minimum threshold for crack-cocaine from 50g to 280g. First, I find that after 2010, there is
a sharp increase in the fraction of cases sentenced at 280g (the point that now triggers a 10-year mandatory minimum),
and that this increase is disproportionately large for black and Hispanic offenders. I then explore several possible
explanations for the observed racial disparities, including discrimination. I analyze data from multiple stages in the criminal justice system and
find that the increased bunching for minority offenders is driven by prosecutorial discretion, specifically as
used by about 20-30% of prosecutors. Moreover, the fraction of cases at 280g falls in 2013 when evidentiary standards become
stricter. Finally, the racial disparity in the increase cannot be explained by differences in education, sex, age,
criminal history, seized drug amount, or other elements of the crime, but it can be almost entirely
explained by a measure of state-level racial animus. These results shed light on the role of prosecutorial
discretion and potentially racial discrimination as causes of racial disparities in sentencing.
This has substantial implications for sentencing length and the economic impact of
incarceration
A conservative estimate suggests that being

bunched at 280g adds 1-2 years to an offender’s sentence. Multiple
estimates suggest the
cost of incarceration (combining direct care costs and the cost of lost current and future wages for the offender)
is approximately $60,000 per person per year (Donohue 2009; Mueller-Smith 2015). I find 3.6% of black and Hispanic crack-
cocaine offenders are bunched at 280g after 2010 versus 1.2% of white crack-cocaine offenders. Assuming 3.6% and 1.2% of all drug cases from
1999-2015 were subject to similar discretion by race implies total costs of 1.3 billion dollars for black and Hispanic
offenders versus 148 million dollars for white offenders. In terms of incarceration, the disparity
implies 21,000 years sentenced due to this discretion for black and Hispanic offenders versus 2,500
years sentenced for white offenders. All of the calculations above are based on the amount of discretion and the disparity
detected right at and above the 10-year mandatory minimum threshold for crack-cocaine. To the extent that prosecutors
exercise similar discretion to push defendants just above 5-year mandatory minimum thresholds or
exercise discretion in less obvious ways (pushing defendants far beyond thresholds, for example), the
cost estimates will only be higher and the effect on racial sentencing differences will only be greater.
Impact Framing
The criminal justice system is an instrument key to white supremacy’s domination
Blanche Bong Cook, professor of law at Wayne State University, 1-1- 2017. “Death-Dealing
Imaginations: Racial Profiling, Criminality, and Black Innocence.” Wayne Law Review.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1491&context=lawfrp (accessed
4/19/20)
It is fundamentally vital that we ground our discussion about the media's role in creating racial profiles of criminality and innocence in the larger
theoretical framework of white supremacy. White
supremacy is the motive. The criminal justice system is its
instrument. The media is merely taking a Polaroid of white supremacy's performance of domination , rule,
and exploitation on bodies of color. Under the narrative of white supremacy, the black body is itself the
evidence of crime and the white body is itself evidence of innocence. Historically, criminalizing the black
body has always been a justification for exploitation. From free labor, to cheap labor, to fodder for the
school to-prison pipeline, and to possible obsolesce (because there are new bodies of color to fill the need for cheap labor), the
criminal justice system and the law, as expressions of power, have consistently made the black body its captive.
Imprisonment does the work of disenfranchisement, arrests do the work of subordination, and
sentencing does the work of domination. As a racial formation or project, white supremacy has had two historical aims:
conquest and exploitation. 10 White supremacy occupies, totalizes, and usurps unrestricted space and relegates certain bodies to
places where the conditions of vulnerability to exploitation abound. " For example, the colonial empire discovered
America and relegated the indigenous populations outside the protections of citizenship into areas of genocide. As another example, the
Founding Fathers proclaimed a constitutional democracy and relegated the black body outside the borders of citizenship to auction blocks
where they were vulnerable to the wildest and most pathological desires and whims. 12
Laws that disproportionately target Black Americans label them as “criminal” and
“deviant”
Blake Edwards, Master’s thesis, University of Southern Mississippi, Summer 2019. “Acting Black: An
Analysis of Blackness and Criminality in Film.” The University of Southern Mississippi.
https://aquila.usm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1718&context=masters_theses (accessed 4/19/20)
The literature review for this thesis finds support in multiple criminological and sociological theories of crime. One theory referenced
extensively is labeling theory. Labeling theory states that offenders
are not inherently criminal; it is the reaction society
has towards the individual that dictates criminality and deviance (Fitch, 2002). Labeling theory asserts that laws are
socially constructed and ultimately serve as a means for society to deem certain actions as criminal
while others are not, making those who are labeled “criminal” victims of the law (Kenney, 2002). According to
Cullen, Agnew, and Wilcox (2014), labeling theory not only transforms the identity of a person, but also their social
relationships. African-Americans have had numerous labels attached to them as a people, mostly criminal. This label has provided
a considerable challenge to how African-Americans form relationships with other racial groups as well as
how they are depicted in the media (Littlefield, 2008). Black characters are often written into a criminal trope which strengthens
the idea that the label accurately fits the description of African-Americans (Corredera, 2017). This has resulted in not only the African
population being labeled as deviant but also black culture. This labeling extends to the representation of blackness as non-black characters who
exhibit these characteristics are also considered criminal, though not as completely as black characters (Cacho, 2012). As mentioned earlier, it is
not until the characters 25 “code switch” into their “normal” racial backgrounds and leave the element of blackness alone that they break free
from the criminal label (Anderson, 2000). The unfortunate consequence of the labeling of blackness is that the criminal label is permanent to
both the individual and the culture. On the opposite end of the spectrum, whiteness is commonly labeled as good and is seen both as infallible
and incorruptible (Zimring, 2015). The labeling of blackness as “criminal” faces the same problems in which incarcerated individuals have the
label of “convict” attached to them (Alexander, 2010). Stigmatization
is not easily broken as African-Americans still fall
victim to issues of labeling including, but not limited to, racial profiling by police, discrimination, and at
times social rejection (Tannenbaum, 1938).
Myths about criminality shape how black youths see themselves

Michelle E. Chen, Sarah Lawrence College, December 2018. “Mass Incarceration and Adolescent
Development: Connecting Identity and Trauma in Black Adolescent Males.” Child Development Graduate
Program, Sarah Lawrence College. https://digitalcommons.slc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1025&context=child_development_etd (accessed 4/17/20)
Children observe patterns every day and with each experience, children internalize messages about themselves and
others. For young black males, the internalized message is often that they are “bad” or “unworthy” (Hardy,
2013). The “teenage super predator” was a direct attack on the identity of black adolescent males, as it
shifted how society viewed black adolescent boys, which inevitably impacted how black adolescent boys
viewed themselves. As we know, adolescence is a critical time for identity development and setting the
foundation for a strong sense of self as we enter adulthood. As we age, we curate this sense of self, secure our interests
and passions and begin to envision the person we believe we can be and the future we believe we can have. Throughout this process, how the
world responds and reacts to us help determine how we see ourselves. A
devaluing message based on a prominent aspect of one’s
identity, such as ethnicity or race, is difficult to change once internalized. A mother of an incarcerated teenager explains how
people of color receive a lifetime of messages that shame and reject who they are, resulting in a lack self respect, self esteem and self worth
(Alexander, 2010, p. 168). She expresses how this
kind of branding results in extreme self-hate, as people of color are
programmed to believe there is something wrong with them.
Criminalization of black bodies dehumanizes both the oppressed and oppressor and
leads to real-world violence
Blanche Bong Cook, professor of law at Wayne State University, 1-1- 2017. “Death-Dealing
Imaginations: Racial Profiling, Criminality, and Black Innocence.” Wayne Law Review.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1491&context=lawfrp (accessed
4/19/20)
Because the criminalization of black bodies and the over valorization of whiteness turns police officers into warriors
and enemy combatants in black communities, and protectors and allies in white neighborhoods. 29 Because
death by imagery increases the instances of police violence and excessive use of force against bodies of
color, cheapens black existence, increases danger for black lives, and dehumanizes all that fall within its
gaze. Because Natasha McKenna, aged thirty-seven, died after police officers tazed her four times while she lay naked and shackled with
handcuffs and leg restraints.30 Because police officers subjected Alexandria Randle and Brandy Hamilton to full blown cavity searches in the
middle of the day in full view of a public highway after a traffic stop.31 Because black men
are seven times more likely than
white men to die by police gunfire while unarmed. 32 Because the dog-whistling effect of feasting on
black flesh distracts us from the treachery of focusing greatly needed resources on denigration and
imprisonment, rather than human uplift.
AFF Extensions
Inherency
Mandatory minimums for drug sentencing substantially increase sentence lengths
Drug mandatory minimum penalties continued to result in long sentences in the federal system. • In
fiscal year 2016, over half (52.8%) of offenders convicted of an offense carrying a drug mandatory
minimum penalty faced a mandatory minimum penalty of ten years or greater. • In fiscal year 2016, the
average sentence for offenders who were convicted of an offense carrying a drug mandatory minimum
penalty was 94 months of imprisonment, more than double the average sentence (42 months) for drug
offenders not convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty. • Offenders who qualified
for relief received significantly lower sentences (64 months) than those offenders who remained subject
to a mandatory minimum penalty at sentencing (126 months). Even when offenders received relief from
a mandatory minimum penalty, the average sentence (64 months) was still one and half times greater
than the average sentence for those not convicted of an offense carrying a drug mandatory minimum.
Mandatory minimum sentencing laws make sentences substantially longer for drug
offenders
JELANI JEFFERSON EXUM Professor, University of Toledo College of Law. February 2016. “A
Commentary on Judicial Discretion, Mandatory Minimums, and Sentencing Reform.” Federal Sentencing
Reporter. https://fsr.ucpress.edu/content/ucpfsr/28/3/209.full.pdf (accessed 4/10/20)
According to the report, the Bureau of Prisons was 32 percent overcapacity in FY 2014, with a majority
of inmates being drug offenders.8 Consequently, federal sentencing reform has focused heavily on
adjusting the sentences applicable to drug trafficking offenses.9 Of course, when drug sentencing is at
issue, so are mandatory minimum laws. The U.S. Sentencing Commission has reported that ‘‘[i]n 23.6%
of all cases in 2014, the offender was convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum
penalty.’’10 Over two-thirds of these cases—67.8 percent, to be exact—were drug trafficking
offenses.11 In 2014, just over half (52%) of federal drug offenders were convicted of an offense carrying
a mandatory minimum sentence.12 Although not all of those offenders were ultimately sentenced to a
mandatory minimum penalty, 46 percent were, which is still a hefty proportion of drug offenders.13 The
actual sentencing outcomes were meaningful, with drug offenders subject to a mandatory minimum
penalty and receiving an average sentence of 127 months, which was 87 months longer than the
average sentence for a drug offender not convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum
sentence.14
Increases in sentence lengths drive mass incarceration

Connor Rothschild, social policy researcher for Rice University. 2019. “The Incarcerated State(s) of
America: The Causes, Consequences, and Solutions to Mass Incarceration in the United States.” Rice
Examiner. https://scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/106093/examiner-2019-art06.pdf
(accessed 4/17/20)
Between the 1980s and 1996, the far-reaching effects of the war on drugs were codified into long-lasting
and heavily impactful sentencing reforms that have had effects outside the realm of drug policy. One
notable sentencing reform was the introduction of mandatory minimums, which, as the name suggests,
require minimum prison sentences for those convicted of certain crimes. Mandatory minimums limit
judicial discretion and guarantee that a prisoner stays in prison no matter the circumstance, which
explains why they have been a large source of increasing incarceration rates. Between 1980 and 2010,
half of the 222% increase in the state prison population was attributable to increases in prison
sentences’ length (The Sentencing Project, n.d.).
Solvency
Reducing sentence lengths would substantially reduce the overall prison population
(accessed 4/17/20)
A first step is eliminating mandatory minimum sentences for minor drug offenses. Earlier, the argument
was put forth that mandatory minimums are to blame for much of mass incarceration’s growth because
half of the state prison population’s growth in the past three decades was attributable to increases in
prison sentences’ length (The Sentencing Project, n.d.). This is significant because roughly two-thirds of
mandatory minimum sentences have been drug offenses (United States Sentencing Commission, 2017),
meaning they are chiefly responsible for this precipitous increase. Experts believe that addressing this
issue would create promising results. An interactive calculator from the Urban Institute reveals that
reducing the length of sentences for drug offenders by 50% would reduce the overall prison population
by 32,750 (7%) by 2021 (King, Peterson, Elderbroom, and Pelletier, 2018).
Rolling back federal drug sentencing rules would substantially decrease the
incarcerated population
Steven Raphael, professor of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, and Michael A. Stoll,
May 2014. “A New Approach to Reducing Incarceration While Maintaining Low Rates of Crime.”
Hamilton Project.
https://www.hamiltonproject.org/assets/legacy/files/downloads_and_links/v5_THP_RaphaelStoll_DiscP
aper.pdf (accessed 4/19/20)
Nonetheless, the federal prison system is larger than any of the individual state systems. Moreover, the
federal prison system disproportionately comprises nonviolent drug offenders and hence is likely a
setting in which sentencing reforms would generate substantial reductions and perhaps encounter less
political resistance. According to our estimates, reversing drug sentencing practices to the levels of the
mid1980s would reduce the national incarceration rate by 30 per 100,000, while changes in weapons
sentencing would reduce the national incarceration rate by 12 per 100,000.
AD1 – Racial Inequality
Mandatory minimums lead to racial inequality

The discrepancy in minimum sentencing between crack and cocaine is racially biased
David Bjerk, professor of economics at Claremont McKenna College. 2016. “Mandatory Minimum
Policy Reform and the Sentencing of Crack Cocaine Defendants: An Analysis of the Fair Sentencing Act.”
IZA Institute of Labor Economics. https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/147923/1/dp10237.pdf
(accessed 4/10/20)
The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 implemented mandatory minimum sentences upon conviction for
trafficking in quantities of drugs exceeding specific quantity thresholds for each drug. While crack
cocaine is produced from powder cocaine, and therefore is pharmacologically identical in its active
ingredient, the mandatory minimum triggering quantities prescribed under the law were extremely
different for the two drugs, with the ratio of powder cocaine relative to crack cocaine needed to trigger
eligibility for a mandatory minimum being 100:1. The reasons Congress initially cited for justifying the
differential treatment of crack cocaine relative to powder cocaine under the mandatory minimum
legislation were eventually revealed to have little merit. Moreover, the disparate treatment of crack
cocaine relative to powder cocaine also became viewed as racially biased, as over 80 percent of those
convicted for crack have generally been African-American, while less than 33 percent of those
convicted for other drugs such as powder cocaine, methamphetamine, and marijuana have been
AfricanAmerican (Vagins and McCurdy, 2006).
Mandatory minimums created sentencing disparity that exacerbated racial inequality,

which persists today
Robert H. Ambrose, criminal defense attorney. 2019. “DECARCERATION IN A MASS INCARCERATION
STATE: THE ROAD TO PRISON ABOLITION.” Mitchell Hamline Law Review.
https://open.mitchellhamline.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1176&context=mhlr (accessed 4/17/20)
At the federal level, mandatory minimum sentences gained notoriety for harsh punishments of
nonviolent drug offenders primarily because of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 (ADAA). This act created
the wellknown sentencing disparity for those found with similar amounts of crack cocaine compared to
powder cocaine—the “amount of powder cocaine required to trigger the five-year and ten-year
minimum mandatory sentences prescribed by the ADAA is [was] 100 times greater than the amount of
crack cocaine required to trigger those sentences.”115 Besides escalating mass incarceration, the ADAA
also amplified the racial disparities for those placed in prison, because the vast majority of crack cocaine
offenders are African-American, while the vast majority of powder cocaine offenders are Caucasian.116
As an attempt to lessen the disparity, President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act (FSA) in 2010,
which reduced sentencing differences between crack cocaine and powder cocaine.117 The FSA also
eliminated mandatory minimum sentences for simple possession of crack cocaine.118 Unfortunately,
further efforts related to sentencing reform, such as the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015
and the Smarter Sentencing Act, fell short in Congress and never ultimately passed.
The War on Drugs has led to mass incarceration and disenfranchisement that targets
nonwhite Americans
Hon. Cory Booker, United States Senator from New Jersey. 2019. “Pass the Next Step Act.” Brennan
Center for Justice. https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2019-
08/Report_EndingMassIncarceration_2.pdf (accessed 4/17/20)
Despite being home to only five percent of the world’s population, the United States houses 25 percent
of the world’s prison population.13 Since 1980, our federal prison population has exploded by almost
800 percent, largely a direct result of the War on Drugs — a government policy that mandated longer,
more punitive sentences, often for nonviolent crimes. These laws not only have wasted precious
resources by locking people up for low-level crimes instead of focusing on rehabilitation, but have been
overwhelmingly disproportionately applied to black, brown, and lower-income Americans. The data is
clear: even though there is no real difference in drug use or dealing between blacks and whites — in
fact, whites are more likely to sell drugs — blacks are 3.6 times more likely to get arrested for selling
drugs.15 And black men are 75 percent more likely than similarly situated white men to be charged with
federal offenses that carry harsh mandatory minimum sentences.16 Unaddressed, implicit racial bias in
our justice system at all levels — from law enforcement encounters to sentencing — and the unequal
application of our laws have created a justice system where inputs and outcomes are often more
dependent on race and class than on guilt or innocence. As a result, today, one in 13 black Americans is
prevented by law from voting, and black citizens are four times more likely to have their voting rights
revoked. Black Americans are more likely to have to endure the 40,000 or so collateral consequences
that come with a criminal record, including barriers to public services, education, and employment.17
Mass incarceration disproportionately impacts Black and Latinx Americans

By Chelsea Jubitana, researcher in Public Policy for the Kenan Institute for Ethics, April 19, 2019.
“Different Strokes: The Function of Mass Incarceration Activists in the United States and Abroad.” Kenan
Institute for Ethics at Duke University. https://kenan.ethics.duke.edu/different-strokes-the-function-of-
mass-incarceration-activists-in-the-united-states-and-abroad/ (accessed 4/17/20)
Despite making up roughly 5% of the global population, the United States has nearly 25% of the world’s
prison population. The incarceration population has increased by over 700% since 1970, with over 2.3
million people in jail or prison today; outpacing population growth and crime. The crime rate intensifies
by demographic as well. One out of every three black boys can expect to go to prison in his lifetime,
compared to 1 out of six Latinx boys, and 1 out of 17 white boys. To combat such alarming rates,
organizations including the NAACP, ACLU, and Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) are advocates for prison
reform. Each organization works to combat racial disparities, harsh sentencing, and mandatory
minimum sentences by using education, policy, and their political platform as a means to protest and
advocate for the issue.
Mandatory minimum sentences may not be served concurrently, and a “prior

conviction” can result from the same trial – this multiplies the length of sentences
A court may not avoid the mandatory minimums called for in Section 924(c)(1) by imposing a
probationary sentence,165 or by ordering that a Section 924(c)(1) minimum mandatory sentence be
served concurrently with some other sentence.166 A court may, however, take Section 924(c)’s
mandatory minimum into account when calculating the appropriate sentence for the underlying
predicate offense.167 If a criminal episode involves more than one predicate offense, more than one
violation of Section 924(c) may be punished.168 Moreover, the second or subsequent convictions which
trigger enhanced mandatory minimum penalties need not be the product of separate trials, but may be
part of the same verdict. Thus, a defendant charged and convicted in a single trial on several counts may
be subject to multiple, consecutive, mandatory minimum terms of imprisonment.169
Higher minimum sentences for re-offenders exacerbate racial

inequality
The school to prison pipeline disproportionately impacts black youth
The myth of the teenage superpredator and subsequent policy changes created the school to prison
pipeline, which disproportionately impact youth of color and resulted in the drastic increase of
incarcerating black boys and young black men. The root of the issue can be traced back to the changes in
school policies, which increased suspensions, expulsions and school dropouts. This ultimately led to a
shift in the juvenile justice system as well. During the expansion of incarceration between 1985 and
1995, youth of color became the majority of youth incarcerated in the United States (Holman &
Ziedenberg, 2013). The detained white youth population increased by only 2%, while the detained
minority youth population grew by 76%. According to The Sentencing Project, in 2017, black youth are
five times more likely to be detained or committed than white youth. White youth make up
approximately 56% of the youth population in the United States and yet only 32% of incarcerated youth
are white (Sentencing Project, April, 2016). Black youth, who make up only 16% of the youth population
in the United States, make up 44% of incarcerated youth (Sentencing Project, September 2017). The
current system of mass incarceration means 1 in 3 black men born in 2001 can expect to go to prison in
their lifetime (Sentencing Project, n.d.). The difference in arrest and detention rates do not reflect a
difference in crime rate among white youth and youth of color (Holman & Ziedenberg, 2013). While
white youth and youth of color commit several categories of crime at the same rate, youth of color are
more likely to be arrested and less likely to have access to good legal representation, programs or
services (Holman & Ziedenberg, 2013). Youth or color will also more likely face stereotypes and implicit
biases by those involved in their case. For white youth, crimes are often explained as a product of their
environment or issues with mental health, while crimes by youth of color are viewed as a result of
personal failing and personality flaws (Holman & Ziedenberg, 2013).
The school to prison pipeline means black youths are more likely to have criminal
charges than their white counterparts
Shantel Meek, professor at Arizona State University and former senior policy advisor in the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services, and Roy L. Austin Jr., October 15, 2019. “Let’s never see
another first-grader in handcuffs.” Hechinger Report. https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-lets-never-
see-another-first-grader-in-handcuffs/ (accessed 4/17/20)
Criminalizing the developmentally appropriate behavior of black children is something that’s been
happening for generations. In past years, there have been other well-publicized cases of school-resource
officers handcuffing children whose hands are too small for handcuffs, putting children small enough to
require a booster seat in patrol cars and driving them to the police station. The Office of Juvenile Justice
and Delinquency Prevention in the U.S. Department of Justice reports that more than 230,000 children
aged 14 and under were arrested in 2017, although the office does not publicly report data broken
down into smaller age groups. The disproportionately harsh discipline that black children encounter
often begins when children are literally in — or just transitioning out of — diapers. In fact, data indicate
that preschoolers are expelled from their learning settings at three or four times the rate of children in
grades K-12, and that black preschoolers are more than three times as likely to be suspended than their
white peers. From this early age, and across the entire K-12 continuum, black children are
disproportionately the victims of exclusionary discipline. And yet there is no evidence that black children
have worse behavior than peers. There is research, however, to indicate that when presented with
identical behavioral records, teachers are more likely to rate the behavior of black children as more
problematic and recommend harsher punishments. Studies have found that black children are also more
often disciplined for subjective behaviors (e.g., disrespect, defiance) that are at the discretion of adult
decision-makers, while white children are more likely to be disciplined for objective offenses (e.g.,
smoking).
Prison culture makes recidivism for young detainees extremely likely

The experience of incarceration, paired with the lack of rehabilitative services means trauma does not
end when youth enter the justice system. Ashkar & Kenny (2008) found adolescent boys experienced
negative feelings and emotions such as shame, guilt, fear, sadness, loneliness, frustration, anger, stress
and boredom. The participants in this study also reported repeated victimization during incarceration, a
lack of adaptive coping strategies, an abuse of power by youth workers, and a strong sense of
interpersonal loss as a result of dislocation and geographical separation from important others (Ashkar
& Kenny, 2008). The prison culture of bullying, substance use and antagonism reinforce behaviors that
are antisocial and may lead to reoffending (Ashkar & Kenny, 2008). Mental health problems are often
exacerbated as a result of the adverse conditions in juvenile detention facilities. Abram et al. (2004)
suggests future research on the re-traumatization or worsening of PTSD symptoms during routine
processing when youth are arrested, such as the use of handcuffs, searches, isolation and restraining
detainees exhibiting symptoms of PTSD. Incarceration is often, if not always, a traumatic experience,
which is likely to perpetuate maladaptive coping patterns. As a result, incarceration may actually
prevent reestablishing a lifestyle that avoids engagement in delinquent behaviors. This is especially true
for black boys, who are disproportionately represented in all aspects of the criminal justice system,
including arrests, detainment, being charged, being sentenced, transfer to adult court and confinement
in secure residential facilities (Alexander, 2010). The juvenile justice system fails to rehabilitate youthful
offenders with trauma histories and is perpetuating mass incarceration through each stage of criminal
processing. Rather than deterring youth from reoffending, the environment in these various facilities
make traumatized youth vulnerable to re-traumatization, and without proper intervention and
treatment, recidivism is almost guaranteed.
Mandatory minimums for repeat offenders drive mass incarceration and racial
inequality
(accessed 4/17/20)
A similarly harsh and widely employed sentencing reform was the introduction of three-strikes laws,
which require minimum sentences (usually around 25 years) for individuals convicted of their third
felony. Indeed, studies also find that three-strikes laws are responsible for aggravating mass
incarceration and existing racial disparities. All other things being equal, black individuals are
significantly more likely than white individuals to be in prison due to a three-strikes violation (Jin and
Hidalgo-Wohlleben, 2016).
Mass incarceration hurts Black communities

Mass incarceration leads to ongoing racial trauma
Mass incarceration has contributed to all levels of disruption in black communities. Families have
experienced separation and loss as a result of incarceration and the over-policing of black communities
has at times resulted in death by police. Abuse and neglect, while often an individual or family issue,
may also be influenced by generations of systemic abuse and structural neglect, directly impacting
families by restricting access to resources. This includes limiting access to housing, education and
employment. Mass incarceration results in ongoing racial trauma, resulting in complex stress that is
likely connected to the abuse and neglect seen in families, as well as health issues later in life, which
may result in early death. Black neighborhoods have been left with limited economic opportunities and
have experienced generations of political and social marginalization as a result.
Mass incarceration destroys economic opportunities

(accessed 4/10/20)
Mass imprisonment works to constrain black communities' participation in the labor market as well.
At the most basic level, incarceration physically keeps inmates from working. More than a million poor
men confined to prisons are not counted in the nation's unemployment statistics. 1 29 This means that
unemployment is far worse in black communities than the official numbers indicate. These figures also
highlight how incarceration depletes black communities of their workforce and income, thereby
impairing their economic stability. L30 Removing large numbers of residents who engage in both legal
work and crime constitutes a significant loss to local economies. L3 1 Incarceration not only temporarily
disrupts employment in black communities, it also "aggravates the already severe labor-market
problems of their mostly low-income, poorly educated inmates" in lasting ways. 1 32 Prison creates
powerful barriers to finding legal employment by discouraging potential employers, interrupting
employment history, eroding job skills, and undermining social connections to stable job opportunities.
I33 When inmates return from prison they typically lack the education and skills needed to compete in
the labor market, and the stigma of criminal conviction makes employers extra wary of hiring them.
I34 Besides reducing the opportunities inmates have for legal work, incarceration strengthens inmates'
ties to criminal networks. 1 35 Being sent to prison completely railroads a young man's transition from
school to stable employment. I 36 Children who are incarcerated have virtually no chance of getting a
good job when they grow up. l37 In short, a stint in prison permanently ruins most inmates' earning
potential . The spatial concentration of incarceration intensifies the scarcity of social connections to
legal work within neighborhoods. This especially impedes access to jobs for youth in these
communities because it decreases the pool of men who can serve as their mentors and their links to
the working world. l38 One group of researchers suggests that "large numbers of idle young men
recently released from prison or jail ... may form peer groups or reference groups that offer the
community few normative or social links to legitimate employment." I 39 Mass imprisonment may also
have a "spillover effect" by generating employment discrimination against entire neighborhoods
associated with high crime or incarceration rates.
Mass incarceration negatively impacts Black youth and leads to cycles of recidivism
In a Justice Policy Institute Report examining the negative impact of youth incarceration, Holman and
Ziedenberg (2013) found placement in secure detention facilities only deter a small proportion of youth
from further criminal activity. According to Bezruki, Varana, and Hill (1999), 70% of those who were
released from detainment would be arrested again within a year (as cited in Holman & Ziedenberg,
2013). Involvement and experience with incarceration is the most significant predictor of recidivism, or
rearrest, (Holman & Ziedenberg, 2013) and studies show involvement with the justice system only
results in further justice involvement. This is in part due to the punitive rather than rehabilitative
approach of incarceration. Behaviors that lead to involvement in the justice system are often left
uncorrected, and youth are not taught prosocial behaviors or how to positively cope with past trauma
that likely relates to justice involvement. Golub (1990) found incarcerating youth disrupts engagement
with family, as well as school and work, which likely interrupts and delays the aging out process (as cited
in Holman & Ziedenberg, 2013). That is, research suggests many youth eventually outgrow delinquent
behaviors as they mature, and incarceration hinders this natural process (Holman & Ziedenberg, 2013;
Lambie & Randell, 2013; Mallett, 2016). This is especially true for young black males, whose typical
adolescent behaviors are often responded to with school suspension and expulsion, police involvement,
violence and incarceration. Unlike their white counterparts, whose age and developmental stage are
often considered when facing criminal processing, young black males are often viewed as dangerous and
are treated as future career criminals. This narrative has plagued black communities for decades and has
contributed to the disproportionate and overrepresented presence of young black males in jails and
prisons across the United States. Incarceration interrupts education and makes returning or continuing
school extremely difficult. As a result, many youth do not return to school and of the ones that do, many
will drop out within a year (Holman & Ziedenberg, 2013). Aizer and Doyle (2013) found juvenile
incarceration reduces the chance of graduating high school and increases the likelihood of incarceration
later in life. Incarceration may also lead to reduced self-control, increased risk taking behaviors and
reduced attentional performance (Meijers, Harte, Meynen, Cuijpers & Scherder, 2018). Meijers et al.
(2018) suggest this may lead to more impulsive and risk taking behavior, making it more difficult to avoid
contact with the criminal justice system after imprisonment. It also suggests impoverished prison
environments may negatively affect executive functioning, making one’s return to society more difficult.
For adolescents, this is particularly concerning as the part of the brain responsible for executive
functioning is not fully developed, thus making adolescents more likely to engage in behaviors that will
lead to further involvement with the justice system and likely result in future incarceration.
Mass incarceration strips black communities of the right to vote

(accessed 4/10/20)
Incarceration concretely denies citizenship rights through felon disenfranchisement laws. In most
states, a felony conviction results in the loss of the right to vote either temporarily during
incarceration or permanently. Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia bar inmates from voting
while they are incarcerated for a felony. Thirty-two states disenfranchise felons while they are in prison
as well as when they are on probation or parole. Fourteen of these states disenfranchise inmates for life.
A 1998 study by the Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch documented the impact of high
incarceration rates on black communities' participation in civic life. The authors estimated that 3.9
million Americans, or 1 in 50 adults, had either currently or permanently lost their right to vote as a
result of a felony conviction. 120 More than a third of these disenfranchised citizens-1 .4 million-were
black men. l21 The impact of incarceration on black political power is more dramatic when these figures
are considered from a community perspective. Nearly 1 in 7 black males of voting age have been
disenfranchised as a result of incarceration. 122 The impact is especially enormous in states where
exfelons are denied the right to vote : 1 in 4 black men is permanently disenfranchised in 7 of these
states. The geographic concentration of mass incarceration translates the denial of individual felons'
voting rights into disenfranchisement of entire communities. Excluding such huge numbers of citizens
from the electoral process substantially dilutes African American communities' voting power. "Thus,
not only are criminal justice policies resulting in the disproportionate incarceration of African
Americans," concludes the Sentencing Project's Marc Mauer, "imprisonment itself reduces black
political ability to influence these policies.'' 124 This dilution in voting strength is compounded by the
Census Bureau's practice of counting inmates as residents of the jurisdictions in which they are
incarcerated. 125 The population inflation in predominantly white, rural districts where prisons are
located generates a perverse redistribution of government aid and political apportionment to these
areas and away from the African American communities from which most of the inmates come. 12 6
Neighborhoods with large percentages of current and former inmates lack the political clout to
influence policies and demand services. Sociologists Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza have projected
that, even accounting for lower turnout by former felons, disenfranchisement laws have influenced
actual election outcomes, playing a decisive role in U.S. Senate and presidential races in recent years.
I27 The demonstrable impact on national elections, they conclude, shows that "rising levels of felon
disenfranchisement constitute a reversal of the universalization of the right to vote." L28 Given the
spatial concentration of disenfranchised felons and exfelons in inner cities, the impact on local elections
is probably even greater. By denying felons the opportunity to participate in legal processes such as
voting, jury service, and holding public office, moreover, mass incarceration reinforces internal social
norms that treat these processes as illegitimate as well as the external perception of these
communities as outside the national polity.
AD2 – Prosecutorial discretion
Prosecutorial discretion encourages guilty pleas

Mandatory minimums undermine the right to trial, punish the innocent, and give
more culpable offenders lower sentences
There are three further reasons to reject this appeal to efficiency. The first is that threatening severely
disproportionate punishments in order to secure plea bargains coercively undermines the right to trial.
This practice has been considered constitutional by the Supreme Court in Bordenkircher v. Hayes. 60 But
it is still odious for a defendant like Hayes to face the prospect of a mandatory minimum sentence of life
imprisonment without parole, rather than a five-year sentence, for exercising the right to trial by jury. A
second concern with the use of mandatory minimums as threats is that this predictably results in the
punishment of the innocent. Consider the position of an innocent defendant who is offered a choice like
Hayes’. Most defendants rely on a public defender, who can often “spend only minutes with their clients
before deciding whether to accept a plea deal”, during which time they cannot provide much advice,
especially since “defendants have almost no constitutional right to discovery during the plea process,
[so] prosecutors are often able to convincingly bluff with weak hands”.61 (And many prosecutors do
bluff.62) Many innocent defendants will plead guilty in the face of such threats: “[s]imply by charging
someone with an offense carrying a mandatory sentence of ten to fifteen years or life, prosecutors are
able to force people to plead guilty” to lesser offenses, including “many innocent drug defendants”.63
Empirical evidence suggests that the majority of innocent defendants will still go to trial.64 Of those,
many are convicted, and face severe mandatory minimums. In 1999 in Tulia, Texas, 43 innocent
defendants were arrested for selling cocaine; the first two who refused plea bargains were tried,
convicted, and sentenced to 99 and 434 years of imprisonment, respectively.65 The threatened use of
mandatory minimums thus results in the unjust punishment of the innocent via compelling innocent
defendants to plead guilty (to lesser offenses) and penalizing innocent defendants who use their right to
trial but are wrongfully convicted (of more severe offenses). Defending the use of drug-related
mandatory minimums requires a cavalier stance toward punishing the innocent. A final problem with
this appeal to efficiency concerns the usefulness of compelled cooperation. In many cases, prosecutors
do not use threats against “lesser distributors” to move up the chain of supply “to prosecute the more
serious dealers and their leaders and suppliers”. If anything, they do the opposite: prosecutors offer
reduced sentences to more serious offenders who have valuable information to gain evidence against
lesser distributors. Consider United States v. Brigham, where a driver received a 10-year mandatory
minimum while a drug kingpin received a reduced sentence (84 months) for providing “substantial
assistance”.
Mandatory minimum laws allow charges based on anonymous testimony, which

encourages defendants to plead guilty
Mona Lynch, professor of Criminology, Law, and Society, University of California, Irvine, 2018.
“Prosecutorial Discretion, Drug Case Selection, and Inequality in Federal Court.” JUSTICE QUARTERLY.
https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10142277 (accessed 4/19/20)
Case selection for federal prosecution in these cases was also a discretionary process. Court proceedings
and file documents, including motions, discovery requests, plea agreements, and sentencing
memoranda, often revealed suspected co-conspirators who either were not criminally charged at all, or
who were prosecuted in state court. In some instances, the uncharged suspects were major players who
cooperated with the government as a way to avoid federal prosecution. In others, the uncharged
persons were only tangentially involved, so likely deemed insufficiently culpable to be prosecuted
federally. Interviews with defense lawyers confirmed that unnamed, uncharged cooperators were a
looming danger for their clients in many of these cases, since the information they provided prosecutors
could increase exposure on guilt or sentence. The primary danger they posed was on “historical” weight
of drugs alleged sold by a given defendant in the conspiracy, since drug weight drives both guideline
ranges and mandatory minimum thresholds. The incentives in “historical” conspiracy cases also played
out so that those who got the best deals in Northeastern—namely those who escaped facing any federal
charges, or any charges at all—were seen by defense attorneys as most likely to exaggerate the scope
and size of the prior deals, since the informant currency is in how much can be provided to increase the
culpability of the target. Those uncharged cooperators were also harder to assess on the defense side,
since they typically could remain confidential and would just be used as a threat by prosecutors to get
the defendant(s) to plead guilty, a near-certainty in federal drug cases. In Northeastern, then, the
prototypical drug defendants sat at the two poles of the continuum of case seriousness. The minute,
hand-to-hand, state-type sales were on one end, and the multijurisdictional, multilevel, multidefendant
conspiracies were on the other. But each type had something in common: shadow potential defendants
NOT selected for federal prosecution. In the conspiracy cases, like in the small cases, relative culpability
was not the primary sorting mechanism as to who faced federal charges and who did not (although it
was a factor). Rather, the willingness to cooperate and the potential value of that cooperation appeared
to be a significant determinant in the sorting process.
Prosecutorial power leads to oversentencing and imprisoning the innocent

Donald A. Dripps, Warren Distinguished Professor, University of San Diego Law School, 2016. “Guilt,
Innocence, and Due Process of Plea Bargaining,” William & Mary Law Review.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1228499?seq=1 (accessed 4/10/20)
The proposed trial offer system responds to one manifestation of the current system's pathological
reliance on executive discretion [is]: the problem of the innocent accused [are] placed in the position
of having no reasonable alternative but to plead guilty. The far more common manifestation of
executive hegemony is overpunishment. Sentences effectively set by the executive are, unsurprisingly,
higher than those that prevailed when the courts played a more active role in sentencing.
Prosecutorial discretion targets racial minorities

Mandatory minimums allow prosecutorial discretion to target Black and Hispanic
defendants for longer sentences
For federal drug crimes, a sharp increase in sentencing is triggered when the offense involves at or
above a certain amount of drugs. In this paper, I show that there is substantial bunching at and above
that point where the mandatory minimum sentence increases, and that bunching is disproportionately
larger for black and Hispanic offenders. I use the pre-2010 distribution of drug weights, when the
threshold is at 50g instead of 280g, to show that the racial disparity in bunching at 280g post-2010 is
conditional on observed drug amounts. Since the bunching only appears in prosecutor case
management data and the final sentencing data but not in data on state-level convictions or drug
seizures, it is likely a result of prosecutorial discretion. Several additional tests confirm this. In fact, just
20-30% of attorneys account for 100% of the bunching observed in the case management data. In
addition, bunching becomes less prevalent among prosecutors following a Supreme Court decision that
requires stricter evidentiary standards for drug quantity evidence. This, in addition to numerous other
tests discussed above, suggests that prosecutors are shading drug amounts upward to induce longer
sentences. Why do some prosecutors bunch black and Hispanic defendants at 280g more often than
white defendants? The racial disparity cannot be explained by observable individual characteristics or
district characteristics. Black and Hispanic crack-cocaine defendants are just as likely to retain private
counsel as white defendants. Also, bunching at 280g is unrelated to judge race, political party, and the
judge’s share of cases at other mandatory minimum thresholds. Since only a subset of prosecutors
practice bunching and there is variation across prosecutors within federal districts, a simple model of
statistical discrimination does not apply either. This suggests the disparity may be the result of taste-
based discrimination. In fact, I find the racial disparity in bunching at 280g is largest in federal districts in
states with higher levels of racial animus.
Prosecutors are responsible for racial disparity in sentencing by choosing what to

charge defendants for – even with limited evidence
Finally, prosecutors can legally influence the drug quantity involved in an offense because, according to
the USSC Guidelines, the quantity of drugs used to determine sentencing is not strictly tied to the
quantity found on the offender at the time of arrest (USSC 2015b). I do find bunching at 280g after 2010
in case management data from the Executive Office of the US Attorney (EOUSA). I also find that
approximately 30% of prosecutors are responsible for the rise in cases with 280g after 2010, and that
there is variation in prosecutor-level bunching both within and between districts. Prosecutors who
bunch cases at 280g also have a high share of cases right above 28g after 2010 (the 5-year threshold
post-2010) and a high share of cases above 50g prior to 2010 (the 10-year threshold pre-2010). Also,
bunching above a mandatory minimum threshold persists across districts for prosecutors who switch
districts. Moreover, when a “bunching” prosecutor switches into a new district, all other attorneys in
that district increase their own bunching at mandatory minimums. These results suggest that the
observed bunching at sentencing is specifically due to prosecutorial discretion. The US Supreme Court
issued a 5-4 decision in Alleyne v. United States on June 17, 2013 that changed the evidentiary standard
necessary for facts that raise a defendant’s exposure to mandatory minimum sentencing (Bala 2015).
Previously, prosecutors could present evidence on drug quantities to the presiding judge, and the judge
would decide, based on the preponderance of evidence, whether the mandatory minimum applied. The
Supreme Court ruling in Alleyne requires that prosecutors present this evidence to the jury, which
evaluates it based on the stricter “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard. The case management data
from the EOUSA show that from 2011-2013, approximately 9.1% of cases were recorded in the range of
280-290g. From 2014-2016, however, 6.8% of cases were recorded in the 280-290g range. Using a
difference-in-discontinuities design, I show that the practice of bunching ballooned in the run up to
Alleyne, and that this bunching was reined in by the Supreme Court decision (though it was not
eliminated entirely). This suggests prosecutors were submitting evidence under the judicial fact-finding
system that would not hold up under the scrutiny of a jury.
Mandatory minimums give discretion over sentencing to prosecutors rather than

judges, which leads to sentencing disparities
A problem for this argument is that mandatory minimums do not eliminate discretion in sentencing.
They transfer it to prosecutors. To understand this, it is helpful to mention Senator Hatch’s third point of
comparison between sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums: [W]hereas the guidelines
incorporate a “real offense” approach to sentencing, mandatory minimums are basically a “charge-
specific” approach wherein the sentence is triggered only if the prosecutor chooses to charge the
defendant with a certain offense.29 Because drug-related mandatory minimums apply to conduct that is
covered by other charges, they give prosecutors a choice over what charge to apply. That “choice of
charge can determine both the minimum and the maximum” sentence, so in exercising this discretion
“prosecutors can restrict judges to narrow sentencing ranges”.30 As one commentator noted, “one
premise of mandatory minimums is that the prosecutors are competent to decide appropriate
sentences until they become judges”.31 Prosecutorial discretion in applying mandatory minimums in the
war on drugs results in disparate sentencing outcomes.32 So much so that many previous federal
Attorneys General have issued memos to restrict prosecutorial discretion because “federal prosecutors
[were] pursuing their own idea of justice”.33 New Jersey implemented prosecutorial guidelines because
“prosecutors in urban counties had been offering much more generous deals that those in suburban or
rural counties”.34 Racial disparities are also rife. For instance, prosecutors in Georgia “have unbridled
discretion” to decide whether to bring a charge carrying a mandatory minimum life sentence for a
second drug offense; when this practice was (unsuccessfully) challenged in 1995, prosecutors “had
invoked [this discretion] against only 1 percent of white defendants facing a second drug conviction but
against 16 percent of black defendants”, so “98.4% of those serving life sentences under the provision
were black”.35
Prosecutorial case selection leads to racialized targeting of low-level drug offenders

These findings also illustrate that prosecutorial discretion at the case selection stage is critically
important to understanding variations in outcomes at all stages of the adjudication process, especially
for prosecutors who have ample luxury in picking and choosing the cases they wish to pursue. For those
drug defendants who are federally charged, the decision sets off a course of adjudicatory action that is
often closely linked to the logic of the choice to file. That is, the same factors that bring drug defendants
to federal court in the first place frequently structure the terms of plea offers, including around
defendants’ prior criminal record, other criminal involvement, and/or the presumed information that
law enforcement hopes to get out of the defendant. As Ulmer (2005) demonstrated, those processes,
too, vary considerably as a function of locale with important justice consequences. Finally, in regard to
the issue of racial inequality and disparity in federal court, this highly discretionary stage of decision-
making appears to be an important, albeit under-appreciated, contributor to inequality in federal drug
caseloads. In Northeastern, Southeast, and Rural, the criminal statutes and sentencing guideline
provisions structured how minorities were disproportionately selected for prosecution. Sentencing
provisions based on prior drug convictions, in particular, played a role in case selection, which in itself is
highly racially stratified and produced by selective law enforcement practices (Lynch, 2016). In addition,
the low bars for mandatory minimums in crack cases prior to 2010 played an important role in case
selection in all three districts, where black defendants have been disproportionately charged nationally
(Provine, 2007). The proactive law enforcement tactics, too, were justified by widely held, more
transcendent racial ideologies and scripts (Haney Lopez, 2000) that rhetorically linked low-level dealers
to gangs, guns and violence. Even in Southwestern, where case selection was less discretionary, the flow
of cases was structured by national policy that had become increasingly hostile toward immigrants, and
that had turned to criminal law to manage migration at the border.
Mandatory minimums encourage people to plead guilty to offenses they didn’t

commit, and disproportionately harm Black Americans
Since slavery, black people have been educationally and economically disadvantaged in the United
States. After slavery was abolished and segregation was ruled unconstitutional, employment in the
United States took a drastic shift in the 1970s and 80s as a result of deindustrialization, globalization and
the advancement of technology (Alexander, 2010). As factories shut down all over the country, black
folks suddenly found themselves “trapped in jobless ghettos, desperate for work” (Alexander, 2010, p.
218). As employment opportunities declined among inner-city residents, unemployment rates rose and
the incentive to sell drugs rose with it. During this time, media images perpetuated the already existing
racial stereotypes of black men and women as crack addicts, crack whores and crack dealers. In 1971,
Ronald Reagan declared the “War on Drugs” and financial incentives gave police more reason to engage
in this “war” (Alexander, 2010). New mandatory minimum prison sentences and “three strikes” laws,
which mandated life sentences for anyone convicted of a third offense, meant accepting plea bargains in
order to avoid unreasonably long prison terms for first time offense, low-level drug dealing and
possession of crack cocaine (Alexander, 2010, p. 87), even if the person was innocent. The result: black
families stripped of fathers, husbands and sons; separated from families and enslaved to the criminal
justice system, leaving black communities nearly destroyed. The War on Drugs did not make even a
fraction of the same impact on white communities (Alexander, 2010) and the reason is not because
drugs were less prominent in white communities. According to Bigg (2007) and Goode (2013), despite
the lack of difference in illicit drug use between black Americans and white Americans, black Americans
are nearly ten times more likely to be incarcerated for drug related charges (as cited in Netherland &
Hansen, 2016). Similarly, while white youth are found to have higher levels of drug and alcohol abuse
risk than black youth (Ford, Hartman, Hawke & Chapman, 2008), black youth are more likely to face
criminal charges. For decades black and brown communities have faced consistent criminalization of
drug use, leading to increased incarceration, while white communities have faced decriminalization of
drug use and the recognition of substance use as a mental health disorder (Netherland & Hansen, 2016).
The criminalization of substance use and abuse disproportionately impacts individuals who come from
low income and ethnic minority backgrounds (Bowen & Walton, 2015; Netherland & Hanson, 2016).
Despite no difference in rates of substance use, black adults face heavier policing and enforcement of
drug laws and are arrested at three times the rate of white adults for possession of marijuana (Bowen &
Walton, 2015). According to a report by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2015, of the sentenced
prisoners for drug offenses under federal jurisdiction, more than 50% are black, while only 15% are
white. Unfortunately, criminalization of drug use and experiences of racial trauma begin well before
adulthood. Despite being less likely to use drugs, black youth are more likely to be arrested for drug
related offenses than white youth (Franklin, 2016).
Prosecutorial discretion leads to mass incarceration

Mandatory minimums increase the importance of prosecutorial discretion and
incentivize more drug charges on less evidence
While the guidelines and mandatory minimums primarily regulate the endpoint of the adjudication
process—the imposition of sentence after conviction—these formal back-end changes triggered
significant changes to all preceding stages, from federal law enforcement strategies through conviction
processes. In particular, charging decisions became highly determinative of sentence outcomes, and
federal prosecutors came to control most of the adjudication process, including “making the relevant
factual findings, applying the law to the facts, and selecting the sentence or at least the sentencing
range.” (Barkow, 2008, p. 878). This shift appeared to incentivize prosecutors to bring many more
criminal matters to federal court, where they could get easy convictions by wielding their enhanced
adjudicatory power. With these developments, drug cases became especially attractive to prosecutors.
Drug crimes could be charged through the conspiracy statute,2 which provides a number of favorable
conditions for obtaining convictions (Lee, 1994). Via the conspiracy law, prosecutors are exempt from
the bar on hearsay testimony, so can use cooperating witness accounts of criminal behavior to gain
convictions, even in the absence of seized drugs or other physical evidence. Cooperators can also be
used to establish weight of drugs sold, which goes directly to punishment severity since both drug
mandatory minimums and guidelines are determined by drug weight. Most significantly, the conspiracy
statute allows prosecutors to charge dealers at all levels of a drug operation with the total amount of
drugs being trafficked, so even low-level street dealers can be tied to large drug quantities and face long
prison sentences (Lee, 1994).
Mandatory minimum sentencing laws take power away from judges to reduce
sentences
Cynthia Alkon, Associate Professor of Law, Texas A&M University School of Law, Spring 2014. “The
U.S. Supreme Court's Failure to Fix Plea Bargaining: The Impact of Lafler and Frye,” Hastings
Constitutional Law Quarterly Vol. 41:3 https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1096&context=facscholar (accessed 4/10/20)
Legislatures have spent decades carefully building Prosecutorial Power Structures into penal codes
around the country. When the law allows a variety of ways to charge the same offense, with wildly
different possible punishments, the legislature has built into the structure of the law extraordinary
powers for prosecutors. As was discussed above, this means that the decision of what to charge is often
the most important decision in a case and this single charging decision can determine the range of
possible outcomes. This is even truer in jurisdictions with mandatory (or quasi-mandatory) sentencing
guidelines because they include mandatory minimums and mandatory sentencing enhancements; this
can prevent judges from exercising discretion to neutralize harsh prosecutorial charging decisions.
Mandatory minimums lead to mass incarceration and increase prosecutorial discretion

over sentencing
TRACIE A. TODD, Judge for the Tenth Judicial Circuit Criminal Division. 2019. “MASS INCARCERATION:
THE OBSTRUCTION OF JUDGES.” LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS.
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4913&context=lcp (accessed 4/17/20)
Mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines have become the most prominently scrutinized tough-on-
crime mandate, and widely credited for exponential increases in incarceration rates. Under the
mandatory minimum sentencing structure, judges have no discretion in the minimum prison sentence
imposed for certain crimes. Judges in both jurisdictions unanimously attributed high prison incarceration
rates in significant part to tough on crime mandates. “Some judges are of the view that if not for that
mandatory minimum, they might come up with a different sentence that might be more appropriate for
the particular offender.” Mandatory minimum sentencing was perceived among judges in both
jurisdictions as a practical obstruction to effective sentencing strategies. Mandatory minimum
sentencing was described by one judge as “shift[ing] discretion from the judge to the prosecutor.” The
judges intuitively used low level drug crimes as the foremost example of the negative impact on prison
populations caused by mandatory minimum sentencing. In discussing this universal frustration with the
adverse effects of mandatory minimum sentencing, one judge explained: “We first […] have to decide
what we’re going do. Are we going to treat everybody as if they are a dangerous major drug dealer? Are
we going to carve out for those persons who are addicted[,] who are as much a victim of the drug? Are
we going to incarcerate them for the duration of their life as we would a major dangerous [offender]?
On this point, there was consensus that mandatory minimum sentencing related to drug offenses,
mental illness, and “spin off” crimes creates an unworkable mandate on judges. Reportedly, the
divesting of discretion here impedes the judges’ ability to tailor sentences to specific circumstances. “It’s
not going to work . . . unless you tailor it to each person’s case individually.” In other words, the judges
correlate mandatory minimum sentencing with the inability to effectively address substance abuse and
mental health illness in the criminal justice system. In support of this view another judge stated, “[i]f you
look at the population in the prisons…, overwhelming numbers…have either substance abuse or mental
illness or both. If you could treat all of that effectively, you could close a lot prisons and prevent a lot of
crime.”
Additional AFF arguments
Economic cost of incarceration

Incarceration costs around $1 trillion per year, nearly 6% of GDP
Derek Brown, health economics professor at the University of St. Louis, et al. July 2016. “The
Economic Burden of Incarceration in the U.S.” Concordance Institute for Advancing Social Justice.
https://joinnia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/The-Economic-Burden-of-Incarceration-in-the-US-
2016.pdf (accessed 4/19/20)
This study estimates the annual economic burden of incarceration in the United States. While prior
research has estimated the cost of crime, no study has calculated the cost of incarceration. The $80
billion spent annually on corrections is frequently cited as the cost of incarceration, but this figure
considerably underestimates the true cost of incarceration by ignoring important social costs. These
include costs to incarcerated persons, families, children, and communities. This study draws on a
burgeoning area of scholarship to assign monetary values to twenty-two different costs, which yield an
aggregate burden of one trillion dollars. This approaches 6% of gross domestic product and dwarfs the
amount spent on corrections. For every dollar in corrections costs, incarceration generates an additional
ten dollars in social costs. More than half of the costs are borne by families, children, and community
members who have committed no crime. Even if one were to exclude the cost of jail, the aggregate
burden of incarceration would still exceed $500 million annually.
Mass incarceration hurts the economy by undermining the core labor force
Julia Bowling, Research Associate at CUNY Institute for State & Local Governance. September 13,
2013. “Mass Incarceration Gets Attention as an Economic Issue.” Brennan Center for Justice.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/mass-incarceration-gets-attention-
economic-issue-finally (accessed 4/19/20)
But, until now, the understanding of incarceration’s broader economic impact has largely been confined
to academia. In the AFL-CIO press release, University of California at Berkeley Economist Steven Pitts put
it best: “We cannot organize an economy that provides shared prosperity if we don’t also end mass
incarceration.” Mass incarceration greatly disrupts the American job market. Sixty-one percent of
people in prison are between 18-39 years old -- in the prime of their working life. Removing able-bodied
working-age people from the labor market lowers the quality of our work force and permanently
damages their employment and educational opportunities. The formerly incarcerated face a daunting
uphill battle with unemployment. In addition to gaps in employment and lack of work experience, the
AFL-CIO resolution notes that many re-entering civil society return to neighborhoods, “long suffering
from economic divestment, high unemployment, poor infrastructure and isolation.” Most importantly,
the formerly incarcerated face stigma and discrimination. Efforts to “ban the box” on employment forms
asking about criminal records may have worked in earlier eras, but today a former convict’s past is only
a quick Google search away. Given this reality, it is no surprise that 60 percent of formerly incarcerated
people are unemployed, compared to 7.3 percent of the general population. High unemployment
among ex-prisoners leads to higher state and federal government assistance payouts, loss of income tax
revenue, and drains on spending for other essential programs.
Incarceration leads to poverty even after release from prison

Melissa S. Kearney, Professor of Economics at University of Maryland, December 22, 2014. “The
Economic Challenges of Crime & Incarceration in the United States.” Brookings Institute.
https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/the-economic-challenges-of-crime-incarceration-in-the-united-
states/ (accessed 4/19/20)
Despite the ongoing decline in crime, incarceration rates in the United States remain at historically
unprecedented levels. High incarceration rates can have profound effects on disadvantaged
communities. Research has shown that incarceration may impede employment and marriage prospects
among former inmates, increase poverty depth and behavioral problems among their children, and
amplify the spread of communicable diseases among disproportionately impacted communities
(Raphael 2007). In particular, these effects are especially harmful for particular demographic groups —
often young minority males — who struggle to gain employment or lead productive lives post-
incarceration. In addition, high rates of incarceration are expensive for both federal and state
governments. On average, it costs over $29,000 each year to house an inmate in federal prison (James
2013). In total, the United States spent over $80 billion on corrections expenditures, with over 90
percent of these expenditures coming from state and local levels (DOJ n.d.b.).
Incarceration leads to lost earnings, both during and after confinement

The wages incarcerated persons could have earned had they been working reduces GDP and constitutes
lost productivity. After subtracting the value of prison production, the average incarcerated person
incurs $23,286 ($33,066 in 2014 dollars) in lost productivity per year (Anderson, 1999). Multiplying this
productivity loss by the average jail population (744,600) yields $24.6 billion in lost wages. For prisons,
the number of new admissions (626,644) is multiplied by lost productivity for 2.25 years (the average
time served in prison) and discounted to its present value. This generates a total cost of $70.5 billion.
Reduced lifetime earnings of formerly incarcerated persons [cost] ($230.0 billion) Incarceration reduces
a person’s lifetime earnings between ten and forty percent (The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2010; Western,
2006). Formerly incarcerated persons earn lower wages because they face occupational restrictions,
encounter discrimination in the hiring process, and have weaker social networks and less human capital
due to their incarceration. The reduced wages of formerly incarcerated persons constitutes lost
productivity and is thus a social cost.
Privatization of policing
Mass incarceration enabled by mandatory minimums draws resources away from law
enforcement, towards incarceration
Stuntz may be right that the imposition of mandatory minimum sentences for drug and non-drug crime
is not the “primary cause” of mass incarceration. But the threat of such charges is key to “the rise in the
number of defendants charged and convicted”. Without this, prosecutors could not get evidence against
and run trials of so many defendants. This should make us question the degree to which mandatory
minimums promote efficiency. If it is this easy for prosecutors to charge and convict so many people, the
land of the free will continue to be, unenviably, the world leader in locking up its own citizens. There are
many reasons to oppose mass incarceration, but the one that is most germane here is that it involves a
remarkably inefficient resource allocation. Federal correction costs increased 925% from 1982 to 2007
and now consume over a quarter of the Department of Justice’s budget. As prison budgets have
increased, legislatures have cut funding for state and local law enforcement (by 76%, since 1998).58 Yet
the return on investment for funding police is far better: “a dollar spent on police goes at least 20
percent further than a dollar spent on corrections”.59 So the use of mandatory minimums as threats
does not save resources; it transfers them from police to prisons.
Civil forfeiture is used to fund police departments

ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). 2020. “ASSET FORFEITURE ABUSE.”
https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police/asset-forfeiture-abuse (accessed
4/19/20)
Police abuse of civil asset forfeiture laws has shaken our nation’s conscience. Civil forfeiture allows
police to seize — and then keep or sell — any property they allege is involved in a crime. Owners need
not ever be arrested or convicted of a crime for their cash, cars, or even real estate to be taken away
permanently by the government. Forfeiture was originally presented as a way to cripple large-scale
criminal enterprises by diverting their resources. But today, aided by deeply flawed federal and state
laws, many police departments use forfeiture to benefit their bottom lines, making seizures motivated
by profit rather than crime-fighting. For people whose property has been seized through civil asset
forfeiture, legally regaining such property is notoriously difficult and expensive, with costs sometimes
exceeding the value of the property. With the total value of property seized [is] increasing every year,
calls for reform are growing louder, and CLRP is at the forefront of organizations seeking to rein in the
practice.
Cuts in police budgets and shifts to self-funding create damaging incentives

Brian A. Jackson, senior scientist researcher. March 16, 2015. “To Serve and Collect?” RAND.
https://www.rand.org/blog/2015/03/to-serve-and-collect.html (accessed 4/19/20)
As part of the report (PDF) on the Ferguson Police Department, one problem flagged by the Department
of Justice was behavior by the department and court system aimed at advancing revenue collection
rather than public safety—and that those efforts were managed to ensure that the department was
“bringing in revenue at the desired rate.” It shouldn't be a surprise that the prospect of police
departments generating revenue would seem like a great idea to municipal leaders. During the financial
crisis, state and local budgets were hit hard. The pain of tight budgets has been felt across the board in
many jurisdictions and the resources available to police departments fell (PDF), requiring changes like
service and staff cuts (PDF). Creating a way for police activities to become partially self-funding, and
setting them up in a way that affects “criminals”—using that term very loosely—rather than the whole
population would clearly seem to be politically attractive. Similarly, it shouldn't be a surprise that this
could look like a great idea to police leadership. Anyone who has ever run an organization knows that
the ability to achieve goals is significantly driven by having the resources available to do so. Given the
range of things society expects from our police departments—answering every call for service fast and
effectively, actively engaging diverse communities, preparing for security threats like terrorism, and
responding to societal problems as varied as drug abuse, mental illness, youth violence and human
trafficking—having discretionary resources to allow leaders flexibility in their efforts to do all those
different tasks could be a real benefit. But, the devil is always in the details. Having these assets go (in
whole or in part) into the budget of the department that collected them creates an incentive for them to
do more—to pursue more resources. This may seem good and reasonable, but the tough question
becomes how those incentives play out over the longer term. If a department starts to plan on having
seized resources available—and to rely on them—or if officers start getting rewarded for how much
revenue they bring in, the concern becomes whether law enforcement action will become driven more
by the goal of revenue and less by the goal of public safety, as the DOJ suggested (PDF) with respect to
the Ferguson Police Department.
Answers to NEG arguments
“Crime rates” answers

High levels of incarceration increase crime and the associated costs
High levels of incarceration may actually increase crime by reinforcing behavior and survival strategies
that are maladaptive outside the prison environment (Aizer & Doyle, 2015; Kellogg, 2015; Hoge,
Buchanan, Kovasznay, & Roskes, 2009; Reiman & Leighton, 2013). Removing large numbers of people
from communities may also weaken the social controls that bind neighborhoods together (Reiman &
Leighton, 2013). Estimates of the criminogenic effect of prison range from 4% to 23% (Aizer & Doyle,
2015; Bhati & Piquero, 2008; Smith, Goggin, & Gendreau, 2002). Applying the midpoint of this range
(13.5%) to the annual cost of crime and adjusting for the fact that 5% of incarcerated persons will never
be released generates a discounted cost of $285.8 billion.
There are diminishing marginal returns in the effectiveness of incarceration for

reducing crime
Steven Raphael, professor of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, and Michael A. Stoll,
May 2014. “A New Approach to Reducing Incarceration While Maintaining Low Rates of Crime.”
Hamilton Project.
https://www.hamiltonproject.org/assets/legacy/files/downloads_and_links/v5_THP_RaphaelStoll_DiscP
aper.pdf (accessed 4/19/20)
The crime-reduction gains from higher incarceration rates depend critically on the incarceration rate
itself. When the incarceration rate is low, marginal gains from increasing the incarceration rate are
higher. This follows from the fact that when prisons are used sparingly, incarceration is reserved for the
highest-risk and most-serious offenders. By contrast, when the incarceration rate is high, the marginal
crimereduction gains from further increases tend to be lower, because the offender on the margin
between incarceration and an alternative sanction tends to be less serious. In other words, the crime-
fighting benefits of incarceration diminish with the scale of the prison population.
“Drug Trafficking” answers

Reducing sentences for cooperation makes it harder to eradicate drug trafficking
networks
Inverted sentencing not only involves disproportionate punishments, but undermines the claim that
mandatory minimums are vital to the war on drugs. For prosecutors to give lower sentences to kingpins
in order to fry the smaller fish hardly helps rid society of drug traf"cking networks.67 It makes it harder
to achieve that goal because the perception of unfair and overly punitive sentencing practices generates
a “cooperation backlash”: it “leads victims and witnesses of crime to think twice before cooperating with
law enforcement”.68 Victims and witnesses would provide more reliable evidence. “Who among us”,
Alexander asks, “would not be tempted to lie if it was the only way to avoid a forty-year sentence for a
minor drug crime?”69 A policy that trades sources of good information for sources of bad information is
hard to justify on utilitarian grounds.
Drug use is not driven by sentencing policy – sentencing differentials between crack
and powder cocaine prove
Lauryn Saxe Walker, professor at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, and Briana
Mezuk. 2018. “Mandatory minimum sentencing policies and cocaine use in the U.S., 1985–2013.”
International Health and Human Rights. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12914-018-0182-2
(accessed 4/10/20)
This study aims to identify changes in cocaine use associated with mandatory minimum sentencing
policies by examining differential sentences for powder and crack cocaine set by the Anti-Drug Abuse
Act (ADAA) (100:1) and the Fair Sentencing Act (FSA), which reduced the disparate sentencing to 18:1.
Methods Using data from National Survey on Drug Use and Health, we examined past-year cocaine use
before and after implementation of the ADAA (1985–1990, N = 21,296) and FSA (2009–2013, N =
130,574). We used weighted logistic regressions and Z-tests across models to identify differential change
in use between crack and powder cocaine. Prescription drug misuse, or use outside prescribed
indication or dose, was modeled as a negative control to identify underlying drug trends not related to
sentencing policies. Results Despite harsher ADAA penalties for crack compared to powder cocaine,
there was no decrease in crack use following implementation of sentencing policies (odds ratio (OR):
0.72, p = 0.13), although both powder cocaine use and misuse of prescription drugs (the negative
control) decreased (OR: 0.59, p < 0.01; OR: 0.42, p < 0.01 respectively). Furthermore, there was no
change in crack use following the FSA, but powder cocaine use decreased, despite no changes to
powder cocaine sentences (OR: 0.81, p = 0.02), suggesting that drug use is driven by factors not
associated with sentencing policy. Conclusions Despite harsher penalties for crack versus powder
cocaine, crack use declined less than powder cocaine and even less than drugs not included in
sentencing policies. These findings suggest that mandatory minimum sentencing may not be an
effective method of deterring cocaine use.
Mandatory minimums are more likely to be applied to less culpable defendants

The available data also undermine this defense. Drug-related mandatory minimums are not “almost
never used”. Close to 47% of federal drug offenders sentenced in 2016 were convicted of offenses
carrying a mandatory minimum penalty.41 Nor are they “saved for the worst of the worst defendants”.
Mandatory minimums are more frequently applied to less culpable offenders. In 2016, over one-third of
federal offenders who were subject to a mandatory minimum penalty at sentencing had a Category I
Criminal History; another third fell into Category II or Category III.42 These are the least serious of the
available six categories.
Mandatory minimums apply to low-level drug traffickers

Drug mandatory minimum penalties applied more broadly than Congress may have anticipated. • While
some legislative history leading up to passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 suggests that “major”
traffickers would be subject to the ten-year drug mandatory minimum penalty and “serious” traffickers
would be subject to the five-year penalty, they often apply to offenders who perform relatively low-level
functions. For example, nearly one-third (32.2%) of Couriers and more than one-quarter of Mules
(25.4%) were convicted of such offenses. • While the rate of conviction for an offense carrying a drug
mandatory minimum penalty tended to decrease with the culpability level of the offender as reflected
by their function, a significant percentage of offenders in every function were nevertheless convicted of
such offenses. In fact, a majority of offenders in seven of the ten function categories (including some
lower-level functions) were convicted of an offense carrying a drug mandatory minimum penalty. •
Many of the offenders convicted of an offense carrying a drug mandatory minimum penalty had little or
no criminal history. Almost half (45.9%) were in Criminal History Category I—37.7 percent of all
offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum received no criminal history points
under the guidelines, while 8.1 percent received one criminal history point. On the other end of the
spectrum, 14.2 percent of all offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty
were in Criminal History Category VI.
“Prison Abolition” answers

Perm – mandatory minimums are counterproductive to a prison abolitionist
framework, and the aff is in the direction of the K
Robert H. Ambrose, criminal defense attorney. 2019. “DECARCERATION IN A MASS INCARCERATION
STATE: THE ROAD TO PRISON ABOLITION.” Mitchell Hamline Law Review.
https://open.mitchellhamline.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1176&context=mhlr (accessed 4/17/20)
Like sentencing guidelines, mandatory minimum sentences need to be eliminated. The role of
mandatory minimum sentences in the mass incarceration boom is widely known.200 Even when a judge
wants to give a sentence they believe is fair, mandatory minimums prevent the judge’s discretion.
Judges are supposed to serve as an independent administer of justice. But when a judge cannot do
anything but pronounce a mandatory minimum sentence, they are unable to execute their independent
role. As one judge noted, “[T]oo many mandatory sentences are a product of political expediency. My
perspective is that too many of our lawmakers vote for long mandatory sentences, so they are seen as
tough on crime without any real thought to whether they truly are in the public’s best interest.”201 The
judge then shared a story about just how cruel sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums can be: I
had a woman before me for a drug sentence. She got involved in drugs and the criminal world through
her abusive boyfriend. Thanks to him, she picked up a huge addiction and some serious legal trouble.
Following the charge in my case, the woman bonded out. She turned her life around—dumped the
boyfriend, got sober, got a job, got her kids back, became a mentor for young, drug-addicted women,
found God, and became everything you would want her to be. Her probation officer came in on the day
of her sentencing crying because it was such a waste to have to send the woman to prison for a really
long time. But I had to because the callous and cruel guidelines gave me absolutely no discretion.202
Giving judges absolutely no discretion to hand down a just and fair sentence is counterproductive to a
prison abolitionist framework, which is a sad result of “prison-backed policing.”203
“Antiblackness” answers
Reform solves - drug offenses have already been dropping as a share of mandatory
minimum convictions based on previous reforms
Although the use of mandatory minimum penalties decreased overall, different trends appeared with
respect to different offenses carrying mandatory minimum penalties. Drug offenses, along with firearms
offenses, continued to top the list of the most frequently used mandatory minimum penalty statutes.
Drug offenses accounted for slightly more than two-thirds of the offenses (67.3%) carrying a mandatory
minimum penalty in fiscal year 2016, significantly higher than the next closest category of offenses.38 As
in fiscal year 2010, the most frequently reported conviction of an offense carrying a mandatory
minimum penalty in fiscal year 2016 was 21 U.S.C. § 846 (Attempt and Conspiracy [to Commit a Drug
Trafficking Offense]). Violations of section 846 accounted for almost a quarter (24.9%) of the convictions
under statutes carrying a mandatory minimum penalty. The primary drug trafficking penalty provisions
of 21 U.S.C. § 841—sections 841(b)(1)(A) and (B)—remain in the top five most frequent statutes of
conviction carrying a mandatory minimum penalty.39 Though drug offenses remain the most commonly
charged offenses carrying mandatory minimum penalties, over time, the percentage of drug offenders
convicted of a drug offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty has decreased significantly while the
percentage of offenders convicted of other offenses carrying a mandatory minimum penalty—violent,
firearms, sexual abuse, pornography and “other” offenses—has steadily increased.40 Figure 2 shows
that the percentage of drug trafficking offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum
penalty remained relatively stable from 1992 through 2013, fluctuating between 60 and 72 percent.
However, after 2013, there was a significant decrease in the percentage of drug trafficking offenders
convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty. It decreased to 52.2 percent in fiscal
year 2014, 47.9 percent in fiscal year 2015, and reached its lowest rate of 46.8 percent in 2016.41
“Safety valve solves” Answers

The safety valve is very narrow and excludes many offenders
Low-level drug offenders can escape some of the mandatory minimum sentences for which they qualify
under the safety valve found in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(f). Congress created the safety valve after it became
concerned that the mandatory minimum sentencing provisions could have resulted in equally severe
penalties for both the more and the less culpable offenders.195 The safety valve is available to qualified
offenders convicted of violations of the possession-with-intent, simple possession, attempt, or
conspiracy provisions of the Controlled Substances or Controlled Substances Import and Export Acts.196
The safety valve is not available to avoid the mandatory minimum sentences that attend other offenses,
even those closely related to the covered offenses. Section 860 (21 U.S.C. § 860), which outlaws
violations of Section 841 near schools, playgrounds, or public housing facilities and sets the penalties for
violation at twice what they would be under Section 841, is not covered. Those charged with a violation
of Section 860 are not eligible for relief under the safety valve provisions.197 In addition, safety valve
relief is not available to those convicted under the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act, even though
the act proscribes conduct closely related to the smuggling and trafficking activities punished under
Sections 960 and 963 (21 U.S.C. §§ 960, 963). 198 For the convictions to which the safety valve does
apply, the defendant must convince the sentencing court by a preponderance of the evidence that he
satisfies each of the safety valve’s five requirements.199 He may not have more than one criminal
history point.200 He may not have used violence or a dangerous weapon in connection with the
offense.201 He may not have been an organizer or leader of the drug enterprise.202 He must have
provided the government with all the information and evidence at his disposal.203 Finally, the offense
may not have resulted in serious injury or death.204
The statutory safety valve is being used less frequently

This is because offenders have been increasingly less likely to receive relief from a mandatory minimum
penalty through a substantial assistance motion or application of the statutory safety valve. In fiscal year
2016, 38.7 percent offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty received
relief, down from 46.7 percent in 2010.37
The safety valve provision isn’t able to reduce the impact of mandatory minimums on
low-level offenders
However, neither the statutory safety valve provision at 18 U.S.C. § 3553(f) nor the substantial
assistance provision at 18 U.S.C. § 3553(e) fully ameliorate the impact of drug mandatory minimum
penalties on relatively low-level offenders. • A significant portion of offenders who performed relatively
low-level functions did not qualify under the safety valve provision. For example, a significant portion of
Couriers (31.9%), Mules (28.8%), and Employees/Workers (33.9%) did not qualify for the safety valve in
fiscal year 2016. • The likelihood of receiving relief for substantial assistance varied depending on the
offender’s function in the offense. Offenders who performed higher-level functions were generally more
likely to receive relief for providing substantial assistance than offenders who performed low-level
functions, reflecting the fact that low-level offenders often do not have valuable information to provide
due to their more limited role in the offense. For example, offenders with the Broker (50.0%), Street-
Level Dealer (38.6%), and Organizer/ Leader (36.2%) functions were more likely to receive substantial
assistance relief than Couriers (26.6%) and Mules (17.3%). • Low-level offenders who remained subject
to a drug mandatory minimum penalty because they did not qualify for relief received long sentences.
For example, Couriers, Mules, and Employees/Workers who remained subject to a drug mandatory
minimum penalty received average sentences significantly exceeding five years at 101 months, 82
months, and 100 months, respectively.
Aff Prison Abolition

Hello!
The case stems from a prison abolitionist ethic. In its simplest sense, the aff contends that prisons are an
extension of slavery and the plantation system; as a result, in current society, prisons structurally
necessitate and incentivize the marginalization and exploitation of those who are disenfranchised
whether that be through, race, class, gender, etc. Therefore, only a complete dismantling of prisons and
policing can we create the possibility for creating alternatives to the prison industrial complex.
Strategically, the affirmative has 2 advantages, the first is concerned about democracy and disease and
is meant to serve as a way to provide more short-term impacts. The second advantage should be used to
frame out disadvantages as well as give you game to Link-turn critiques.
Best of luck <3
1AC CARDS
Inherency
Incarceration is a racialized and is rapidly expanding
The Sentencing Project, The Sentencing Project is a research advocacy group for criminal justice reform,
2019“Criminal Justice Facts”, https://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/ (accessed: 04/01/20)
Harsh sentencing laws like mandatory minimums, combined with cutbacks in parole release, keep people in prison for longer periods of time.
The National Research Council reported that half of the 222% growth in the state prison population between 1980
and 2010 was due to an increase of time served in prison for all offenses. There has also been a historic rise in the
use of life sentences: one in nine people in prison is now serving a life sentence, nearly a third of whom are
sentenced to life without parole. Mass incarceration has not touched all communities equally The racial impact of mass
incarceration Sentencing policies, implicit racial bias, and socioeconomic inequity contribute to racial disparities at
every level of the criminal justice system. Today, people of color make up 37% of the U.S. population but 67% of
the prison population. Overall, African Americans are more likely than white Americans to be arrested; once
arrested, they are more likely to be convicted; and once convicted, they are more likely to face stiff sentences.
Black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men and Hispanic men are more than twice as likely to
be incarcerated as non-Hispanic white men.
Advantage 1: Profit Over People

Private Prisons are growing 4 times faster than public prisons and it will get worse under
Trump
Kara Gotsch and Vinay Basti, Gotsch is the Director of Strategic Initiatives and Basti is an intern at The
Sentencing Project, August 02, 2018, “Capitalizing on Mass Incarceration: U.S. Growth in Private Prisons”,
https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/capitalizing-on-mass-incarceration-u-s-growth-in-private-prisons/
(accessed: 04/01/20)
While both federal and state governments have increasingly relied on privatization since 2000, the federal prison
system’s commitment to privatization grew more dramatically. The number of federal prisoners held in private
prisons rose 120 percent from 15,524 in 2000 to 34,159 in 2016, while the number of state prisoners incarcerated
privately grew by 31 percent over the same time period , from 71,845 to 94,164. Among those confined under private contracts in
the federal system, about 37% are in halfway houses or are on home confinement.7) A reduction in the overall federal prison
population that began in 2014 resulted from changes in sentencing policy and influenced a modest decline in private prison
use in 2016. The overall declines in the prison population helped persuade President Obama’s Department of Justice to phase out federal
private for-profit prison contracts. The move was bolstered by a report from the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General that
outlined safety issues in for-profit facilities. The report concluded that private prisons had “more safety and security incidents per capita than
comparable BOP [Bureau of Prisons] institutions,” in such areas as presence of contraband, prison lockdowns, and inmate discipline.8)
However, in February 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the reversal of this plan, indicating that the
Bureau of Prisons would continue to rely on these facilities. Sessions stated that private prison companies would
assist in meeting “the future needs of the federal correctional system.” 9) This policy reversal was followed by a
directive to prosecutors to pursue the most serious charges and toughest sentences in all federal cases. These
changes are projected to increase prison admissions and sentence length, which is likely to contribute to an
expansion of private facility contracting.10)
Prisons have corrupted democracy to create the Prison Industrial Complex

Michael Cohen, Cohen is a freelance writer at The Washington Post, April 28, 2015, “How for-profit
prisons have become the biggest lobby no one is talking about”,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/28/how-for-profit-prisons-have-
become-the-biggest-lobby-no-one-is-talking-about/ (accessed: 04/04/20)
Several industries have become notorious for the millions they spend on influencing legislation and
getting friendly candidates into office: Big Oil, Big Pharma and the gun lobby among them. But one has managed to
quickly build influence with comparatively little scrutiny: Private prisons. The two largest for-profit
prison companies in the United States – GEO and Corrections Corporation of America – and their
associates have funneled more than $10 million to candidates since 1989 and have spent nearly $25
million on lobbying efforts. Meanwhile, these private companies have seen their revenue and market
share soar. They now rake in a combined $3.3 billion in annual revenue and the private federal prison population more than doubled
between 2000 and 2010, according to a report by the Justice Policy Institute. Private companies house nearly half of the nation’s immigrant
detainees, compared to about 25 percent a decade ago, a Huffington Post report found. In total, there are now about 130 private prisons in the
country with about 157,000 beds. Marco Rubio is one of the best examples of the private prison industry’s growing
political influence, a connection that deserves far more attention now that he’s officially launched a presidential bid. The U.S.
senator has a history of close ties to the nation’s second-largest for-profit prison company, GEO Group,
stretching back to his days as speaker of the Florida House of Representatives. While Rubio was leading
the House, GEO was awarded a state government contract for a $110 million prison soon after Rubio
hired an economic consultant who had been a trustee for a GEO real estate trust . Over his career, Rubio has
received nearly $40,000 in campaign donations from GEO, making him the Senate’s top career recipient of contributions from the company.
(Rubio’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)
Prisons are critical for the hoarding of white capitalist wealth as well as the
establishment of dominate ideologies
William Calathes, Calathes is a professor of law at New Jersey City University, October 12, 2017,
“Racial capitalism and punishment philosophy and practices: what really stands in the way of prison
abolition”, https://www-tandfonline-
com.ezproxy.library.wwu.edu/doi/full/10.1080/10282580.2017.1383774?scroll=top&needAccess=true
Quite simply, in
a racial capitalist society, the purpose of punishment is to maintain capital accumulation on
behalf of the capitalist class and to maintain white privilege through the exploitation and punishment of
black people. The combination of self-definition and definition of the ‘other’ defines the pathology of whiteness in America (Roediger,
1991). This definition of the pathological white self relates to the narcissistic psychic processes underlying
Euro-centrism and to the core understanding of racial capitalism . Individual social-psychological processes have nothing
to do with ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ per se, but derive from and manifest a deeper prior process (‘architectonic’) of intra-European racism
(Robinson, 1983). As noted earlier, capitalism
was not a break from European feudalism, but rather an expansion
of feudalism into European ethics: a restricting of ‘global feudalism,’ as opposed to the invention of a
new economy that broke completely with the old. If there was a break, European ethnics thrive relative
to people of color through the creation of the white race, the legalization of whiteness as property, and
the establishment of nation states to territorialize it all ( Harris, 1993). Under the ‘“racial contract,” even
those who are “less equal” within the white race, such as poor white people, are still “more equal” than
people of color within the legal doctrine of white supremacy ’ (Mills, 1997, pp. 32–33). White supremacy derives
directly from the structure of racial capitalism and gains support from the endemic, pathological,
individual social-psychological processes that maintain whiteness and its accompanying accumulation
and societal privileges and punishment practices .
The streamlining of private and public prison has corrupted politics and created a
revolving door that renders accountability impossible
David Shapiro, Staff Attorney at the ACLU, November 02, 2011, “Banking On Bondage”,
https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/bankingonbondage_20111102.pdf (accessed:
04/08/20
Private prison companies make their money through contracts for prison construction and operation
negotiated with public officials. Many in the private prison industry, however, once served in state
corrections departments, and numerous state corrections officials formerly worked for private prison
companies. In some cases, this revolving door between public corrections and private prisons may
contribute to the ability of some companies to win contracts or to avoid sufficient scrutiny from the
corrections departments charged with overseeing their operations . A full examination of the numerous instances in
which private prison contractors have been hired into and out of government posts could fill an entire report. Select examples include the
following:
Prior to becoming the New Mexico Secretary of Corrections, Joe Williams worked for the GEO
Group as a warden. In 2010, the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee reported that although
private prisons, including GEO, failed to maintain prison staffing levels required by contract, the state
corrections department—headed by Williams— declined to collect contractual fines. The Committee found that
the state might have collected an estimated $18 million from the private prison companies if the corrections department had enforced the
contractual rules applicable to private prisons.226 Former
BOP Director Harley Lappin, after being arrested for alleged
drunk driving, left government service in early 2011 .227 Lappin clearly remained valuable to the private
prison industry, and soon began work for CCA, as the company’s Chief Corrections Officer . As the
corporation’s CEO stated, “Harley values correctional partnerships …. I am very excited to have him as part of our leadership team.”228 The
company’s payroll also includes a second former BOP Director: J. Michael Quinlan serves as a Senior Vice President of CCA.229 According
to a letter from the American Federation of Government Employees to Senator Patrick Leahy, during
Stacia A. Hylton’s tenure as Federal Detention Trustee, GEO obtained contracts to house federal
prisoners, including U.S. Marshals Service detainees, that generate more than $80 million in annual
revenue for the company. The letter asserts that even before she retired as Federal Detention Trustee, Hylton formed a private
consulting company. Shortly after retiring, the letter continues, Hylton accepted $112,500 from the GEO Group, her only client.230 In 2010,
Hylton reentered the federal government, as head of the U.S. Marshals Service.23
Prisons operate on a for-profit model where suffering and dehumanization are utilized
to generate revenue
Allegra M. McLeod, McLeod is an associate professor at Georgetown University Law Center, 2015,
“Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice”, https://www.uclalawreview.org/wp-
content/uploads/2019/09/McLeod_6.2015.pdf, (accessed: 04/03/20)
Further, the
criminal process still operates on a for-profit model importantly distinct, but not entirely
removed from, earlier systems of confinement for profit that were the direct outgrowth ofs lavery.198
Prisoners’ labor does not itself directly provide a significant source of profit to a lessor or single business
as it once did. Instead, large-scale incarceration—marked by prisoners’ suffering, dehumanization, and
violence—generates a market for the construction of facilities to house approximately two million
prisoners and jail inmates; the technology and mechanisms to maintain almost seven million persons
under criminal supervision; and the employment of thousands of prison guards, prison staff, probation
and parole officers, and other penal professionals .199 The large sums of money poured into prisons and
criminal surveillance have drawn major firms and a variety of Wall Street financiers to prison
construction.200 Underwriting prison construction through private finance and the sale of tax-exempt
bonds has served as a lucrative undertaking in itself .201 Though only used to manage a small portion of detention facilities,
private corrections corporations, such as Corrections Corporation of America and Wackenhutt, submit bids to governments to manage different
detention systems, especially immigration detention, and guarantee to provide these services at a lower cost than the state is able to
deliver.202 Additionally, vendors of everything from stand alone cells, hand and foot cuffs, razor wire, and
shank proof vests make considerable profits from prisons.203 A single contract to provide prisoners in
the state of Texas with a soy-based meat substitute, awarded to VitaPro Foods, went for $34 million per
year.204 The profits for phone service inside prison walls make food contracts seem insignificant.205 Meanwhile, prisoners
continue to serve as a captive labor force, working for approximately one dollar per hour, and often
less.206 Numerous firms use prisoners as a component of their workforce in the United States, as do government entities that use prison
labor to manufacture products that are then sold to other government agencies.207 Although prisoners are no longer forced to
work by or for the state (as they were in the South well into the twentieth century), the perverse profit
motive that spurred the convict lease system with all its horror might be understood in historical context
as preserved yet transformed in these various other guises .
Prisons leave inmates structurally vulnerable to disease. This violates human rights
and international law and prevents global elimination of disease
James Hamblin, Hamblin is a lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health and a staff writer at The
Atlantic, July 18, 2016, “Mass Incarceration Is Miking Infectious Disease Worse”,
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/07/incarceration-and-infection/491321/ (accessed:
04/08/20)
Some countries do make condoms available to prisoners, while others cite security issues, or blanket
prohibitions of sex. Only last year, California became the second state to require that condoms be
available to all prisoners. Even in places where condoms are available, guards sometimes limit
distribution as a form of control. In the medical journal The Lancet this week, researchers at Johns Hopkins cite this
as one factor in the spread of infectious diseases in prisons. The researchers argue that this spread
amounts to a human-rights abuse and a violation of international law—a cruel and inhuman failure to
ensure humane prison conditions. The penal system remains a source of diseases that spread among
prisoners at rates far exceeding those in the communities from which they came . Of more than 10
million incarcerated people in the U.S. alone, 4 percent have HIV, 15 percent have hepatitis C, and 3
percent have active tuberculosis. These diseases are part of our criminal justice system, then, metered
out and sanctioned implicitly by the state. The penal system is also a primary reason that these
diseases can’t be eliminated globally, and the problem goes well beyond condoms, according to Chris Beyrer,
the Desmond Tutu Professor of Public Health and Human Rights at Hopkins, who edited the Lancet research series. He spoke with me by phone
from South Africa, where he is co-chairing the International AIDS Conference in Durban. He
sounded distraught over the fact
that HIV infections stopped declining years ago in the United States, and are now stable around 45,000
every year
Advantage 2: Intersectional Violence

Prisons are the embodiment of structural racism
Connor Maxwell and Danyelle Solomon, Maxwell is a senior policy analyst for Race and Ethnicity Policy at
American Progress and Solomon is the vice president of Race and Ethnicity Policy at American Progress, June 5,
2018, “Mass Incarceration, Stress, and Black Infant Mortality”,
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2018/06/05/451647/mass-incarceration-stress-black-
infant-mortality/ (accessed: 04/01/20)
Infant mortality and mass incarceration are major issues affecting the black community . But while they are often thought
of and dealt with on separate tracks, structural racism firmly connects these critical issues. Structural racism exposes black
women to distinct stressors—such as contact with the criminal justice system—that ultimately undermine their
health and the health of their children. Today, infants born to black mothers die at twice the rate as those born to
white mothers.1 This horrific disparity cannot be fully explained by differences in income, education, or even health care; evidence
suggests that cumulative stress from generations of structural racism is driving this epidemic. 2 To combat this
persistent problem, lawmakers must attack structural racism in all its forms—including mass incarceration. Structural
racism is defined as a system of public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms that work in reinforcing ways
to perpetuate racial inequality.3 The criminal justice system
is perhaps the clearest example of structural racism in the
United States. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and the overwhelming burden of
contact with the system has fallen on communities of color, especially African Americans.4 African American adults
are five times more likely to be imprisoned than white Americans.5 According to data detailed in this issue brief,
African Americans are twice as likely as their white counterparts to have a family member imprisoned at some
point during their childhood.6 With overall incarceration rates more than 500 percent higher than they were forty
years ago, black Millennials and post-Millennials are at greater risk of contact with the system than any previous
generation.7 In fact, a new CAP analysis finds that 1 in 4 black Millennials had an incarcerated loved one before
they even turned 18. For those born in the early 1990s, the rate is almost 1 in 3.8 (see Methodology) Mass
incarceration has long-term physiological effects that contribute to a range of health issues, including mental
health disorders, diabetes, asthma, hypertension, HIV, and Hepatitis C. 9 Although not as well-studied, mass incarceration
can also directly and indirectly affect infant mortality. While its direct effects are well-documented, its indirect
effects are pervasive and damaging but largely unrecognized. When incarcerated, an individual can face increased
risk of sexual violence and infectious illness; loss of connection with family and friends; as well as trauma resulting
from draconian prison policies and practices. Furthermore, the incarceration of a loved one or breadwinner can
cause families and friends significant emotional distress, loss of income and property, and residential instability.
These experiences put affected individuals at a heightened risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety,
and depression.
Prisons are based on and are inextricably linked to a legacy of slavery

Bryan Stevenson, Stevenson is a NYU clinical professor of Law, August 14, 2019, “Slavery gave America a fear of
black people and a taste for violent punishment. Both still define our criminal-justice system”,
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/prison-industrial-complex-slavery-racism.html
Several years ago, my law office was fighting for the release of a black man who had been condemned, at the age of 16, to die in prison .
Matthew was one of 62 Louisiana children s, entenced to life imprisonment without parole for nonhomicide
offenses. But a case I’d argued at the Supreme Court was part of a 2010 ruling that banned such sentences for juveniles, making our clients
eligible for release. Some had been in prison for nearly 50 years. Almost all had been sent to Angola, a penitentiary
considered one of America’s most violent and abusive. Angola is immense, larger than Manhattan, covering land
once occupied by slave plantations. Our clients there worked in fields under the supervision of horse-riding,
shotgun-toting guards who forced them to pick crops, including cotton. Their disciplinary records show that if
they refused to pick cotton — or failed to pick it fast enough — they could be punished with time in “the hole,”
where food was restricted and inmates were sometimes tear-gassed. Still, some black prisoners, including
Matthew, considered the despair of the hole preferable to the unbearable degradation of being forced to pick
cotton on a plantation at the end of the 20th century. I was fearful that such clients would be denied parole based
on their disciplinary records. Some were.
Policing criminalizes queer folx; queer youth of color has the highest rates of sexual
harassment and violence by officers
The Center for American Progress and the Movement Advancement Project , CAP and
MAP are think tanks that provide research to policy makers and MAP specialized in LGBT studies,
February 2016, “Unjust: how the broken criminal justice system fail LGBT people”,
https://www.lgbtmap.org/file/lgbt-criminal-justice.pdf (accessed: 04/08/20)
National attention has recently focused on the abuse, harassment, and discrimination faced by communities of color, particularly black and
African American communities, in the United States. In
a nationally representative sample of young people ages 18 to
29 conducted in December 2013 and January 2014, young black people reported the highest rate of harassment by
police (54%), nearly twice the rate of other young people. 305 LGBT people, including many LGBT people
of color, have long suffered from discrimination, harassment, and violence at the hands of police. Recent
surveys have quantified these experiences, and they highlight the ways in which law enforcement not
only targets LGBT people for breaking the law, but also abuses its power and treats LGBT people in
deplorable ways, as shown in Figure 29 on the next page. Youth A survey of LGBTQ youth in New
Orleans found that 59% of transgender youth surveyed had been asked for a sexual favor by the police
in New Orleans, along with 12% of non-transgender LGBQ youth.306 In a survey of youth in New York
City, some of whom identified as LGBT, 12% reported negative sexual experiences with police, including
receiving sexual attention or being touched inappropriately.307 LGBT youth in the New York City survey
were more than twice as likely to report negative sexual contact with police in the past six months,
compared to nonLGBT youth. With the power dynamic so tilted in a police officer’s favor—both
because of their ability to use lethal force but also the threat of arrest— these demands amount to
sexual extortion.
Prisons cultivate a culture of brutality against people of color and those who resist the racial
hierarchy
These strategies intensified whenever black people asserted their independence or achieved any measure of
success. During Reconstruction, the emergence of black elected officials and entrepreneurs was countered by
convict leasing, a scheme in which white policymakers invented offenses used to target black people: vagrancy,
loitering, being a group of black people out after dark , seeking employment without a note from a former enslaver. The
imprisoned were then “leased” to businesses and farms, where they labored under brutal conditions. An 1887 report
in Mississippi found that six months after 204 prisoners were leased to a white man named McDonald, dozens were dead or dying, the prison
hospital filled with men whose bodies bore “marks of the most inhuman and brutal treatment ... so poor and emaciated that their bones almost
come through the skin.” Anything that challenged the racial hierarchy could be seen as a crime, punished either by the
law or by the lynchings that stretched from Mississippi to Minnesota . In 1916, Anthony Crawford was lynched in South
Carolina for being successful enough to refuse a low price for his cotton. In 1933, Elizabeth Lawrence was lynched near Birmingham for daring
to chastise white children who were throwing rocks at her. It’s not just that this history fostered a view of black people as
presumptively criminal. It also cultivated a tolerance for employing any level of brutality in response. In 1904, in
Mississippi, a black man was accused of shooting a white landowner who had attacked him. A white mob captured
him and the woman with him, cut off their ears and fingers, drilled corkscrews into their flesh and then burned
them alive — while hundreds of white spectators enjoyed deviled eggs and lemonade. The landowner’s brother, Woods
Eastland, presided over the violence; he was later elected district attorney of Scott County, Miss., a position that
allowed his son James Eastland, an avowed white supremacist, to serve six terms as a United States senator,
becoming president pro tempore from 1972 to 1978 . This appetite for harsh punishment has echoed across the
decades. Late in the 20th century, amid protests over civil rights and inequality, a new politics of fear and anger
would emerge. Nixon’s war on drugs, mandatory minimum sentences, three-strikes laws, children tried as adults,
“broken windows” policing — these policies were not as expressly racialized as the Black Codes, but their
implementation has been essentially the same. It is black and brown people who are disproportionately
targeted, stopped, suspected, incarcerated and shot by the police.
The prison industrial complex conducts violence through a heteronormative gaze that
magnifies all other impacts
Rae Rosenberg and Natalie Oswin, Rosenberg is a PhD candidate in Geography at York University
and Oswin is Assistant Professor of Geography at McGill University, October 22, 2014, “Trans
embodiment in carceral space: hypermasculinity and the US prison industrial complex”,
https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2014.969685 (accessed: 04/04/20)
While the exact number of trans people in US prisons is difficult to assess, scholars and activists concur
that this population is definitely overrepresented (see Hagner 2010; Maruri 2011; Peek 2004; Spade 2011; Stanley and Smith 2011;
Sylvia Rivera Law Project 2007). Trans persons are at risk of high incarceration rates for numerous reasons . As Spade
(2011, 12) notes, they face a ‘set of barriers – both from bias and from the web of inconsistent administrative
rules governing gender – that produce significant vulnerability.’ Employment and educational
discrimination along with family rejection lead to high rates of poverty and homelessness for trans
persons, conditions that are exacerbated by transphobic exclusions encountered when attempting to
access social services, healthcare, public housing, and other government benefits. To quote Spade (2011, 147) again, ‘people who have
gender markers on records and ID that do not match their identity face major obstacles in accessing
public bathrooms, drug treatment programs, homeless shelters, domestic violence shelters, foster care
group homes, and hospitals.’ Pushed to the margins of the formal economy and unable to access social
services due to biases and the erosion of social safety nets over the last several decades of neoliberal
restructuring, ‘with few options, many low-income and poor transgender people engage in criminalized
means of making a living, such as sex work’ (Sylvia Rivera Law Project 2007, 11). Furthermore, trans persons are especially
vulnerable to police profiling given their nonconformity to heteronormative visual cues and they spend
time in jail following arrests for entering the ‘wrong’ bathroom or for failing to produce ‘proper’ identity
documents, and get arrested for ‘quality-of-life’ crimes such as sleeping in public (Peek 2004). Due to all of these
factors, trans persons have been swept into prisons in high 1272 R. Rosenberg and N. Oswin numbers, while US incarceration
rates have soared (indeed its rate of imprisonment has grown to surpass that of any other country) as a result of, for instance, the ‘war on drugs’ and crackdowns on
undocumented migrants. So, in summary, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (2007, 11) notes: the
increasing imprisonment of low-income
people, people of color, and women has occurred in conjunction with the disproportionate arrest and
imprisonment of transgender and gender nonconforming people, and has led to a particularly high risk
of imprisonment for people who live at the intersections of more than one of these experiences. Once
incarcerated, trans people face extremely difficult circumstances. In one of the first published scholarly pieces on trans experiences of incarceration in the USA,
Rosenblum (1999, 502) asserts, ‘corrections authorities, through indifference or incompetence, foster a shockingly
inhumane daily existence for transgendered prisoners .’ Since then, several other scholars and activist researchers have found the
situation to be largely unchanged. For instance, Peek states that ‘prison merely exacerbates the prejudice transgender
persons already face’ (2004, 1218); the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (2007) titled its report ‘it’s war in here,’ given
the rampant stories of assault, harassment, and denial of medical care that their respondents in New
York state recounted; and as recently as 2011 Spade notes that ‘trans people in prisons face severe
harassment, medical neglect, and violence in both men’s and women’s facilities’ (2011, 89). Despite these facts,
very few states have enacted policy statements on the treatment of trans people in penal institutions,
and lack of compliance is an issue even in those states that have done so (see Hagner 2010). In addition, many US
prisons are privatized, making it difficult to standardize and enforce policies regarding transgender
prisoners (Rosenblum 1999; Spade 2008a; Sylvia Rivera Law Project 2007).
Thus the plan: The United States Federal Government should end its use of prison
sentencing
Solvency
Abolishing prisons is key to ending the protection of white capital accumulation and
privilege
Moreover, free
market forces have contributed to white capital accumulation with the creation and
expansion of private prisons. The prison-industrial complex has become a venue for profit as well as
punishment. By 2010, for example, the Corrections Corporation of America, the largest of all private prison companies, employed 17,000
incarcerated individuals and its valuation on the New York Stock Exchange was $53.5 billion (Harcourt, 2012). Prison privatization ‘is integral to
privatization in other sectors and to the globalization of government and global markets’ (Aman & Greenhouse, 2015, pp. 359–360). Public
and private prisons warehouse a significant proportion of the nation’s poor and people of color and
remain brutal places characterized by a large population in tight cells under aggressive supervision. Prisons
are ‘merely as storage dumps … they usually present themselves to the public as rational organizations designed consciously … as effective
machines for producing a few officially avowed and officially approved ends’ (Goffman, 1961, p. 74). Mass incarceration
is a ‘prison
fix’ that has the effect of identifying and isolating wrongdoers, ‘which conceptually and geographically
conceals the complex workings of prison life and brings into clear focus the less-than-human,
perpetually condemned, jobless, criminal’ (Gilmore, 2007, p. 109). Prisons are unequivocally about
punishment, and their existence and purpose are politica l (Kerness & Lewey, 2014). Punishment practices in
racial capitalist America, whether historic or contemporary, have succeeded in protecting the white
capital accumulation and white privilege.
The legacy of slavery and anti-blackness necessitate a total rejection of prisons;

“humane” prisons are impossible in the US
It is insufficient to simply seek to reform the most egregious instances of violence and abuse that occur
in prison while retaining a commitment to prison backed criminal law enforcement as a primary social
regulatory framework. Of course, less violence in these places would undoubtedly render prisons more habitable, but the degradation
associated with incarceration in the United States is at the heart of the structure of imprisonment elucidated decades ago by Sykes:
Imprisonment in its basic structure entails caging or imposed physical constriction, minute control of
prisoners’ bodies and most intimate experiences, profound depersonalization, and institutional
dynamics that tend strongly toward violence. These dehumanizing aspects of incarceration are unlikely
to be meaningfully eliminated in the U.S., following decades of failed efforts to that end, while retaining
a commitment to the practice of imprisonment. This is especially so in the United States for reasons
related to the specific historical and racially subordinating legacies of American incarceration and
punitive policing. Two hundred and forty years of slavery and ninety years of legalized segregation ,
enforced in large measure through criminal law administration , render U.S. carceral and punitive policing practices less
amenable to the reforms undertaken, for example, in Scandinavian countries, which have more
substantially humanized their prisons.127
2AC Extensions
Prisons Bad: Dehumanization

The carceral state is used to corrupt democracy by creating a racialized other
Racialized punishment practices become part of the dominant political order often because fear is
utilized to gain public support. For example, in order to fuel public fear and facilitate the drug war and
mass incarceration, crack cocaine was chosen as the drug of principal concern, erroneously
propagandized as a drug used primarily by black people (Reinarman & Levine, 1997). The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010
prescribed huge sentencing disparities between people charged with possession of crack as compared to those found in possession of cocaine .
This law, and others before it, unfairly targeted the poor, with people of color experiencing high
incarceration rates as a result. Moreover, although the crack scare began to decline in 1992, the media
continued to sensationalize the horrors of drug use and drug trafficking, and most politicians supported
the intensification of the drug war. Through the race-coded language of ‘drugs’ and ‘crime,’ politicians
pacified a white electorate anxious about its declining privilege in the emerging neoliberal world
(Beckett, 1999). The stereotyping and criminalization of the ‘other’ was re-formulated – this time through
the use of the war on drugs. This war, justified as a necessary crime control policy, led to aggressive
policing and began to militarize American law enforcement. ‘Masquerading as an expanded national
criminal justice enforcement program of controlled/illegal substances, it is a selective widening of the
law’s net into our nation’s impoverished and disenfranchised urban communities’ (Steiner & Argothy, 2000–
2001, p. 443). Relative to their numbers in the general population, and among drug offenders, people of color are disproportionately
investigated, stop-and-frisked, searched, arrested, charged, convicted, and sentenced with use, possession, and sale of illegal drugs (Fellner,
2009). Systematic disparities generated by racially and geographically targeted drug enforcement policies
focusing on people of color have insulated white people from the state’s punishment practices. ‘The
political and cultural construction of the white middle-class victim operate alongside the racialized
threats of the urban drug pusher, foreign trafficker, predatory ghetto addict and sustains the war on
drugs and expands the American carceral state ’ (Lassiter, 2015, p. 140).
Prisons are dehumanizing and deny basic humanity

Prisons are places of intense brutality, violence, and dehumanization .70 In his seminal study of the New Jersey State
Prison, The Society of Captives, sociologist Gresham M. Sykes carefully exposed how the fundamental structure of the modern
U.S. prison degrades the inmate’s basic humanity and sense of selfworth .71 Caged or confined and
stripped of his freedom, the prisoner is forced to submit to an existence without the ability to exercise
the basic capacities that define personhood in a liberal society.72 The inmate’s movement is tightly
controlled, sometimes by chains and shackles, and always by orders backed with the threat of force ;73 his
body is subject to invasive cavity searches on command;74 he is denied nearly all personal possessions;
his routines of eating, sleeping, and bodily maintenance are minutely managed; he may communicate
and interact with others only on limited terms strictly dictated by his jailers; and he is reduced to an
identifying number, deprived of all that constitutes his individuality. 75 Sykes’s account of “the pains of
imprisonment”76 attends not only to the dehumanizing effects of this basic structure of imprisonment—which
remains relatively unchanged from the New Jersey penitentiary of 1958 to the U.S. jails and prisons that
abound today77—but also to its violent effects on the personhood of the prisoner
Solitary confinement is dehumanizing torture, the main method of discipline, and will
be relied on with increased frequency
As incarcerated populations have increased, solitary confinement has emerged as a primary mechanism
for internal jail and prison discipline , such that the actual number of individuals confined to a small cell for twenty-three hours per day remains
unknown and may be significantly in excess of 80,000.88 Some people are sentenced to “Super-Max” facilities that only
contain solitary cells; other people are placed in solitary confinement as punishment for violating prison
rules or for their own protection. Stays in solitary confinement are often lengthy, even for relatively
minor disciplinary rule violations, and may be indefinite. For example, one young prisoner caught with seventeen packs of Newport
cigarettes was sentenced to fifteen days solitary confinement for each pack of cigarettes, totaling more than eight months of solitary confinement.89 Another
prisoner in New Jersey spent eighteen years in solitary confinement. Although his solitary confinement status was subject to review every ninety days, this prisoner
explained that he eventually stopped participating in the reviews as he felt they were “a sham, with no real investigation,” and lost hope that he would ever be able
to leave.90 Solitary confinement has become a widely tolerated and “regular part of the rhythm of prison
life,”91 yet this basic structure of prison discipline in the United States entails profound violence and
dehumanization; indeed, solitary confinement produces effects similar to physical torture . Psychiatrist Stuart
Grassian first introduced to the psychiatric and medical community in the early 1980s that prisoners living in isolation suffered a
constellation of symptoms including overwhelming anxiety, confusion, hallucinations, and sudden

violent and self destructive outbursts.92 This pattern of debilitating symptoms, sufficiently consistent among persons subject to solitary
confinement (otherwise known as the Special Housing Unit (SHU)), gave rise to the designation of SHU Syndrome.93 Partly on
this basis, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture has found that certain U.S. practices of
solitary confinement violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and
Degrading Punishment.94 Numerous psychiatric studies likewise corroborate that solitary confinement
produces effects tantamount to torture.95 Bonnie Kerness, Associate Director of the American Friends Service Committee’s Prison Watch,
testified before the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons that while visiting prisoners in solitary confinement, she spoke repeatedly “with people
who begin to cut themselves, just so they can feel something.” 96
Soldiers who are captured in war and subjected to solitary
confinement and severe physical abuse also report the suffering of isolation to be as awful as, and even
worse than, physical torture.97
Private Prisons Bad

Private prisons create a revolving door where inmates are traded to maximize profit
gains for corrupt politicians
Noah Lanard, Reporter at Mother Jones, November 25, 2019, “ICE’s Revolving Door: Top Official Goes
to Work for Private Prison Company”, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/11/ices-revolving-
door-top-official-goes-to-work-for-private-prison-company/ (accessed: 04/08/20)
In June, when Scott Sutterfield became Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s top official in the Deep
South, the number of immigrants detained in the region was exploding. Between February and August,
ICE started using eight new for-profit detention centers in Louisiana and Mississippi. A few months later,
Sutterfield took a new job at the private prison company that runs six of the new jails. Since September,
Sutterfield has been a development executive for LaSalle Corrections, where he is responsible for
creating business opportunities for a family-run company whose most important client is his former
employer. LaSalle has a thoroughly documented history of negligence leading to the deaths of inmates
in its custody. Yet while Sutterfield served as deputy director and then acting director of ICE’s New
Orleans field office, which oversees much of the Deep South, his office began sending asylum seekers to
six of the company’s jails. As acting director, he signed off on blanket parole denials that kept people in
those jails. Now he is working for a company that is profiting from those decisions. His move to LaSalle is
among the most egregious examples in a pattern of senior ICE officials taking jobs at the detention
companies they were once tasked with holding accountable. LaSalle is detaining roughly 5,000 people at
the six Louisiana jails that ICE has started using this year. The agency is paying about $75 per detainee
per day at two of the jails, according to documents obtained through public records requests. That is
three times more than what the state of Louisiana pays LaSalle when it holds convicted criminals. If ICE
continues to keep 5,000 people at those jails, LaSalle will receive roughly $136 million a year from ICE,
compared to $44 million if those beds were filled by Louisiana convicts . (ICE is holding more than 2,500 additional
people at LaSalle jails in Arizona, Georgia, and Texas.)
The US has the world’s largest prison populations and private prisons are growing at 5 times
faster than public prisons
The United States has the world’s largest private prison population. Of the 1.5 million people in state and federal
prisons in 2016, 8.5 percent, or 128,063, were incarcerated in private prisons .1) Another 26,249 people -73 percent of all
people in immigration detention- were confined in privately-run facilities on a daily basis during fiscal year 2017.2) From 2000 to 2016 the
number of people housed in private prisons increased five times faster than the total prison population . Over a similar
timeframe, the proportion of people detained in private immigration facilities increased by 442 percent. The federal government and 27
states utilized private prisons operated by for-profit and non-profit entities during 2016 .3) New Mexico and Montana led
the nation in their reliance on private prisons with 43 percent and 39 percent of their prison populations, respectively, housed within them (See
Table 2). Between 2000 and 2016, eight states – Arkansas, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, North Dakota, Utah and Wisconsin – eliminated
their use of private prisons due to concerns about safety and cost cutting.4) In 2016, Louisiana changed the classification of its contracted beds
and reported its private prison population as zero for the first time during this period. Alternatively, five states – Alabama, Connecticut,
Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Vermont – began contracting with private prisons between 2000 and 2016.
Private prisons are invested in corrupting politics to maximize profits by incarcerating millions
For-profit prison companies exist to make money, and therefore the size and status of the country’s criminal
justice system is of upmost importance to them. This connection was summed up in Corrections Corporation of America’s (now-
Core Civic) 2010 Annual Report: Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop
and manage new correctional and detention facilities . This possible growth depends on a number of factors we
cannot control, including crime rates and sentencing patterns in various jurisdictions and acceptance of
privatization. The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of
enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the
decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws .31) In order to overcome these
challenges, private prison companies at times have joined with lawmakers, corporations, and interest groups to advocate for
privatization through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). This organization is a nonprofit
membership association focused on advancing “the Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government,
federalism, and individual liberty. ” This is pursued in part by advocating for large-scale privatization of governmental functions. Core
Civic paid between $7,000 and $25,000 per year as an association member before leaving the organization in 2010.
The company contributed additional funds to sit on issue task forces and sponsor events hosting legislators.32)
Core Civic and GEO Group were involved with ALEC at a time when it worked with members to draft model
legislation impacting sentencing policy and prison privatization. These policies promoted mandatory minimum
sentences, three strikes laws, and truth-in-sentencing, all of which contribute to higher prison populations. ALEC
also helped draft legislation that could increase the number of people held in immigration detention facilities. While
no longer a member of ALEC, Core Civic and GEO face the bottom line reality that a decline in incarceration is bad for business.
Prisons have had unprecedented growth for 4 decades and private prisons particularly
magnify an ideology of profit over people
The United States has experienced 40 years of unprecedented growth in its prison population but a recent
stabilization and modest reduction in incarceration has largely ended the prison building boom and now provides
an opportunity to reexamine policies of prison privatization. The complications of mass incarceration that include the
fracturing of low-income communities of color, the mistreatment of incarcerated people and the subjugation of
people with criminal records cannot be wholly laid at the feet of private prison corporations. Over several decades, public
institutions and lawmakers, with public consent, implemented policies that led to mass incarceration and the
collateral consequences that followed. But private prisons have capitalized on the chaos of this policy approach
and have worked to sustain it. Public corrections systems have been plagued by poor conditions of confinement
and mismanagement that require significant reform. But the introduction of profit incentives into the country’s
incarceration buildup crosses a troubling line that puts financial gain above the public interest of safety and
rehabilitation, and with limited transparency. As a result the worst elements of incarceration are exacerbated by
privatization.
Private prisons aren’t cost effective; their data is biased

Prison privatization has prospered because of claims that for-profit facilities are more cost efficient at providing
services than publicly-run institutions. The evidence does not support this assertion. In 1996, the U.S. General
Accounting Office (GAO) looked at four state-funded studies and one commissioned by the federal government
assessing the cost benefits of private prisons. The outcomes of the research varied, leading the authors to
conclude that “…these studies do not offer substantial evidence that savings have occurred.”22) Similar
conclusions were reached in a 2009 meta-analysis by researchers at the University of Utah that looked at eight cost
comparison studies resulting in vastly different conclusions. The analysis led the researchers to state, “…prison
privatization provides neither a clear advantage nor disadvantage compared to publicly managed prisons” and that
“…cost savings from privatization are not guaranteed.”23) Many of these findings have been replicated in
individual states. In Ohio, state officials have contended that private facilities regularly meet or surpass the legal
requirement of containing costs at least five percent below a state-run equivalent. However, a report by the
nonpartisan Policy Matters Ohio criticized the state’s measurements for comparing privately operated prisons to
hypothetical public facilities, exaggerating overhead and staff costs for public prisons, and failing to account for the
higher proportion of prisoners in public institutions requiring expensive high-level security. Accounting for these
factors greatly reduced if not completely diminished the purported advantages of private prisons.24) In Arizona,
which also has cost-saving requirements for private prisons, research conducted by the state’s Department of
Corrections in 2010 found that the state had not saved money by contracting out minimum security beds, and that
more money is actually spent on private medium security beds than would be spent in a publicly operated
institution.25)
Prisons Cause Disease

The prison system is a “petri dish” for disease spread
Timothy Williams, Benjamin Weiser, and William K. Rashbaum, Williams and Weiser are reporters
and Rashbaum is a senior writer from The New York Times, March 30, 2020, “’Jails Are Petri Dishes’:
Inmates Freed as the Virus Spreads Behind Bars”,
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/us/coronavirus-prisons-jails.html (accessed: 04/08/ 20)
In Chicago, as the number of positive test results at the county jail has skyrocketed, the sheriff, Tom Dart,
has established a quarantine area for those who have the virus, and another one for those showing symptoms who have not tested positive but
need to be monitored. The most serious patients are being taken to a hospital. “Our
jails are petri dishes,” said Toni
Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, comparing them to nursing homes
or cruise ships — both places where the virus has spread rapidly . She said officials were seeking to reduce the jail’s
population to 4,000 people, from about 6,000 before the outbreak began. Currently, the population stands at about 5,000. Only inmates
accused of nonviolent crimes are eligible for release, she said.
Prisons are a double threat: America is uniquely vulnerable to Corona and prisons
guarantee the worst case pandemic scenario
German Lopez, March 17, 2020, “A coronavirus outbreak in jails or prisons could turn into a
nightmare”, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/17/21181515/coronavirus-covid-19-jails-
prisons-mass-incarceration (accessed: 04/08/20
A lot of countries are going to face new challenges in their jails and prisons due to the coronavirus
pandemic. But the US is unique, because mass incarceration has led to millions of people incarcerated
across thousands of jails, prisons, and other correctional facilities in America — any of which could become
hotbeds for disease on their own. It’s not just the number of people in jail and prison, but the number going in
and out of them. As criminal justice expert John Pfaff pointed out, roughly 5 million people go in and out
of jails alone each year. There are also visitors and correctional staff, who interact — sometimes in very
limited spaces — with inmates. Any of these people can bring the virus in and take it out. No other
country faces a risk quite like this. Even the states that incarcerate the least numbers of people in the US
still lock up far more people than the vast majority of other countries: The Prison Policy Initiative in 2018
estimated that the incarceration rate of Massachusetts, the least carceral state, was more than double
that of England and Wales and nearly triple that of South Korea . So a prison outbreak would present a
potentially deadly risk to a relatively massive population, which, on top of everything else, disproportionately suffers from
chronic illnesses and other health conditions that could exacerbate Covid-19.
Prisons are the most likely place for a corona outbreak and threaten to overload the
healthcare system
German Lopez, March 17, 2020, “A coronavirus outbreak in jails or prisons could turn into a
nightmare”, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/17/21181515/coronavirus-covid-19-jails-
prisons-mass-incarceration (accessed: 04/08/20
The next site of a deadly coronavirus outbreak may not be a cruise ship, conference, or school. It could be one of
America’s thousands of jails or prisons. Just about all the concerns about coronavirus’s spread in packed
social settings apply as much, if not more, to correctional settings. In a prison, multiple people can be
placed in one cell. Hallways and gathering places are often small and tight (often deliberately so, to make it easier to
control inmates). There is literally no escape, with little to no space for social distancing or similar
recommendations experts make to combat coronavirus. Hand sanitizer can be contraband. Such an
outbreak could not only infect and kill hundreds or thousands of people in prison, but potentially spread
to nearby communities as well. Visitors and correctional staff could spread the disease when they go
back home, and inmates could spread it when they’re released. Even an outbreak contained within a jail
or prison could strain nearby health care systems, as hundreds or thousands of people suddenly need
medical care that jails and prisons themselves can’t provide . So if you want to “flatten the curve” to
spread out the illness and avoid overwhelming health care systems, experts say, you should worry about
coronavirus in prisons and jails.
Prisons accelerate disease spread

Haven Orecchio-Egresitz, Orecchio-Egresitz is a news reporter at Business Insider, March 05, 2020,
“US jails and prisons are 'fertile grounds for infectious disease' and preventing the spread of coronavirus
behind bars will be a challenge, say experts”, https://www.businessinsider.com/experts-keeping-
prisons-free-of-coronavirus-will-be-a-challenge-2020-3 (accessed 04/08/20,
More than two million people are being held in jails and prisons across the United States, and
oftentimes these men and women are tightly housed . Preventing the spread of the highly contagious
and deadly coronavirus in these institutions will pose unique challenges, medical experts told Business
Insider. "They're unique because these people are in tight confines, often tightly packed, and that's a
fertile ground for infectious disease," said Dr. Burton Bentley II, an emergency medicine physician and
founder of the consulting firm Elite Medical Experts . "Anytime you have populations that are tightly condensed, the
spread of communicable diseases … is obviously elevated and accelerated ."
Jails are particularly vulnerable to diseases like COVID-19 and risk the breakdown of
the entire healthcare sector
Kelsey Kauffman, Kauffman is the founder and emeritus director of the higher education program at
the Indiana Women’s Prison, a 2020, “Why jails are key to ‘flatening the curve’ of coronavirus”,
https://theappeal.org/jails-coronavirus-covid-19-pandemic-flattening-curve/?
fbclid=IwAR1K9cf0ardpNwIfxtzjLlegqusQ4l_ZpY1MEuagMfcnqsttzMi5aGlKnCQ (accessed: 04/08/20)
“Flattening the curve” so that the infection rate for COVID-19 stays below the healthcare system
capacity is now critical to controlling the pandemic in the United States. For individuals, that means cleaning your
hands frequently and limiting social interactions. For governments and institutions, however, “flattening the curve” requires focusing on
densely populated places whose inhabitants cannot isolate themselves. That is why the CDC has warned Americans not to go on cruise ships
and why colleges across the nation are sending their students home even though few of those students are at risk of dying from COVID-19. So
far, however, we are ignoring what are probably the most important institutions that will undermine
efforts to flatten the curve in every community: jails. Jails are notorious incubators and amplifiers of
infectious diseases. On any day, more than 600,000 people—roughly 75 percent of whom have not been convicted of a crime—are being
held in one of our nation’s 3,000 local jails, most in congregate confinement, often in overcrowded conditions and with poor sanitation. What
will happen when a new and poorly understood infectious disease makes its way inside a jail? It will likely spread like wildfire, not just among
the people who live in the jail, but also among those who work there. COVID-19
is also likely to be deadlier inside jails,
where a greater share of the population has “underlying health conditions” than on the outside,
including 7 percent with diabetes, 20 percent with asthma, 10 percent with heart-related problems, 7
percent with kidney problems, and 26 percent with high blood pressure. And because disease can
spread quickly in crowded jails, they’re likely to produce large numbers of patients at once,
overwhelming not just each jail’s primitive healthcare system but also hospitals to which the very sick
and dying will be transferred .
Prisons offer no protections, risk the immediate infection of 2.3 million people as well
as the rest of society
Ned Parker et al, Parker is a Pulitzer finalist and writer for Reuters, March 28, 2020, “Spread of
coronavirus accelerates in U.S. jails and prisons”, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-
coronavirus-usa-inmates-insigh/spread-of-coronavirus accelerates-in-us-jails-and-prisons-
idUSKBN21F0TM (accessed: 04/08/20)
The United States has more people behind bars than any other nation, a total incarcerated population of
nearly 2.3 million as of 2017, including nearly 1.5 million in state and federal prisons and another 745,000 in local jails, according to the U.S. Bureau
of Justice Statistics. An inmate released on Monday from Rikers Island said sick and healthy people often
mingled freely inside the jail. After a prisoner and a guard in his area of the jail were diagnosed with
COVID-19, the inmate said he started spending more time in his two-man cell. But he still had to line up
with other inmates at the medicine window to get his daily dose of methadone, a drug-addiction
treatment. “There is no protection,” said the 32-year-old inmate, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “You want to get away
from people but you can’t.” The New York City Department of Correction said it has taken measures to address the outbreak, including distributing
masks to inmates in areas where someone tested positive for COVID-19, promoting distancing between inmates, cleaning cells and providing soap. “The
Department of Correction is doing everything we can to safely and humanely house people in our custody amid the broader COVID-19 crisis,” said Peter Thorne, the
deputy commissioner of public information. Some jails are releasing inmates who may be ill. In Marietta, Georgia, Aubrey Hardyway, 21,
developed a cough, headache, sore throat and a 103-degree fever while held at the Cobb County Adult Detention Center on theft charges. “I just couldn’t take it, I
was feeling terrible,” he said.
Prisons are a health risk that endanger the entire society

Ned Parker et al, Parker is a Pulitzer finalist and writer for Reuters, March 28, 2020, “Spread of
coronavirus accelerates in U.S. jails and prisons”, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-
coronavirus-usa-inmates-insigh/spread-of-coronavirus accelerates-in-us-jails-and-prisons-
idUSKBN21F0TM (accessed: 04/08/20)
Inmates have no access to gloves or proper masks and have only cold water to wash their hands, said
Hernandez, who was convicted of attempted murder and has served eight years. He said inmates watched on Thursday as a guard coughed, her cheeks turned red
and she collapsed to the ground. “We are pleading with officers” for better defenses, he said. “They just shrug. In the
end, we are just inmates, second-class citizens. We are like livestock.” As of Saturday, at least 132
inmates and 104 staff at jails across New York City had tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused
by the coronavirus. The virus appears to be spreading quickly through a jail system famous for its
overcrowded cell blocks. The city’s Department of Correction said it is taking many measures to protect detainees, and declined to comment on
Hernandez’s account of an infected guard collapsing. Across the United States, jails and prisons are reporting an
accelerating spread of the new disease, and they are taking a varied approach to protecting the inmates in their charge. Thousands
of inmates are being released from detention, in some cases with little or no medical screening to
determine if they may be infected by the coronavirus and at risk of spreading it into the community ,
Reuters found.
Prisons easily spread disease and inmates are uniquely vulnerable to COVID-19
Timothy Williams, Benjamin Weiser, and William K. Rashbaum, Williams and Weiser are reporters
and Rashbaum is a senior writer from The New York Times, March 30, 2020, “’Jails Are Petri Dishes’:
Inmates Freed as the Virus Spreads Behind Bars”,
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/us/coronavirus-prisons-jails.html (accessed: 04/08/ 20)
The coronavirus is spreading quickly in America’s jails and prisons, where social distancing is impossible
and sanitizer is widely banned, prompting authorities across the country to release thousands of inmates in recent weeks to try to
slow the infection, save lives and preserve medical resources. Hundreds of Covid-19 diagnoses have been confirmed at
local, state and federal correctional facilities — almost certainly an undercount, given a lack of testing
and the virus’s rapid spread — leading to hunger strikes in immigrant detention centers and demands
for more protection from prison employee unions . A week ago, the Cook County jail in Chicago had two
diagnoses; by Sunday, 101 inmates and a dozen employees had tested positive for the virus. A nearby
Illinois state prison reported a coronavirus-related death on Monday, and Michigan prisons had 78
positive tests. The Rikers Island jail complex in New York City had 167 confirmed cases among inmates
by Monday. And at least 38 inmates and employees in the federal prison system have the virus, with one
prisoner dead in Louisiana. “It’s very concerning as a parent,” said William Brewer Jr., whose son is serving time for robbery in
Virginia. “He’s in there sleeping in an open bay with 60 other people. There’s no way they can isolate and get six feet between each other.”
Defense lawyers, elected officials, health experts and even some prosecutors have warned that efforts
to release inmates and to contain the spread of the disease are moving too slowly in the face of a contagion that
has so far infected at least 156,000 people in the United States, with more than 2,500 known deaths.
Jails are particularly susceptible to disease and COVID-19

Keri Blakinger and Beth Schwartzapfel, Blakinger is a star writer and Schwartzapfel is a staff writer
at The Marshall Project, March 06, 2020, “When Purell is Contraband, How Do You Contain
Coronavirus?”, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/03/06/when-purell-is-contraband-how-do-
you-contain-coronavirus (accessed: 04/05/20)
“Jails and prisons are often dirty and have really very little in the way of infection control,” said Homer
Venters, former chief medical officer at New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex. “There are
lots of people using a small number of bathrooms. Many of the sinks are broken or not in use. You may
have access to water, but nothing to wipe your hands off with, or no access to soap . ”So far, the respiratory virus
has sickened more than 97,000 people worldwide and at least 200 in the U.S. More than 3,300 people have died. As of late Thursday
there were no reported cases in American prisons, though experts say it’s just a matter of time. To
minimize further spread, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests things like avoiding
close contact with people who are sick, covering your mouth with a tissue when you cough or sneeze,
disinfecting frequently-used surfaces and washing your hands or using alcohol-based hand sanitizer. But
these recommendations run up against the reality of life in jails and prisons. Behind bars, access to toilet paper or
tissues is often limited and covering your mouth can be impossible if you’re handcuffed, either because of security status or during transport to
another facility.
Prisons Cause Racial Incarceration

Prisons cause intergenerational trauma, magnify structural violence, and are particularly
violent against black women and families
Indirect contact with the system—such as having an incarcerated loved one—is another traumatic
experience that is more likely to affect black women than white women . For children, having an
incarcerated parent is associated with developmental, emotional, and behavioral problems.3 6 Children
with incarcerated parents are also more likely to experience housing instability, homelessness, and
health care and nutrition insecurity .37 This trauma lingers well into adulthood and undermines long-term
mental health outcomes. One team of researchers discovered that adults who had an incarcerated household member during
childhood were at higher risk of poor health-related quality of life.38 While having an incarcerated household member during childhood has
severe and long-lasting consequences, having this experience during adulthood also contributes to higher levels of
stress. Women typically bear a tremendous emotional and financial burden when a loved one is
incarcerated. Beyond significant loss of income , a new CAP analysis found that 45 percent of adults with
incarcerated family members supported that person financially during and/or after their sentence .40
Women constitute 83 percent of those responsible for incarcerated family members’ court-related costs
and typically pay more than $13,000 in fines and fees alone .41 The financial burden of having an incarcerated loved one
means that many families struggle to meet basic food, housing, transportation, and clothing needs.42 In fact more than 1 in 3 affected
families—34 percent—go into debt just to pay for phone calls and visits.43 The emotional and financial
costs associated with indirect contact undermine the long-term health and well-being of women and
children. In fact, half of all people with indirect contact with the system report symptoms of PTSD,
hopelessness, or anxiety related to a loved one’s incarceration .44 And because African Americans are
overrepresented in the criminal justice system, millions of black women suffer from the stress
associated with having a family member incarcerated. This indirect contact with the criminal justice
system increases the risk of family instability, unemployment, socioeconomic disadvantage, substance
use disorders, and mental health problems. 45
Prisons magnify all other impacts, transcends generational lines, and prison walls
Contact with the criminal justice system is stressful no matter one’s economic status, race, gender, or
age. However, as important groups like SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective and the Center for Reproductive Rights have highlighted,
many women—especially black women—are exposed to unique stressors when they are incarcerated .17
For example, 86 percent of incarcerated women are survivors of past sexual violence, but they are still
subject to procedures that fail to consider past trauma. These procedures can include cavity searches,
pat downs, and shackling.18 In addition, most jails and prisons lack adequate mental health services,
menstrual hygiene products, or gynecological and obstetric care—compounding the stress and trauma
experienced while incarcerated.19 Furthermore, the vast majority of incarcerated women are also mothers—
mostly to young children.20 Prior to incarceration, most of these women were the primary caretakers of
their children.21 But half are confined in facilities located more than 100 miles from their families, and
more than one-third (38 percent) will not see their children even once while incarcerated. 22 Lack of
regular contact with their children heightens stress levels among incarcerated mothers.23 To make
matters worse, many siblings are split up when a mother is imprisoned .24 When this occurs, incarcerated
mothers are four times more likely to experience high levels of maternal strain—or significant stress
from feeling like they are not fulfilling their obligations as a mother .25 In addition, if children are placed in
foster care, incarcerated mothers risk never getting them back, even if they are able to demonstrate the
ability to care for them upon release.26 Black mothers are already far more likely to report depression
than the general population.27 These stressors only exacerbate this persistent problem. According to the U.S.
Bureau of Justice Statistics, 4 percent of women in federal prison and 3 percent of women in state prison are
pregnant at the time of incarceration.28 For these women, negligent correctional procedures can
produce high levels of stress and exacerbate pregnancy-related mental health disorders, which are
already disproportionately experienced by black women. 29 In 2010, the most recent year for which
aggregated data are available, dozens of states did not require medical examinations or prenatal
nutrition counseling for pregnant inmates. 30 They also failed to offer pregnant women guidance on
recommended activity levels or safety measures during pregnancy .31 Many also failed to
comprehensively limit the shackling of pregnant women—including during transportation to the doctor
and to the hospital for labor, delivery, and recuperation.32 Banned by the Federal Bureau of Prisons in
2008, this cruel practice increases stress and jeopardizes birth outcomes .33 After giving birth, incarcerated women are
frequently rushed back to prison and are unable to breastfeed or otherwise care for and bond with their newborns.34 These traumatic experiences
produce mental and physical scars that undermine the long-term health and well-being of women and
their infants.35 As discussed above, black women are overrepresented in the criminal justice system and thus at heightened risk of exposure to these unique
stressors. This reality contributes to health disparities between African American women and white women.
Prison violence is structurally patriarchal and anti-black and extend beyond prison walls
Structural racism exposes countless black women and children to the harmful stressors associated with the
criminal justice system. The number of incarcerated U.S. women overall has increased dramatically in recent
decades—from just 26,000 in 1980 to 219,000 in 2017 .13 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the spike in female incarceration has
disproportionately affected black women, especially young black women. While black women overall are twice as
likely to be imprisoned as their white counterparts, black women ages 18 to 19 are three times more likely to be
imprisoned than their white counterparts. If current incarceration trends continue, 1 in 18 black women will be imprisoned at some
point in their lifetime.14 Black women and their families, especially within younger generations, are also more likely
than their white counterparts to have indirect contact with the criminal justice system through the incarceration of
a household member. According to new CAP analysis of data from nine states, African American children across generations
have had more than twice the odds of having an incarcerated household member as white children.15 This is true
even after controlling for income level; geography; and family history of addiction, mental illness, and abuse. The
data also reveal that younger generations are at greater risk, with 27.4 percent of black Millennials having indirect
contact during childhood, compared with 10.7 percent of black Baby Boomers. A related CAP analysis found that
racial disparities in indirect contact with the criminal justice system persist long after childhood. In fact, more than
1 in 4 African American baby Boomers—26.4 percent—report having an immediate family member incarcerated at
some point in their lifetime, compared with just 15.1 percent of white Baby Boomers.16 Large disparities exist
even after controlling for other important variables, such as income and education. As Millennials and post-
Millennials have come—or are coming—of age during a period of mass incarceration, they will likely report even
higher rates of contact with the system during their lifetimes.
Prisons and policing are rooted in anti-black violence; the laws may change in name but the
effect remains the same. Only a complete rejection of prison system can solve.
Hundreds of years after the arrival of enslaved Africans, a presumption of danger and criminality still follows black
people everywhere. New language has emerged for the noncrimes that have replaced the Black Codes: driving
while black, sleeping while black, sitting in a coffee shop while black . All reflect incidents in which African-Americans
were mistreated, assaulted or arrested for conduct that would be ignored if they were white . In schools, black kids
are suspended and expelled at rates that vastly exceed the punishment of white children for the same behavior .
Inside courtrooms, the problem gets worse. Racial disparities in sentencing are found in almost every crime category.
Children as young as 13, almost all black, are sentenced to life imprisonment for nonhomicide offenses. Black
defendants are 22 times more likely to receive the death penalty for crimes whose victims are white, rather than
black — a type of bias the Supreme Court has declared “inevitable.” The smog created by our history of racial
injustice is suffocating and toxic. We are too practiced in ignoring the victimization of any black people tagged as criminal; like Woods
Eastland’s crowd, too many Americans are willing spectators to horrifying acts, as long as we’re assured they’re in the
interest of maintaining order.
The prison system is designed to discipline and enslave black folx; slaves are now criminals,
and neither are human
It took only a few decades after the arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia before white settlers demanded a new
world defined by racial caste. The 1664 General Assembly of Maryland decreed that all Negroes within the province “shall serve durante
vita,” hard labor for life. This enslavement would be sustained by the threat of brutal punishment . By 1729, Maryland law
authorized punishments of enslaved people including “to have the right hand cut off ... the head severed from the body, the body divided into
four quarters, and head and quarters set up in the most public places of the county.” Soon American slavery matured into a
perverse regime that denied the humanity of black people while still criminalizing their actions. As the Supreme Court of
Alabama explained in 1861, enslaved black people were “capable of committing crimes,” and in that capacity were
“regarded as persons” — but in most every other sense they were “incapable of performing civil acts” and
considered “things, not persons.” The 13th Amendment is credited with ending slavery, but it stopped short of
that: It made an exception for those convicted of crimes . After emancipation, black people, once seen as less
than fully human “slaves,” were seen as less than fully human “criminals.” The provisional governor of South
Carolina declared in 1865 that they had to be “restrained from theft, idleness, vagrancy and crime.” Laws
governing slavery were replaced with Black Codes governing free black people — making the criminal-justice
system central to new strategies of racial control .
Prisons devour and trade off with social wealth and mask racism
Angela Davis, Davis is an activist and professor emerita at UC Santa Cruz, September 10, 1998, “Masked Racism:
Reflectinos on the Prison Industrial Complex”, https://www.colorlines.com/articles/masked-racism-reflections-
prison-industrial-complex (accessed: 04/0/20)
Although prison labor – which ultimately is compensated at a rate far below the minimum wage – is hugely
profitable for the private companies that use it, the penal system as a whole does not produce wealth. It devours
the social wealth that could be used to subsidize housing for the homeless, to ameliorate public education for poor
and racially marginalized communities, to open free drug rehabilitation programs for people who wish to kick their
habits, to create a national health care system, to expand programs to combat HIV, to eradicate domestic abuse –
and, in the process, to create well-paying jobs for the unemployed . Since 1984 more than twenty new prisons have
opened in California, while only one new campus was added to the California State University system and none to
the University of California system . In 1996-97, higher education received only 8.7 percent of the State’s General
Fund while corrections received 9.6 percent. Now that affirmative action has been declared illegal in California, it is obvious that
education is increasingly reserved for certain people, while prisons are reserved for others. Five times as many black men are presently in
prison as in four-year colleges and universities. This new segregation has dangerous implications for the entire country. By segregating
people labeled as criminals, prison simultaneously fortifies and conceals the structural racism of the U.S. economy.
Claims of low unemployment rates – even in black communities – make sense only if one assumes that the vast
numbers of people in prison have really disappeared and thus have no legitimate claims to jobs. The numbers of
black and Latino men currently incarcerated amount to two percent of the male labor force . According to criminologist
David Downes, “[t]reating incarceration as a type of hidden unemployment may raise the jobless rate for men by about one-third, to 8 percent.
The effect on the black labor force is greater still, raising the [black] male unemployment rate from 11 percent to 19 percent.”
Slavery never ended; we’ve changed from plantations to prisons to further a white
supremacist capitalist society
Punishment practices become part of the dominant political order in a racial capitalist society when
either white-accumulating people and/or white-privileged people begin to fear the loss of their status. In
contemporary times, politicians justify the dismantling of the welfare state and the deregulation of industry
and the economy, and employ a new form of punishment – the elimination of social welfare programs
and the unprecedented class polarization on the one hand, and on the other, the replacement of social
programs with an unprecedented buildup of a ‘carceral Marshall Plan, that found hundreds of millions of
dollars to erect, expand, and tighten the most repressive features of state power, creating a prison
complex that is now the third largest employer in the nation’ (Abu-Jamal & Fernandez, 2014, pp. 9–10). All that was
required were justifications to exploit prison labor once that labor was incarcerated. Such justifications were found in the Constitution and
through court rulings. The
Thirteenth Amendment did not abolish slavery, but rather moved it from the
plantation, first to the convict leasing system, and today, directly into the prison . As a result of the
drug war and mass incarceration, there are more black people enslaved today than in 1800, and
incarcerated individuals can be forced to work for pennies an hour with the profits going to counties,
states, and private corporations. Many working incarcerated individuals may be totally uncompensated
and increasingly are compelled to produce for the market as a condition of their imprisonment (Wacquant,
2009). Prison industry in the United States today takes the form of the forced labor camps that have
existed in all totalitarian states (Hedges, 2014). Courts, in the same manner of upholding chattel slavery in its
legal pronouncements of the nineteenth century, upheld the ‘legality’ of prison slave wages . ‘Inmates
perform for the prison industry not to turn profits for their supposed employer, but rather as a means of rehabilitation and job training for
themselves and are not entitled to wage and working conditions protection’ (Harker v. State Use Industries, 1993).
Prisons are integral to racial capitalism; they quell resistance to white empire through
imprisonment
Although it could be argued that race was more explicitly an axis of punishment in earlier periods, in contemporary times, racial
capitalism still relies upon punishment practices much in the same way historic practices were relied
upon to maintain the system of white elite capital accumulation and white privilege. Contemporary
punishment practices became urgent by the end of the 1960s when the compromise between labor and
capital collapsed and tensions between working-class white people and black people that emerged
during the civil rights struggle surfaced (Inwood, 2015). Indeed, punishment practices are modified according
to new socio-economic arrangements during different eras. Current punishment practices such as the
drug war and mass incarceration as well as prison labor are, for example, the result of
deindustrialization, austerity, the collapse of the ‘welfare state,’ as well as an expression of the global
process of ‘accumulation by dispossession ’ (Harvey, 2003, p. 145). Simply stated, contemporary punishment
practices reduce both aggregate and racially specific unemployment rates and are used to quell
resistance and imprison those who are made redundant through retrenchment. ‘The critical
engagement with the war on drugs begins by placing its relationship with the rise of the “penal state” in
the context of neoliberalism in the U.S.’ (Corva, 2008). Racial capitalism was in need of a re-boot and
contemporary punishment practices provide it.
The atrocities of prisons are not outliers; they are structurally necessitated by
dominance and brutality
These horrific experiences of incarceration are not simply outlier forms of dehumanization and violence,
but are produced by the structure of U.S. imprisonment—by the basic manner in which caging or
confining human beings strips individuals of their personhood and humanity, and sets in motion
dynamics of domination and subordination. In research widely known as the Stanford Prison Experiment,
psychologists Philip Zimbardo and Craig Haney further elucidated these structural dynamics.113 Notwithstanding subsequent criticism, their
experiment revealed
how the basic structure of the prison in the United States tends toward
dehumanization and violence.114 At the outset of their now famous (or infamous) experiment, Zimbardo and Haney placed a group
of typical college students into a simulated prison environment on Stanford University’s campus.115 Zimbardo and Haney randomly designated
certain of the students as mock-prisoners and others as mock-guards.116 What happened in the course of the six days that followed shocked
the researchers, professional colleagues, and the general public.117 Zimbardo and Haney found that their “‘institution’ rapidly
developed sufficient power to bind and twist human behavior . . . .”118 Mock-guards engaged with
prisoners in a manner that was “negative, hostile, affrontive, and dehumanizing,” despite the fact that
the “guards and prisoners were essentially free to engage in any form of interaction.” 119 “[V]erbal interactions
were pervaded by threats, insults and deindividuating references . . . . The negative, anti-social reactions observed were not
the product of an environment created by combining a collection of deviant personalities, but rather the
result of an intrinsically pathologicalsituation which could distort and rechannel the behavior of
essentially normal individuals.”120 The Stanford Prison Study has been criticized for methodological, ethical, and other
shortcomings, but, despite its limitations, it attests to the dehumanizing dynamics that routinely surface in carceral
settings.121 According to some critics, for instance, the Stanford Prison Study reflects the participants’ obedience and conformity to
stereotypic behavior associated with prisoners and guards, rather than an effect produced exclusively and directly by the institutional
environment of prisons.122 But even if the study’s critics are correct, it
remains true that these same features of
conformity and behavioral expectations obtain in actual prison environments. Therefore, whether the
Stanford Prison Study measures institutional effects or the tendency of people in such institutional
settings to conform to widely understood behavioral expectations associated with such settings, it is still
the case that these settings will tend to reproduce powerful dynamics of dominance, subordination,
dehumanization, and violence.
Prisons Bad: Anti-Queer Violence

Prisons disenfranchise marginalized communities and millions of people
When LGBT individuals return to their communities After spending time in prison, they are frequently
excluded from making decisions about the future of their communities —through restrictions on identity
documents, voting, serving on juries, and holding public office . Combined with the pervasive stigma and discrimination
experienced by LGBT people in general, these barriers can leave them feeling less invested in and excluded from
their communities. Obtaining a state-issued ID. Individuals who have spent time in prison need
assistance obtaining current identity documents, which are crucial for securing housing, opening a bank
account, getting a job, and obtaining health benefits. Many individuals leaving prison do not have
identity documents, as they have been lost during the criminal justice process or are out of date. In addition, some states
automatically suspend or revoke driver’s licenses for drug-related offenses, and 11 states do not even
offer a restricted license for these individuals to work, attend drug treatment, or obtain an education .762
Ability to vote. It is estimated that 5.9 million Americans are unable to vote because of laws
disenfranchising people with felony convictions .763 Felony disenfranchisement laws impact local, state, and federal voting
rights. These laws make it more difficult for people with criminal records to be connected to their
communities and feel invested and empowered to make a difference. For individuals who are already
impacted by discriminatory laws—such as LGBT people, people with disabilities, older people, and
people of color—the inability to vote and perhaps have an influence on laws and policy can be especially
frustrating. Only two states (Maine and Vermont) have no limitations on voting by individuals convicted of a crime.764 In 12 states,
individuals with felony convictions are unable to vote while in prison or on probation and even once they have served their sentence. In the
remainder of states, individuals have their right to vote limited for a period of time, such as while they are serving time in prison; while they are
in prison and on parole; or while they are in prison, on parole, and probation.Even in states where individuals with criminal
records can apply to restore their right to vote, there are disparities in the application of these laws.
Despite the fact that two-thirds of people in Alabama’s prisons are black, nearly two-thirds of individuals
whose voting rights have been restored in recent years have been white .765 In Alabama, 30% of voting-
age black men lack the right to vote because of criminal records.766 Serving on a jury. Individuals
convicted of a felony are unable to serve on a federal jury. However, in many states once an individual’s civil rights have
been restored (such as after the completion of a sentence), individuals can serve on state juries.767 Elected office. Some states have
limitations on individuals with a criminal record serving in public office. This can further limit an
individual’s abilities to make change in the local community. Given the low representation of LGBT
people in public office, this limitation is also an added barrier for LGBT people seeking to represent their
communities.
Gay and bisexual men at criminalized for their sexuality due to policing
Gay and bisexual men, and men who have sex with men but who may not identify as gay or bisexual,
remain at higher risk for criminalization of consensual sex than other adults. Although anti-sodomy laws
were found unconstitutional, gay and bisexual men often are targeted. Police often focus their attention
on areas where men meet or places where they engage in sexual contact, even if similar sexual contact
between opposite-sex couples doesn’t draw police attention .192 In 2013, an undercover sheriff’s deputy
in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, met another man at a public park.193 The deputy asked the man if he’d
like go back to his place for “some drinks and some fun.” Despite the fact that no money was exchanged,
the man was arrested. This arrest was part of a series of efforts by law enforcement in the city to single
out gay men who visited a public park, even though they were not engaged in any illegal activity. Police
in other cities often focus their efforts on public places such as restrooms in transportation terminals ,
such as the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City,194 or public parks. Frequently, the statutes used to prosecute
gay and bisexual men for consensual sex mandate that convicted individuals register as sex offenders;
this can have lifetime consequences long after an individual has served a sentence . In addition, when a person is
charged with violating a sex-related statute, he frequently receives additional charges or harsher sentences than if the conduct were with a
member of the opposite sex under these “crimes against nature” statutes
Prisons necessitate gendered violence; prison inmates and guards hierarchize gender
as method of self-determination
As many scholars and activist researchers have noted (Hagner 2010; Hearts on a Wire 2011; Rodriguez 2006; Sexton,
Jenness, and Sumner 2010; Shabazz 2009; Sylvia Rivera Law Project 2007; Tarzwell 2006), gender regulation is a standard
element of social control within carceral institutions and is a fundamental aspect of the interactions
between prisoners and correctional officers . In particular, harassment and violence in men’s prisons indicate
performative elements of carceral masculinity, which establishes hierarchies of failed and successful
hegemonic masculine expressions (Shabazz 2009; Tarzwell 2006). Particularly noticeable among participant responses is how the
majority of harassment and violence was committed by groups of inmates and correctional officers. This
group Gender, Place and Culture 1277 element of masculine performance is critical, as carceral
masculinities are constantly being asserted and defended by all persons in men’s prisons (Shabazz 2009).
Masculine performances by correctional officers reinforce institutional dominance over prisoners by
limiting their means of expression, and masculine performances by prisoners assert resistance against
this dominance, simultaneously setting up social hierarchies between inmates . The group harassment of research
participants can thus be understood as signaling a collective performance in which the harassing actors reassure themselves of their masculinity
and higher-ranking status. By
engaging in sexist and homo/transphobic behavior in front of other prisoners
and correctional staff, men demonstrate their masculinity to the larger prison population to display
self-determination against carceral power, and also gendered hierarchies that place them above others
who are less masculine. As Tarzwell (2006, 179) writes, ‘within this framework [of hypermasculine dominance],
femininity and weakness are reciprocally referential: those prisoners displaying “feminine” traits are
more likely to be victimized.’ Participants discussed the ways that harassment and violence demean their lives, identities, and bodies
by making them feel diseased, different, and hypersexualized. One participant, Claireissa, wrote, ‘ ... it is very hard sometimes I feel ashamed at
times to be who and what I am some times I feel like there is something wrong with me like what they say I must have some kind of disease.’
Similarly, Monica stated that ‘I get use to being angry all the time and I train my body in fighting and killing arts of native warriors and plan for
the day I’m released. There’s no other way for me to deal with the way I feel.’
Prison abolition must be the site of trans/queer scholarship and liberation

For these reasons – enhanced likelihood of incarceration and abusive treatment while inside US penal
institutions – issues surrounding trans incarceration are in urgent need of attention . As Stanley (2011, 3), one of
the editors of the important volume Captive Genders – the most extensive treatment of trans incarceration issues to date – states, the small
existing body of activist and academic research shows that
the legal system ‘works to deaden trans and queer lives.’ As
such, he further asserts that ‘the prison must emerge as one of the major sites of trans/queer
scholarship and political organizing,’ and that this scholarship and organizing ought to proceed ‘in a way
that centers the experiences of those most directly impacted’ (Stanley 2011, 4). Spade (2011, 221) concurs, stating that
there is a continuing need to ‘expose the violences of imprisonment that often remain hidden when
their targets are isolated from contact with the outside.’
Radical imaginaries of the future and policing is key to resist state violence and
breakdown carceral logics
Clearly, then, the power of the imagination is crucial when positioned against institutions that wield
social death through complete control over a person’s identity, emotionality, and embodiment . As
Appadurai (2000, 6) states: The imagination is no longer a matter of individual genius, escapism from ordinary
life, or just a dimension of aesthetics. It is a faculty that informs the daily lives of ordinary people in
myriad ways: It allows people to consider migration, resist state violence, seek social redress ... [and] it is
also the faculty through which collective patterns of dissent and new designs for collective life emerge.
For trans feminine individuals who face attempted carceral breakdowns of their bodies and identities,
the imagination can provide a means of resistance by accessing, or obtaining proximity to, happiness.
Obtaining this closeness to what Sara Ahmed (2010a) calls a ‘happy object’ can be incredibly powerful for those who are marginalized or
oppressed. Ahmed explains: We
could say that happiness is promised through proximity to certain objects.
Objects would not refer only to physical or material things, but also to anything that we imagine might
lead us to happiness, including objects in the sense of values, practice, and styles, as well as aspirations .
Doing x as well as having x might be what promises us happiness. (2010a, 41) Gender, Place and Culture 1279 Ahmed (2010b, 202, original
emphasis) continues that ‘happiness might also contain the forms in which desire can be realized’; consequently, a happy object
can contain a desired physical form that can be realized mentally and thus become proximate to the
subject. For trans feminine prisoners, a happy object may be the imagining of a future feminized body.
The potential in being able to imagine and explore a gender-affirming physical form can provide the
space for emotional reprieve, in which the desire to live in a body that more accurately reflects one’s
understood self can emerge. If these moments of reprieve, these happy objects, are accessible, a
prisoner’s future can become tangible, instilling that they can survive incarceration and achieve a
desired form of embodiment. This is a space where the hope of embodiment can manifest, and is a
critical component of survival and selfcare . Consequently, while Jessica may not be allowed access to hormones and express
herself on the inside, she is able to access and explore a vision of what her body will look like in the future. This will is significant, as it
signifies that there is no doubt for Jessica. She is assured that this achievement will one day be possible.
Be skeptical of their case indicts: prison surveillance dramatically skews the

availability and interpretation of data
Trans lives have unfortunately been largely ignored within the by now very large queer geography and
sexuality and space literatures. As part of efforts to address this omission, this article extends geographical understandings of trans
lives to a new population in a new space, and one that is in urgent need of scholarly and activist attention. As demonstrated in the
small body of work on trans prisoners in the USA that has emerged recently outside the discipline of
geography, trans persons are incarcerated at a disproportionately high rate and face harsh conditions
while imprisoned. This is, however, a difficult group of people to gain access to as researchers. Of
course, conducting research with any prison population is difficult since confinement in government
facilities complicates attainment of participant consent and raises issues of confidentiality due to the
pervasiveness of surveillance techniques. But additional practical and ethical issues arise when attempting to access sexual and
gender minorities such as trans prisoners who are in especially vulnerable 1280 R. Rosenberg and N. Oswin positions. Thus, despite
growing scholarly and activist attention to the urgent plight of trans incarcerated persons in the USA,
there are still very few available first-hand accounts of their experiences. The responses of our 23 participants
confined in several US states thus extend existing knowledge. Our research participants endure harsh conditions of
confinement, and therefore their stories corroborate the findings of the existing literature within trans
studies. Furthermore, some of their responses offer insight into ways in which trans incarcerated persons cope in the hypermasculine and
heteronormative space of the US prison.
Prisons cause anti-trans violence and are the basis of anti-trans policing outside of
prison walls
Emmi Bevensee, PhD student at the University of Arizona in the iSchool studying machine learning,
2014, “Transwomen, the Prison-Industrial Complex, and Human Rights: Neoliberalism and Trans
Resistance”, https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1045&context=swb
One of the most visible and invisible sites of both resistance and colonization of the colonized-body is
within the realms of penology and incarceration (Arnold :141; Visweswaran 1996:95-102). In the sentiment of the honorable
Bay Area trans-elder, Miss Major, “trans women are often born into the prison pipeline with little hope for
outside intervention (Stanley and Smith 2011: 211)”. In “Normal Life” by Dean Spade, he states of incarceration, neoliberalism, state
violence, and misleading and problematic law reform, “These concerns are particularly relevant for trans people given
our ongoing struggles with police profiling, harassment, violence, and high rates of both youth and adult
imprisonment. Trans populations are disproportionately poor because of employment discrimination,
family rejection, and difficulty accessing school, medical care, and social services. These factors increase
our rate of participation in criminalized work to survive, which in combination with police profiling,
produces high levels of criminalization” (Spade 2011: 89). This quote deters the mythos that trans-racialized beings are
inherently criminal by exposing the structural inequity and interrogating a moralistic approach of
demeaning trans lives that also exist within a project of structural racialization that encompasses all
aspects of ones being. Dominant discourses define the dominant approaches to policy of the era (Foucault
1978). This is seen in how statistics of incarcerated transwomen, which inform the archive, which informs
the policy, which informs the structures, which informs livelihoods, is skewed by an initial misreading
and classifying of transwomen as either men or gay men as can be seen in the archival work done by
George Chauncey (1994) into the New York City Police records . The statistics of incarcerated transwomen are
misleading, despite already being disproportionately high, because many transwomen are placed in the high risk arena of men’s prisons as
opposed to being housed according to their identified gender (Spade 2011: 220-227, 273). Because
of this skewing and of the
pressures of incarcerated transwomen to remain closeted, finding reliable statistics about the number of
transwomen in men's prison is nearly impossible.
Prisons structurally incentivize rampant sexual violence

In addition to the dehumanization entailed by the regular and pervasive role of solitary confinement in
U.S. jails, prisons, and other detention centers, the environment of prison itself is productive of further
violence as prisoners seek to dominate and control each other to improve their relative social position
through assault, sexual abuse, and rape. This feature of rampant violence, presaged by Sykes’s account, arises from the
basic structure of prison society, from the fact that the threat of physical force imposed by prison guards
cannot adequately ensure order in an environment in which persons are confined against their will, held
captive, and feared by their custodians.98 Consequently, order is produced through an implicitly
sanctioned regime of struggle and control between prisoners .99 Rape, in particular, is rampant in U.S.
jails and prisons.100 According to a conservative estimate by the U.S. Department of Justice, 13
percent of prison inmates have been sexually assaulted in prison, with many suffering repeated sexual
assaults.101 While noting that “the prevalence of sexual abuse in America’s inmate confinement facilities is a
problem of substantial magnitude,” the Department of Justice acknowledged that “in all likelihood the institution-
reported data significantly undercounts the number of actual sexual abuse victims in prison, due to the
phenomenon of underreporting .”102 Although the Department had previously recorded 935 instances of
confirmed sexual abuse for 2008, further analysis produced a figure of 216,000 victims that year
(victims, not incidents).103 These figures suggest an endemic problem of sexual violence in U.S. prisons
and jails produced by the structure of carceral confinement and the dynamics that inhere in prison
settings.
Prisons Bad: Economy

US prisons costs $182 billion annually
Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy, Wagner is an attorney and the Executive Director of the prison
Policy Initiative and Rabuy is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Prison Policy Initiative, January 25, 2017,
“Following the Money of Mass Incaerceration”, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/money.html
The cost of imprisonment — including who benefits and who pays — is a major part of the national discussion
around criminal justice policy. But prisons and jails are just one piece of the criminal justice system and the amount of media and
policy attention that the various players get is not necessarily proportional to their influence. In this first-of-its-kind report, we
find that the system of mass incarceration costs the government and families of justice-involved people
at least $182 billion every year. In this report: we provide the significant costs of our globally
unprecedented system of mass incarceration and over-criminalization , we give the relative importance of the various
parts, we highlight some of the under-discussed yet costly parts of the system, and then we share all of our sources so that journalists and
advocates can build upon our work.
Prisons drain the economy of more than $100 billion annually

Peter N. Salib, Salib is a Judicial Cleark to Honorable Frank H. Easterbrook, March 07, 2017, “Why
Prison?: Economic Critique”, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2928219, (accessed:
04/05/20)
Let’s frame these inherent social costs in terms of actual dollars. According to the U.S. Census Bureau,
the per capita income of an American between March 2015 and March 2016 was $28,555.61 There are
obvious problems with using per capita income as a precise measure of the wages lost while in prison, For example, those sent to prison might,
on average, earn either more or less than the general population. But the figure is good enough for a rough estimate. The idea here is to get a
sense of scale, not to calculate precise dollar figures. Using
the per capita income figure, a 10 year prison sentence of a
working-age person precipitates an inherent social cost of around $300,000. That is, $300,000 in value
fails to be created. Taking another perspective, in 2013, there were 2.2 million people incarcerated in the
United States.62 If those people had been in the workforce, the per capita income figure suggests that
they would have earned over $60 billion in wages in that year alone! But because they were imprisoned,
rather than subjected to more efficient nonmonetary sanctions, those wages were lost . These are back-of-the-
envelope figures,63 but there can be no doubt that the social costs of imprisonment from lost wages during incarceration are staggering. But
prison’s needless social costs do not end when convicts’ sentences do. It
is welestablished that imprisonment causes ex-
convicts to face dismal odds of post-release employment. For example, a 2001 survey of employers in Los Angeles County
found that “over 40 percent of employers indicated that they would ‘probably’ or ‘definitely’ not be willing to hire an applicant with a criminal
record for a job not requiring a college degree.”64 The problem has become sufficiently well-recognized that a number of states have instituted
“ban the box” laws.65 Those laws make it illegal for employers to ask about past convictions in job application forms.66 Thus, imposing prison
as an immediate nonmonetary punishment for bad acts causes a net social loss of the bad actor’s wages not only while incarcerated, but also
for years thereafter.67 One study suggests that these losses amount to an annual loss in output of between
$57 and $65 billion.6
The economic impact of prisons is incalculable: prisons destroy the ability for millions
to gather any wealth
04/05/20)
The inherent social costs of imprisonment are, by contrast, more or less invisible. That is because they
do not, like administrative social costs, take the form of monetary transfers from one party to another .
Rather, the inherent social costs of prison are largely composed of wealth that would have been created,
but, because of prison, was not. This kind of wealth destruction does not generate invoices. It does not
require governments to write checks or to tax citizens. Because of this, such costs are likely to be ignored by both
scholars and politicians. Prison needlessly prevents bad actors from earning money. Indeed, the wages
bad actors must forego while in prison count among prison’s deterrent private costs . But, in imposing this
private cost, prison destroys societal wealth that otherwise have been transferrable to victims or the
government. Every dollar not earned by a prisoner is a dollar not added to the size of the total social pie. Prison replaces
nonmonetary sanctions in the form of socially costless wealth transfers with those in the form of socially
costly wealth destruction.
Prisons necessitate the degredation society because they inherently impose massive
social costs
04/05/20)
Nonmonetary sanctions ideally step in when the bad actor has no more transferrable wealth to give. They
then impose further private costs by destroying the bad actor’s nonmonetary wealth. A bad actor’s
freedom of movement cannot be transferred, but can be destroyed via imprisonment. The same goes
for wealth in the form of bodily integrity, free association, and a whole array of other endowments
stripped away by nonmonetary sanctions. Because the only way to create private costs of this kind is to
destroy wealth, such private costs are also, necessarily, social costs. That is to say, when such private
costs are imposed, the aggregate wealth of society is reduced. Interestingly, leading scholars of law and economics
tend to underestimate or undertheorize these long-recognized costs.40 So there are at least two kinds of social costs
associated with the enforcement of criminal law. Some are administrative, including the costs of
discovering bad acts, prosecuting them, and administering sanctions. Some are inherent . Monetary sanctions
carry few or no inherent social costs, 41 because they merely transfer wealth. However, nonmonetary sanctions, by their very
nature, destroy private wealth without corresponding gains elsewhere. They therefore necessarily
reduce total societal wealth. An economic view of the criminal law should be attentive to both kinds of
social costs. It should advocate for a system that strives to minimize total social losses, including both those
associated with bad acts themselves and also those associated with deterring them.42
Prisons sap our economic wealth: the average administrative cost of one federal
prisoner is 60% of US GDP per captia
04/05/20)
As discussed in Part I.B, all

forms of nonmonetary criminal punishment entail social costs. Some of these costs
are administrative, and some inherent to the sanctions themselves. What is not common to all forms of
criminal punishment is the magnitude of such social costs. And the magnitude of prison’s social costs is
great. Start with the obvious administrative costs of imprisonment. Recent estimates of the average cost
to imprison a single inmate in the United States for one year put the figure above $30,000.46 In some
states, like California and Washington, the cost can creep above $40,000.47 In Connecticut, the average
is $50,262.48 New York takes the prize for the state in which it is most expensive to hold a prisoner,
coming in at a whopping average cost of $60,076.49 These are not estimates of the average total cost
to the state of punishing a prisoner; they include only costs directly connected with imprisonment
itself. These costs are those billed directly from departments of corrections, along with other closely-related costs like employee benefits and
prisoner services.50 They do not include, for example, costs of policing, trials, appeals, or post-conviction
collateral attacks. Thus, these numbers are a mere sample of what prison costs to administer. A recent
estimate from the World Bank puts the American GDP per capita somewhere between $49,000 and
$55,000.51 Thus, the national average administrative cost of imprisoning one American prisoner
approaches 60% of GDP per capita. This figure is astonishing
Social Spending Trade off

Prisons necessitate wealth exploitation of inmates and their support network; profit
incentives will always cause price hikes for necessitates
Nicole Lewis and Beatrix Lockwood, Lewis is a CUNY graduate from its School of journalism and
Lockwood is a reporter at The Marshall Project, December 17, 2019, “The Hidden Cost of
Incarceration”, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/12/17/the-hidden-cost-of-incarceration,
In many facilities, basic items are sold by private vendors, often with substantial markups or added
service fees. Over the years, the cost to families has increased as prisons and jails across the country
increasingly outsource many of the basic functions of running a correctional facility to private
companies. Hayes puts on her ex-husband's favorite shoes at her home as she prepares to go visit him at The Louisiana State Penitentiary.
It is a trend that has accelerated since the 2008 recession, as state legislatures have looked for ways to
bring down the rising cost of incarceration, according to Hadar Aviram, a professor at the University of California, Hastings
College of the Law. “Public prisons are public only by name,” she said. “These days, you pay for everything in prison. ”Prison officials often say
the switch to private vendors makes the prisons more secure and prevents contraband from being smuggled in with outside food or gifts.
Many families say they’re now paying more for the same goods they used to be able to purchase on
their own. “Back in the day, we could buy underwear and tennis shoes and jeans and have it shipped
directly to the inmate,” said Hayes, who is 50. Now, she said, she has to go through approved
vendors.“The price is jacked up on everything,” she said. Over the two years since the couple reconnected
after a 12-year separation, Hayes estimates that she has spent upward of $10,000 supporting him in
prison. Her ex-husband is serving a life sentence for aggravated rape, so the costs of staying in touch could extend for many years.
Incarceration regardless of frequency, will significantly decrease wealth accumulation

and uniquely hurts people of color
Meredith Booker, Booker is a writer for the Prison Policy Initiative, April 26, 2016, “The Crippling
Effect of Incarceration on Wealth”, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2016/04/26/wealth/ (accessed:
04/08/20
Once an individual is incarcerated, they often lose what little wealth they have and are left with little to
no wealth accumulation. Once released, that individual may make gains in wealth accumulation, but
they will always remain at significantly lower levels of wealth compared to those who are never
incarcerated in their lifetime. This is consistent with our previous conclusions about differences in pre-incarceration incomes in our report
Prisons of Poverty: Uncovering the pre-incarceration incomes of the imprisoned, where we use a little-used government dataset to find that
pre-incarceration incomes of incarcerated people are 41% lower than those of people of similar ages on the outside. Looking
at the
same trend disaggregated by race adds another layer of detail to the story . In a press release, author Khaing Zaw
says, “When it comes to wealth and incarceration outcomes, the disadvantages of being black or Hispanic
compound the disadvantages of poverty.” White men that never experience incarceration will
accumulate the most wealth compared to Black and Hispanic men regardless of incarceration status. At
the other end of the spectrum, Black men that are incarcerated at some point in their lifetime
accumulate less wealth compared to all other groups regardless of incarceration status. Later in life, this
disparity endures. As the survey respondents got older, white men who experienced incarceration
reported higher levels of wealth compared to Black men who had never experienced incarceration.
Prison funding trades off with social spending—particularly education

Michelle Chen, History Graduate student at CUNY Graduate Center, April 08, 2011, “States’ Shameful
Trade-Off: Putting Prisons over Public Schools”,
https://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/7161/states_shameful_trade-
off_putting_prisons_over_public_schools/ (accessed: 04/05/20)
The state lawmakers who are pushing hard for "austerity" aren't so much enemies of government
“waste” as they are expert money launderers in the business of politics. Education is at the center of
their shell game. Across the country, conservatives are fixated on a curious formula for deficit reduction:
wholesale disinvestment in schools (coupled with erosion of union rights and working conditions for teachers), plus a race to
pump tax breaks for the rich and stifle health care for the poor. And in many areas, one sacred cow continues to fatten
while students starve: our bloated prison system. This week will bring more showdowns over public
sector budget cuts in states like Florida and Ohio, hammering down especially hard on education. The
Associated Press reports that the evaporation of federal stimulus funds is pushing schools toward a
funding “cliff.” Adding insult to injury,some state governments appear to have funded certain programs
by stealing stimulus funds intended for education, “thus avoiding cuts elsewhere in their budgets.”
Solvency
Embracing the possibilities of the future is key to realizing prison abolition: prison
abolition failed in the 70s due to a lack of faith in the struggle
Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd, Dubler is an assistant professor of religion at the University of
Rochester and Lloyd is an associate professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University,
May 19, 2018, “Think prison abolition in America is impossible? It once felt inevitable”,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/19/prison-abolition-america-impossible-
inevitable (accessed: 04/08/20)
To end mass incarceration, we need prison abolition. Impossible? Not so long ago, prison abolition felt
almost inevitable. Juan G Morales belonged to the 1970s crush of incarcerated men and women who
asked the courts to ease the harshness of prison life . Morales was incarcerated in the state of Wisconsin, and his jailers were
not allowing him to exchange letters with his lover. He brought an action in federal court against the state in order for
his right to correspondence to be restored. His case came to Judge James E Doyle, father to a future
governor. Doyle sided with Morales, and the language he employed says much about how the prison system was viewed by
mainstream America at that time: “I am persuaded that the institution of prison probably must end. In many
respects it is as intolerable within the United States as was the institution of slavery, equally brutalizing
to all involved, equally toxic to the social system, equally subversive of the brotherhood of man, even
more costly by some standards, and probably less rational.” In the years after Doyle wrote, the prison population soared,
imprisonment became a predominant feature of American life, and a world without prisons became even more difficult to imagine. Yet
Doyle’s words reflected a very real sense common to the early 1970s that the end of the prison could be
quite near. The Norwegian criminologist and prison abolitionist Thomas Mathiesen describes this
historical moment – not only in the US, but across the Atlantic as well – as the only time in the history of
the prison when prison abolition was a real possibility . We are reaching another such moment, and we
ought to learn from what went wrong nearly a half-century ago . Among the reasons the protean
movement to abolish prisons fizzled was its refusal to speak in plainly moral terms. In foregrounding
pragmatic reforms, 1970s prison reformers turned away from the rich abolitionist heritage and failed to
generate the force necessary for effecting radical social change .
Abolitionism doesn’t’ only end with prisons; the aff is key to creating a new system
that restores and protects communities
Rachel Kushner, Kusher is a writer for The New York Times, April 17, 2019, “Is Prison Necessary? Ruth
Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind”, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-
abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html (accessed: 04/08/20)
Which isn’t to say that Gilmore and other abolitionists are opposed to all reforms. “It’s
obvious that the system won’t
disappear overnight,” Gilmore told me. “No abolitionist thinks that will be the case .” But she finds First Step, like
many state reforms it mimics, not just minor but exclusionary, on account of wording in the bill that will make it even harder for some to get
relief. (Those convicted of most higher-level offenses, for example, are ineligible for earned-time credits, a new category created under First
Step.) “So many of these proposed remedies don’t end up diminishing the system. They regard the system
as something that can be fixed by removing and replacing a few elements.” For Gilmore, debates over
which individuals to let out of prison accept prison as a given. To her, this is not just a moral error but a
practical one, if the goal is to actually end mass incarceration. Instead of trying to fix the carceral system,
she is focused on policy work to reduce its scope and footprint by stopping new prison construction and
closing prisons and jails one facility at a time, with painstaking grass-roots organizing and demands that state funding benefit,
rather than punish, vulnerable communities. “What I love about abolition,” the legal scholar and author James Forman Jr. told me,
“and now use in my own thinking — and when I identify myself as an abolitionist, this is what I have in mind — is the idea that you
imagine a world without prisons, and then you work to try to build that world.” Forman came late, he said, to
abolitionist thinking. He was on tour for his 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Locking Up Our Own,” which documents the history of mass
incarceration and the inadvertent roles that black political leaders played, when a woman asked him why he didn’t use the word “abolition” in
his arguments, which, to her, sounded so abolitionist. The question led Forman to engage seriously with the concept. “I
feel like a
movement to end mass incarceration and replace it with a system that actually restores and protects
communities will never succeed without abolitionists. Because people will make compromises and
sacrifices, and they’ll lose the vision. They’ll start to think things are huge victories, when they’re tiny.
And so, to me, abolition is essential.”
Be skeptical of their links: the struggle for prison abolition is intersectional and
therefore popular
Ruth Wilson Gilmore and James Kilgore, Gilmore is a professor of geography at CUNY Graduate
Center and Kilgore is a media justice fellow at media justice, June 19, 2019, “The Case for Abolition”,
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/06/19/the-case-for-abolition (accessed: 04/05/20)
Authors of reforms claim expertise about what “the public” will accept, as if it were a single entity that’s
already made its mind about everything. But people frequently broaden their commitments because
they learn about, and link to, previously unfamiliar struggles. These are not the public experts invoke but
a public resolved to pursue policies and plans to realize their goals . In other words, a public is made. How do we know?
Experience. To forge such a public, for decades abolitionists have been doing everything we can imagine to
bring about change. We stand on the frontlines to oppose all forms of state violence. We work with
communities sited for prisons to fight expansion, while organizing to secure decent wages and housing
in the regional economy. We work with Republican ranchers worried about the water table, and with
undocumented agricultural workers vulnerable to pesticides and Immigration and Customs
Enforcement. We work with city managers and residents of prison towns disappointed in lockups touted
for economic development that never deliver . We document the cultural and environmental
degradation resulting from cities of incarcerated people deprived of their civil rights , write handbooks and
advise rural and regional development experts on alternative projects. We work with unions, on strategy to develop long-
term goals for job protection, environmental justice and membership growth—especially because half
the U.S. labor force has some record of criminalization that makes employment insecure and depresses
wages.
We must have a fundamental rejection of the prison industrial complex; any reform
sanitizes dehumanization
Ruth Wilson Gilmore and James Kilgore, Gilmore is a professor of geography at CUNY Graduate
Center and Kilgore is a media justice fellow at media justice, June 19, 2019, “The Case for Abolition”,
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/06/19/the-case-for-abolition (accessed: 04/05/20)
Our belief in abolition is first and foremost philosophical. It grew from watching, experiencing, and
opposing decades of reliance on concrete and steel cages as catch-all solutions to social problems. We
want a society that centers freedom and justice instead of profit and punishment . Locking people up
does not provide adequate housing, proper mental health treatment or living wage jobs, nor does it make us safe in
any other way. Moreover, reforms that embody electronic monitoring or other forms of e-carceration,
build gender-responsive jails or broaden the scope of parole and other forms of carceral control only
deepen our conviction that fundamental change is the only path . While we value philosophy, we have also grown
weary of worn-out debates over the feasibility of a world without prisons and whether we would like to abolish prison for Dylann Roof. We
prefer to talk about what we do.
Prison abolitionist ethics are key to empower social institutions that render
incarceration unnecessary
Criminal punishment organized around incarceration in the United States, as well as incarceration’s
corollaries (punitive policing, arrest, probation, civil commitment, parole), subject human beings to extreme violence,
dehumanization, racialized degradation and indignity, such that prison abolition ought to register as a more compelling call
than it has to date.66 At the same time, the use of imprisonment as a means of achieving collective peace and
security, as well as meaningful retributive justice, ought to be called into serious doubt .67 Prison
abolition seeks to end the use of punitive policing and imprisonment as the primary means of addressing
what are essentially social, economic, and political problems. Abolition aims at dramatically reducing
reliance on incarceration and building the social institutions and conceptual frameworks that would
render incarceration unnecessary. Abolition is not a simple call for an immediate opening or tearing
down of all prison walls, but entails an array of alternative nonpenal regulatory frameworks and an ethic
that recognizes the violence, dehumanization, and moral wrong inherent in any act of caging or chaining
—or otherwise confining and controlling by penal force—human beings. This holds true even in the case of those
few people who may pose a severe, demonstrated danger to others and so, as the lesser of two evils, must be convicted and the threat they
pose contained.
The aff is key: only a total abolish of prisons solve

This Part explores the entrenched structural problems that recommend abolition, along with its theoretical, legal, and political contours and
implications. I will first examine the violence, dehumanization, and racial subordination inherent in the basic structural parameters of
imprisonment and punitive policing in the United States that motivate the turn toward an abolitionist framework. One
problem with
more moderate reformist accounts (of which most criminal legal scholarship consists) is that they fail to identify the
basic structural terms of punitive policing and incarceration in the U.S. that render these practices
fundamentally indefensible, and instead assume that the problematic features of these practices are
more peripheral and subject to elimination or thoroughgoing change. As a consequence, moderate
reformist accounts are limited to recommending only minor revisions to the fundamental structures of
incarceration and punitive policing practices—which are not susceptible to meaningful change without far
more fundamental reconstitution.69
AT: Crime
The prison industrial complex costs a $1 trillion and is unnecessary; punishment policy
is only 15% effective and crime rates are at historic lows
William R. Kelly, Kelly is a professor at University of Texas at Austin, April 25, 2018, “Why Punishment
Doesn’t Reduce Crime”, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/crime-and-
punishment/201804/why-punishment-doesnt-reduce-crime (accessed: 04/06/20)
We have spent $1 trillion on tough on crime and $1 trillion on the war on drugs, and these figures do not
include any of the collateral social and economic costs of crime, the costs of criminal victimization, and a
variety of other consequences. The total price tag, including criminal justice, drug control and the
collateral costs, is estimated at $1 trillion per year. So, what is our return on investment ? What have we
achieved with our nearly unilateral focus on punishment? There are several ways of looking at it, but perhaps the most direct is recidivism or
reoffending. The overall recidivism rate is about 70%, meaning 70% of offenders are rearrested within five
years of being released from the criminal justice system. It is important to note that recidivism is a
conservative measure since it only counts those who have been caught. article continues after advertisement
Another way of assessing return on investment is to statistically estimate the impact of punishment policy on crime declines. Crime in the
U.S. dropped dramatically during the late 1990s and has continued a downward trend, producing
historically low crime rates today. Surely that is a result of our massive expansion of prisons and jails.
Unfortunately, this is not good news either. The scientific consensus is that between 10% and 15% of the
crime decline in the U.S. is attributable to punishment policy.
Aff Qualified Immunity

This affirmative has the Supreme Court reform the legal doctrine of qualified immunity to restrict use for
public officials. While qualified immunity exists for all public officials, law enforcement officers and
prosecutors are of primary concern. Qualified immunity allows public officials to execute their jobs with
special protections from lawsuits they might be subject to. While this doctrine does have some value in
channeling civil accountability to the government itself rather than individual officials doing their jobs, it
always creates an excessively high burden for victims of police and prosecutor abuse to prove their
claims and get restitution. The Aff argues that the lack of accountability undermines democracy,
perpetuates racism, and violates civil rights. While a reclarification of qualified immunity’s parameters
by the Supreme Court is the most common suggested path of reform, there is extensive disagreement
about whether the courts or Congress should act which creates quality ground for agent counterplans.
The questions of how changes in immunity would change official conduct and affect the court’s ability to
weigh in on other issues are also central to this debate.
1AC
Plan—The Supreme Court of the United States should substantially restrict the “clearly
established” and “excessive reasonableness” standards in the application of qualified
immunity for public officials.
Advantage 1 Civil Rights

Qualified immunity creates an imbalance of civil rights that is a threat to marginalized
communities
Emma Andersson. Senior Staff Attorney at ACLU. APRIL 9, 2018 . The Supreme Court Gives
Police a Green Light to ‘Shoot First and Think Later’ https://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-
reform/reforming-police/supreme-court-gives-police-green-light-shoot-first-and (accessed April 19,
2020)
Qualified immunity has become a misnomer. It should be called what it is, as Justices Sotomayor and
Ginsberg did in their dissent from last week’s opinion. It is an “absolute shield.” This absolute shield
subverts the basic principles of our legal system. It’s supposed to be harder to hold someone criminally
liable than civilly liable, but is it? If you unknowingly commit a crime and the government wants to put
you in prison for it, you can’t use your ignorance of the law as a defense. But if an officer makes “a
mistake of law” by unreasonably gunning you down in your own backyard, that officer gets to use the
defense of qualified immunity to avoid paying damages in a civil case. It doesn’t take a law degree to
know this is absurd. Furthermore, it turns out the doctrine of qualified immunity has no legal basis in the
first place — the courts simply made it up. So how can it possibly be justified? The Supreme Court has
told us that the doctrine “balances two important interests—the need to hold public officials
accountable when they exercise power irresponsibly and the need to shield officials from harassment,
distraction, and liability when they perform their duties reasonably.” That maybe sounds okay in theory,
but Hughes’ case is just the latest to show us that in reality, there is no balance and there is no
accountability. The court’s qualified immunity doctrine contributes to the deep deficit in police
accountability throughout our country, which disproportionately threatens and ends the lives of people
of color, people with mental or physical disabilities, and members of LGBTQ communities. We are
collectively holding law enforcement to the lowest standard of performance, when we should instead
incentivize better, smarter, and more humane policing. The result of the court’s decision is clear. Our
right to not be unreasonably shot by the police is less protected, and therefore less important, than the
court’s interest in shielding police officers from civil liability for their abuses of authority.
“Clearly established” standard leads to blatant violations of civil rights

MATT FORD. Writer at New Republic. September 12, 2018. Should Cops Be Immune From
Lawsuits? https://newrepublic.com/article/151168/legal-revolt-qualified-immunity (accessed April 19,
2020)
In October 2013, two

investigators from the Texas Medical Board arrived at Dr. Joseph Zadeh’s medical
practice in suburban Dallas with an administrative subpoena for the medical records of more than a
dozen patients, joined by two DEA agents. When a medical assistant told them that she would need to
contact a lawyer first, they said Zadeh’s license was at risk if she didn’t comply immediately. She backed
down, and they rooted through Zadeh’s patient files for evidence of wrongdoing—all without a proper
search warrant. Zadeh and an unnamed patient thus sued the board in federal court. The Fifth Circuit
Court of Appeals agreed that the board had violated Zadeh’s rights with the warrantless search. But it
ruled against him nonetheless. The court found that under the Supreme Court’s precedents on qualified
immunity, a legal privilege for certain types of government officials, the violation of Zadeh’s rights
wasn’t “clearly established” under existing legal precedents . The ruling drew an unusual concurring opinion from Judge
Don Willett, a widely respected conservative jurist who is on President Donald Trump’s original shortlist for Supreme Court nominees. Willett
labeled his concurrence as “dubitante,” a Latin legal phrase used by judges to signal misgivings about their own rulings. He argued not that his
court had incorrectly applied Supreme Court precedents, but that those precedents are the real problem. “ The court is right about Dr.
Zadeh’s rights: They were violated,” he wrote. “But owing to a legal deus ex machina—the ‘clearly
established law’ prong of qualified-immunity analysis—the violation eludes vindication.” Willett’s
opinion adds to the growing criticism of how the Supreme Court has shaped qualified immunity over the
years. This burgeoning pushback includes two of the high court’s justices, and an unlikely pair at that: conservative Clarence Thomas, who has
signaled his displeasure on originalist grounds, and liberal Sonia Sotomayor, who has objected to the doctrine’s tendency to protect public
officials in cases of clear wrongdoing. Qualified immunity isn’t in mortal danger yet, but the ranks of powerful opponents to it are growing. If
the doctrine is eventually weakened or even eliminated, it would expand citizens’ right to seek remedies
against public officials, including police officers, who have wronged them—and could prevent future
constitutional wrongs.
The excessive reasonableness standard excuses gross violations of rights

Erwin Chemerinsky. Writer at New York Times. August 26, 2014 . How the Supreme Court
Protects Bad Cops. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/opinion/how-the-supreme-court-protects-
bad-cops.html (accessed April 19, 2020)
When there is not absolute immunity, police officers are still protected by qualified immunity" when
sued for monetary damages. The Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia in 2011, ruled
that a government officer can be held liable only if "every reasonable official" would have known that
his conduct was unlawful. For example, the officer who shot Michael Brown can be held liable only if
every reasonable officer would have known that the shooting constituted the use of excessive force and
was not self defense. The Supreme Court has used this doctrine in recent years to deny damages to an
eighth-grade girl who was strip-searched by school officials on suspicion that she had prescription-
strength ibuprofen. It has also used it to deny damages to a man who, under a material-witness warrant,
was held in a maximum-security prison for 16 days and on supervised release for 14 months, even
though the government had no intention of using him as a material witness or even probable cause to
arrest him. In each instance, the court stressed that the government officer could not be held liable,
even though the Constitution had clearly been violated. Taken together, these rulings have a powerful
effect. They mean that the officer who shot Michael Brown and the City of Ferguson will most likely
never be held accountable in court. How many more deaths and how many more riots will it take before
the Supreme Court changes course?
Tort lawsuits against public officials are key to protect constitutional rights
TE O’Brien. Professor at University of Texas. February 2004 . The Paradox of Qualified
Immunity: How a Mechanical Application of the Objective Legal Reasonableness Test Can Undermine
the Goal of Qualified Immunity. https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-585279591/the-paradox-
of-qualified-immunity-how-a-mechanical (accessed April 19, 2020)
The objective legal reasonableness test is an attempt to balance the competing interests of protecting
and vindicating the rights of citizens, on the one hand, and defending officials who are required to
exercise their discretion and the related public interest in encouraging the vigorous exercise of official
authority, on the other. n127 The Fifth Circuit's decision to grant Officer Rivera's motion for summary
judgment based on the defense of qualified immunity failed to serve this stated purpose. First, the Petta
children had an interest in being made whole from the severe psychological damage caused by Officer
Rivera's malicious and unconstitutional actions. They could not recover from the State of Texas or
Officer Rivera, in his official capacity, due to the barrier of state sovereign immunity. n128 Injunctive or
declaratory relief also would have been useless because the children had already been injured. For the
Petta children, it was damages recovered through a 1983 action or nothing, and the Fifth Circuit's
decision foreclosed this measure of recovery. Secondly, the claims filed against Officer Rivera clearly
were not frivolous, and the social costs of litigating those claims would have been well worth paying.
Specifically, the monetary cost of trying the lawsuit would have been minimal compared to the enduring
psychological damages incurred by the Petta children, and the diversion of Officer Rivera's energies
[*784] would have been justified by the importance of the constitutional rights he allegedly violated.
Moreover, there was no reason to fear that a suit against Officer Rivera would chill the ardor with which
public officials discharge their duties. To the contrary, 1983 and Bivens actions were created with the
hope that they would discourage such abuse of official power. n129 An agent acting in the name of a
government entity possesses a far greater capacity for harm than an individual exercising no authority
other than his own. n130 Consequently, 1983 and Bivens actions are vital to the protection of the
American citizenry. If citizens cannot recover damages through these actions, government officials will
have less incentive to follow the law and citizens' basic rights will be jeopardized. n131
Qualified immunity protects outrageous rights violations both from redress and
constructive scrutiny
Evan Bernick. Assistant Director of the Center for Judicial Engagement at the Institute
for Justice. April 20, 2015. To Hold Police Accountable, Don't Give Them Immunity.
https://fee.org/articles/to-hold-police-accountable-dont-give-them-immunity/ (accessed April 19, 2020)
In practice, qualified immunity provides a near-absolute defense to all but the most outrageous conduct.
The Ninth Circuit has held that throwing a flash-bang grenade “blindly” into a house, injuring a toddler,
isn’t outrageous enough. Just last year, in Plumhoff v. Rickard, the Supreme Court decided that firing 15
bullets at a motorist is a reasonable method to end the driver’s flight from the police. So much for
“every person” “shall be liable.” Qualified immunity shields police misconduct not only from liability but
also from meaningful judicial scrutiny. Private lawsuits are an essential tool in uncovering the truth
about police misconduct. The discovery process can yield information that makes broader policy
changes within police departments possible. At trial, judicial engagement — an impartial, evidence-
based determination of the constitutionality of the officer’s actions — can take place. Qualified
immunity can cut this search for truth short. If qualified immunity is raised as a defense before trial and
the judge denies it, that decision is immediately appealable. If it is granted, discovery stops, and there is
no trial on the merits. What needs to happen? Simply put, qualified immunity has to go.
Qualified immunity chills constructive legal discourse and obfuscates rights

Diana Hassel. Professor at Roger Williams University Law. 1999 . Living a Lie: The Cost of
Qualified Immunity. http://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3402&context=mlr
(accessed April 19, 2020)
The problem with qualified immunity is not so much that the outcomes are sometimes unfair but the
fact that qualified immunity blocks a clear view of the real limitations that exist in civil rights law. Civil
rights law is, in effect, being designed in the dark. Distinctions are being made about the types of cases
that will receive compensation and the types that will not. These distinctions are not articulated as such;
instead, the results are understood to be the result of the [*153] qualified immunity defense. As we
have seen, for example, a procedural complaint in the context of an employment dispute is more likely
to survive the qualified immunity defense than is a complaint about whether a police officer used
excessive force in the arrest of a dangerous suspect. Rather than organizing civil rights law in these
categorical ways, however, qualified immunity makes the civil rights remedial system appear to be
about individual cases and the reasonableness of individual defendants. Current qualified immunity
doctrine serves as a means to diffuse conflict. Without a clear rule that some kinds of civil rights harms
will not be redressed, there is minimal pressure for change. This "hiding of the ball" quality of qualified
immunity is why, in spite of many expressions of dissatisfaction with the system, there had been little
effective rallying for change. The reason the discontent of the participants in this system has not led to a
significant change is that the terms of the debate are defined by the immunity system rather than by the
fundamental question of the extent of rights and liabilities in civil rights actions. The civil rights remedial
scheme organized around qualified immunity thus has an inherently self-preserving or stabilizing quality.
It allows for tinkering at the margins, but fundamental recasting of the terms of the debate is unlikely.
My assertion that qualified immunity has a camouflaging effect on civil rights law is supported by a large
body of scholarship that explores legal regimes that define reality in a way that limits the ability of the
participants in the system to change it.
Rights are an absolute good and access util framing

Human Rights Watch. 1997. An Introduction to the Human Rights Movement. http://www.hrweb.org/intro.html.
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged
the conscience of [hu]mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of
speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people, Whereas it is
essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that
human rights should be protected by the rule of law... These are the second and third paragraphs of the
preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on
December 10, 1948 without a dissenting vote. It is the first multinational declaration mentioning human rights by name, and the human rights
movement has largely adopted it as a charter. I'm quoting them here because it
states as well or better than anything I've read what
human rights are and why they are important. The United Nations Charter, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and
UN Human Rights convenants were written and implemented in the aftermath of the Holocaust , revelations
coming from the Nuremberg war crimes trials, the Bataan Death March, the atomic bomb, and other horrors smaller in magnitude but not in
impact on the individuals they affected. A
whole lot of people in a number of countries had a crisis of conscience
and found they could no longer look the other way while tyrants jailed, tortured, and killed their
neighbors. In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Communist. Then they came
for the Jews, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak up, because I was not
a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak up, because I was not a Catholic. Then they came for me... and by that
time, there was no one to speak up for anyone. -- Martin Niemoeller, Pastor, German Evangelical (Lutheran) Church Many also realized
that advances in technology and changes in social structures had rendered war a threat to the
continued existence of the human race. Large numbers of people in many countries lived under the control
of tyrants, having no recourse but war to relieve often intolerable living conditions. Unless some way was
found to relieve the lot of these people, they could revolt and become the catalyst for another wide-scale
and possibly nuclear war. For perhaps the first time, representatives from the majority of governments in the world
came to the conclusion that basic human rights must be protected , not only for the sake of the individuals and
countries involved, but to preserve the human race.
Advantage 2 Accountability
Qualified immunity undermines the basic premise of judicial oversight of public
officials
Joanna C. Schwartz. Professor at UCLA. February 20, 2018 . The Case Against Qualified
Immunity. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3127031 (accessed April 19, 2020)
How can courts tell when a violation of constitutional rights is justified enough to overcome qualified
immunity? The Supreme Court tells lower courts to determine whether the violation ran counter to
“clearly established law,” a term that the justices interpret in the narrowest possible ways. Willett
signaled that he found the premise absurd because it effectively requires that there be precedent for
every imaginable constitutional violation, otherwise the offender can’t be held responsible. “To some
observers, qualified immunity smacks of unqualified impunity, letting public officials duck consequences
for bad behavior—no matter how palpably unreasonable—as long as they were the first to behave
badly,” he wrote. “Merely proving a constitutional deprivation doesn’t cut it; plaintiffs must cite
functionally identical precedent that places the legal question ‘beyond debate’ to ‘every’ reasonable
officer.” Qualified immunity’s impact radiates beyond each individual case that it thwarts. The doctrine’s
flaws might be mitigated if the Supreme Court provided better guidance on what amounts to “clearly
established law,” for example. But another problem, Willett explained, is that courts are no longer
required to determine whether the act in question actually violated the Constitution in qualified-
immunity cases. Instead, judges can simply cite the lack of existing precedent and end the inquiry there.
The result is “constitutional stagnation” for American law as well as a Catch-22 for would-be litigants, he
concluded. “Plaintiffs must produce precedent even as fewer courts are producing precedent,” Willett
wrote. “Important constitutional questions go unanswered precisely because those questions are yet
unanswered. Courts then rely on that judicial silence to conclude there’s no equivalent case on the
books. No precedent = no clearly established law = no liability. An Escherian Stairwell. Heads defendants
win, tails plaintiffs lose.”
The Courts must be the actor to reform qualified immunity, not Congress
Scott Michelman. Professor at Harvard Law. 2018. The Branch Best Qualified To Abolish
Immunity. http://ndlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/7-Michelman.pdf (accessed April 19,
2020)
I take as a starting point the many critiques of qualified immunity and then turn to the question of
whether courts should wait for Congress to reform this problematic doctrine. Do considerations of stare
decisis or institutional competence counsel in favor in leaving to Congress the task of reform? I argue
that they do not. In light of the Supreme Court’s persistent and pervasive involvement with the
development of all aspects of modern qualified immunity doctrine, from its content to its scope to the
manner and timing of its assertion and resolution in the courts, qualified immunity has become a special
province of the Court rather than a mere byproduct of statutory interpretation that should be corrected
(if at all) by Congress. The Court is best positioned to understand the effects of the doctrine on the
development of constitutional law. Moreover, the criteria to which the Court traditionally looks in
deciding whether it should overrule a precedent counsel in favor of judicial reform. The factual and legal
foundations underlying qualified immunity have been eroded. The doctrine is unworkable, producing
contradictions and confusions and stultifying the development of constitutional law. Although it is
reasonable to assume that officers and municipal governments rely on the protection of qualified
immunity for the protection of municipal coffers, the Court should not, and in prior cases did not, afford
weight to a reliance interest in violating the Constitution. From Pierson to Pearson, qualified immunity is
a mess of the Supreme Court’s making, and the Supreme Court should clean it up.
Judicial oversight is key to genuine democracy

WILLIAM REDDINGER. Writer at Lean Liberty. APRIL 10, 2017 . Is Judicial Review
Undemocratic? https://www.learnliberty.org/blog/is-judicial-review-undemocratic/ (accessed April 19,
2020)
Before we get to the answer, a brief refresher in American civics: American

constitutionalism as understood by the
framers of the U.S. Constitution requires that the “will of the people” exists not in any single law passed
by Congress but only in the fundamental law that is the U.S. Constitution. It is the Constitution that
embodies the long-term will of the people. The Constitution established an essentially-popular
government, but the problem with all popular governments is the constant tendency of majorities to
oppress minorities, particularly during temporary periods of political passion. The framers therefore
institutionalized certain checks against the temporary ambition of the majority through such features as the
bicameral legislature (Article I, Sec. 2-3) and the executive veto (Article I, Sec. 7), while respecting the popular foundation of American political
authority in the form of an original ratification of the U.S. Constitution in the people of the several states (Article VII) and of regular revisions to
the fundamental law through amendments to the U.S. Constitution when a supermajority agrees to it (Article V). So,
the Constitution,
taken as a whole, represents the will of the people bound by certain constraints to prevent tyranny of
the majority. Any action of a congressman, president, or Supreme Court justice at odds with the U.S.
Constitution therefore is at odds with the will of the people. We have a word for that: unconstitutional.
What shall we say then of judicial review? If Congress passes an unconstitutional law, that law cannot in
any true sense represent the will of the people, especially if it were to represent only some temporary
spasm of political desire on the part of a majority of the country. This, in any case, was Alexander
Hamilton’s argument in Federalist 78. According to Hamilton, when Congress passes a law that it had no
authority to pass, it effectively “enable[s] the representatives of the people to substitute their will to
that of their constituents.” When this happens, the Supreme Court may lawfully act as “an intermediate
body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the
limits assigned to their authority.” In this way, Hamilton explains the essentially-democratic nature of
the practice of judicial review: “If there should happen to be an irreconcilable variance” between the
Constitution and a law of Congress, “that which has the superior obligation and validity ought of course
to be preferred; or in other words, the constitution ought to be preferred to the statute, the intention of
the people to the intention of their agents.” Rather than being undemocratic, judicial review, rightly
understood and rightly exercised, defends the long-term will of the people .
The US model of democracy is key to global promotion
Francis Fukuyama. Professor at Johns Hopkins. 2007 . Should Democracy Be Promoted or Demoted?
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/washington_quarterly/v031/31.1fukuyama.html 2007 (accessed April 19, 2020)
Restoring the U.S. Example Inspiration for democrats struggling against autocracy and a model for
leaders in new democracies are two U.S. exports now in short supply. Since the beginning of the republic, the U.S.
experiment with democracy has provided hope, ideas, and technologies for others working to build
democratic institutions. Foreign visitors to the United States have been impressed by what they have seen, and U.S. diplomats, religious missionaries,
and businesspeople traveling abroad have inspired others by telling the story of U.S. democracy. In the second half of the twentieth
century, during which the United States developed more intentional means for promoting democracy
abroad, the preservation and advertisement of the U.S. democratic model remained a core instrument.
Global democracy promotion is key to prevent extinction

Larry Diamond. Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. 1995 . Promoting Democracy in the 1990s.
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/di/fr.htm (accessed April 19, 2020)
This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the
stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly powerful international crime syndicates that have made
common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear,
chemical, and
biological weapons continue to proliferate. The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem,
appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or
aggravated by the weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and openness.
LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly
democratic fashion do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to
aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own
populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor
terrorism against one another. They do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another.
Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for
investment. They are more environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the
destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their openness
makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights,
and the rule of law, democracies are the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international
security and prosperity can be built.
Qualified immunity perpetuates the police accountability crisis which turns crime
Jay Schweikert. Writer at CATO. July 11, 2018. Leading Scholars and Most Diverse Amici Ever
Assembled File Briefs Challenging Qualified Immunity. https://www.cato.org/blog/leading-scholars-
most-diverse-amici-ever-assembled-file-briefs-challenging-qualified-immunity (accessed April 19, 2020)
The primary theme of this brief is that our nation is in the midst of a major accountability crisis. The widespread
availability of cell phones has led to large‐scale recording, sharing, and viewing of instances of egregious
police misconduct, yet more often than not that misconduct goes unpunished. Unsurprisingly, public
trust in law enforcement has fallen to record lows. Qualified immunity exacerbates this crisis, because it
regularly denies justice to victims whose constitutional rights are violated, and thus reinforces the sad
truth that law enforcement officers are rarely held accountable, either criminally or civilly. Moreover,
qualified immunity not only hurts the direct victims of misconduct, but law enforcement professionals as
well. Policing is dangerous, difficult work, and officers—most of whom do try to uphold their constitutional obligations—increasingly report
that they cannot effectively carry out their responsibilities without the trust of their communities. Surveys of police officers thus
show strong support for increased transparency and accountability, especially by holding wrongdoing
officers more accountable. Yet continued adherence to qualified immunity ensures that this worthy goal
will never be reached. The Supreme Court is in recess now, and the defendants’ response brief won’t be due until September 10th, so
we’re going to have to wait until early October to find out if the Supreme Court will take the case. But the Court, the legal community, and the
public at large should now be aware that criminal defense lawyers, trial lawyers, public‐interest lawyers of every ideological stripe, criminal‐
justice reform groups, free‐market & limited‐government advocates, and law enforcement professionals themselves all agree on at least one
thing—qualified
immunity is a blight on our legal system, and the time has come to cast off this pernicious,
counter‐productive doctrine.
Qualified immunity encourages over policing and poor training officers so they can
claim ignorance later
Coqui Law Blog. July 28, 2012. Videotaping the Police – The Issue of Qualified Immunity.
http://ccwvslaw.org/item/1040 (accessed April 19, 2020)
How can a police officer become ignorant of citizens’ right to videotape, thus making himself immune to
lawsuit? The most common explanation given by federal judges is that the police agency trained them
wrong. In other words, an officer given improper training by his superiors has qualified immunity and
cannot be sued for false arrest. Consequently, Florida is in the odd situation that a superior police officer
can immunize subordinates from false arrest lawsuit under 42 USC 1983 by (wrongly) teaching them
that they may arrest anyone who videotapes police against their will. The arresting officers are thus
shielded by qualified immunity. The lying superiors can also claim immunity because they did not make
the arrest. The dual immunity applies even if it were proven beyond doubt that the arrest was a
violation of the Consitution. This bizarre situation–that ignorant police officers are immune to false
arrest lawsuit but knowledgeable ones are vulnerable–has resulted in a mad scramble by police agencies
throughout the state to publish training brochures that misstate the law. For example, “Legal Bulletin
20-12” by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office was distributed to police agencies throughout Florida.
It teaches officers that they are within their legal rights to arrest citizens who record them if they
specifically state they do not wish to be recorded. Virtually every sentence of the bulletin is in error:
Protecting officials from scrutiny justifies racist and fascist law enforcement tactics
Ta-Nehisi Coates. Writer at the Atlantic. October 27, 2015 . The Creationist Style of Crime
Control. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/james-comeys-crime-
creationism/412585/ (accessed April 19, 2020)
This is creationism, or crime-fighting on a hunch. But creationism is a respected tradition in America,

extending from “draeptomania” to “they’re raping our women” to “negro cocaine fiends,” to “crack
babies,” to “super-predators,” to “wilding,” to “the knock-out game” and now to “the Ferguson Effect.”
There is something of a trend here—the creationist-style of crime control takes a special and
discriminating interest in black communities. This is our heritage. It worth considering what manner of
America Comey’s creationism would have us build. On Monday a black student in Columbia, South
Carolina, refused to move out of her seat. She was then assaulted by a police officer. The officer then
told the other students in the class, “I’ll put you in jail next.” The officer has been the subject of two
civil-rights suits. In James Comey’s America, the actions of this officer are not recorded, and not
scrutinized. The creationist style of crime control renders the beating of Marlene Pinnock invisible.
Policing on a hunch allows that Walter Scott was resisting arrest and that his killer feared for his life.
Indeed it asserts, implicitly, that Scott’s murder wasn’t the problem, so much as the fact that citizens
saw it. Creationist crime-fighting may take special interest in black communities, but its effects have
always been widespread. James Comey was not simply indicting scrutiny of the police in black
neighborhoods. Police serve on behalf of the public. If that public is discouraged from healthy scrutiny,
who is actually working for whom? A theory of government which tells citizens to invest agents of the
state with the power to mete out lethal violence, but discourages them from holding those officers
accountable is not democracy. It is fascism.
Blatantly racist policies should be rejected every time

Albert Memmi. Professor at University of Paris. 2010 . Naiteire, Racism, Translated. p. 163-165
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably
never achieved. Yet, for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without
concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism ; one must not even let the monster in the house,
especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in
other people, which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree
is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. it is to
agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which man is not himself an outsider relative to someone else?. Racism
illustrates, in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated that is, it illuminates in a certain sense the
entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to
the ultimate passage from animosity to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that
one’s moral conduit only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its
foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the
establishment of a human order, for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral
order, let alone a legislative order, on racism, because racism signifies the exclusion of the other , and
his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language,
racism is ‘the truly capital sin. It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsels respect for the weak, for
orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the
safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing
injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if
one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. Bur no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day,
perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably
smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. “Recall.” says the Bible, “that you were once a stranger in Egypt,”
which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming one again someday.
It is an ethical and a practical appeal—indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In
short, the refusal of racism is the
condition for all theoretical and practical morality because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the
political choice, a just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not
accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope
someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.
Affirmative Files
Over policing extension

There are no reliable mechanisms to hold police accountable
Matt Kaiser. Writer at Huffington Post. April 1, 2015. Police Think They’re Above the Law, and
for Good Reason: Here’s One Way to Change It. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-kaiser/police-
think-theyre-above_b_6573806.html (accessed April 19, 2020)
Take a group made up of predominantly young men, give them military equipment to go after civilians,
train them to use SWAT team tactics, and give them a massive amount of power. It’s dangerous to rely
on The Onion as a source of news, but the fake paper got it right with “Insecure, Frustrated Bully With
Something to Prove Considering a Career in Law Enforcement.” When you look at the arrest of Tillotson,
and the other abuses the country has seen lately, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that cops think
they’re above the law. What’s worse, when you look at what happens to cops who abuse their
authority, it’s hard to say that’s not right. There are three main ways cop face consequences if they step
out of line. First, the can be prosecuted for a crime. This is hard, and only happens to a rare number of
cases. As we saw in Ferguson, local prosecutors have a hard time going against the cops they work with
every day. The federal Department of Justice can step in, but there are a limited number of cases they
can do. Criminal prosecution, in any event, is not the right option to meaningfully curb police abuses. It’ll
weed out the worst of the worst, but it won’t stop the garden variety abuses of authority that corrode
public confidence in the police. Second, public attention can have some effect. Again, this isn’t a
widespread fix, and only a small number of cases will go viral and capture the public’s attention. Third,
and finally, people can sue bad cops. There’s a myth that it’s easy to sue the police. It’s just not. That’s
why many law firms just won’t take a police misconduct case, including mine. The reason - aside from
often having to prove that a cop lied - is that police get to hide behind a doctrine called “qualified
immunity.” What that basically means is that if there’s any viable argument at all that what the cop did
was legal, the cop can’t be held responsible. This is what should change. Lawsuits against cops should be
easier; the doctrine of qualified immunity should be eliminated. If a cop violates someone’s civil rights, a
jury should be able to find them liable.
Police are using qualified immunity to prevent citizens from legally recording them
Radley Balko. Writer at Reason. August 2, 2010. Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse.
http://reason.com/archives/2010/08/02/ignorance-of-the-law-is-no-exc/ (accessed April 19, 2020)
Carlos Miller, who has documented dozens of these incidents on his Photography Is Not a Crime blog,
has twice been prevented by private security and public police from taking video at a Miami Metrorail
station, despite getting assurance from Metrorail Safety and Security Chief Eric Muntan that shooting
non-commercial video on the train and in its stations is perfectly legal. Last month, The Washington Post
catalogued numerous instances where people were arrested, detained, or warned for taking pictures or
video in public despite having the law on their side. The New York Times reported similar incidents,
including one where a man was prevented from taking photos at an Amtrak station for a photography
competition sponsored by Amtrak. What Klein describes as Vorus "escalating the situation" was Vorus
explaining his rights to the cops. Not only are citizens expected to know all of the applicable laws, and to
know how the courts have interpreted those laws, they must also know the sometimes tortured way
that current law enforcement officials are applying those laws and legal decisions in the field. Police
officers, on the other hand, do not have to know any of that. And even when citizens are right on the
law, explaining the law and its proper application when confronted by the police can be interpreted as
"escalating the situation," which then justifies detainment and possible arrest.
Qualified immunity allows police to use illegal wiretaps

Radley Balko. Writer at Reason. August 2, 2010. Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse.
http://reason.com/archives/2010/08/02/ignorance-of-the-law-is-no-exc/ (accessed April 19, 2020)
There have also been recent wiretapping arrests of citizens recording police in Maryland, New
Hampshire, and Oregon, despite the fact that all three states have privacy provisions in their
wiretapping laws, and that no court in the country has ruled that on-duty cops have an expectation of
privacy in public spaces or while performing their official duties. The justification for those arrests is that
the citizens of those states should know that antiquated laws covering the tapping of phone lines also
make it illegal to record a police officer with a cell phone. But just as in Pennsylvania, it is law
enforcement officials themselves who are wrong on the law. And even in the rare case where a wrongful
arrest leads to a cash settlement, it's generally paid for by taxpayers, not the law enforcement officials
who broke the law in the first place.
Police lawsuits extension

Qualified immunity makes excessive force lawsuits impossible
Emma Andersson. Senior Staff Attorney at ACLU. APRIL 9, 2018 . The Supreme Court Gives
Police a Green Light to ‘Shoot First and Think Later’ https://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-
reform/reforming-police/supreme-court-gives-police-green-light-shoot-first-and (accessed April 19,
2020)
The Supreme Court just ruled that a police officer could not be sued for gunning down Amy Hughes. This
has vast implications for law enforcement accountability. The details of the case are as damning as the
decision. Hughes was not suspected of a crime. She was simply standing still, holding a kitchen knife at
her side. The officer gave no warning that he was going to shoot her if she did not comply with his
commands. Moments later, the officer shot her four times. “Shoot first and think later,” according to
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, is what the officer did . As Sotomayor argued in dissent, the court’s decision in Kisela v. Hughes
means that such “palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished .” According to seven of the nine Justices, Hughes’
Fourth Amendment right to not be shot four times in this situation is less protected than the officer’s interest in escaping accountability for his
brazen abuse of authority. According to Justice Sotomayor, “If
this account of [the officer’s] conduct sounds
unreasonable, that is because it was. And yet, the Court ... insulates that conduct from liability under the
doctrine of qualified immunity.” Worse yet, this decision wasn’t a surprise. And it certainly isn’t an
aberration. In fact, it is just the latest in a long line of cases in which the Supreme Court has decimated
our ability to vindicate constitutional rights when government actors overstep. And when law
enforcement oversteps, as was the case with Hughes, the consequences can be devastating . As Professor
William Baude explains, “[t]he doctrine of qualified immunity prevents government agents from being held personally liable for constitutional
violations unless the violation was of ‘clearly established’ law.” If any reasonable judge might have deemed the action permissible, the law is
not “clearly established.” Essentially, if you want to sue a police officer who you think violated your constitutional rights, you first have to
convince the court that what happened to you was so outrageous that no reasonable person could have thought it was okay. This
makes
excessive force cases a steep uphill battle. Such cases turn on the Fourth Amendment — a constitutional
right that is notorious for its murky and context-specific contours. So proving a Fourth Amendment
violation is hard enough on its own. When you have to prove a “clearly established” violation, the task
becomes all but impossible because the Supreme Court keeps raising the bar. This further disempowers
those injured or killed by police, and their surviving families . Let’s examine the evolution of the term. In 1982 it meant
that “a reasonable person would have known” an action was unlawful. Fast forward to 2010 and “clearly established” meant that “every
‘reasonable official would have understood that what he is doing violates that right.’” The difference between “a” and “every” may seem
technical, but, as Dean Chemerinsky and the late Judge Stephen Reinhardt explained, this
change marks the difference between
a measured fair notice standard under which it was possible to hold law enforcement accountable and
what we have now: a system that “protects all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly
violate the law.”
Tort lawsuits against the police are key to public interest legal precedent
TE O’Brien. Professor at University of Texas. February 2004 . The Paradox of Qualified
Immunity: How a Mechanical Application of the Objective Legal Reasonableness Test Can Undermine
the Goal of Qualified Immunity. https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-585279591/the-paradox-
of-qualified-immunity-how-a-mechanical (accessed April 19, 2020)
Finally, by focusing on the results of Officer Rivera's conduct, rather than on the reasonableness of his
conduct, the Fifth Circuit's decision even failed to further the "public interest in encouraging the
vigorous exercise of official authority." n132 In Petta, the Fifth Circuit stated that while Officer Rivera's
actions implicated the Fourth Amendment, "the fortuity of his bullets going astray" n133 removed the
case from constitutional protection. n134 Had the bullets not gone astray, Officer Rivera clearly would
have used excessive force. Taken literally, this approach undermines officials' ability to reasonably
anticipate when their conduct may give rise to liability for damages. For example, assume that both
Officer Rivera and his partner had shot at the Petta vehicle, but only Officer Rivera's partner had caused
the Petta children severe physical as well as psychological harm. Under the Fifth Circuit's approach,
Officer Rivera's claim for qualified immunity would have been granted, while his partner's claim would
have been denied, despite the fact that their actions were identical. Officials cannot reasonably
anticipate when their actions may give rise to liability for damages when their liability turns on an
approach that leads to such inconsistent results. Therefore, the Petta court undermined officials' ability
to reasonably anticipate when their actions may give rise to liability for damages - and, thus, their ability
to assert their authority confidently - by focusing on the results of Officer Rivera's conduct. If the court
instead had focused on the reasonableness of Officer Rivera's conduct, it would have preserved rather
[*785] than undermined officials' ability to anticipate when their conduct may give rise to liability for
damages. Officials could exercise their authority more confidently because they would know that their
liability depended on the reasonableness of their actions, which they can control, rather than on some
fortuitous result. In all, the Fifth Circuit's decision to grant Officer Rivera's motion for summary judgment
based on the defense of qualified immunity failed either to redress and deter a civil rights abuse or to
preserve government stability through the expedient resolution of an insubstantial civil rights claim.
Consequently, the court's decision, reached through a mechanical application of the objective legal
reasonableness test, was anomalous given the test's stated purpose.
Police training extension

Political debates are pushing police to take advantage of legal protections
Joel Valenzuela. Editor at the Desert Lynx. November 2, 2015 . Cops don’t need more legal
immunity. http://libertyupward.com/cops-dont-need-more-legal-immunity/#Zb4pcUWVyu2L8z1s.99
The police accountability movement is not without its enemies. From posts bragging about a routine
traffic stop over a busted headlight not resulting in violence and death to thin blue lines appearing on
curbs to express the territory’s gang-style support for police, the war of ideas over law enforcement
being held to a higher standard of conduct and legal compliance is heating up. Now, those who oppose
insisting that cops not abuse their power and stay within the boundaries of their legal authority have a
new tool to deploy: hate crime legislation. Yes, Red Wing, MN passed a resolution calling for assaults on
police to be classified as a hate crime. Yes, this was done at the urging of the Fraternal Order of Police
union. No, this isn’t at all a good idea. First off, the “war on cops” is nonsense. Police violence is at some
of the lowest levels in living memory. And second, the entire reason for the police accountability
movement’s rise was the historical prevalence of police employing violence or abuse with little to no
oversight, due to courts’ preference to side with the officer in any given situation. Sure enough, when
law enforcement have been forced to wear body cameras, their incidence of violence has tumbled more
than 50%. If anything, these two trends indicate that what’s needed is less, not more, legal immunity for
police. The fact is, police already have a legal superpower: legitimate use of force. Every manner of
civilian may only employ force in a clear and pressing case of self-defense, while law enforcement
officers are given the ability to employ violence to enforce any number of regulations.
With qualified immunity, the law follows police practices when it should be the other
way around
Liz Sheeny. Writer at Jurisfemme Publications. Winter 2001 . Twelve Good Reasons to
Oppose Granting Criminal Immunity to Police. http://nawl.ca/en/jurisfemme/entry/twelve-good-
reasons-to-oppose-granting-criminal-immunity-to-police (accessed April 19, 2020)
Campbell and Shirose didn't "change" the law; we have known at least since the McDonald Commission
reported on the activities of the RCMP in1981 that police are subject to the criminal law, that there is no
residual common law authority or defence to exempt them and that to determine otherwise would
amount to a serious abrogation of the "rule of law". One wonders what the possible basis in law the
Department of Justice had for apparently advising the RCMP in Campbell and Shirose that their criminal
actions of selling drugs were above the law. In other words, it is not a development in the law that has
created the "crisis". The real crisis may perhaps be for the Department of Justice, since they seem to
have provided the police with questionable legal advice in Campbell and Shirose. The Ontario Court of
Appeal stated that if they had indeed advised the RCMP that their actions were legal, then this advice
would amount to "an aggravating factor" in the abuse of process argument, because the "full might of
the Crown resources were set upon the task of illegal conduct." Law enforcement itself also seems to be
generating a crisis in response to Campbell and Shirose: it was suggested that officers are loathe to
continue undercover operations unless they receive carte blanche immunity from criminal prosecution.
Qualified immunity compromises police training

John Floyd. Criminal Attorney. September 9, 2018 . Qualified Immunity Smacks of Unqualified
Impunity. https://www.johntfloyd.com/qualified-immunity-smacks-of-unqualified-impunity/ (accessed
April 19, 2020)
Qualified immunity can play this role in constitutional litigation while still being the reason few filed
cases are dismissed. Third, decisions allowing courts to grant qualified immunity without ruling on the
underlying constitutional claims may compromise police departments' policies and trainings. Many law
enforcement agencies' policies and trainings hew closely to Supreme Court and circuit decisions. When
the Supreme Court and circuit courts issue opinions announcing new constitutional rights—or clarifying
that rights do not exist—law enforcement agencies modify their policies and trainings to conform to
those opinions. But when the Supreme Court suggests that only its decisions can clearly establish the
law, and then repeatedly grants qualified immunity without ruling on the underlying constitutional
questions, law enforcement agencies have little in the way of guidance about how to craft their policies.
If qualified immunity doctrine effectively shielded government officials from burdens associated with
litigation in insubstantial cases, one might justify these impositions on government accountability as a
necessary evil. But the Court's qualified immunity jurisprudence threatens to undermine government
accountability in each of these ways without meaningfully achieving its goals of shielding government
defendants from financial exposure and shielding officials from litigation burdens when they act
reasonably. The failure of qualified immunity to achieve its intended policy goals makes its negative
impact on government accountability indefensible.
QI standards bad
Democracy extension
Selective application of rights always creates inequalities
In commenting on the effect of the adoption of equal rights rhetoric on the struggle to end racial
inequality, Kimberle Crenshaw has concluded that "society's adoption of the ambivalent rhetoric of
equal opportunity law has made it that much more difficult for Black people to name their reality. While
equal employment opportunity law has been adopted, the material reality of most Black people has not
improved." n130 In fact, improvement may be hindered by the existence of the equal opportunity law
since it may undermine the political consensus necessary for change. n131 Another commentator has
suggested that "the language of rights undermines efforts to change things by absorbing real demands,
experiences, and concerns into a vacuous and indeterminate discourse. The discourse abstracts real
experience and clouds the ability of those who invoke rights rhetoric to think concretely about real
confrontations and real circumstances." n132 The existence of antidiscrimination law can thus create
the appearance of improvements in racial equality while at the same time not encouraging fundamental
change. n133 The focus on the intent of the actor in equal protection claims rather than the impact on
the person experiencing the discrimination has also been criticized as an inhibitor to the elimination of
racial inequality. n134 By paying exclusive [*155] attention to the blameworthiness of the defendant, an
examination of the impact of the challenged practice on those complaining about it is lost. Fairness to
the defendant, rather than eliminating discriminatory effect, is the central concern. These
commentators suggest that the economic and social reality of race inequality is obscured by the
existence of antidiscrimination law and by the success of a small exceptional group. This current critique
of antidiscrmination law can be used to understand how the qualified immunity standard affects the
system of compensation for constitutional wrongs. One major similarity is the way in which the
existence of Section 1983 siphons off pressure to create some other system of redress. The open-ended
language of the Section 1983 statute seems to promise a powerful remedy against governmental abuse.
As we have seen, qualified immunity severely limits that remedy, but on a case-by-case basis. There is
no general prohibition against certain types of civil rights claims, only the seemingly individualized
application of the qualified immunity defense. The fact that some types of claims are destined to fail
because of the type of claim they are, not because of the particularized behavior of the defendant, is
hidden. Adding to the illusion of a generally available remedy is the spectacular success of a few high
profile cases. A few large recoveries in cases that present particularly compelling facts obscure the
reality of the fruitlessness of most claims. n136
Only domestic policy changes can make democracy promotion effective

Nayef Al-Rodhan. Director at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. 2014 . Reforming
Democracy and the Future of History: To spread Democracy, democratic nations must look inward first.
http://www.theglobalist.com/reforming-democracy-and-the-future-of-history/ (accessed April 19, 2020)
In 1975, a report prepared by the Trilateral Commission, The Crisis of Democracy, signaled the pessimism and defeatism
prevailing in Western democracies at the time about the future and sustainability of democracy . The report
reflected a deep economic downturn, as well as social and political turmoil. This crisis of democracy was tightly connected with concerns about “monopoly
capitalism,” rampant materialism and corruption. Four
decades later, democracy is again in a state of crisis. This comes as
somewhat of a surprise, given that successive waves of democratization have touched every region of
the world over the past 40 years. What is becoming evident now is that an opposite trend has emerged .
Democracy has in fact been in retreat for years, as many repressive governments became even more
repressive, civil liberties were dropped and the military was empowered in many countries. The state of democracy today
In the early 1990’s, the end of the Cold War had brought the revalidation of democracy with great vigour as the most representative form of government. Yet this
exuberance has been counterbalanced with criticism of its failings and shortcomings. Democracies
guarantee political freedom, the rule
of law, human rights and a platform for citizens to engage in the political process. Yet, in practice,
democracies feature numerous inadequacies . Inequality, economic disparity, disempowerment, lack of opportunity, infringements of civil
liberties, ethnic, social and cultural discrimination, corruption and opaque honor titles systems are all present, and apparently not antagonistic to democracies.
Globally, democracies have also acted in ways that suggest an outright renunciation of their principles at home. Irresponsible
conduct, including
unwarranted invasions, toleration of brutality, genocide, misuse of the UN veto system at the expense of global harmony and peace, as well
geopolitical machinations or meddling in the affairs of weaker states — these are all traits that have characterized the foreign conduct of
major democratic states at some point. Inequality alienates Western democracies like the United States, United Kingdom or
France — traditionally considered “advanced democracies” — experience acute inequalities, and even cases of abject poverty. In 2009,
a U.S. government report pointed to the dramatic increase in hunger and food insecurity. About 50 million people were identified as having suffered food insecurity
at some point during the previous year. One in five people in the United Kingdom are also identified as falling below the poverty line. Growing inequality is at times
reinforced by, and an enabler of, shrinking opportunity. This fuels disillusionment and low political participation. As Joseph Stiglitz has noted, “The rich don’t need to
rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security — they can buy all these things for themselves. In the process, they become more
distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may once have had.” Corporate financing of political campaigns have reinforced this, hijacking the
democratic process. It further alienates voters who feel they are excluded from a process that is beyond their control. The role of money in politics is worth singling
out as a major problem with democratic governance. Its effects are truly worrisome, especially when there is little transparency and regulatory mechanisms to limit
the distorting role of money in politics. A check is worth a thousand words The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in the “Citizens United” case openly enshrined
the right of unlimited campaign spending, giving corporations, associations and billionaire donors the freedom to heavily and undemocratically influence
government, perversely as an expression of their free speech. The “super PACs” have blurred the line between the personal and the political. They reinforce and
perpetuate the rotation of policymakers in the U.S. Congress and the executive branch, many of whom are already part of the wealthiest 1% (and, under any
circumstance, remain kept in office by money from the top 1%). Whatever constraints existed to this practice, they were expunged earlier in 2014 when the
Supreme Court opened the door to even more money in politics by striking down the aggregate contribution limits for campaigns. The decision means, in very
practical terms, that one single donor can contribute millions of dollars to political candidates or campaigns and thereby dim the prospect of new entrants, ideas or
challengers to the political arena. Finally, the
sense of disillusionment with democracy in its current form has been
reinforced with disclosures of large-scale government surveillance, violations of privacy and civil
liberties. The claim of sweeping authority over the right to collect personal data is harmful to core
liberties. Overseeing the overseers and keeping states’ need to know in balance with the safeguard of
privacy and civil liberties remains a challenge . Reforming democracy Opinion polls across many continents reflect
this current dissatisfaction with democracy. These forms of disillusionment indicate the need to
embrace a paradigm that goes beyond political freedom and addresses the basic human need for
dignity. Democracy guarantees political freedom and rights. Yet it is not incompatible with marginalization, exclusion, poverty, disempowerment or disrespect.
The triumph of a liberal democratic order as a final destination of history and historical ideas, as once predicted by the “end of history”, needs a serious re-
evaluation. A
greater emphasis on human dignity and a governance model that places dignity at the center
can halt the current disenchantment with democracy. A more feasible paradigm is an approach I call Sustainable History. It focuses
on dignity rather than just freedom. And it allows for reconciling accountable governance with various political cultures.
Independent judicial oversight key to democracy

LINDA A. KLEIN. Writer at ABA Journal. JUNE 1, 2017. Independent courts are vital to
democracy. https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/independent_courts_protect_democracy
Judicial independence is one of the most important principles of the rule of law. It is critical in defending
people from intrusions and overreach by the government and preserving a free and democratic society .
James Madison, when drafting the Constitution, sought to guard against a “tyranny of the majority” by designing a government that was
balanced, with three separate, co-equal branches—including an independent judiciary. Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution protects the
federal judiciary by granting lifetime appointments “during good behavior” and compensation that “shall not be diminished.” This means
federal judges can’t be threatened with the loss of their jobs or a pay cut if they render an unpopular decision. An
independent
judiciary envisions that courts should follow the rule of law, basing their decisions on constitutional
principles, applying relevant statutes and legal precedents to the facts of each case. Unlike politicians,
judges should be immune from public opinion and special interests and must decide cases according to
the law, even when doing so may be unpopular. But the structure set up by our nation’s founders is not
enough to guarantee this very important tenet of our democracy . Public trust is eroded when leaders attack judges’
character and competence. Disagreeing with a decision is one thing. But personal attacks on judges are attacks on our Constitution. The ABA
and the legal community cannot tolerate assaults on the judiciary because they can chip away at the legitimate authority of that branch of
government and give undue influence to the legislative and executive branches. In many jurisdictions, state court judges face elections.
Campaign contributions and interest group pressures during these elections, at the very least, create an appearance of influence and
undermine public confidence in the impartiality of the judiciary. So do political attack ads that mislead the public about the legal process and
the role of judges. Because judges must follow professional codes of conduct that prohibit them from speaking about pending cases, they are
often prevented from publicly defending themselves from attacks. It is therefore up to the bar, the legal community and all citizens to protect
the integrity of the courts. In
his book, On Tyranny, Yale history professor Timothy Snyder studies the ways that
authoritarian regimes came to power and offers lessons to protect against tyranny. He argues that it is
imperative to defend institutions, which include the press, trade unions and, of course, the courts. He
points out that although institutions normally protect people, there are times when institutions cannot
protect themselves and need to be defended. “Judicial independence does not just happen all by itself ,”
associate Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in 2008. “It is tremendously hard to create, and easier than most people imagine
to destroy.” The American Bar Association, often in partnership with state and local bar associations, has long made defending the courts and
preserving judicial independence a priority. The ABA evaluates the professional qualifications of federal judicial nominees, responds to
unwarranted criticism of judges and, through programs like Law Day, provides information about the role of the judiciary in our system of
government. We recently compiled some of the ABA’s many resources at ambar.org/ProtectOurJudiciary. Please share them widely. The ABA
has opposed state and federal legislation that has attempted to punish judges for making unpopular decisions or even from hearing cases that
deal with controversial issues. These are attempts to circumvent the authority of the courts. Because the bar is uniquely qualified for this role, it
will continue its important work to preserve the independence of the judiciary and take action when judges are subjected to attacks. The
legal community must remain diligent and vigilant in their support of institutions, especially the
autonomy of the courts. Judicial independence ensures the rule of law, safeguards our democracy and is
what former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist called “the crown jewel of our system of
government.”
Global democracy is backsliding—it’s key to defend it now

Béla Greskovits. Professor at University of Budapest. April 3, 2015. The Hollowing and
Backsliding of Democracy in East Central Europe.
http://politicalscience.ceu.edu/sites/politicalscience.ceu.hu/files/attachment/event/1113/greskovitsholl
owingandbackslidingofdemocracy-globalpolicy2015.pdf (accessed April 19, 2020)
Focusing on ten East Central European member states of the E uropean Union, this essay explores two major
challenges to the quality and solidity of their democracies. The first of these refers to the general
European problem of declining popular involvement in politics, termed hollowing of democracy (Mair,
2006). The second challenge is captured by the term backsliding, which suggests destabilization or even a
reversal in the direction of democratic development . Backsliding is usually traced to the radicalization of sizeable groups
within the remaining active citizenry, and the weakening loyalty of political elites to democratic principles. While the long-term process of
hollowing of democracy is less spectacular, the news on backsliding often make it to the headlines. Today
analysts and the general
public are alarmed by the frequent disruptive protests against unemployment, poverty and uncertainty stemming from
austerity, and the occasional remarkable showing of radical Right-wing and other anti-system parties at
elections. In several countries of the region , especially those hard hit by the global financial crisis and the Great Recession,
governments have also attempted to gain control over free media and other institutions of democratic
checks and balances, as well as over the activity of civil society organizations.
Race extension
Qualified immunity is anti-black and make trust between black people and police
impossible
Vikram Balasubramanian. Professor at Penn State Law. October 21, 2019 . Qualified
Immunity for Police Officers: An Obstacle to Justice. https://www.pulj.org/the-roundtable/qualified-
immunity-for-police-officers-an-obstacle-to-justice (accessed April 19, 2020)
Though the doctrine poses numerous constitutional questions, this article will focus on the impact of
qualified immunity on trust with communities that are being policed. The stories of violence against
mainly minority bodies raise the question of the legitimacy of the police as an equal arbiter of the laws
of the land. The qualified immunity doctrine essentially, by shielding officers from accountability, pits
the force that is supposed to protect the populous as an antagonist that was sent in to infiltrate
communities and creates an “us versus them” mentality. [4] First, it is important to know that the issue
of police brutality is an issue of anti-blackness. Black Americans are 2.5 times more likely than white
Americans to be killed by the police. [5] In fact, the origins of a state-run police force are drawn from
slave catcher patrols. A study in the Journal of Criminal Justice Education found that “the literature
clearly establishes that a legally sanctioned law enforcement system existed in America before the Civil
War for the express purpose of controlling the slave population and protecting the interests of slave
owners. The similarities between the slave patrols and modern American policing are too salient to
dismiss or ignore.” [6] The slave patrols had no accountability; today, the police don’t either.
Unaccountability is the lynchpin of community mistrust. Today, the issue of police mistrust stems from a
lack of positive community engagement and accountability. In high-crime communities, engagement
with the police is limited to “high rates of incarceration and community supervision, and concentrated
violence.” [7] Due to the qualified immunity doctrine, police officers seem above the law, a paradox
when you consider their function is to enforce the law. Though it may be justified in court by some
arcane legal detail, in communities it looks like the police are allowed to brutalize and kill community
members with no repercussions. The police exist to enforce every law, even though we can undoubtedly
say there are some unjust and racist laws. For example, mandatory sentencing laws repeatedly condemn
people to unfairly harsh prison terms, such as low-level drug possession crimes being answered with
life-long imprisonment. These laws deliberately target black Americans, and the results can be seen in
the statistics: “prosecutors are twice as likely to pursue a mandatory minimum sentence for black
people as for white people charged with the same offense.” [8] On the surface level, the police have
been tasked with disrupting communities and carrying out racist policies. Take, for example, the War on
Drugs. In response to the supposed epidemic of weed and crack, the public pressured the Nixon
administration to do something. Yet, the laws passed pit low-level minority drug dealers and users
against police. Unsurprisingly, these policies have racist origins in the Nixon era. Nixon’s domestic policy
chief admitted as much, saying: “[T]he Nixon White House... knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be
either against the [Vietnam] war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with
marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those
communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them
night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.'' [
Qualified immunity encourages unscrupulous investigations of marginalized

communities
Tristin Hopper. Writer at National Post. December 12, 2014 . Diplomatic Immunity: In Ottawa
there are as many as 6,000 residents who are effectively above the law.
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/diplomatic-immunity-in-ottawa-there-are-as-many-as-
6000-residents-who-are-effectively-above-the-law (accessed April 19, 2020)
We oppose the law proposed by the White Paper because it contemplates a serious derogation of the
"rule of law". It thus strikes a blow against democratic principles of separation of executive and police
powers, the notion that no one is above the law, and the requirement that democratic institutions
operate openly, publicly, and be accountable to the electorate. It is further disconcerting in the extreme
that the proposed legislation states its purpose as to ensure that "public officers may effectively carry
out their law enforcement duties in accordance with the rule of law" [italics added]. This proposal
represents the biggest threat to the civil liberties of Canadians since the invocation of the War Measures
Act in 1970. Unlike that measure, however, this suspension of democratic principles will not bea
temporary but rather an indefinite expansion of police powers. The dramatic expansion of police powers
contemplated here will have an unequal impact on marginalized communities. Data on policing and
prosecutions already identifies systemic racism in the exercise of discretion at almost every turn.
African- Canadian and Aboriginal communities as well as women who work in prostitution, are already
the subject of questionable undercover investigations in specific contexts such as drug trafficking,
smuggling, hunting and fishing enforcement, and prostitution, and we should worry about whether
these communities will be even more severely affected by an expanded police immunity.
Rights innovation extension

Qualified immunity discourages constitutional innovation
April 19, 2020)
As a preliminary matter, qualified immunity does not appear to encourage very much in the way of
constitutional innovation. To the extent courts use qualified immunity to shield government defendants
from liability while expanding constitutional rights moving forward, they must find a constitutional
violation and then grant qualified immunity on the ground that the right was not clearly established. But
several studies of circuit court decisions show that qualified immunity motions are rarely decided in this
manner. The Supreme Court also seems uninterested in constitutional innovation through qualified
immunity—since its 2009 decision in Pearson, it has found a constitutional violation but granted
qualified immunity just two times. Indeed, studies show that courts are far more likely to grant qualified
immunity motions without ruling on the underlying constitutional claim—a practice that increases
constitutional stagnation, not innovation. The fact that courts infrequently find constitutional violations
but grant qualified immunity does not foreclose the possibility that they are dramatically innovating on
the rare occasions that they do. But, in fact, these decisions offer little in the way of constitutional
innovation. In their study of 844 circuit court qualified immunity opinions decided over a three-year
period—encompassing 1,460 separate claims—Aaron Nielson and Christopher Walker identified forty-
three opinions in which circuit courts found one or more constitutional violations but granted qualified
immunity. I reviewed each of these decisions and would characterize none as dramatically expanding
the law. Most offer what could be described as modest or incremental developments of the law,
applying well-established constitutional principles to slightly different factual scenarios. Moreover, there
is no reason to believe that qualified immunity's shield from damages liability is what motivated courts'
decisions to find constitutional violations in these cases. Courts issuing these decisions are just as likely
to be simply applying the law—concluding that defendants violated plaintiffs' constitutional rights but
were entitled to qualified immunity because there was no "controlling authority in their jurisdiction" or
a "consensus of cases of persuasive authority" with facts so closely resembling the instant case that
"existing precedent . . . placed the statutory or constitutional question beyond debate."
Qualified immunity prevents law from evolving to accommodate the public interest
Sam Wright. Writer at Above the Law. November 3, 2015. Want to Fight Police Misconduct?
Reform Qualified Immunity. http://abovethelaw.com/2015/11/want-to-fight-police-misconduct-reform-
qualified-immunity/?show=comments#comments (accessed April 19, 2020)
In order to truly hold police accountable for bad acts, civilians must be able to bring, and win, civil rights
suits themselves — not rely on the Department of Justice, or special prosecutors, or civilian review
boards to hold officers accountable. And in order to both bring and win civil rights suits, civilians need a
level playing field in court. Right now, they don’t have one. Instead, police officers have recourse to the
broad protections of the judicially established doctrine of qualified immunity. Under this doctrine, state
actors are protected from suit even if they’ve violated the law by, say, using excessive force, or
performing an unwarranted body cavity search — as long as their violation was not one of “clearly
established law of which a reasonable officer would be aware.” In other words, if there’s not already a
case where a court has held that an officer’s identical or near-identical conduct rose to the level of a
constitutional violation, there’s a good chance that even an obviously malfeasant officer will avoid
liability — will avoid accountability. To bring about true accountability and change police behavior, this
needs to change. And change should begin with an act of Congress rolling back qualified immunity.
Removing the “clearly established” element of qualified immunity would be a good start — after all,
shouldn’t it be enough to deviate from a basic standard of care, to engage in conduct that a reasonable
officer would know is illegal, without having to show that that conduct’s illegality has already been
clearly established in the courts?
Limits are necessary to make qualified immunity responsive to rights

Chad Howell. Professor at George Mason University. Spring, 2011 . Qualified Discovery:
How Ashcroft v. Iqbal Endangers Discovery when Civil Rights Plaintiffs File Suit Against Government
Officials. http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/gmcvr21&div=9&id=&page=
Iqbal potentially presents an almost insurmountable hurdle for civil rights plaintiffs seeking discovery in
the face of qualified immunity claims. Because the Supreme Court has traditionally been so vague when
dealing with qualified immunity, n169 district courts may look to Iqbal's dicta and find there a blanket
rejection of the "careful-case-management approach" to discovery in these situations. n170 This reading
of Iqbal would severely damage civil rights plaintiffs' ability to prove their claims, and it would hinder the
ability of American citizens to hold high-ranking government officials accountable for their actions . Before
relying on Iqbal's dicta, district courts should carefully consider the balance of the scale between qualified immunity and discovery in the cases
pending before them. If
there are any issues of fact bearing on the qualified immunity defense, those courts
should deny the qualified immunity motion and, relying on Johnson, allow discovery to go forward . n171
On the other hand, district courts should tightly control discovery if they deny a motion as a matter of law and the defendant appeals.
Furthermore, courts should continue to follow Apostol and certify qualified immunity appeals as frivolous if the defendant is using the motion
to disrupt litigation. n172 This course of action would balance nicely with the defendant's ability to raise the qualified immunity defense at
many points during litigation. n173 Conducting
these types of analyses would allow district courts to blunt the
impact of Iqbal's dicta and once again properly balance discovery and qualified immunity . [*321]
Ultimately, the balance between protecting government officials from litigation and allowing plaintiffs'
discovery to vindicate their claims needs to be restored. Qualified immunity weighs too heavily on the
scale, and either a clear Supreme Court decision or congressional legislation is needed to restore that
fragile balance.
There are no avenues for restraining prosecutors other than qualified immunity
reform
Bidish Sarma. Writer at American Constitution Society. July 19, 2016 . Private: After 40
Years, Is It Time to Reconsider Absolute Immunity for Prosecutors?
https://www.acslaw.org/expertforum/after-40-years-is-it-time-to-reconsider-absolute-immunity-for-
prosecutors/ (accessed April 19, 2020)
Two alternatives for redressing prosecutor wrongdoing beyond civil liability that the Court mentioned in
Imbler include disciplinary sanctions issued by state disciplinary bodies and, in extreme cases, criminal
prosecutions. But, the Court’s prediction that these other methods for accountability would suffice looks
like the prediction that Y2K would cause a global technological meltdown. In a word: wrong. Study after
study has documented the ways that professional disciplinary organizations have failed to contribute to
prosecutorial accountability. These studies effectively cover every decade since Imbler came down. A
1987 eye-opening piece revealed that in a six year period disciplinary sanctions for prosecutors who
suppressed evidence numbered in the single digits. In 1999, the Chicago Tribune examined 381 cases in
which courts overturned homicide convictions due to prosecutors concealing evidence or presenting
false testimony and found that none of the prosecutors involved faced criminal sanctions or disbarment.
In 2010, the Northern California Innocence Project’s review found that the California State Bar “publicly
disciplined only one percent of the prosecutors in the 600 cases in which the courts found prosecutorial
misconduct.” Meanwhile, as one scholar-commentator has noted, “[w]hile [some] state penal laws
contemplate the prosecution of prosecutors who violate Brady, they are so infrequently enforced that
the possibility of prosecution barely warrants a mention.” Moreover, one recent article analyzed
disciplinary practices in three New York prosecutors’ offices and found that “Brady and related due
process violations committed by public prosecutors are tolerated by their respective offices, which
almost never discipline or sanction offenders.” A ProPublica analysis further supported these findings,
revealing that only one prosecutor was punished internally by superiors in more than two dozen
instances of prejudicial misconduct and that several, instead, received promotions and raises.
Rights chilling extension

Qualified immunity is applied unevenly and serves a chilling function
Laura Kusisto. Writer at Wall Street Journal. February 5, 2020 . Long Shielded From Lawsuits,
Prosecutors Face Scrutiny After Fake Subpoenas. https://www.wsj.com/articles/long-shielded-from-
lawsuits-prosecutors-face-scrutiny-after-fake-subpoenas-11580914550 (accessed April 19, 2020)
My findings suggest that regional differences in qualified immunity doctrine affect the decisions of
courts and litigants. Defendants in the Southern District of Texas and the Middle District of Florida were
more likely to raise qualified immunity than defendants in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and the
Northern District of California; courts in the Southern District of Texas and the Middle District of Florida
were more likely to grant defendants' qualified immunity motions than were judges in the Eastern
District of Pennsylvania and the Northern District of California; and grants of qualified immunity ended
more cases in the Southern District of Texas and the Middle District of Florida than in the Eastern District
of Pennsylvania and the Northern District of California. But even in the Southern District of Texas-the
district in my dataset most likely to dismiss cases on qualified immunity grounds-just 2.3% of all suits
were dismissed on qualified immunity grounds at the motion to dismiss stage, and 6.9% of all suits were
dismissed at summary judgment on qualified immunity grounds." Unless the vast majority of law
enforcement officer defendants in the Southern District of Texas are "plainly incompetent" or have
"knowingly violate [d] the law,"'1 16 qualified immunity is not playing its expected role even in the
district in my dataset most sympathetic to the defense. Although qualified immunity is rarely the reason
that Section 1983 cases end, there are other ways in which qualified immunity doctrine might influence
the litigation of constitutional claims against law enforcement. For example, qualified immunity may
discourage people from ever filing suit. Available evidence suggests that just 1% of people who believe
they have been harmed by the police file lawsuits against law enforcement."'
Qualified immunity freezes legitimate civil rights lawsuits
April 19, 2020)
First, as
Justice Sotomayor has explained, the Supreme Court's flurry of recent decisions granting qualified
immunity—even to officers who have acted unreasonably or in bad faith—suggest to officers that they
can act with impunity. As Justice Sotomayor has written, an opinion like Kisela "tells officers that they
can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go
unpunished." The Supreme Court's decisions can send this message to police and the public regardless
of how many decisions are dismissed on qualified immunity grounds in the lower courts. Second,
qualified immunity doctrine may discourage some people from bringing cases when their constitutional
rights are violated. The Supreme Court's decisions send the message to plaintiffs' attorneys that even
Section 1983 cases with egregious facts run the risk of dismissal on qualified immunity grounds, and
encourage defense counsel to raise qualified immunity at every turn and immediately appeal district
court decisions denying their motions. These dynamics likely increase the cost, complexity, and delay
associated with litigating Section 1983 cases. Although my research indicates that some attorneys are not dissuaded by the
costs and risks associated with qualified immunity, the doctrine discourages other attorneys from taking cases—particularly cases involving
novel or ill-defined constitutional rights and cases with low damages.
Prison reform add-on

Qualified immunity is stifling prisoner lawsuits
Andrew Cohen. Writer at Brennan Center for Justice. January 7, 2020 . Qualified Immunity
Is the Scourge of Prison Reform. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/qualified-
immunity-scourge-prison-reform (accessed April 19, 2020)
There are many ways to stifle prison reform, too. Unions and lobbyists representing law enforcement and corrections officers
can resist it. Elected officials can evade or delay it. And judges can ignore it by protecting those who make or allow
prisons to be places of deplorable cruelty . The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals surely falls in the latter category. A federal
appeals court with jurisdiction over Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, it has a long history of antipathy
toward prisoners. It also now is brimming with new Trump appointees. On the Friday before Christmas,
it quietly and largely upheld a lower federal court’s ruling against a Texas prisoner named Trent Taylor.
Corrections officers allegedly laughed in his face when he complained about living for days in
unspeakably filthy conditions. The decision stands as a particularly pungent example of the ways in
which the federal courts can stymie prison reform through an overbroad (and in this case absurd)
interpretation of the doctrine of “qualified immunity.” The doctrine shields from civil liability public
officials, like corrections or police officers, who deprive people of their legal rights so long as those rights
were not “clearly established” when they were violated .
Qualified immunity makes prison reform lawsuits impossible

Andrew Cohen. Writer at Brennan Center for Justice. January 7, 2020 . Qualified Immunity
Is the Scourge of Prison Reform. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/qualified-
immunity-scourge-prison-reform (accessed April 19, 2020)
Evidently not. First, the

federal district court judge in Taylor’s case ruled that his cell conditions did not create
a constitutional violation because he was “only” held there for a few days and had shown no evidence of
injury as a result of this ordeal. Imagine spending 87 hours living in your own filth and arguing it’s a short
period. The judge ruled in favor of the nearly four dozen defendants (corrections officers and prison
officials) Taylor had sued, effectively ending his lawsuit far short of the damages and jury trial he was
seeking. Taylor and his attorneys appealed to the Fifth Circuit, which took a different route but ended up
at the same place. In its view, Taylor did allege facts that might establish that his constitutional rights
were violated. There was evidence that the officers had acted with “deliberate indifference” toward him
and had subjected him to a “substantial risk of serious harm.” But, the court ruled, under “qualified
immunity” doctrine Taylor had no “clearly established” right not to be housed for days in his own filth.
Got that? Because no court had ever ruled it unconstitutional to keep a prisoner in such horrible
conditions for “only” a few days, the officers had no reason to consider that he had a right to be free
from such conditions. Because no federal court had “clearly established” such a right, no such right
existed. This Kafkaesque tautology spares corrections officers and their bosses in Texas and around the
rest of the country from having to defend to a jury their deliberate indifference to incarcerated people.
It’s not just the cruel result of the ruling that makes it so galling. It’s the way in which the judges
welcome future constitutional violations.
Ideologically diverse legal scholars agree that qualified immunity violates on the rights
of prisoners
Jay Schweikert. Writer at CATO. July 11, 2018. Leading Scholars and Most Diverse Amici Ever
Assembled File Briefs Challenging Qualified Immunity. https://www.cato.org/blog/leading-scholars-
most-diverse-amici-ever-assembled-file-briefs-challenging-qualified-immunity (accessed April 19, 2020)
I’ve previously blogged about Allah

v. Milling, a case in which a pretrial detainee was kept in extreme solitary
confinement for nearly seven months, for no legitimate reason, and subsequently brought a civil‐rights
lawsuit against the prison officials responsible. Although every single judge in Mr. Allah’s case agreed
that these defendants violated his constitutional rights, a split panel of the Second Circuit said they
could not be held liable, all because there wasn’t any prior case addressing the “particular practice”
used by this prison. Cato filed an amicus brief in support of Mr. Allah’s cert pertition, which explicitly
asks the Supreme Court to reconsider qualified immunity—a judge‐made doctrine, at odds with the text
and history of Section 1983, which regularly allows public officials to escape accountability for this kind
of unlawful misconduct. I also blogged about how, on June 11th, the Supreme Court called for a response to the cert petition,
indicating that the Court has at least some interest in the case. The call for a response also triggered 30 days for additional amicus briefs, and
over the last month, Cato has been coordinating the drafting and filing of two such briefs—one on behalf of a group of leading qualified
immunity scholars (detailing the many recent academic criticisms of the doctrine), and the other on behalf of an incredibly broad range of
fifteen public interest and advocacy groups concerned with civil rights and police accountability. The
interest‐group brief is
especially noteworthy because it is, to my knowledge, the single most ideologically and professionally
diverse amicus brief ever filed in the Supreme Court. The signatories include, for example, the ACLU, the
Institute for Justice, the Second Amendment Foundation, Americans for Prosperity (the Koch brothers’
primary advocacy group), the American Association for Justice (formerly the Association of Trial Lawyers
of America), the Law Enforcement Action Partnership (composed of current and former law‐
enforcement professionals), the Alliance Defending Freedom (a religious‐liberties advocacy group), and
the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers . The brief’s “Statement of Interest” section, after identifying and
describing all of the individual signatories, concludes as follows: The above‐named amici reflect the growing cross‐
ideological consensus that this Court’s qualified immunity doctrine under 42 U.S.C. § 1983
misunderstands that statute and its common‐law backdrop, denies justice to victims of egregious
constitutional violations, and fails to provide accountability for official wrongdoing. This unworkable
doctrine has diminished the public’s trust in government institutions, and it is time for this Court to
revisit qualified immunity. Amici respectfully request that the Court grant certiorari and restore Section
1983’s key role in ensuring that no one remains above the law .
QI unconstitutional
Qualified immunity is unconstitutional
Evan Bernick. Assistant Director of the Center for Judicial Engagement at the Institute
for Justice. April 20, 2015. To Hold Police Accountable, Don't Give Them Immunity.
https://fee.org/articles/to-hold-police-accountable-dont-give-them-immunity/ (accessed April 19, 2020)
The sad fact is that is often effectively impossible to hold police officers accountable for unconstitutional
acts. That fact is attributable in large part to a potent well of unchecked power that many Americans
have never heard of. You will not find it in the Constitution. You will not find it in any federal law. It is a
judge-made doctrine, invented by the Supreme Court. It is called qualified immunity. And if those
charged with enforcing the law are to be kept within the bounds of their rightful authority, it must be
abolished. Section 1983, the federal law that allows citizens to sue for constitutional violations, is broad,
unequivocal, and unambiguous. It says that “every person” who is acting “under color of” law who
causes a “deprivation of any rights… secured by the Constitution and laws” “shall be liable to the party
injured.” Section 1983 embodies a foundational principle of justice that resonates with Americans who
have never heard of Marbury v. Madison: where there is a right, there is a remedy. But for decades, we
have had rights without remedies.
Limitless qualified immunity violates separation of powers

Jason P Rubin. Professor at University of Pennsylvania Law. 2004 . A Constitutional
Education: Use of the Enforcement Clause to limit the unfortunate effect of the qualified immunity
doctrine. http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1338&context=jcl (accessed
April 19, 2020)
The more success § 1983 plaintiffs have, the more the Fourteenth Amendment is being enforced.
Congress has been given the power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment, and by passing ELEO, that is
exactly what it will be doing. In spite of the tight constraints that the Supreme Court has placed upon
Congress's use of Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, ELEO constitutes a use of this power that
must withstand a judicial challenge for three reasons: (1) ELEO complies with the language of Section 5
itself; (2) ELEO does not define or expand the substance of the Fourteenth Amendment's protections,
which was the motivating fear of the Court when it announced the congruence and proportionality test;
and (3) ELEO avoids the shortcomings of other laws that the Court has struck down as not congruent and
proportional. Congress must be permitted to utilize the important power given to it by the Fourteenth
Amendment and enforce the Amendment by supplementing the efforts of those private individuals who
themselves attempt to enforce the Amendment by bringing § 1983 claims. Without Congress's
interjection, the Fourteenth Amendment will continue to go unenforced each time an officer
successfully pleads qualified immunity. Mandating the education of law enforcement officers will
enforce the Fourteenth Amendment through an increase in complete adjudications of § 1983 claims.
The protections of the Fourteenth Amendment are hollow if we accept that an officer's insufficient
knowledge of constitutional law is sufficient to prevent a plaintiff form having his full day in court.
A2 Depolicing/Over-Deterrence
Qualified immunity doesn’t improve official function or protect public officials
Joanna Schwartz. Professor at Yale Law. 2018. How Qualified Immunity Fails.
https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=9263&context=ylj (accessed April 19,
2020)
My study shows that, at least in filed cases, qualified immunity rarely functions as expected. Defendants
could not or did not need to raise qualified immunity in 17.3% of the 1,183 cases in my docket dataset,
either because the cases did not name individual defendants or seek monetary damages, or because the
cases were dismissed sua sponte by the court before the defendants had an opportunity to answer.
Defendants raised qualified immunity in motions to dismiss and motions for judgment on the pleadings
in only 13.9% of the cases in which the defense could be raised."' Courts granted those motions on
qualified immunity grounds 9.1% of the time, but those grants were not always dispositive because
additional claims or defendants remained, or because plaintiffs were given the opportunity to amend. As
a result, just seven of the 1,183 cases in my docket dataset were dismissed at the motion to dismiss
stage on qualified immunity grounds. Qualified immunity more often prevented cases from proceeding
past summary judgment. Defendants were more likely to include qualified immunity in motions for
summary judgment than in motions to dismiss, and courts were more likely to grant summary judgment
motions than motions to dismiss on qualified immunity grounds.112 Moreover, courts of appeals
reversed five denials of summary judgment motions on interlocutory appeal and granted qualified
immunity in these cases. Yet qualified immunity motions at the summary judgment stage rarely shield
government officials from discovery because most summary judgment motions require at least some
depositions or document exchange." And grants of qualified immunity at summary judgment relatively
rarely achieved their goal of protecting government officials from trial such decisions by the district
courts or courts of appeals disposed of plaintiffs' cases just thirty-one times across the five districts in
my study, amounting to just 2.6% of the 1,183 cases in my dataset. Qualified immunity is likely raised
more often at or after trial than my data suggest. But even if many more qualified immunity motions are
made during or after trial, and even if qualified immunity regularly convinces judges and juries to enter
defense verdicts, qualified immunity would still fail to serve its expected role. Qualified immunity
doctrine is intended to shield government officials from burdens associated with litigation and trial. A
grant of qualified immunity entered during or after trial has come too late to shield government officials
from these assumed burdens. My data demonstrate considerable regional differences in the litigation
and adjudication of qualified immunity across the country. Scholars have observed that the federal
circuits interpret qualified immunity standards differently.114
When Canada’s Supreme Court established limits on qualified immunity, it didn’t

result in reduced operational flexibility or frivolous lawsuits
Liz Sheeny. Writer at Jurisfemme Publications. Winter 2001 . Twelve Good Reasons to
Oppose Granting Criminal Immunity to Police. http://nawl.ca/en/jurisfemme/entry/twelve-good-
reasons-to-oppose-granting-criminal-immunity-to-police (accessed April 19, 2020)
Second, there is no evidence of any actual negative effects of Campbell and Shirose. Police and
prosecutors continue to exercise their discretion such that only egregious police criminality is
prosecuted. The Department has no evidence to suggest any surge in criminal charges against police.
The law enforcement representatives acknowledged that they have not experienced an increase in
charging of police after Campbell and Shirose. Moreover, Campbell and Shirose has not resulted in any
increase in the rate at which stays of proceedings are granted on the basis of abuse of process. In fact,
the Supreme Court in Campbell and Shirose said simply that crimes committed by police during an
operation were only one factor, not a determinative factor, to be considered when deciding whether the
prosecution should be stayed on the basis of abuse of process.
Qualified immunity reform won’t cause over-deterrence of police or prosecutors

Evan Bernick. Lecturer at Georgetown Law. September 18, 2018. It’s Time To Limit Qualified Immunity.
https://www.law.georgetown.edu/public-policy-journal/blog/its-time-to-limit-qualified-immunity/
Turning to the pragmatic ground, the Court in Pierson considered that risk-averse officials wouldn’t
energetically discharge their duties if they had to worry about being held civilly accountable for actions taken in good faith, and
that it wouldn’t be fair to them to be thus held accountable.[8] Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote: “A policeman’s lot is not so unhappy that he
must choose between being charged with dereliction of duty if he does not arrest when he has probable cause, and being mulcted in damages
if he does.”[9] These weren’t unreasonable concerns. Raise the expected costs of any activity, you’ll get less of it. Energetic
official
action has benefits as well as costs to members of the public, and raising the costs to officials of
energetic action by increasing the likelihood that it will give rise to litigation and liability threatens to
reduce those benefits by “over-deterring” officials . Further, around the time that Pierson was decided, the Court was
recognizing a number of novel constitutional rights.[10] Should well-intentioned but mistaken officials really be forced to endure the burdens of
discovery and trial on their way to paying out of their own pockets if they fail to predict the progress of a criminal procedure revolution? But
over-deterrence and fairness concerns cannot justify qualified immunity today. Consider the officials for
whom those concerns seem most pressing—ordinary police officers on the beat, doing their best to
keep track of evolving doctrine. Police officers are virtually always indemnified by their employing
municipality—taxpayers foot the bill if they’re held liable for rights-violations .[11] Further, qualified
immunity rarely shields police officers from the burdens of litigation—vanishingly few claims are
dismissed at the motion to dismiss stage or at summary judgment on qualified immunity grounds.[12]
Accordingly, qualified immunity is ill-suited to ensure that, as the Court has put it, the prospect of
liability and litigation will not “dampen the ardor” of officials.[13] Because the Court subsequently held
that the subjective good faith of officials is irrelevant in determining whether qualified immunity can be
invoked,[14] it is doubtful that qualified immunity reliably distinguishes between officials who are trying
their best to abide by the law and those who are not .
Using the fear of depolicing as an excuse to degrade civil rights is fascist

Sam Wright. Writer at Above the Law. November 3, 2015. Want to Fight Police Misconduct?
Reform Qualified Immunity. https://abovethelaw.com/2015/11/want-to-fight-police-misconduct-
reform-qualified-immunity/?rf=1 (accessed April 19, 2020)
Despite the fact that it doesn’t appear to be supported by evidence, FBI Director James Comey gave some credence to the
notion of a “Ferguson effect” in a speech last week at the University of Chicago Law School. He described “a chill wind that has blown
through American law enforcement over the last year” and suggested this “chill wind” was “some part of the explanation” for a putative rise in
violent crimes. The White House disagreed with Comey. And Ta-Nahesi Coates had some things to say about Comey’s remarks, too,
saying they reflected an attitude of non-evidence-based policing — a sort of “creationism, crime-fighting on a hunch.” He linked this
attitude to longstanding racist police practices, and he ended with these words: “A theory of
government which tells citizens to invest agents of the state with the power to mete out lethal violence,
but discourages them from holding those officers accountable is not democracy. It is fascism.” Coates
hits the proverbial nail squarely on its head: again it comes down to accountability . So now let’s take a look at
what Campaign Zero is asking for on police accountability. I think Megan McArdle is probably right that these proposals (and the others in
Campaign Zero’s broader platform) range from “worthy of consideration” to “immediate moral imperative.” But I also think the list is missing
something. As usual, I’ve not buried the lede: that something is qualified immunity reform. In
order to truly hold police
accountable for bad acts, civilians must be able to bring, and win, civil rights suits themselves — not rely
on the Department of Justice, or special prosecutors, or civilian review boards to hold officers
accountable. And in order to both bring and win civil rights suits, civilians need a level playing field in
court. Right now, they don’t have one. Instead, police officers have recourse to the broad protections of
the judicially established doctrine of qualified immunity .
A2 Courts capital/politics
The courts would have a diverse group of amicus briefs to support qualified immunity
reform
Emma Andersson and Jay Schweikert. Fellows at ACLU and CATO. July 11, 2019 .
'Violation eludes vindication': Left/Right Alliance Urges Supreme Court to Reform Police Immunity.
https://takecareblog.com/blog/violation-eludes-vindication-left/right-alliance-urges-supreme-court-to-
reform-police-immunity (accessed April 19, 2020)
Judges, scholars, and organizations across the ideological spectrum agree that qualified immunity
weakens respect for the rule of law by widening the gap between rights and remedies and ensuring that
many constitutional violations will go unredressed. The federal judges who have publicly criticized
qualified immunity now include appointees of every single President since Carter , as well as one of the two
remaining LBJ appointees. As Judge Willett, a Trump appointee to the federal appeals court based in New Orleans, has
lamented, “To some observers, qualified immunity smacks of unqualified impunity, letting public officials
duck consequences for bad behavior—no matter how palpably unreasonable—as long as they were the
first to behave badly.” And on the other end of the spectrum is Democratic Presidential candidate Julián
Castro, whose police reform platform includes a commitment to “Reform and restrict” qualified
immunity. Encouraged by this developing consensus, the Cato Institute and the ACLU are working together to urge the Court to abolish or
narrow qualified immunity and reopen the doors of federal courts to hearing cases about government officials’ abuses of power. When
these abuses go unaddressed, government officials become less likely to respect our rights in the future,
and the Constitution itself is eroded. Earlier this year, Cato Institute filed an amicus brief asking the Court to
reconsider qualified immunity in a case where the doctrine protected a social worker who strip searched
a four-year-old Head Start student without a warrant and without the consent of her parents. These
amicus briefs were filed by Cato Institute, prominent Legal Scholars, and Cross-Ideological Groups
Dedicated to Ensuring Official Accountability, Restoring the Public's Trust in Law Enforcement, and
Promoting the Rule of Law. (The brief in opposition and reply in support of the petition are available here.) If the Court is ready, Mr.
Baxter may present the justices with their best opportunity yet to rethink qualified immunity because the facts of his case are so simple: man
surrenders, cop unleashes dog, and cop gets away with it. The
organizations that support qualified immunity reform
span the ideological spectrum and include: Alliance Defending Freedom, The American Association for
Justice, Americans for Prosperity, The Cause of Action Institute, The Due Process Institute, Freedom
Partners Chamber of Commerce, The Institute for Justice, The Law Enforcement Action Partnership, The
Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center, The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers,
The National Police Accountability Project, Public Justice, Reason Foundation, and Second Amendment
Foundation. Qualified immunity subverts the rule of law, and has decimated the ability to vindicate our
constitutional rights when government actors overstep . It is time for the Court to reconsider this rule and enable all of us
to stand up for the Constitution.
A variety of judicial philosophies come together on the need to reform the clearly
established standard
Emma Andersson and Jay Schweikert. Fellows at ACLU and CATO. July 11, 2019 .
'Violation eludes vindication': Left/Right Alliance Urges Supreme Court to Reform Police Immunity.
https://takecareblog.com/blog/violation-eludes-vindication-left/right-alliance-urges-supreme-court-to-
reform-police-immunity (accessed April 19, 2020)
Alexander Baxter was bitten by a police dog unleashed on him while he was sitting with his hands in the
air, having surrendered to police. Last year, a federal appeals court held that Mr. Baxter cannot sue the
police who perpetrated this unreasonable attack because of a rule called “qualified immunity .” Now, both
the ACLU and the Cato Institute are calling on the Supreme Court to reconsider this rule. As lawyers for the Cato Institute and
the ACLU, we often hold different views about the law. And on the Supreme Court, Justices Sotomayor
and Thomas are not the most common allies. But something that unites all four of us is our criticism of
“qualified immunity”—a judicial doctrine that shields government officials from liability for their misconduct, even when they break the
law. After the Civil War, in order to stop state-sponsored and state-condoned violence against newly freed Black citizens, Congress passed a law
allowing those whose constitutional rights have been violated to sue for damages. But the Supreme Court then created a rule of “qualified
immunity,” that lets government officials off the hook if the law was not “clearly established. In other words, it is entirely possible—and quite
common—for courts to hold that government agents did violate someone’s rights, but that the illegality of their conduct wasn’t sufficiently
obvious for them to be held liable. And in
practice, “clearly established law” is a very hard standard to meet. It
generally requires civil rights plaintiffs to show not just a clear legal rule, but a prior case with
“functionally identical” facts, as one federal court of appeals judge has explained. The practical effect is
that public officials—especially members of law enforcement—routinely get away with unconstitutional
misconduct, simply because no one else has committed that precise kind of misconduct before. Justice
Sotomayor criticizes the doctrine for sending “an alarming signal to police and the public,” that officers
“can shoot first and think later.” Justice Thomas questions qualified immunity because neither the text
of our federal civil rights laws nor the historical common law provide for such immunity. Thomas
believes qualified immunity is an exercise in “substitut[ing] our own policy preferences for the mandates
of Congress.”
Originalists also reject qualified immunity’s constitutionality

2020)
The doctrine is also under siege from originalists, who argue that the court’s purported historical basis
for qualified immunity appears to be groundless. In a 2017 article, University of Chicago law professor
William Baude noted that the court typically advances three justifications for the doctrine . “One is that it
derives from a common law ‘good faith’ defense; another is that it compensates for an earlier putative mistake in broadening the statute; the
third is that it provides ‘fair warning’ to government officials, akin to the rule of lenity,” he wrote. But Baude found those arguments wanting:
“There was no such defense, there was no such mistake, and lenity ought not to apply.” In the 2017 case
Ziglar v. Abbasi, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurring opinion that cited Baude’s work and
echoed his concerns. “Because our analysis is no longer grounded in the common-law backdrop against
which Congress enacted the 1871 Act, we are no longer engaged in ‘interpret[ing] the intent of Congress
in enacting’ the Act,” he wrote, paraphrasing other cases. “Our qualified immunity precedents instead
represent precisely the sort of ‘freewheeling policy choice[s]’ that we have previously disclaimed the
power to make.” He suggested that the court should revisit the issue “in an appropriate case .”
Courts capital doesn’t tradeoff between issues

MARTIN H. REDISH. Professor at Northwestern Law. 1991. CONSTITUTIONAL PERSPECTIVES:
ARTICLE: "IF ANGELS WERE TO GOVERN. 41 Duke L.J. 449 Lexis Nexis. (accessed April 19, 2020)
Choper's assumption that the judiciary's institutional capital is transferable from structural cases to
individual rights cases is no more credible. Common sense should tell us that the public's reaction to
controversial individual rights cases-for example, cases concerning abortion,240 school prayer,241
busing,242 or criminal defendants' rights243- will be based largely, if not exclusively, on the basis of its
feelings concerning those particular issues. It is unreasonable to assume that the public's acceptance or
rejection of these individual rights rulings would somehow be affected by anything the Court says about
wholly unrelated structural issues.
Winners win for the Courts—controversial decisions enhance the court’s legitimacy:
David Law. Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. March 2009 . A Theory of
Judicial Power and Judicial Review. 97 Geo. L.J. 723 Lexis Nexis. (accessed April 19, 2020)
Part IV of this Article discusses a counterintuitive implication of a coordination-based account of judicial power. Conventional
wisdom
suggests that courts secure compliance with their decisions by drawing upon their store of legitimacy,
which is undermined by decisions that are unpopular, controversial, or lack intellectual integrity. n25
Part IV argues that precisely the opposite is true: an unpopular or unpersuasive decision can, in fact,
enhance a court's power in future cases, as long as it is obeyed. Widespread compliance with a decision
that is controversial, unpopular, or unpersuasive serves only to strengthen the widely held expectation
that others comply with judicial decisions. This expectation, in turn, is self-fulfilling : those who expect others to
comply with a court's decisions will find it strategically prudent to comply themselves, and the aggregate result will, in fact, be widespread
compliance. Part IV illustrates these strategic insights--and the Supreme Court's apparent grasp of them--by contrasting [*734] Bush v. Gore
n26 with Brown v. Board of Education n27 and Cooper v. Aaron. n28
A2 Backlog DA
Qualified immunity doesn’t stop backlog
Rory Little. Writer at Scotus Blog. March 23, 2017. Argument analysis: An unsatisfying
argument regarding Fourth Amendment qualified immunity and proximate cause.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2017/03/argument-analysis-unsatisfying-argument-regarding-fourth-
amendment-qualified-immunity-proximate-cause/ (accessed April 19, 2020)
At first, the
Supreme Court said, public officials could cite traditional common-law defenses of good faith
and reasonableness to overcome Section 1983 lawsuits. But the court abandoned those subjective
defenses in 1982 for an objective formulation that survives today, and which the doctrine’s critics are
challenging on multiple fronts. The Supreme Court has justified qualified immunity as a protection for
government officials from the costs of litigation as well as the stresses of discovery and trial. But there
doesn’t appear to be empirical evidence that it actually fulfills this purpose . Joanna Schwartz, a UCLA law professor,
studied how courts applied the doctrine in five federal court districts. In the cases she examined, qualified immunity only led to
dismissal before the discovery phase in 3.2 percent of the cases where it was raised . Schwartz noted that the
low dismissal rate doesn’t reflect qualified immunity’s overall impact. First, she argued, the Supreme Court’s habit of upholding it at almost
every opportunity may send a message to law-enforcement officers that they can act with impunity. Second, she noted that qualified immunity
may act as a deterrent in challenging other violations of constitutional rights. Finally, she warned that the
court’s current approach
could undermine police departments’ ability to properly train officers. “When the Supreme Court
suggests that only its decisions can clearly establish the law, and then repeatedly grants qualified
immunity without ruling on the underlying constitutional questions, law enforcement agencies have
little in the way of guidance about how to craft their policies ,” Schwartz wrote earlier this year. Justice Sonia Sotomayor
in particular has raised concerns about the impact of the court’s qualified-immunity rulings when it comes to police shootings. “As I have
previously noted, this Court routinely displays an unflinching willingness to summarily reverse courts for
wrongly denying officers the protection of qualified immunity but rarely intervenes where courts
wrongly afford officers the benefit of qualified immunity in these same cases ,” she wrote in a dissent in the 2018
case Kisela v. Hughes. “Such a one-sided approach to qualified immunity transforms the doctrine into an
absolute shield for law enforcement officers, gutting the deterrent effect of the Fourth Amendment .”
Qualified immunity does not effectively filter insubstantial cases

JOANNA SCHWARTZ. Writer at Reason. June 13 2018. The Case Against Qualified Immunity.
https://reason.com/2018/06/12/the-case-against-qualified-immunity/ (accessed April 19, 2020)
Qualified immunity also cannot be justified as a means to shield government officials from burdens of
discovery and trial in insubstantial cases . If, as the Court has written, "the 'driving force' behind creation of the qualified
immunity doctrine was a desire to ensure that 'insubstantial claims' against government officials [will] be resolved prior to discovery," the
doctrine is utterly miserable at achieving its goal. In another study, I reviewed 1183 lawsuits filed against
law enforcement officers and agencies over a two-year period in five federal districts and found that just
seven of these cases (0.6%) were dismissed on qualified immunity before discovery. Qualified immunity
was little better at shielding government officials from trial—just thirty-eight (3.2%) of those cases were
dismissed before trial on qualified immunity grounds . My findings do not foreclose the possibility that qualified immunity
shields government officials from the burdens of litigation by discouraging insubstantial cases from ever being filed. Accordingly, for a future
project, I surveyed attorneys from around the country who entered appearances in the 1183 cases in my dataset and interviewed a subset of
them. Although this research is still ongoing, my findings thus far offer three reasons to believe qualified immunity does not do a good job of
filtering out insubstantial cases before filing. First,
although the majority of attorneys I interviewed reported
considering qualified immunity when deciding whether to accept a case, qualified immunity was one of
many considerations they took into account —including the egregiousness of the facts, the strength of the evidence supporting
the claim, whether a jury would find the plaintiff sympathetic, and the amount of recoverable damages. And many reported that
qualified immunity does not play a controlling role in their case selection decisions. So, to the extent
that qualified immunity is playing a role in case selection, it is playing a role mediated by a number of
different concerns. Second, a majority of the attorneys I interviewed reported that they rarely or never
decline to bring a case because of qualified immunity. Some explained that the challenges posed by
qualified immunity are replicated by other case-screening considerations. For example, several
attorneys reported that concerns about judges' and juries' predispositions against police misconduct
suits cause them to select cases with facts so egregious that they are not vulnerable to dismissal on
qualified immunity. Others explained that they limit the effects of qualified immunity by including state
law claims or municipal liability claims—that cannot be dismissed on qualified immunity grounds—in
their cases. And several attorneys made clear that they will accept a case they view as important, even if
the case is vulnerable to attack on qualified immunity grounds . When qualified immunity impacts case
filing decisions, it is far from clear that the doctrine is filtering out only insubstantial cases. The attorneys
who reported declining cases because of qualified immunity reported that the doctrine discourages the
filing of cases concerning constitutional violations that are novel or ill-defined, and cases in which the
costs of litigating qualified immunity would be greater than the damages at stake. One attorney
reported that the challenges associated with litigating qualified immunity discouraged him from bringing
Section 1983 cases altogether. None of these responses suggest that qualified immunity is doing a good
job of screening out "insubstantial" cases.
A2 Congress CP
Congressional action against qualified immunity would provoke backlash—judicial
review is better
Evan Bernick. Lecturer at Georgetown Law. September 18, 2018. It’s Time To Limit Qualified Immunity.
https://www.law.georgetown.edu/public-policy-journal/blog/its-time-to-limit-qualified-immunity/
So, what’s to be done? Congress could always amend Section 1983 to take aim at the Court’s various
departures from its original meaning, and I have provided guidance to policymakers who are interested in doing precisely that. I
worry, however, that any such effort will meet with intense opposition from law enforcement interest groups .
The Court could also retreat from its more sweeping statements concerning qualified immunity—disavowing, for instance, the proposition that
officials must be “plainly incompetent or . . . knowingly violate the law” before they are denied qualified immunity[24]—or recognize, as it once
did, the relevance of subjective intent of officials. I worry, however, that the Court has little interest in doing so. If nothing else, qualified
immunity helps the Court—and the judiciary generally—economize on scarce resources. It discourages litigation that might otherwise be
generated by countless interactions between public officials and ordinary citizens by raising the expected costs and lowering the expected
benefits to litigants of seeking relief for constitutional and statutory injuries. That means that less litigation takes place and courts have more
time to focus on cases that Justices on both sides of the ideological spectrum appear to believe that the judiciary is more institutionally
competent to decide. The Court’s qualified immunity doctrine has expanded and hardened over the years,[25] notwithstanding complaints
from Justices Sotomayor and Thomas. Moreover, the Court closely monitors lower-court compliance with its qualified immunity doctrine—
Mullenix is but one of many examples. None of the practical concerns canvassed above, however make qualified
immunity good law or
good policy. It is neither. It contradicts the original meaning of Section 1983 and undermines constitutional
principles. It imposes heavy costs on the victims of official misconduct by making it far more difficult for
them than it would otherwise be to vindicate their rights. It does not provide compensating benefits to
officials who conduct themselves in good faith or to members of the public who might benefit from
officials’ ardor not being dampened. At a minimum, qualified immunity doctrine should be re-calibrated
in light of what scholarly inquiry into the history of common-law immunities and practical experience
with the doctrine have shown. I’m not optimistic about the prospects of any meaningful change, but the need for change is urgent.
Courts are key to check the executive branch with the Fourth Amendment—self-
restraint and Congress fail:
Timothy Casey Professor at Case Western Law. 2008 . RIGHTS AND REMEDIES: Electronic
Surveillance and the Right To Be Secure. UC Davis Law Review, Lexis Nexis. (accessed April 19, 2020)
The courts must be more proactive in their role in limiting the reach of the executive branch. Both the
Pen Register Decisions and the NSA Cases presented Fourth Amendment issues in a context that suggest
a greater role for the courts. In the traditional conception of the adversarial system, the court plays the role of neutral arbiter, deciding only the
issues framed by the parties, based on the evidence provided by the parties. n276 However, in the constitutional context, and particularly in the context of ex parte
proceedings, the courts must protect the unrepresented interests of the People. Courts should assume the additional obligation of assuring that the government
does not reach further than permitted by the Fourth Amendment and the relevant statutory structure. If courts are not comfortable accepting this role, and many
may not be, then they should freely explore alternative measures to ensure the representation of the interests of the People. The Pen Register Decisions suggest
one immediate [*1032] remedial measure. n277 Commendably, a few courts appointed amici to brief the position opposed to the government. n278 The
appointment of counsel to represent the interests of the People would identify the separate interests of the collective people and would encourage a more
thorough litigation of the issues before the courts. From an institutional perspective, courts
must accept their role of enforcing the
Constitution against the executive branch by applying greater scrutiny to executive claims of authority .
The NSA Cases present the courts with an opportunity to revisit the difficult issue of the state secrets privilege. As discussed earlier, the application of the state
secrets privilege should be subject to a balancing test where the significance of the interests at stake in the lawsuit are fairly weighed in the determination of
whether the privilege applies. The privilege itself rests on the proposition that some interests, such as national security, are superior to other types of interests, such
as the individual claims in a lawsuit. However, where the interest asserted in the lawsuit is not a claim for breach of contract but a claim for breach of the
Constitution, the application of the privilege should not be taken lightly. The difficulty in apportioning proper weight to the interests protected by the Fourth
Amendment stems from the use of the language in the reasonable expectation of privacy test. Reclaiming the language of the Fourth Amendment implies a
different role for the courts because the original language denotes a right, rather than an expectation. An expression of the interests protected by the Fourth
Amendment as a right rather than as an expectation necessarily entails a higher degree of involvement for the courts. If
we expect to restore
significance to the promise of the Fourth Amendment, we must encourage courts to abandon the
reasonable expectation of privacy test. We cannot reasonably expect the executive branch to limit
itself, nor can we expect the legislative branch to successfully restrain the executive. The Constitution's
original promise to the People of a right to be secure cannot survive without a renewed commitment
and vigilance from the courts.
SCOTUS must reinterpret Qualified Immunity

2020)
The broad, cross-ideological push against qualified immunity is a rare step in the right direction, but any
reform of the doctrine relies on the Supreme Court. The justices have multiple options if they take up a
case where they can reconsider qualified immunity itself. The first, of course, would be to leave it intact.
Baude noted in his 2017 article that the court is usually reluctant to overturn its own precedents when
they interpret federal statutes instead of the Constitution. “Because qualified immunity has been on the
books for years and Congress has declined to revisit it, it may have obtained a belated congressional
imprimatur,” he wrote. The doctrine’s questionable justifications could help the court overcome that
reluctance, however. That would allow the justices to either eliminate qualified immunity altogether,
substantially narrow its scope, or justify it on other grounds. “Plaintiffs should be able to defeat a
qualified immunity motion by pointing to evidence of an officer’s bad faith,” Schwartz wrote earlier this
year. “And the Court should broaden its definition of clearly established law—by making clear that
courts of appeals can clearly establish the law, by defining clearly established law at a higher level of
factual generality, and by recognizing obvious constitutional violations [...] without reference to an
analogous case.” Those suggestions may provide the court with a good starting point. “Doctrinal reform
is arduous, often-Sisyphean work,” Willett observed in last month’s concurrence. “And the entrenched,
judge-made doctrine of qualified immunity seems Kevlar-coated, making even tweak-level tinkering
doubtful. But immunity ought not be immune from thoughtful reappraisal.”
A2 QI is precedent
Qualified immunity is not protected by precedent
Tim Cushing. Writer at Tech Dirt. March 26, 2020. Appeals Court Says No Immunity For Cops
Who Shot A Man Standing Motionless With His Hands In The Air.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200314/21310944098/appeals-court-says-no-immunity-cops-
who-shot-man-standing-motionless-with-his-hands-air.shtml (accessed April 19, 2020)
The most dramatic course would be to eliminate qualified immunity or conform qualified immunity
doctrine to common law defenses in existence in 1871, when Section 1983 became law. If the Court is
inclined to take this type of action, I agree with Will Baude that stare decisis should not be an
impediment. Principles of stare decisis do counsel against overruling statutory precedent and, instead, leaving modifications of such rules
to Congress. But, as Baude has observed, the Court does not treat qualified immunity as a "purely statutory
doctrine left to the pleasure of Congress," and its perpetual "tinker[ing]" with both procedural and
substantive aspects of the doctrine suggests "the Court takes more ownership of it than more orthodox
statutory doctrines." If the Supreme Court is disinclined to overrule qualified immunity because of stare decisis or for any other reason,
it could, instead, revisit some of its prior qualified immunity decisions to better align the doctrine with evidence of its actual role in
constitutional litigation. For
example, in Harlow, the Court eliminated inquiry into officers' subjective intent so
that qualified immunity could more easily be resolved at summary judgment. John Jeffries has suggested
that the Court's narrow interpretation of "clearly established" law—requiring a prior finding of
unconstitutionality in a very similar case from a circuit or the Supreme Court—may also be prompted by
its interest in facilitating dismissal at summary judgment. But the Court's subsequent decisions
strengthening summary judgment standards arguably made Harlow unnecessary, as Justice Kennedy has
observed. Moreover, evidence that qualified immunity rarely ends cases at summary judgment confirms
that the doctrine is ill-suited and unnecessary to shield government officials from trial . The Supreme Court has
recognized that its decision in Harlow significantly altered qualified immunity doctrine to protect government officials from the burdens of
litigation. Now,
faced with evidence that qualified immunity does not achieve these intended policy goals,
and reasons to believe that the doctrine jeopardizes interests in government accountability, it is
incumbent on the Court to revisit its standard. Plaintiffs should be able to defeat a qualified immunity
motion by pointing to evidence of an officer's bad faith. And the Court should broaden its definition of
clearly established law—by making clear that courts of appeals can clearly establish the law, by defining
clearly established law at a higher level of factual generality, and by recognizing obvious constitutional
violations, as it did in Hope, without reference to an analogous case. These adjustments would better
calibrate the doctrine's balance between interests in advancing government accountability and interests
in shielding government officials from litigation when they have acted reasonably .
Qualified immunity is applied entirely subjectively

Qualified immunity is clearly a standard. n112 The test the courts must apply in determining whether a
defendant is entitled to qualified immunity is whether the defendant violated a clearly established right
of which a reasonable person would have known. This test provides for fact-based assessment of
circumstances surrounding the alleged violation of constitutional rights. First, an inquiry must be made
into whether, with respect to the particular situation confronted by the defendant, the right allegedly
violated was clearly established. Then the court can look to the facts surrounding the actions of the
government employee to determine whether a reasonable person in his position would have known of
this right. This analysis provides a wide range of discretion and flexibility on the part of the judge. [*148]
Decisions articulating the application of qualified immunity necessarily will be tied to the particular facts
of the case. No binding statements about the contours of qualified immunity will be articulated. The
case, instead, will be decided on the specific facts of the encounter between the citizen and the
government official. n113 Thus, a decision will state that this particular officer is entitled to qualified
immunity, not that qualified immunity will or will not be available with respect to certain claims. By
couching decisions in qualified immunity terms, it is more difficult to accurately track the expansion or
retraction of the remedy available for violation of a constitutional right. The use of the standard form
thus hides the doctrinal reality of civil rights litigation. n114 The fact that the qualified immunity
standard hides the ball, that is, hides the fact that certain rights have been curtailed and that others are
more likely to be vindicated, is not just an unfortunate side effect of the defense. n115 Rather, this
ability to obfuscate provides a basic element of its appeal as a doctrine.
A2 QI is common law
Qualified immunity has expanded beyond its original mandate and is not grounded in
common law
JOANNA SCHWARTZ. Writer at Reason. June 13 2018. The Case Against Qualified Immunity.
https://reason.com/2018/06/12/the-case-against-qualified-immunity/ (accessed April 19, 2020)
The first argument to reconsider qualified immunity should be well known to readers, as it was
powerfully set out by William Baude in a recent article and was invoked by Justice Thomas in Ziglar:
ample evidence undermines the purported common law foundations of the doctrine. When the
Supreme Court first announced that executive officers were entitled to qualified immunity in Pierson v.
Ray, the Court described qualified immunity as grounded in common law defenses of good faith and
probable cause that were available for state law false arrest and imprisonment claims. But, as Baude
and others have shown, history does not support the Court's claims about qualified immunity's common
law foundations. When the Civil Rights Act of 1871 was passed, government officials could not assert a
good faith defense to liability. A government official found liable could petition for indemnification and
thereby escape financial liability. But if a government official engaged in illegal conduct he was liable
without regard to his subjective good faith. Indeed, the Supreme Court expressly rejected a good faith
defense to liability under Section 1983 after it became law. The Court's conclusion in Pierson that a good
faith immunity protected the defendant officers from liability is, as Robert Alschuler has argued,
"inconsistent with the common law and many of the Court's own decisions." Moreover, even if one
believed that the Court's decision in Pierson accurately reflected the common law, today's qualified
immunity doctrine bears little resemblance to the protections announced in Pierson. Although qualified
immunity was initially available to government officials who acted with a subjective, good faith belief
that their conduct was lawful, the Supreme Court in Harlow eliminated consideration of officers'
subjective intent and focused instead on whether officers' conduct was objectively unreasonable. Even
when a plaintiff can demonstrate that a defendant was acting in bad faith, that evidence is considered
irrelevant to the qualified immunity analysis. The Court has repeatedly made clear that a plaintiff
seeking to show that an officer's conduct was objectively unreasonable must find binding precedent or a
consensus of cases so factually similar that every officer would know that their conduct was unlawful.
And qualified immunity applies to all types of constitutional claims, not only claims for which an officer's
good faith might otherwise be relevant. None of these aspects of qualified immunity can be found in the
common law when Section 1983 became law, or in Pierson.
A2 Grand juries provide accountability

Grand juries don’t effectively hold police accountable
Ben Casselman. Writer at Five Thirty Eight. November 24, 2014 . It’s Incredibly Rare For A
Grand Jury To Do What Ferguson’s Just Did. http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/ferguson-michael-
brown-indictment-darren-wilson/ (accessed April 19, 2020)
“If the prosecutor wants an indictment and doesn’t get one, something has gone horribly wrong,” said
Andrew D. Leipold, a University of Illinois law professor who has written critically about grand juries. “It
just doesn’t happen.” Cases involving police shootings, however, appear to be an exception. As my
colleague Reuben Fischer-Baum has written, we don’t have good data on officer-involved killings. But
newspaper accounts suggest, grand juries frequently decline to indict law-enforcement officials. A
recent Houston Chronicle investigation found that “police have been nearly immune from criminal
charges in shootings” in Houston and other large cities in recent years. In Harris County, Texas, for
example, grand juries haven’t indicted a Houston police officer since 2004; in Dallas, grand juries
reviewed 81 shootings between 2008 and 2012 and returned just one indictment. Separate research by
Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip Stinson has found that officers are rarely charged in
on-duty killings, although it didn’t look at grand jury indictments specifically. There are at least three
possible explanations as to why grand juries are so much less likely to indict police officers. The first is
juror bias: Perhaps jurors tend to trust police officer and believe their decisions to use violence are
justified, even when the evidence says otherwise. The second is prosecutorial bias: Perhaps prosecutors,
who depend on police as they work on criminal cases, tend to present a less compelling case against
officers, whether consciously or unconsciously. The third possible explanation is more benign. Ordinarily,
prosecutors only bring a case if they think they can get an indictment. But in high-profile cases such as
police shootings, they may feel public pressure to bring charges even if they think they have a weak
case.
A2 State courts should interpret

Qualified immunity prevents the states from articulating which police protections are
necessary
Jason P Rubin. Professor at University of Pennsylvania Law. 2004 . A Constitutional
Education: Use of the Enforcement Clause to limit the unfortunate effect of the qualified immunity
doctrine. http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1338&context=jcl (accessed
April 19, 2020)
It must not be overlooked that requiring law enforcement officers to know the state of constitutional
law will not only benefit civil rights plaintiffs, but it will also benefit states in criminal prosecutions. If law
enforcement officers are better informed regarding what they can and cannot do under the Fourth and
Fifth Amendments, the amount of evidence excluded under the exclusionary rule will decrease, and will
thus result in more successful criminal prosecutions.1 2 0 Because the exclusionary rule requires that
evidence obtained in violation of the Constitution be excluded from trial, a law enforcement officer
educated under ELEO performing a criminal investigation may be less likely to commit an error that
could compromise the success of a prosecution. When an individual's civil rights have been violated by a
law enforcement officer, that individual is entitled to have the courts enforce the dictates of the
Fourteenth Amendment by providing compensation or other forms of relief. Congress passed § 1983 to
provide for this enforcement by private individuals. However, this enforcement only occurs when the
plaintiff is compensated and vindicated, and the defendant is held responsible for his violations. Without
any compensation or vindication, there is no court-ordered penalty imposed upon the violator, and thus
there is no enforcement in any significant sense of the word. Unfortunately, this is what the doctrine of
qualified immunity achieves.
A2 Helps complainants
Qualified immunity leaves defendants in the dark about what actions are permissible
On the other side of the lawsuit, qualified immunity promises much more to the defendant than it
delivers. The defense is supposed to protect government actors not only from liability but also from
entanglement with litigation. The promise is often not kept because the qualified immunity defense
presents a combination of fact and law questions that cannot be quickly disposed of prior to trial.
However, the theoretical protection offered by the defense and the low incidence of actual judgments
against government actors lulls government employees into acquiescence to the system. The emphasis
that qualified immunity places on the reasonableness of the defendant's actions rather than on whether
a constitutional right was violated is [*156] another way in which qualified immunity distorts civil rights
law. Qualified immunity makes the essential issue of a civil rights claim the question of whether it would
be too much of an inhibitor of government action to require a particular defendant to pay damages to
the plaintiff. The focus is not, at least initially, on whether the plaintiff's constitutional rights were
violated. This emphasis also makes it difficult to discern and consider which rights are or should be
protected and which we are content not to protect with monetary compensation. Qualified immunity's
harm is that it makes it difficult to see the policy choices made by courts in civil rights actions. Cloaking
these policy choices in the qualified immunity doctrine avoids the possibility of an open debate
concerning which civil rights should be protected and how.
A2 Deters new public officials

Limiting qualified immunity will not deter people from public office or law
enforcement careers
Nick Sibilla. Senior Contributor at Forbes. September 30, 2019 . Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth
Warren Want New Limits On “Qualified Immunity” For Police Misconduct.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibilla/2019/09/30/bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren-want-new-
limits-on-qualified-immunity-for-police-misconduct/#67cf2df52e51 (accessed April 19, 2020)
The only remaining justification that the Supreme Court has offered for qualified immunity is that it
protects against overdeterrence. The Court fears that damages actions may "deter[] . . . able citizens
from acceptance of public office" and "dampen the ardor of all but the most resolute, or the most
irresponsible [public officials], in the unflinching discharge of their duties," and expects that qualified
immunity will protect against these ills. Available evidence undermines this justification for qualified
immunity as well. Multiple studies have found that law enforcement officers infrequently think about
the threat of being sued when performing their jobs. And, to the extent that people are deterred from
becoming police officers and officers are deterred from vigorously enforcing the law, available evidence
suggests the threat of civil liability is not the cause. Instead, departments' difficulty in recruiting law
enforcement personnel has been attributed to high-profile shootings, negative publicity about the
police, strained relationships with communities of color, tight budgets, low unemployment rates, and
the reduction of retirement benefits. Regardless of how "unflinching" one believes an officer should be
in the "discharge of their duties," the threat of being sued appears to play little role in job applicants'
decisions and officers' decisions on the street. This discussion has focused on the role qualified immunity
plays in the litigation of claims against law enforcement. It could be that other types of government
actors have different rules on indemnification or that litigation against these actors are resolved in
different ways. But law enforcement officers are common defendants in Section 1983 cases, and cases
involving law enforcement have played a significant role in the development of the Supreme Court's
qualified immunity jurisprudence. I disagree with Aaron Nielson's & Chris Walker's view that further
research is necessary to prove that qualified immunity is ineffective. Given available evidence of
qualified immunity's failure to achieve its intended policy goals, the burden should now rest on
defenders of qualified immunity to show how the doctrine meets those goals in other contexts.
Aff Voting Enfranchisement
End Felon & Prisoner Disenfranchisement
Although some voting rights affirmatives on this resolution will emphasize either ex-felons or currently
incarcerated (and evidence in this file assists in both), the solvency advocate for this 1AC favors
amending the Voting Rights Act to guarantee the right to vote for all who are convicted of crimes.
Currently, two states, Maine and Vermont, allow both currently and formerly incarcerated felons to
vote. The plan extends that right nationwide. The advantages in the 1AC are democracy and racism, but
there are also international human rights, war on drugs, and rehabilitation advantages on which
affirmatives can do further research. Moreover, affirmatives can expand on the 14 th Amendment and
overall representative government implications of housing inmates in rural areas, boosting the census of
those areas while denying incarcerated people the right to vote in the very communities whose
populations they boost—what some authors call a contemporary version of the 3/5ths Clause.
The negative file contains movements, states, federalism, courts, the exclusion counterplan evidence,
kritik links, and case defense. A combination of states/federalism and movements may be an effective
story: the status quo is slowly solving locally, this is better because it allows movements to guide policy
changes, and both states and movements are important to avoid rolling back the rights that the plan
would give. The evidence on state rollback specific to felon voting rights is pretty good.
There are numerous advocacy organizations and web sites debaters can visit centered around voting
rights and they may be valuable sources not only for further evidence, but in helping affirmatives shape
a vocabulary and concept map to effectively run this aff.
1AC 1 of 7
Contention One: Inherency
U.S. states disenfranchise over 6 million people, undermining democracy, often with
explicitly racist intent
Dana Liebelson, writer for the Atlantic, Huffington Post and Mother Jones, September 6, 2019
"In Prison, and Fighting to Vote," The Atlantic,
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/09/when-prisoners-demand-voting-rights/597190/
(accessed 4/13/2020)
The U.S. is a long way from embracing universal prisoner suffrage. Vermont and Maine are the only U.S.
states that allow all people with felony convictions, including those incarcerated, to vote. (People
incarcerated in Puerto Rico also vote.) Massachusetts permitted almost everyone to vote while
incarcerated until around 2000. Now it and most other states, as well as Washington, D.C., ban people
with felony convictions from voting from prison. (Alabama, Mississippi, and Alaska allow some prisoners to vote, depending
on their felony convictions.) Many of those places also impose voting restrictions once people are out—in some cases, permanently barring
them from voting. Pretrial detainees can vote, and most people serving time for a misdemeanor can as well, though difficult logistics and a lack
of education sometimes prevent them from doing so. Officials and lawmakers have, however, recently backed efforts to make it easier to vote
from jail, including in New York and Illinois. As
of 2016, state laws collectively disenfranchised more than 6 million
Americans with felony convictions, according to the Sentencing Project, a group that advocates against
mass incarceration. In four southern states, more than one in five African Americans were barred from
voting for that reason, the group found. Some argue that disenfranchisement should be part of the
punitive process, or say individuals should get their rights back on a case-by-case basis. Those who favor
enfranchising all people with felony convictions, on the other hand, argue that voting is a right of
citizenship and shouldn’t be connected to punishment. Disenfranchising a specific group of people
undermines democracy, advocates contend, with a disproportionate impact on people of color because of
racial disparities in the criminal-justice system. Some state disenfranchisement laws have explicitly racist
origins, advocates argue. And just because many people in prison can’t vote doesn’t mean they disappear:
They have ties to their communities, and most of them come back.
1AC 2 of 7
Thus the following plan: The United States federal government should enact
substantial criminal justice reform in the area of sentencing by banning felon voting
disenfranchisement. Specifically, Congress should amend the Voting Rights Act to
proactively guarantee the right to vote for all incarcerated people and all felons.
Contention Two: Racism

Disenfranchisement exists in America because of discriminatory intent and has a
disparate impact. Disenfranchisement is discriminatory because the criminal justice
system is discriminatory—policymakers have admitted discriminatory intent—the
racial imbalance is because of policing and prosecution, not any propensity to commit
crimes
Hadar Aviram, Professor of Law at UC Hastings, et al, October 2017
"Felon Disenfranchisement," Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Vol. 13:295-311,
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-110316-113558 (accessed
4/11/2020)
To understand the racial underbelly of felon disenfranchisement, it is important to widen the picture
and discuss the racial underbelly of criminal justice policies in general , a task that exceeds the framework of this
essay. However, a few data points should be mentioned. Recently, John Ehrlichman, an aide to President Richard Nixon,
admitted that the so-called War on Drugs was meant to criminalize both hippies and African Americans
because of their perceived threat to Nixon's policies (Baum 2016). As explained above, President Ronald Reagan
continued Nixon's War on Drugs. The Reagan administration's focus on the crack epidemic is widely attributed to racial politics
(Alexander 2012, Beckett 1997, Hinton 2016). The Anti-Drug Abuse Act, passed in 1986, punished individuals convicted of using or selling crack
cocaine more harshly than those convicted of powder cocaine–related offenses (McGinley 2015). This
disproportionally affected
African Americans because crack cocaine was more commonly used in black communities, whereas
powder cocaine was more frequently used in white communities. The War on Drugs led to increased
police presence in poor minority communities, which has not subsided today (McGinley 2015). The US prison
population increased exponentially between 1980 and 2013, with a majority of these convictions for
drug offenses and the offenders largely composed of African Americans and Latinos (McGinley 2015). Rather
than representing a greater propensity to commit crime, these criminal justice outcomes represent stark racial disparities in policing,
prosecution, and incarceration, which greatly disfavor black and Latino men (Baldwin 2015). The
United States incarcerates 2,200
African Americans; 700 Latinos; and only 400 white people per 100,000 residents .
1AC 3 of 7
Racism is a foundational policy question and is the universal human rights barometer
—it’s the foremost question in the debate
Paul Gordon Lauren, Regents Professor of History at University of Montana, 1996
Power and Prejudice, p. 321, https://books.google.com/books?
id=ykBNDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Yet despite these many problems and centuries of wrestling to find solutions, normative questions about the ought rather than simply the is of
global politics and diplomacy remain before us. Indeed, such questions are particularly pressing and acute in the area of racial discrimination.
Race was the subject that placed the whole issue of human rights upon the international agenda in the
first place, and for a vast majority in the world race remains the most critical and universal test of how
people deal with other people on the basis of an ethical standard. The principle of racial equality itself
flows from a basic ethical concept, that of human dignity which implies in its simples terms that every
human being is an end in himself or herself, not a mere means to an end, and should be treated as such.
Thus, it is only natural for people to ask whether the conduct of politics and diplomacy supports or
opposes racial discrimination, which is the very negation of the principle of equality. This should not be at all
surprising, for as scholar Stanley Hoffman writes in his penetrating book Duties Beyond Borders: On the Limits and Possibilities of Ethical
International Politics: “We must remember that states
are led by human beings whose actions affect human beings
with and outside: considerations of good and evil, right or wrong, are therefore both inevitable and
legitimate.”
1AC 4 of 7
Contention Three: Democracy
Disenfranchisement as collateral criminal punishment has been central to countering
any rising power among oppressed groups in America
Elizabeth J. Chen, Reproductive Justice Fellow at Center for American Progress, 2014
"Restoring Rights for Reproductive Justice," Journal of Gender Social Policy and Law vol. 22,
https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/jgspl/vol22/iss2/3/ (accessed 4/12/2020)
The landscape of disenfranchisement has shifted substantially over the course of history in the United States.
During colonial rule, the right was excised only if one had committed an election-related crime. Over time,
as political power began to extend to increasingly larger groups of individuals, so too did the range of
crimes for which disenfranchisement was attached as a penalty. While states first began including disenfranchisement
as a penalty for felony convictions generally after the American Revolution, the practice ramped up once the property test
for voter qualification was eliminated, presumably in an attempt to limit the expansion of the electorate.
With the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, the restrictions merely became less overtly racial in nature but increasingly racial in their
impact. They continue in this fashion to this day. After
the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, there were
expanded efforts to dilute the voting power of people of color. The Fifteenth Amendment was passed during
Reconstruction as a direct response to attempts to limit the full citizenship and civic participation of formerly enslaved black men. It explicitly
states that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous
condition of servitude.” With
an explicit prohibition on disenfranchisement on the basis of race, states seeking
to abridge voting rights of people of color were forced to do so in more subtle ways, from literacy tests,
to poll taxes, to selection of particular crimes for disenfranchisement. In the specific context of
disenfranchisement of individuals convicted of felonies, states were explicit in their biases. Mississippi
targeted offenses that it believed Black people were more likely to commit, such as burglary, theft, and
arson, but excluded robbery and murder, which it believed whites were more likely to commit. Alabama
had a similar philosophy, believing that Black men were more likely to beat their wives than to kill them,
thereby attaching disenfranchisement as a collateral consequence to the crime of domestic violence, but
not for the murder of one’s wife. These policies had specific racial intent and fell neatly within Equal
Protection jurisprudence addressing the disparate impact of laws.
1AC 5 of 7
The result is entire generations alienated from the political process
Jonah Walters, graduate student in geography at Rutgers University, March 23, 2020
"Incarcerated People Must Be Heard," Jacobin, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/incarceration-felony-
voting-rights-criminal-justice (accessed 4/12/2020)
The effects of felony disenfranchisement on rates of black political participation span generations by
frustrating the formation of future voters. “When you remove voting from the home [by
disenfranchising parents], you remove a model of political participation that could affect the next
generation coming up,” Emmett Sanders told me. “This kind of disenfranchisement is not just cutting out
the voters as they exist. It’s stemming the tide of future voters, as well. Entire generations are
undermined in this way.” The disenfranchisement of incarcerated people is even more insidious when you consider the fact that prison
populations are counted in the census as residents of the jurisdictions where they’re housed, not where
they were arrested. Through a process activists call “prison-based gerrymandering,” state prisoners —
who disproportionately come from diverse urban centers — are usually included in the official
population numbers of the majority white rural areas where most state prisons are located. This system,
which resonates darkly with the history of the three-fifths compromise, distorts the districting process by artificially inflating the
weight of rural votes, possibly contributing a conservative bias in the legislatures of states like Michigan
and Pennsylvania. As Robert Saleem Holbrook, a prisoners’ rights advocate who was incarcerated for twenty-
seven years in Pennsylvania, put it recently, prison-based gerrymandering “falsely bolsters the power of
rural white areas, effectively using incarcerated people as voiceless tools in an unfair political system.”
Democracy solves war
Andres Eduardo Fernandez Osorio, Major in Colombian Army and international relations scholar at
University College London, London, 2012
"Democracies Do Not Fight Each Other. Why?" Banco De La Republica, Colombia Actividad Cultural,
http://www.banrepcultural.org/sites/default/files/colf_fernandezosorio_andreseduardo_articulo2.pdf
Democratic institutions such as transparency, political pluralism, and legal rights minimize the
possibilities of governments and leaders creating false justifications in order to convince the population
to declare war on another state. When thinking about democratic dyads, transparency is an important
factor because it means that both states can clearly perceive or infer the other’s intentions. Starr (1997,
p.157) states, “such transparency means that each party has too much information about the other to
create convincing enemy images, for either elites or masses”.
1AC 6 of 7
Contention Four: Solvency
Congress should ban felon disenfranchisement laws in order to fulfill constitutional
guarantees and address disparate racial impacts
Robin L. Nunn, attorney and chair of Dechert LLP’s Consumer Financial Services practice, January 1,
2005
"Lock Them up and Throw away the Vote," Chicago Journal of International Law, Volume 5,
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1611&context=cjil (accessed
4/8/2020)
Congress should ban felon disenfranchisement laws. The power to enact felon reenfranchisement
legislation is found under the enforcement clauses of the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendment. In
fulfillment of its mandate to “guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican form of Government,”
Congress should outlaw states’ discriminatory restrictions on voting rights. Any broad laws restricting
felon voting will have a disproportionate impact on racial minorities. It is well-known that the population
of inmates does not reflect the racial composition of the United States as a whole. Rather, it consists
disproportionately of large numbers of African American and Latino people." Based on the importance
of addressing racial discrimination, Congress would be justified in ensuring "equal and universal
suffrage" rights for former felon offenders due to the disparate racial composition of the group in the
United States and because the current US broad disenfranchisement policy may have been racially
motivated.
1AC 7 of 7
Policies like the affirmative mobilize communities to create comprehensive change
and increase political participation—ending disenfranchisement solves an urgent
impediment to racial justice
Brian McWalters, Policy Associate at Accountability Counsel, Fall 2018
“A VOTE FOR THOSE WHO CAN’T: STRATEGIES FOR FELON VOTING RIGHTS REFORM,” Georgetown
Journal of Law & Modern Critical Race Perspectives, p. 160
Highlighting the disparate racial impact or racist origins when challenging an existing law is clearly an
effective means to cultivate solidarity within minority communities. This is particularly important when
the law at issue disproportionately impacts impoverished minorities, as felon disenfranchisement laws
do. An emphasis on racial justice can galvanize not only those minority communities with a high
proportion of disenfranchised citizens but also more affluent minorities who are much less likely to feel
the impact of felon disenfranchisement laws and thus might otherwise be inclined to refrain from
participation in reform efforts. Racial justice appeals can be a powerful mobilizing force for communities
that tend to be distrustful of the political process and so participate at a low rate, in no small part
because of policies like felon disenfranchisement .Fixating on the preferences of an electoral majority underestimates the impact a
dedicated electoral minority can have on discrete political questions.A singularly focused and highly mobilized minority voting bloc can often achieve its goals when
Focusing on mobilization, rather than persuasion, seems especially
the majority bloc is coalesced around other issues.
prudent during times of general political malaise. Rhode Island’s Question 2, for instance, was decided during a midterm election when
overall turnout dropped by almost seven percentage points. Rather than bury the issue of racial justice and felon
disenfranchisement, activists would be wise to use it as part of a multifaceted public advocacy

campaign. The non-racial and racial justice impetuses for reform do not undermine, but rather enforce
one another; the importance of the right to vote makes the expansion of felon voting rights an urgent
racial justice issue, while the racist origins of felon disenfranchisement laws are probative evidence of
the flimsiness of their contemporary justifications.
Topicality "Sentencing" Answers

Counterinterpretation: Sentencing is punishment
Franklin E. Zimring, Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley, 2014
Substance and Procedure in the Reform of Criminal Sentencing, McGeorge Law Review vol. 46,
https://www.mcgeorge.edu/documents/Publications/2Vol464Zimring.pdf (accessed 4/17/2020)
See In re Lynch, 503 P.2d 921, 924 (1972) (stating that the goal of indeterminate sentencing is to use
shorter sentences and reform the offender). But see CAL. PENAL CODE § 1170(a)(1) (West 2015)
(declaring the Legislature’s purpose for sentencing is punishment and terms should be determined by
seriousness of the offense). See also CAL. R. CT. 4.410 (combining the goal of deterring future offenses
along with aim to punish defendant as “general objectives in sentencing”).
We meet:
A. Field context: in legal literature, disenfranchisement is a punishment or
sanction resulting from criminal conviction
George P. Fletcher, professor of law, Columbia Law School, 1999
"Disenfranchisement as Punishment: Reflections on the Racial Uses of Infamia," UCLA Law Review vol.
46, https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/1063 (accessed 4/17/2020)
And so it is with disenfranchisement as a sanction. The impact of disenfranchisement is felt primarily in
the black community. The statistics are indeed disturbing. Fourteen percent of African-American men are
ineligible to vote because of criminal convictions. In seven states, one in four black men are permanently barred from voting
because of their criminal records. The racial impact of the disenfranchisement means that we will finally take
cognizance of an unjust institution-one that betrays a primitive conception of punishment and a deficient
commitment to democratic voting. In one promising decision the Supreme Court, without dissent, struck down an Alabama constitutional
provision that disenfranchised everyone who committed a crime of moral turpitude." The Court found a current of racial motivation in the
convention that adopted the disenfranchising amendment to the state constitution, and in fact the rule, as applied, had a disproportionate
impact on blacks.
B. Purpose of disenfranchisement is to punish

Court of the Northern District of Florida, 2019
Jones v. DeSantis, 410 F. Supp. 3d 1284, 1302 (N.D. Fla. 2019)
The second exception is for claims related to criminal or quasi-criminal processes. Cases applying this exception hold that punishment
cannot be increased because of a defendant's inability to pay . See, e.g., Bearden v. Georgia, 461 U.S. 660, 103 S.Ct. 2064,
76 L.Ed.2d 221 (1983) (holding that probation cannot be revoked based on failure to pay an amount the defendant is financially unable to pay).
Disenfranchisement of felons has a regulatory component, see, e.g., Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86, 96-97, 78 S.Ct. 590, 2 L.Ed.2d 630 (1958), and
when so viewed, disenfranchisement is subject only to the first M.L.B. exception, not this second one. But when
the purpose of
disenfranchisement is to punish, this second exception applies. If, after adoption of Amendment 4, the purported
justification for requiring payment of financial obligations is only to ensure that felons pay their “debt to
society”—that is, that they are fully punished —this second M.L.B. exception is fully applicable.
Topicality "Sentencing" Answers

Disenfranchisement stems from the civil death category of sentencing types
Gabriel J. Chin, Professor of Law, University of California Davis, 2012
"The New Civil Death: Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Conviction," University of Pennsylvania
Law Review Vol. 160,
https://www.law.upenn.edu/journals/lawreview/articles/volume160/issue6/Chin160U.Pa.L.Rev.1789(2
012).pdf (accessed 4/12/2020)
While the entire array of collateral consequences may not apply to any given person, the State is always able to add new disabilities or to
extend existing limitations. As a practical matter, every
criminal sentence contains the following unwritten term: The
law regards you as having a “shattered character.” Therefore, in addition to any incarceration or fine,
you are subject to legal restrictions and limitations on your civil rights, conduct, employment, residence,
and relationships. For the rest of your life, the United States and any State or locality where you travel
or reside may impose, at any time, additional restrictions and limitations they deem warranted. Their power
to do so is limited only by their reasonable discretion. They may also require you to pay the expense of these restrictions and limitations. For
many people convicted of crimes, the most severe and longlasting effect of conviction is not imprisonment or fine. Rather, it is being
subjected to collateral consequences involving the actual or potential loss of civil rights, parental rights,
public benefits, and employment opportunities.
Sentencing includes any imposition of punishment
People's Law Dictionary, 2002
"Sentencing," The Legal Dictionary, https://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=1917 (accessed
4/13/2020)
Sentencing: The punishment given to a person convicted of a crime. A sentence is ordered by the judge, based on the
verdict of the jury (or the judge's decision if there is no jury) within the possible punishments set by state law (or federal law in convictions for a
federal crime). Popularly, "sentence" refers to the jail or prison time ordered after conviction , as in "his sentence
was 10 years in state prison." Technically, a sentence includes all fines, community service, restitution or other
punishment, or terms of probation. Defendants who are first offenders without a felony record may be entitled to a probation or
pre-sentence report by a probation officer based on background information and circumstances of the crime, often resulting in a
recommendation as to probation and amount of punishment. For misdemeanors (lesser crimes) the maximum sentence is usually one year in
county jail, but for felonies (major crimes) the sentence can range from a year to the death penalty for murder in most states. Under some
circumstances the defendant may receive a "suspended sentence," which means the punishment is not imposed if the defendant does not get
into other trouble for the period he/she would have spent in jail or prison; "concurrent sentences," in which the prison time for more than one
crime is served at the same time and only lasts as long as the longest term; "consecutive sentences," in which the terms for several crimes are
served one after another; and "indeterminate" sentences, in which the actual release date is not set and will be based on review of prison
conduct. 2) v. to impose a punishment on a person convicted of a crime.
Topicality “Criminal Justice Reform” Answers

Criminal justice reform includes eliminating undesirable consequences of conviction
and fixing perceived errors
Wikipedia, April 18, 2020
"Criminal Justice Reform," Wikipedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_reform_in_the_United_States (accessed 4/17/2020)
Criminal justice reform in the United States is aimed at fixing perceived errors in the criminal justice
system. Goals of organizations spearheading the movement for criminal justice reform include decreasing the United States' prison
population, reducing prison sentences that are perceived to be too harsh and long, altering drug sentencing policy, policing reform, reducing
overcriminalization, and juvenile justice reform. Criminal
justice reform also targets reforming policies for those with
criminal convictions that are receiving other consequences from food assistance programs, outside of
serving their time in prison.
Political usage justifies: restoring felon voting rights is considered criminal justice
reform in public advocacy
Corey Brettschneider, professor of Political Science at Brown University, June 21, 2016
"Why Prisoners Deserve the Right to Vote," Politico,
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/prisoners-convicts-felons-inmates-right-to-vote-
enfranchise-criminal-justice-voting-rights-213979 (accessed 4/17/2020)
For one, our constitutional ideals support the right of prisoners to vote , and denying it violates the concept of self-
government that the founders cherished. Granting this right also makes sense for the country in terms of politics and policy. As prisons have
grappled with the explosion in their populations in the past 20 years, allegations of prisoner maltreatment multiply, and criminal justice
reform moves to the fore of our political debate, we should consider that one of the best ways to solve
these intractable and expensive problems would be to listen to those currently incarcerated—and to
allow them to represent themselves in our national political conversation.
Inherency Extensions
Courts won’t fix disenfranchisement--existing Supreme Court precedent means
Congress will have to act through the VRA
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4/8/2020)
The US Constitution prohibits the denial of the right to vote on the basis of race, sex, mature age, or
failure to pay a poll tax. Most other restrictions are subject to strict scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment. As a matter of constitutional law, the United States Supreme Court has said that felon
disenfranchisement laws do not violate the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments, so long as they were
not enacted purposefully to deprive racial minorities of the right to vote . Despite civil rights advocates' and legal
scholars' efforts to overcome discrimination in the areas of race, it is unlikely that the Supreme Court will strike down a
felon disenfranchisement provision based on an equal protection challenge without a showing of
intentional discrimination. The Supreme Court majority held in Richardson v Ramirez that felon disenfranchisement is "affirmatively
sanctioned" by Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, Justice Marshall wrote a lengthy dissent that warned of
the potential abuses of discretion if the phrase "other crimes" was allowed to be loosely interpreted .'
American criminal disenfranchisement laws are also subject to challenge under the Voting Rights Act of 1965
("Voting Rights Act"), which prohibits any voting law or scheme that results in a minority group having less opportunity than other groups to
participate in the electoral process. The Voting Rights Act was adopted to buttress the Fifteenth Amendment and remedy racial discrimination
in American voting. Recognizing that the intent standard used in American constitutional claims was virtually
impossible to satisfy for plaintiffs in voting rights cases, the United States Congress formally enacted a
results test where plaintiffs do not need to demonstrate that the challenged election law was designed
for a discriminatory purpose. Under the results test, an election law violates the Voting Rights Act if under the "totality of the
circumstances," the law results in a protected minority group having less opportunity to participate in the political process. The Voting
Rights Act has led to the disqualification of many voting barriers in the United States and, therefore, a
significant increase in African American voting and representation. Recently, numerous academics, legal
scholars, civil rights advocates, and political figures have begun to argue that felon disenfranchisement
laws violate the Voting Rights Act.
Solvency Extensions
Congress should amend the Voting Rights Act to ban felony voting restrictions in
conformity with international law
2005
4/8/2020)
The affirmative obligation of states to protect their citizens’ right to vote is recognized in international
treaties and declarations adopted by the United Nations and by regional treaty organizations. Regardless
of each statute’s language, voting restrictions designed to disfranchise a particular group on the basis of
race trample citizens’ political rights. Similarly, voting restrictions which have a disproportionate impact
on particular racial and ethnic groups abandon customary international law and antidiscrimination
treaties. As a party to many international treatises concerning political rights, the United States should
take into consideration international discussions on the importance of citizens' right to vote and the
unreasonableness of blanket felon voting restrictions. Furthermore, given the overwhelmingly disparate
racial impact of American criminal disenfranchisement laws and their historically discriminatory
purpose, Congress should amend the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to conform with antidiscrimination and
customary international laws. The United States should reform its state voting laws to allow suffrage
rights for criminal offenders. American lawmakers should become vigilant in enforcing international
antidiscrimination treaties in light of the racial composition and history of racial animus in this country.
Courts will uphold plan if Congress acts

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Therefore, based on this fairness principle and the disproportionate number of racial minorities denied the right to vote under criminal
disenfranchisement policy, the
majority of circuit courts addressing the issue have held that the Voting Rights
Act can be used to consider evidence of discrimination in the civil justice system and to evaluate criminal
disenfranchisement law claims by looking at the totality of the circumstances. Nonetheless, no US court
has abolished a state's practice of disenfranchising for a felony conviction.' Despite the differing
perspectives among and within the court of appeals, the Supreme Court has not yet addressed the
legitimacy of applying the Voting Rights Act to felon disenfranchisement laws.
Solvency Extensions
Plan makes transition from prison easier and contributes to universal suffrage
Jamelle Bouie, New York Times columnist, April 11, 2019
"Tell Me Again Why Prisoners Can’t Vote," New York Times,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/opinion/voting-prisoners-felon-disenfranchisement.html
On the other end, suffrage in prison may help incarcerated people maintain valuable links to their
communities, which might smooth the transition process once they’re released. “Citizenship is not a
right that expires upon misbehavior,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for the majority in Trop v. Dulles, a
1958 case dealing with the rights of a military deserter. And, he continued, “citizenship is not lost every
time a duty of citizenship is shirked.” Yes, prisoners have committed crimes, and yes, some of those are
egregious. But depriving any citizen of the right to vote should be the grave exception, not a routine part
of national life. Universal suffrage means universal suffrage.
U.S. policies are much harsher than the rest of the world—U.S. policymakers should
act by amending the VRA
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4/8/2020)
By the customary standards of most democratic nations, American disenfranchisement policies are
extreme. Most countries have limited or abolished voting restrictions on felon offenders. Evolving
notions of customary international law support the right to vote for felon offenders. There is a strong
international legal standard against laws depriving all felon offenders of the right to vote while on
probation, on parole, or after the completion of an incarceration sentence. Most nations acknowledge
that once released from prison, a felon has paid her debt to society and is entitled to the full rights of
citizenship. Disenfranchisement is a disproportionate penalty for the crimes committed and should not
be imposed as a collateral consequence upon the majority of felon offenders. Even though recent legal
decisions display hope for overturning disenfranchisement laws under American antidiscrimination legal
principles, courts are unlikely to broadly invalidate the denial of voting rights to felons. Therefore, given
the significant impact of criminal disenfranchisement laws on the voting population, in particular their
extreme disparate impact on African Americans, and the lack of judicial enforcement options, US
policymakers should consider alternative policies that will better protect voting rights. Legislation may
be the best and most probable method to remove permanent state felon voting restrictions." In order to
comply with customary international legal standards and antidiscrimination treatises, the United States
should consider legislating removal of restrictions on voting rights for former felons under the Voting
Rights Act of 1965.
Racism Links
We know most existing disenfranchisement laws are racist—separating them from
racially neutral laws is impossible because legislators connive to give racist laws the
guise of neutrality
Most states’ felon disenfranchisement laws are inextricably linked with the country’s dark history of
racial subjugation. In the wake of the Civil War, many states rushed to pass felon disenfranchisement
laws that, as some unabashedly candid legislators made clear, were meant to undercut the political
power of emancipated black citizens. The Fifteenth Amendment forbids states from abridging any
citizen’s right to vote on the basis of race. However, conniving legislators conceived of a number of
facially race-neutral election laws that would accomplish, in practice, what the Fifteenth Amendment
forbids. Among these end-arounds were felon disenfranchisement laws that were contoured in order to
have a disparate impact on black men. Legislators identified infractions for which black men were
disproportionately convicted and made disenfranchisement a collateral consequence for those
infractions. Today, felon disenfranchisement laws continue to have a highly disproportionate and
adverse effect on minority communities. Nationwide, 7.4% of the adult African American population is
disenfranchised. Among several states, the proportion is above 20%. The national disenfranchisement
rate for non-African Americans is only 1.8%.
Disenfranchisement empowers rural white communities at the expense of nonwhite
communities by moving prisoners, padding the population, then denying prisoners the
right to vote
Nick Harpster and Michael S. Vaughn, professors of criminal justice at Sam Houston State University,
Fall 2016
“Felon Disenfranchisement Laws: A Review of Current Policies, Challenges of Disenfranchisement Laws,
and Recent Trends in Legislative and Legal Change,” Criminal Law Bulletin, article #4 pp. 1-26
The 1990 census also showed that felons and ex-felons could change elections. The increasing prison population was beginning to impact the
drawing of political districts; thus, there was an initiative to change the way the U.S. Census Bureau counted prisoners. Based
on the
“usual residence” principle, the Census Bureau counts prisoners where they reside in institutions, rather
than their home communities. According to Taormina, this raised both constitutional and statutory problems because it did not fit
with the Constitution’s “one person-one vote” requirement, nor did it fit the legal confines of § 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires that
When prisoners are counted in the
redistricting plans have no “dilutive effect on the voting strength of voting minorities.”
institutions in which they reside, it creates “phantom residents” that cannot vote, but are used to garner
state and federal funding based on population, giving the location more legislative districts and political
influence than if the prisoners were not institutionally counted. The “usual residence” principle dilutes
the political voice of minority neighborhoods, where a majority of inmates originally lived, and it moves
them to mostly white rural communities where they give others their political voice.
Racism Links
Disenfranchisement is the sole remnant of post-civil war voting restrictions and
historically coincides with Civil War-era Black empowerment
Andréa L. Maddan, labor attorney and former Editor-in-Chief for the Rutgers Race & the Law Review,
2014
"Enslavement to Imprisonment: How the Usual Residence Rule Resurrects the Three-Fifths Clause and
Challenges the Fourteenth Amendment," Rutgers Race & L. Rev. vol. 15, pp. 330-332(2014)
In 1800, no state prohibited felons from voting. On the eve of the Civil War, 80% of the states did,
largely to block African Americans, who though rarely allowed to vote were disproportionately
represented among felons.150 It has been argued that “criminal disenfranchisement ... was the most
subtle method of excluding blacks from the franchise” of voting.151 Narrower in scope than literacy
tests or poll taxes and easier to justify than understanding our grandfather clauses, criminal
disenfranchisement laws provided Southern states with “insurance if courts struck down more blatantly
unconstitutional clauses.” A century after the disenfranchising conventions, criminal disenfranchisement
is the only substantial voting restriction of the era that remains in effect.
Racism Impacts
Any acceptance of marginalization in policymaking culminates in war and genocide
Pinar Batur Ph.D., Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Urban Studies at Vassar College,
2007,
“Heart of Violence: Global Racism, War, and Genocide,” Handbook of the Sociology of Racial and Ethnic
Relations, ed. Hernan Vera and Joe R Feagin, p. 449, https://books.google.com/books?
id=7Q93YGc6kngC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Exclusion in physical space is only matched by exclusion in the imagination, and racialized exclusion has
an internal logic leading to the annihilation of the excluded. Annihilation, in this sense, is not only
designed to maintain the terms of racial inequality, both ideologically and physically, but is
institutionalized with the vocabulary of self-protection. Even though the terms of exclusion are never
complete, genocide is the definitive point in the exclusionary racial ideology, and such is the logic of the
outcome of the exclusionary process, that it can conclude only in ultimate domination. War and
genocide take place with compliant efficiency to serve the global racist ideology with dizzying frequency.
International Human Rights Links

U.S. laws were enacted with discriminatory intent—this destroys political
participation and undermines representative government, cutting against the grain of
international norms
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4/8/2020)
American felon disenfranchisement laws were enacted with the intent to disenfranchise African
Americans and have a disparate effect on minorities. As a result of felon disenfranchisement laws , at least
two million African American citizens are legally prevented from casting their votes.' Convicted felons essentially become
noncitizens under current US policy, which works to further alienation among poor and minority voters,
destroy minority communities, and undermine representative government. " These millions of US citizens are
denied the enjoyment of a fundamental political right: the right to participate in the political process. The emerging international
consensus views broad felon disenfranchisement as illegitimate. Significant international treaties
enshrine exfelon offenders' claims to "universal and equal" suffrage. In particular, Article 5, Section (c) of the
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
guarantee every citizen certain fundamental rights, including
"universal and equal suffrage" without "unreasonable
restrictions" and without regard to "race, colour, or national or ethnic origin. '
There’s an overall global trend to give prisoners and felons the right to vote
Susan Easton, lecturer in law at Brunel Law School, November 27 2012
"Enfranchisement recognises that prisoners remain citizens while incarcerated," Criminal Justice
Matters, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09627251.2012.751247 (accessed 4/8/2020)
Moreover, the overall trend worldwide is towards enfranchisement rather than disenfranchisement.
Other states including South Africa and, closer to home, the Republic of Ireland, have given prisoners
the vote with no ill effects. But if the UK rejects the Strasbourg Court’s ruling to amend the current ban,
it undermines its reputation as a state committed to respect for human rights and the rule of law.
The European Court ruled that barring inmates from voting violates their human rights
and undermines democratic norms
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4/8/2020)
On March 30, 2004, the European Court of Human Rights ruled unanimously that laws in the United Kingdom
barring inmates from voting violate their human rights . The Court expressed that "any devaluation or
weakening of th[e] right [to vote] threatens to undermine [the democratic] system and should not be
lightly or casually removed."3 The European Court of Human Rights recognized the constitutional utility of
prisoners participating in the democratic process, and that the denial of prisoners' rights can have a
deleterious effect on democracy as a whole .
International Human Rights Links

Article 25 is a core component of democratic governance; international agreements
create a burden on states to guarantee the right to vote
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4/8/2020)
The UN Human Rights Committee, which reviews adherence to the ICCPR, has affirmed that Article 25
"lies at the core of democratic government based on the consent of the people" and that restrictions on
the right to vote should only be based on grounds that are "objective and reasonable." Noting the
existence of criminal disenfranchisement laws, the committee has stated that "if conviction for an
offence is a basis for suspending the right to vote, the period of such suspension should be
proportionate to the offence and the sentence." The UN Human Rights Committee has consistently
discouraged and attempted to limit the reach of felon disenfranchisement laws. In addition, according to
the Committee, the ICCPR not only protects the right of every citizen to vote, but also requires states to
take necessary measures to ensure that citizens have an effective opportunity to enjoy that right."
Right to participate in the political process is enshrined in international law, which

holds that intent is not necessary to prove
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3. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination Converging with these
international legal recognitions, recognizing the links between voting disenfranchisement and race
discrimination, and codifying some of the earliest and widely agreed-upon views of the international
community, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination ("CERD") guarantees
"[p]olitical rights, in particular the right to participate in elections-to vote and to stand for election-on
the basis of universal and equal suffrage," without distinction as to race, color or national origin. Similar
to the Voting Rights Act, the CERD does not require discriminatory intent for a finding of discrimination.
The CERD advises state parties to eliminate laws or practices that may be race-neutral on their face but
have "the purpose or effect" of restricting rights on the basis of race. Thus, this Convention, to which the
US is a party, makes discriminatory effect a factor for the basis of determining the legitimacy of a law.
Democracy Links
Disenfranchisement undermines democracy and judicial review, undermining criminal
justice reforms
Universal suffrage is premised on the notion that the best policy decisions result from aggregating the
diverse preference of the entire citizenry. Felon disenfranchisement not only deprives citizens of their
most fundamental civil right without a legitimate penal or regulatory justification, but also undermines
the efficacy of our democracy, potentially obscuring the impetus for needed criminal justice reforms.
One person one vote is the core of democracy
Inmates should have a say about the laws that affect them
2014
Challenges the Fourteenth Amendment," Rutgers Race & L. Rev. vol. 15, pp. 325-26
In Gray, the Court stated, “the conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments can mean
only one thing--one person, one vote.” Following Gray, in Reynolds v. Sims, Justice Warren found that the Equal
Protection Clause requires substantially equal legislative representation for all citizens in a state
regardless of where they reside. Justice Warren also opined that weighing votes differently according to where citizens reside is
discriminatory. People do not want their legislature controlled by small pockets of people. Thereafter, the development of redistricting was
established “to review districts and where necessary, redraw districts in order to address any changes in population concentration.” This was
necessary because the votes of people living in very populous districts were “worth less” than the votes of people living in less populated
districts.
UDHR says disenfranchisement undermines democracy

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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights ("Universal Declaration") is a significant document on human
rights, adopted unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly. 2 In outlining principles of
representation and equality, Article 2 states: "Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set
forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, ... or other status." 3
Blanket felon disenfranchisement laws threaten the rights and freedoms of persons based on their
status as felon offenders; the United States' laws on what citizens should be denied the right to vote, as
remnants of America's racist past, hinder the rights of criminal offenders on the basis of race. Among the
rights recognized by the Universal Declaration is that "[t]he will of the people shall be... by universal and
equal suffrage.' In this document, universal and equal suffrage is a key component of democratic
representation.
Democracy Links
U.S. disenfranchisement violates proportionality and deeply damages democracy

Fall 2016
and Recent Trends in Legislative and Legal Change,” Criminal Law Bulletin, article #4, pp. 1-26.
In still the most comprehensive research on international voting rights to date, Fellner and Mauer found that at least 135 countries guarantee
their citizens the right to vote. Internationally, thirtycountries allow prisoners to vote, twenty-three others allow
prisoners to vote under certain circumstances, fifty-three do not allow prisoners to vote at all, and eight countries have
restrictions on voting even after a prisoner’s sentence is complete.9 The U. S. falls into the latter category. The U.S. overlooks the
United Nations’ International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights by denying certain citizens voting
rights. In fact, the United Nations states that “[i]f conviction for an offense is the basis for suspending the right to
vote, the period of such suspension should be proportionate to the offence and the sentence.” 11 This policy
has been widely debated, but the discussion was amplified after the U.S. presidential elections of both 2000 and
2004. One of the initial efforts that sparked national interest in collateral penalties of felony prosecution, particularly felon
disenfranchisement, was a groundbreaking, state-by-state study. In 1998, Human Rights Watch and The Sentencing
Project reported state-based estimates on the impact of disenfranchisement laws, presenting a detailed
account of the effect that disenfranchisement has on the democratic process and on racial inequity on
voting eligibility. The authors concluded that the utilization of felon disenfranchisement in the U.S. was
far more damaging than in other countries, threatening the foundation of the democratic process.
Disproportionality of criminal treatment of marginalized groups crushes democracy
Nick Harpster and Michael S. Vaughn, professors of criminal justice at Sam Houston State
University, Fall 2016
and Recent Trends in Legislative and Legal Change,” Criminal Law Bulletin, article #4, pp. 1-26
Current statistics show that an estimated 5.8 million Americans are denied the right to vote . Of these, 2.2 million are
African-American men, a rate four times greater than the national average. The Mexican American Legal and Educational Fund found
that compared to blacks, estimates of Latino disenfranchisement are difficult to determine because Latinos are not uniformly tracked by each
states’ Department of Corrections. It is known, however, that Latinos make up roughly 17% of the population in the
U.S.,62 but comprise 22% of the state, federal, and jail populations . Moreover, as of year end 2004, 792,200
women were disenfranchised, an increase of 17%; up from 676,730 in 2000. Black women account for nearly 41% of
all disenfranchised women, a rate nearly four times greater than the national average for women in the U.S. The Sentencing Project
has noted that military veterans make-up a large proportion of the disenfranchised . According to the Sentencing
Project, 585,355 veterans are ineligible to vote because of a prior felony conviction, meaning that one in every eight
disenfranchised individuals is a veteran, the majority of which have completed their sentence . Using
incarceration rates from 2005, The Sentencing Project forecasted that three in ten of all black men in the next generation
will have been incarcerated at some point in their lives, raising their disenfranchisement rate to 40% in
some states. The current interest in felon disenfranchisement has begun to focus on the racial impact of
the policies and on the detrimental consequences to the democratic political process.
Democracy Impacts
Democratic norms ensure peace
Andres Eduardo Fernandez Osorio, Major in Colombian Army and international relations scholar at
University College London, London, 2012
"Democracies Do Not Fight Each Other. Why?" Banco De La Republica, Colombia Actividad Cultural,
http://www.banrepcultural.org/sites/default/files/colf_fernandezosorio_andreseduardo_articulo2.pdf
Second, a normative approach, sometimes called cultural explanation, maintains that common liberal and democratic concepts
explain stability and peaceful relations between democratic states. According to this variant, the existent
knowledge and culture regarding to democratic political values and means of conflict resolution,
supports honest relations between states and their leaders . In addition, these leaders expect that their
counterparts will also understand the necessity of solving the differences without the use of violent
methods. It is important to note how this democratic perception of one state by another could affect
and modify the motivation for warmongering policies . Supporting this, Elman (1997) argues that “political ideology,
therefore, determines how democracies distinguish allies from adversaries: democracies that represent and act in their citizens’ interests are
treated with respect and consideration, whereas non-democracies that use violence and oppression against their own
people are regarded with mistrust and suspicion ”.
Disenfranchisement de facto gerrymanders entire communities
Fall 2016
Minority communities have had their political power diluted because of the number of community
members convicted on felony charges. This dilution of political power is apparent in New York
neighborhoods where distinct lines are drawn in the ethnic make-up of communities. According to David
Jones, President of the Community Service Society of New York, African Americans and Latinos account
for nearly 80% of the state’s prison population, coming from a total of ten New York City neighborhoods.
In these neighborhoods the impact of disenfranchisement diminishes minority communities’ political
strength.
14th Amendment Links

Justice Marshall is correct: disenfranchisement is a multi-tiered mockery of the 14 th
amendment
2014
Challenges the Fourteenth Amendment," Rutgers Race & L. Rev. vol. 15, pp. 337–38 (2014)
Richardson v. Ramirez found that “the exclusion of felons from the vote has an affirmative sanction in § 2 of the
Fourteenth Amendment.” In his dissent, Justice Marshall found it clear that § 2 of the 14th Amendment only
provided a special remedy to cure the disenfranchisement of newly freed slaves .138 Justice Marshall's
view should be heavily weighed, as the 14th Amendment was part of the Reconstruction Amendments
adopted post Civil War to establish the United States as a nation of liberty, not previously afforded to
the slaves. “Where people of color are inflating the population numbers of largely rural areas and
shifting resources to those areas and away from the urban areas where those people of color are likely
to return the analogy to the Three Fifths clause is all the more compelling.” Before the 1970's, the geographical
distribution of the United States prison population was stable. Over time, the South's share of prisoners has steadily increased.140 By 1978, the Southern
incarceration rate was 93% higher than the average of the other three regions of the *331 United States.141 In that same year Southern prisons also held 58% more
inmates than its share of serious crime would warrant.142 It warrants consideration that in the 1600s, the enslavement of blacks flourished in the Southern region
as well. Coincidence? Asvoteless inmates increase the voting power for the region in which they are imprisoned,
so did slaves as part of the Three-Fifths Compromise. Just as the South negotiated for more voting
power, today, prisoners are being counted toward an area in which they have no intention of staying. It
has been said that one momentous element of the Three-Fifths Clause was the notion that a person who
lived among slaves had greater political representation than a person who did not. Likewise, a citizen
who has the political fortune to live near a prison has greater political representation than a person who
does not. It is striking that the Three-Fifths Clause has been characterized as “a political gift” and the inclusion of prisons in a political district as “a coveted
prize.”146 It certainly does not help that, “Alabama inmates have been forced to sleep on concrete floors in facilities were the sardine-can appearance of cell units
more nearly resemble the holding units of slave ships during the Middle Passage of the eighteenth century than anything in the twenty-first century.”147 No doubt
picturesque of the Three-Fifths Clause era. Recall that it
was the monopoly of power held by the rural areas that sparked
the courts to challenge and subsequently rule that malapportionment denies citizens equal protection of
the law. “One person, One Vote” was not embraced as a disjunctive phrase. Therefore, if a man loses his vote, by way of incarceration, should he be counted as
one person, specifically for the purposes of representation? No, he should not. There are fundamental issues with the ability to draw legislative power from
imprisonment.
14th Amendment Links & Impacts

Status quo interpretation of the 14th amendment is counter to its purpose,
undermining constitutional protections
Human Rights Watch and the Sentencing Project, 1998
"The Constitutionality of Criminal Disenfranchisement," LOSING THE VOTE: The Impact of Felony
Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States, https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports98/vote/usvot98o-
05.htm (accessed 4/12/2020)
Section 2 reads, in relevant part: “When the right to vote...is denied to any of the male inhabitants of
such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged,
except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced
in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male
citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.” The majority’s interpretation of the history of Section 2
has been strongly criticized by many. In his dissent, Justice Marshall insisted that Section 2 was not
intended to exempt felons from equal protection coverage but was created as a special remedy of
reduced representation to cure the disenfranchisement of blacks at a time when an explicit grant of
suffrage to African Americans was not politically possible. Section 2 “put southern States to a choice—
enfranchise Negro voters or lose congressional representation...[But simply] because Congress chose to
exempt one form of electoral discrimination from the reduction-of-representation remedy provided by
Section 2 does not necessarily imply congressional approval of this disenfranchisement.” Richardson v.
Ramirez, 418 U.S. at 75-76 (Marshall J. dissenting).
Status quo uses prisoners to pad populations of elite communities, gutting 14 th
amendment protections
2014
Challenges the Fourteenth Amendment," Rutgers Race & L. Rev. vol. 15, pp. 337–38 (2014)
Using prisoners to effect legislation when they are not allowed to vote cultivates unbalanced political
power in certain regions. Instead of decreasing the power of prisoners as a consequence of their
incarceration, it seems that their power is simply shifted. Because states are taking matters into their
own hands, the effects are increasingly problematic. It is important to consider the ramifications that
result in different districts having different apportionment schedules. Because there is no federal
mandate, it is quite possible that the sending state may count a prisoner toward their population and
the receiving state may do the same. This means that at any given time a prisoner, stripped of his right
to vote is effecting political change in not one, but two places, therefore garnishing more political power
than the law-abiding citizen. Surely, this is not what is meant by our Constitutional guarantee of
equality.
14th Amendment Impacts

Constitutionalism is necessary to protect democracy
Corey Brettschneider, professor of political science at Brown University, October 31, 2018
"The Constitution's Role in Defending Democracy," Take Care Blog, https://takecareblog.com/blog/the-
constitution-s-role-in-defending-democracy
On my view our Constitution is best understood to contain explicit and implicit protections of both
democratic procedures and substantive democratic rights and values , as I argued here. Regardless of whether our
institutions in practice act contrary to those values and democratic rights, institutions used by political actors to undermine
democratic ideals do not lay an accurate claim to the Constitution itself. Authoritarians might make use
of the procedures of American democracy, but they do so in a manner that is at odds with the
foundational values of our constitution. Huq and Ginsburg are right to focus on procedural fixes to American democracy, such as
the creation of a moderate Supreme Court and a role for minority leadership in congressional committees, but their account sometimes
underplays substantive aspects of liberal democracy and our constitution. I would add that the
point of procedural fixes to our
system of governance must be to aim at policy outcomes that preserve the substantive democratic
values and rights which our constitution enshrines.
Disenfranchisement makes inmates pawns to pad other communities’ voting rights,

which alienates inmates and increases recidivism
2014
Challenges the Fourteenth Amendment," Rutgers Race & L. Rev. vol. 15, p. 334 (2014)
Being incarcerated far away from home has more than representation consequences. One must
consider the social implications and how separation from family members and a familiar community
stifles successful reintegration. Being cast off as part of the population of another region only promotes
recidivism. Moving a prisoner away from their hometown is detrimental to the prisoner, and their
families as well. A mother in Maine who could not visit her son due to his relocation to a Florida prison
says “The families haven't done anything and they've made victims of us.” Damage to family structure is
yet another characteristic that some argue is reflective of slavery.
War on Drugs Links

Disenfranchisement saps the political capital to end the war on drugs
Journal of Law & Modern Critical Race Perspectives, p. 149-50
Far from enabling imagined blocs of felons to dictate soft-on-crime policies, a fiction dispelled by the
experience of numerous jurisdictions (including two U.S. states) that allows all felons to vote, felon
disenfranchisement can more plausibly be said to hinder a society’s ability to update archaic laws that
no longer comport with contemporary norms. The slow dismantling of the War on Drugs is perhaps the
most visible illustration of this phenomenon. Despite an overwhelming consensus as to the policy’s
disastrous results, politicians have been excruciatingly slow to redress them, as countless individuals
collaterally disenfranchised by the policy find themselves without the political capital to demand
change.
Answers to States Counterplan: States Will Roll Back

Empirically state reforms are rolled back beyond the counterplan – term-to-term
rollback goes beyond counterplan solvency
Fall 2016
Precedent has shown that the Federal government has left it up to the states to decide what policies to
enact relating to felon disenfranchisement. Often, it is partisan politics that derails movement to a more
enfranchised nation. States often lessen restrictions in one politician’s term, then strengthen them the
next, or vice/versa. The state of Iowa is a perfect case in point. Democratic Governor Tom Vilsack signed Executive Order
42171 in 2005, granting automatic restoration to felons who had completed their sentence. However, in 2011,
Republican Governor Terry Branstad signed Executive Order 70,172 which rescinded that order. Currently, felons
must complete their sentences, including probation, parole, and any monetary sanctions that they owe, before they can apply for restoration of
their voting rights.
States empirically roll back federally-imposed voting rights laws by gutting

enforcement provisions and forcing plaintiff litigation
Danielle Lang and J. Gerald Hebert, Senior Legal Counsel and Senior Director of Voting Rights and
Redistricting Program at the Campaign Legal Center, 2018
"A Post-Shelby Strategy: Exposing Discriminatory Intent in Voting Rights Litigation," Yale Law Journal vol.
127, pp. 780–81
The Fourth Circuit's strong language--describing the law's “surgical [ly] precise” discrimination--caught
the attention of courts, lawyers, and the public, shaping the discourse around strict voter photo ID laws
and other recent rollbacks in access to the ballot . Moreover, this was not an isolated case. In 2016 and 2017, federal
courts issued decision after decision finding that states and localities engaged in intentional
discrimination in formulating their voting and election rules. These decisions are partially a result of
increasingly aggressive and discriminatory tactics by state legislatures, particularly after the Supreme
Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) Section 5 preclearance regime in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder.6
Prior to 2013, states and localities with a history of discrimination were required to submit all voting changes to either the Department of
Justice or a federal court for approval. Voting changes could only be approved if the jurisdiction could show that the changes would not harm
minority voters. By
gutting preclearance, the Shelby Court nullified the VRA's ex ante protections and left
minority voters to fend for themselves through affirmative litigation.
Answers to States Counterplan: States Will Roll Back

States will roll back voting rights in other ways to dodge evidence of intent
Danielle Lang and J. Gerald Hebert, Senior Legal Counsel and Senior Director of Voting Rights and
Redistricting Program at the Campaign Legal Center, 2018
"A Post-Shelby Strategy: Exposing Discriminatory Intent in Voting Rights Litigation," Yale Law Journal vol.
127, pp. 783–84
States have rolled back minority access to voting through, among other restrictions, strict photo ID laws
and the elimination of early voting and same-day registration-- mechanisms disproportionately used by
minorities. Legislators have promoted a myth of widespread voter fraud, stoking mistrust in our
electoral system, to support these restrictions. This disconcerting trend coincided with the loss of
preclearance in Shelby County. These events have resulted in an avalanche of voting restrictions that
target minority voters to minimize their political power. The longstanding focus on Section 2 results claims can be
explained, in part, by the sheer difficulty of proving discriminatory intent. After all, “[i]n this day and age we rarely have legislators
announcing an intent to discriminate based upon race.” Such obstacles, including the difficulty of
proving the intent of a large deliberative body, claims of legislative privilege, and the complications of
the correlation between race and party, can increase the costs, burdens, and risks of litigation.
Answers to Movements
Plan is complimentary with social justice movements and solves the solvency deficit of
conservative states
Journal of Law & Modern Critical Race Perspectives, p. 157-58
While advocates have had success appealing to national or regional standards, none have made a
concerted effort to appeal to international standards. Most felon disenfranchisement laws in the United
States are glaring outliers amongst developed democracies. Canada, Germany, England, and many other
countries prohibit blanket disenfranchisement of people with felony convictions, often even when they
are still serving their prison sentence. Appeals to international standards of felon voting rights are
unlikely to prevail in those states where the electorate is generally contemptuous of more progressive
nations. However, activists are more likely to gain traction by pointing to international standards in
more progressive states that still retain the remnants of atavistic felon disenfranchisement laws. Indeed,
appeals to international standards may be key to breaking the inert pull that moderate felon
disenfranchisement laws currently have on state legislators and voters, creating a path to pursue the
abolition of felon disenfranchisement laws.
Movements don’t solve racial component of disenfranchisement because politics

forces accommodation to white interests
Given its racist origins and its continued disparate impact, it is undeniable that felon voting rights reform is, in part, a racial justice
issue. However, activists have sometimes been reluctant to embrace this component . For example, proponents
testifying before a Nevada senate committee were cautious when discussing race. While acknowledging the impact they observed firsthand in minority
communities, advocates made a point of declaring that the bill was “not about race.” Elsewhere, activists
have gone a step further and attempted to strike any mention of race from public advocacy efforts . Such
decisions are informed by cold political realities. Because courts have decreed that felon disenfranchisement is to remain
in the domain of the majoritarian process, activists may feel the need to pander in order to garner
support from white legislators and voters to redress the racial injustices wrought by felon
disenfranchisement laws. Some fear that an emphasis on the disproportionate racial impact of felon disenfranchisement policies will inhibit a
campaign’s ability to garner support from white legislators or voters who may perceive that reform does not stand to impact their communities or, worse yet, are
hostile to identity politics.110 For these activists, downplaying the racial justice aspect is a pragmatic decision that
prioritizes ends over means.111 Evading the issue of racial justice, the thinking goes, is necessary to secure it.
Prison Abolition Counterplan/Kritik Answers: Permutation Solvency

The permutation is net-beneficial: disenfranchisement is a lens into the recognition of
intersectional oppression and the oppression of women of color, enabling all voices to
be heard
Equally important, however, women of color have unique life experiences, as explained by a number of scholars. Kimberlé Crenshaw
explains that women of color, in her case Black women, experience oppression because of their identity
categories, not merely in an additive manner, but also at the intersection of those identities . Black women
then, do not merely experience oppression similar to white women and Black men, but also because of their own particular
experiences as Black women, which they share with neither white women nor Black men. Moreover, Angela Harris explains the
danger in theorizing women’s oppression through the law from a universal subject who is white, arguing instead for recognizing multiple
identities. In practice, women
of color experience the wage gap more sharply, have had their reproduction
controlled in different ways, and are affected differently by efforts to reform immigration. By recognizing
their unique life experiences, and examining their particular political power and experiences of
oppression through the system of felony disenfranchisement, we can ensure that both their
marginalized voices and all marginalized voices are better heard.
Women of color are at the intersection of carceral oppression, with voter suppression
a key factor
As described above, women of color are becoming increasingly influential in national elections. As history has
predicted, an increase in electoral influence has correlated with an increase in the impact of voter
suppression efforts like felony disenfranchisement on that very group. While disenfranchisement rates are not
broken down by gender, an examination of incarceration rates shows that women face similar rates. Black women are three times
more likely than white women to be incarcerated. Latina women are 1.6 times more likely than white
women to be incarcerated. Like with much polling and data collection, while it is understood that Asian American,
Pacific Islander, and Native American women are overrepresented in the prison system , breakdowns of their
representation are unavailable. Michelle Alexander has done a great deal to expose the detrimental effects of the criminal justice system and
mass incarceration upon men of color. However, she deliberately declines to make a similar assessment for incarcerated women, calling instead
for others to perform that analysis. In her choice, she both leaves room for a nuanced analysis, but also implicitly marginalizes the importance
of the issue for women. While scholars and activists like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Dorothy Roberts, and Juanita Diaz-Cotto have argued for
foregrounding women—especially women of color—in the mass incarceration conversation, the specific consequence of disenfranchisement
remains unexplored. This lack of analysis is particularly problematic because women of color are at the intersection of the
expanding incarceral state and voter suppression attempts.
Released Felons Only PIC Answers

Vermont and Maine disprove any disadvantage to including the incarcerated—also
disproves the threat of special voting blocs
Some of the opposition to letting people with serious convictions vote is based on the fear that
dangerous offenders could influence laws, and that law-abiding citizens could be harmed. But in the two
states that already allow everyone to vote, such worst-case scenarios do not appear to have come to
pass. In Vermont, voting from prison is “no big deal,” according to Seth Lipschutz, the supervising
attorney at the Vermont Prisoners’ Rights Office. Vermonters who are incarcerated, even those held in a
CoreCivic facility in Mississippi, may vote by absentee ballot. Prisons sometimes host voter-registration
drives. People register and vote at their last address before they were sent to prison, so they don’t
hypothetically register in a bloc and “take over the town” where their prison is located, Lipschutz said.
Breaking down division between felons behind bars and those who've been released
is critical to the realization of our democracy advantage
It remains to be seen whether lawmakers—or the public—will eventually be open to going well beyond
that, letting people with felony convictions vote even if they are still in prison. Some advocates argue
that carving people into different groups, based on whether or not they’re behind bars, doesn’t reflect
the realities of the criminal-justice system. “By virtue of being able to afford a good attorney, there are
people currently on probation for the same exact crime that other people are in prison for,” said Henal
Patel, an associate counsel with the nonprofit New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, which backs
pending legislation in the state that would restore voting rights to all people with criminal convictions,
including those currently incarcerated. “It matters if a parent can vote for their child’s school board,
even when incarcerated,” she pointed out.
Released Felons Only PIC Answers

Doesn’t get the democracy advantage: lawmakers won't listen to incarcerated people
as long as they can't vote
For people who are disenfranchised as a result of felony convictions, however, getting through to their
representatives has presented a significant challenge. Lawmakers represent this group, including those
still in prison. But they may not feel the need to prioritize the interests of prisoners, because they can’t
vote. (The U.S. census counts prisoners where they are incarcerated, though some states have decided to tally prisoners in their pre-
incarceration districts for the purpose of drawing political maps.) So Washington wrote templates for letters that people in prison could send to
family members and supporters, who in turn could send them to their local representatives. The family members wouldn’t vote for the
lawmakers, the letters said, if they didn’t back universal prisoner suffrage and other issues important to their incarcerated loved ones.
General Kritik Answers

Permutation, do both. Plan is the focal point at the intersection of democracy and
racial justice and immediately provides civic participation to those who can’t access
any other alternative
Fall 2016
The most current estimation shows that there are 5.85 million people (one in forty) in the U.S. are denied the right
to vote because of felony convictions. Even though there has been some legislative change, there is still
one in thirteen black males disenfranchised nationally , with three states with disenfranchisement rates of black greater
than 20%. Six southern states disenfranchise nearly seven percent of the adult population. The twelve most
restrictive states make up nearly forty-five percent of the total disenfranchised population. Several
organizations involved in human rights, prisoner rights, and social justice have worked to reform felon
disenfranchisement laws. In addition, legal organizations, such as New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice have challenged
felon disenfranchisement laws on constitutional grounds. In fact, litigation is a frequent tool to combat felon disenfranchisement, focusing on
the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the Voting Rights Act. There are four main issues that are connected to
felon disenfranchisement policies: (1) Prison Reform; (2) Democracy; (3) Civil Rights; and (4) Election
Reform. The focus of this article provides an examination of state felon disenfranchisement laws and current legislative or legal action in the
states. The article shows how opponents have unsuccessfully challenged these laws through civil rights lawsuits. Having fewer successes with
litigation, antagonists over time have adopted a more direct approach of challenge, including legislative reform and state constitutional
amendments, which have been more successful in curbing the regressive nature of felon disenfranchisement laws.
Historical scope of disenfranchisement was part of criminal punishment--this is key to

understanding the law's racist and classist discriminatory intent
Jean Chung, communications manager for The Sentencing Project, June 27, 2019
"Felony Disenfranchisement: A Primer," The Sentencing Project,
https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/felony-disenfranchisement-a-primer/ (accessed
4/12/2020)
English colonists brought to North America the common law practice of “civil death,” a set of criminal
penalties that included the revocation of voting rights. Early colonial laws limited the penalty of
disenfranchisement to certain offenses related to voting or considered “egregious violations of the
moral code.”6) After the American Revolution, states began codifying disenfranchisement provisions and
expanding the penalty to all felony offenses .7) Many states instituted felony disenfranchisement policies
in the wake of the Civil War, and by 1869, 29 states had enacted such laws.8) Ward Elliot argues that the elimination of the
property test as a voting qualification may help to explain the popularity of felony disenfranchisement
policies, as they served as an alternate means for wealthy elites to constrict the political power of the
lower classes.
General Kritik Answers

Disenfranchisement uniquely strips agency—and perspectives of the incarcerated are
key to meaningful change
Jamelle Bouie, New York Times columnist, April 11, 2019
"Tell Me Again Why Prisoners Can’t Vote," New York Times,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/opinion/voting-prisoners-felon-disenfranchisement.html
Prisoners are neither more nor less rational than anyone else who is allowed to vote. If anything, the
political system needs the perspectives of prisoners, with their intimate experience of this otherwise
opaque part of the state. Their votes might force lawmakers to take a closer look at what happens in
these institutions before they spiral into unaccountable violence and abuse. There are practical benefits
as well. Racial disparities in criminal enforcement and sentencing means disenfranchisement falls
heaviest on black communities. This is not just a direct blow to prisoners’ electoral power; it also ripples
outward, depressing political participation among their friends, families and acquaintances.
Capitalism Kritik Answers

Plan puts workers in the best position for successful revolution--Friedrich Engels
would support it
Meagan Day, columnist for Jacobin, September 21, 2018
"Why Socialists Should Care About Felon Voting Laws," Jacobin,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/09/felon-voting-law-disenfranchisement-universal-suffrage
On principle, democratic socialists believe that the people who make up society should have a say in
how that society operates. In furtherance of that principle, it’s incumbent on us to politically intervene
in cases where that clearly isn’t happening — which is why socialists were front and center in the
struggles for women’s suffrage and voting rights for African Americans. But our interest isn’t just moral;
it’s also tactical. Friedrich Engels was an ardent proponent of universal suffrage as a matter of socialist
strategy. He wrote of the dual effort to expand suffrage and to use that voting power to workers’
advantage, building toward the eventual eradication of capitalism: It’s slower and more boring than the
call to revolution, but it’s ten times more sure, and what is even better, it indicates with the most
perfect accuracy the day when a call to armed revolution has to be made; it’s even ten to one that
universal suffrage, intelligently used by the workers, will drive the rulers to overthrow legality, that is, to
put us in the most favorable position to make revolution.
Revolution is impossible without solving voter suppression
Meagan Day, columnist for Jacobin, September 21, 2018
"Why Socialists Should Care About Felon Voting Laws," Jacobin,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/09/felon-voting-law-disenfranchisement-universal-suffrage
On another occasion Engels put it even more succinctly: Universal suffrage is the gauge of the maturity of the
working class …. On the day the thermometer of universal suffrage registers boiling point among the workers, both they and the capitalists
will know where they stand. When Engels wrote this he hadn’t had a chance to observe the cleverest suffrage work-arounds of the American
two-party system: the gerrymandering, voter suppression, strict laws stymieing independent political parties, and the pervasive feeling of
alienated disempowerment among the working class engendered by decades of political disappointment. In light of these, and on top of them
the generally low level of class consciousness in America, it will take a lot more than expanded suffrage to get us to the point where a working-
class political force is challenging capital so effectively in the state that the capitalist class essentially invites a revolution by abandoning all
pretense to democracy. But if
we’re sympathetic to Engels’s argument that proletarian successes in the
electoral sphere will both act as a barometer for preparedness for a revolution and also help establish
the conditions for one, then we should also accept that nothing of the sort is possible if massive swaths
of the working class are prohibited from participating in sanctioned democratic politics altogether.
Capitalism Kritik Answers

Plan solves a foundation of racial oppression and is an intrinsic part of the socialist
project
Jonah Walters, graduate student in geography at Rutgers University, March 23, 2020
"Incarcerated People Must Be Heard," Jacobin, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/incarceration-felony-
voting-rights-criminal-justice (accessed 4/12/2020)
To strip voting rights away from anyone due to their entanglement with the US prison system — a
world-historical achievement in detention and criminalization, more comprehensive than any other
criminal justice apparatus in modern history — is an affront to democracy. And because the racial
demography of incarceration skews dramatically towards African Americans and Latinos, this form of
disenfranchisement disproportionately affects those who are already most likely to face barriers to
voting, perpetuating a long history of racist exclusion from the American political system . By calling for the re-
enfranchisement of prisoners, Sanders is following in a proud tradition of American socialism. The socialist Eugene Debs, who in 1918
was incarcerated in a federal prison on sedition charges, once advocated a “prison population organized
upon a basis of mutuality of interest and self-government,” with no guards or wardens in charge. “Any
honest warden would admit that 75 percent of the prison population consists of decent, dependable men,” Debs wrote, “and with this for a
Debs’s vision of
foundation I would proceed to build up the superstructure of the prison’s self-determination.” We’re a long way from
the self-governed penitentiary, and perhaps even further from the prison-less society he saw as an
intrinsic objective of socialist politics.
Deterrence Answers
Disenfranchisement is inconsistent with coherent theories of crime and punishment
Journal of Law & Modern Critical Race Perspectives, p.148
Numerous rationales are put forth to justify felon disenfranchisement, and each of them suffer from serious shortcomings. However, U.S.
courts have largely refrained from scrutinizing these rationales, following the lead of a Supreme Court case that is an anomaly amongst the
Court’s voting rights decisions. Many rationales have been offered for disenfranchising people with felony convictions, though none are without
serious infirmities. Some attempt to justify disenfranchisement on penological grounds. Like other deprivations of liberty that accompany a
conviction, the loss of the franchise is said to serve a correctional function. However, proponents of felon disenfranchisement struggle to
specify what that function is. Except for those rare individuals convicted of electoral fraud, voting cannot be a means to further a crime, and so
disenfranchisement serves no incapacitation function.22 Disenfranchisement serves no rehabilitative purpose and indeed may greatly inhibit
The notion that disenfranchisement is anything more than an
rehabilitative efforts by discouraging civic engagement.
extremely attenuated deterrent to individuals facing much more immediate and visceral consequences
is far-fetched, to say the least. All that is left is some amorphous punitive rationale, one that is
incongruous with contemporary notions of crime and punishment.
2AC Case Offense/Extensions

Prefer our case impacts over their arguments about whether felons and the
incarcerated deserve the right to vote -- Democratic participation spurs people to look
beyond their own self-interest, one study found that voters had lower arrest rates
than nonvoters, and enfranchisement recognized as an international human right
Susan Easton, lecturer in law at Brunel Law School, November 27 2012
"Enfranchisement recognises that prisoners remain citizens while incarcerated," Criminal Justice
Matters, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09627251.2012.751247 (accessed 4/8/2020)
Enfranchisement is also embedded in international human rights standards. Article 25 of the
International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights stipulates that all citizens have the right to vote.
Participation in the democratic process would promote civic responsibility by encouraging prisoners to
see themselves as citizens and reminding them that citizenship involves obligations or burdens as well as
well as benefits. A study in the United States found that there were ‘consistent differences between
voters and non-voters in rates of subsequent arrest, incarceration and self- reported criminal behaviour’
(Uggen and Manza, 2004). While it is not argued that voting per se generates law abiding behaviour,
participation in political life can encourage the individual to look beyond self-interest, towards the wider
interest of the community.
Black political activity increased after the Civil War, and disenfranchisement laws were
passed in response to this—we can debate about statistics and why rates are the way
they are but disenfranchisement disproportionally discriminates
4/11/2020)
The pernicious effects of disenfranchisement on exclusion and marginalization are particularly
problematic in light of the racial composition of the US prison population. As of 2016, approximately 6.1
million people are disenfranchised because of a felony conviction (Uggen et al. 2016). One in thirteen
black adults of voting age is disenfranchised, a rate that is over four times greater than that of nonblack
Americans of voting age (Uggen et al. 2016). Felon disenfranchisement has a disproportionate effect on
communities of color. America's black population makes up just 12.2% of the entire population (Humes
et al. 2011) but makes up 40% of the prison population (Cammett 2012). Although the reasons and
theories behind these statistics may be up for debate, the numbers do not lie—communities of color are
disproportionately impacted by felon disenfranchisement policies. In the aftermath of the Civil War,
numerous laws were passed to limit voter participation based on race. There is a link between
disenfranchisement laws enacted post Civil War and the rise of black political activity. As Ewald (2002, p.
1065) remarks, “After Reconstruction, several Southern states carefully rewrote their criminal
disenfranchisement provisions with the express intent of excluding blacks from the suffrage” (also see
Robinson 2016, p. 640).
2AC: Case Offense/Extensions

Inmates should have a say about the laws that affect them
2014
Challenges the Fourteenth Amendment," Rutgers Race & L. Rev. vol. 15, pp. 328-30 (2014)
Without a need to verbalize such, all inmates have a say on the bills, resolutions, and other amendments that
representatives propose. They may not be allowed at the polls but they do affect the way people vote
because of the Usual Residence Rule. Representatives, who would likely not receive the votes of those
who are incarcerated were the prisoners allowed to vote, are in office specifically because of the
presence of the prisoners in their district . Counting inmates where they are confined rather than where they are from has been
considered “prison-based gerrymandering.” Dale Ho of the NAACP underlines the issue by stating, “[i]n a district where 15 percent
of residents are incarcerated, the votes of every group of 85 residents carry the same weight as 100
residents in a district with no prisoners. And that violates the constitutional principle of ‘one man, one
vote.”’ Many states' definition of residence or legal residence aligns with the dictionary definition of legal residence which is “the permanent
fixed place of abode at a specific address to which one intends to return despite temporary absences or residence elsewhere.” The California
Constitution, for example, states that [r]esidence in connection with the right to vote is ‘legal residence’; a voter who temporarily removed
from the precinct where he was registered, without intention of making the place his home, did not lose his legal residence in the precinct,
notwithstanding he may not have had any house, room, or place therein he called his home.
Disenfranchisement creates stigma and communicates to the person that they are
outsiders in their own communities
4/11/2020)
Formerly incarcerated people have to contend with the resulting stigma well past their sentence and
parole. Those who are disenfranchised consider their disenfranchisement as a symbol that they do not
belong and are outsiders in their own communities (Hamilton-Smith & Vogel 2012). Disenfranchisement can be considered
an extension of the criminal label. If the process of political elections and voting is considered a fundamental right
of a democratic society, losing the right to vote tells ex-offenders that they are no longer members of
society on a basic level. It is important to distinguish the difference between losing the right to vote and choosing not to vote when
trying to understand the effects of disenfranchisement on ex-offenders (Hamilton-Smith & Vogel 2012). Many American citizens do
not vote, even though they are able to. The difference, however, is when society tells individuals that
they are not good enough to vote but does nothing in response to citizens not doing their civic duty. This
distinction illustrates a message communicated by society to individuals who are disenfranchised,
namely, that they are not part of their community. Travis Spears, an attorney in Washington State, lost the right to vote 10
years ago (personal communication, October 27, 2016). With a felony conviction on his record, Mr. Spears was 23 and suddenly made to feel
like a pariah of society. In his words, felon disenfranchisement creates a “caste system.” Although his felony conviction
turned him on to the idea of going to law school, he saw how a felony record and a perceived lack of options after incarceration lead others to
recidivate (Spears 2014). Felon
disenfranchisement sends the message to ex-offenders that they are not part of
society—they are not entitled to a right that every other American citizen of age is able to enjoy. To
participate in the franchise is to be part of society.
2AC: General Case Answers

No justice is served in the status quo because the reasons various states
disenfranchise people are arbitrary and sometimes absurd
Fall 2016
The types of crimes that lead to disenfranchisement are varied, including “vagrancy, breaking a water
pipe, participating in common-law marriage, and stealing edible meat.” Among ex-offenders, there are
limitations that differ based on crime types in both disenfranchisement and in restoration to vote. Marc
Mauer testified before Congress, stating: “The differing voting restrictions in each state result in
participation in the electoral process that is in part based on one’s state of residence. An ex-felon in
West Virginia can vote for President, but an ex-felon in Virginia cannot. Similarly, if an ex-felon moves
from Virginia to West Virginia, he or she regains the right to vote, while a shift from West Virginia to
Virginia would result in the loss of the vote.”
Voting tendency arguments are incorrect and further jeopardize democracy—those
arguments are the reason cynical politicians support disenfranchisement
A related rationale attempts to justify felon disenfranchisement on the basis of what policies felons
would purportedly support. Proponents argue that enfranchised felons would form a monolithic voting
bloc that would advocate for soft-on-crime policies. As with the other broad generalizations proffered by
proponents of felon disenfranchisement, this presumed voting tendency has been proven inaccurate.
With regard to the general public, people with felony convictions possess a diverse range of policy
positions and evidence suggests that they predominantly support most law and order policies. More
importantly, by evoking the prospects of criminal justice reform, proponents of felon
disenfranchisement may have unwittingly made the strongest argument against felon
disenfranchisement. The intuitive appeal of disenfranchising those who possess opposite policy opinions
is actually the most pernicious impulse that democracies must avert. The most fundamental principles of
democracy demand that all views be allowed a forum and that ill-conceived policies be defeated not by
disenfranchising their proponents but by voting them down.
2AC: General Case Answers

Electoral integrity argument is garbage
Journal of Law & Modern Critical Race Perspectives, p.148-49
Proponents of felon disenfranchisement laws have also tried to justify them as regulatory measures
meant to ensure electoral integrity. The prevention of electoral fraud, a rationale largely overlapping
with incapacitation, suffers from the same infirmities. If the aim is to protect the integrity of the
electoral process from those who would attempt to subvert it, then blanket felon disenfranchisement
laws are patently overbroad. The vast majority of felony convictions are unrelated to election law, and
there is no evidence that felons are more likely to commit electoral fraud than anyone else.
Voter fitness argument is ableist and categorically unjustified
Journal of Law & Modern Critical Race Perspectives, p.148-49
Proponents of felon disenfranchisement have also tried to justify the policy in terms of voter fitness.
Voter fitness - the voter’s capacity to make a reasoned voting decision - is typically accepted as a
justification for denying the franchise to underage citizens and those with severe mental disabilities, but
it is widely regarded with much suspicion in other contexts. Any law that attempts to make broad and
loose-fitting generalizations about the fitness of a large and diverse group of individuals is at best
arrogant and at worst Machiavellian. Whatever increased propensity for impulsivity that can be ascribed
generally to people with felony convictions neither justifies categorical exclusions nor relates to a
person’s ability to make a reasoned judgement in the much more deliberative context of voting. Indeed,
there is no evidence that people with felony convictions are any less capable than the general public at
rendering reasoned voting decisions.
Voting bloc arguments are bad and turn the public against the incarcerated
People with felony convictions are a stigmatized group and reforms that stand to benefit these
individuals often struggle to garner broad support. Sensationalist claims about felon voting blocs
dictating the laws under which upstanding citizens live have proven to have an effective hold on the
public’s imagination.
Responses to States Counterplan
States Counterplan Affirmative Answers
States Counterplan Doesn't Solve
No counterplan solvency: states won't cooperate with each other

Robert P. Inman, professor of economics and public policy at University of Pennsylvania, and Daniel L.
Rubinfeld, professor of law and economics at UC Berkeley, 2014
"Economics of Federalism," Berkeley Law Repository,
https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/Inman_and_Rubinfeld_-_Economics_of_Federalism4.pdf (accessed
5/11/2020)
Our analysis of local political institutions reveals strong pressures towards favoring narrow,
geographically concentrated interests. The hope that voluntary inter-jurisdictional compacts might
control these inefficiencies is optimistic; the assumptions required for such Coasian agreements are
demanding and unlikely to hold in practice. Difficulties are only compounded when local officials treat
the division of proceeds from the bargain as a signal of their political “toughness.”
Local officials have no bargaining incentives to cooperate with other states

5/11/2020)
Further, what is seen as an exogenous norm of fairness in a one-time game may be a rational
endogenously chosen strategy in a repeated political game. For example, a local official seeking re-
election cannot appear “weak” when bargaining with another jurisdiction. If the money involved is
modest relative to the overall local budget, then the political symbolism of the “share” from the divide-
the-pie game may be far more important for re-election prospects than the actual dollars involved. If so,
and if officials from both jurisdictions demand more than half, agreement will not be possible. Strategic
interplay becomes even more complicated and agreement less likely as the number of bargaining
jurisdictions increases beyond two. This is true even if preferences are fully known and the free-rider
problem is not at issue.
States Bad on CJS
States don’t act rationally on criminal justice because they compete with other states
—federal control is warranted
Doron Teichman, Assistant Professor, Hebrew University Faculty of Law, 2006
"Decentralizing Crime Control: The Political Economy Perspective," Michigan Law Review vol. 104, pp.
1759-60
Logan further claims that the external approach is unwarranted since it forsakes “the right of states to
act autonomously and independently, free of the constraining authority of other governmental units.”
This claim overlooks the fact that even without any federal constraints, states act under a different, and
at times much more ruthless, constraint: the constraint of the market. When actors operate within a
competitive setting, their choices might be constrained such that they reflect the structure of the setting
and not their individual choices. The Market demonstrates that state legislation and policies in the area
of criminal justice do not necessarily reflect the ideal decisions for the state. Rather, they reflect the
ideal decisions given the competitive pressures arising from other states. I personally, like others writing
from a rational choice perspective, am not inclined to make a fetish of federalism. At the end of the day
the question is an instrumental one. States should not have a “right” to engage in harmful competition,
and the federal government should not be precluded from regulating certain types of state behavior
merely because it did not do so before.
Federal courts check state excesses in oversentencing

1756-57
Having made these preliminary comments, I would like to address several of the policy issues raised by the commentators and use this
opportunity to clarify and extend some of the arguments I made in The Market. Barkow focuses her critique on the unique pathologies of the
politics of American criminal justice. These pathologies, she argues, render the federal government a poor central planer. For the most part I
find myself in complete agreement with Barkow. Yet her analysis does raise several side issues. First, while the institutional analysis she
presents is important, a substantive theory of the goals of legislation is important as well . The Market offers
policymakers a clear benchmark in order to evaluate crime control legislation enacted by Congress. For instance, it allows the critic to explain
precisely what is wrong with federal legislation that imposes harsh minimal standards on states. Second, a specific subset of policymakers that
could find the ideas of The Market useful in making decisions are federal judges. As Barkow and I agree, the federal
courts could serve
a useful role in curbing the trend of increasing harshness in American criminal justice. Understanding the
role of the federal government as a central planner of crime control can assist federal judges in
interpreting legal terms such as “cruel and unusual punishment” and “legitimate state interest.”
States Bad on CJS

States are incentivized by competition to symbolically be tough on crime
1754-55
A final point, which may be a tangential step from the comments, has to do with the deeper social meaning of jurisdictional competition. Gross
opens his comment by citing stories from Huckleberry Finn and Unforgiven about driving the bad guy out of town. These anecdotal stories
might reflect the role that jurisdictional competition and crime displacement play in structuring the way people think and feel about crime
control. People might not consciously think in terms of displacing crime, but after so many books, movies, and plays describe crime
displacement as a solution to crime problems, they might simply perceive crime as something that needs to be displaced. If this is the case,
displacement could very well be yet another elephant hiding in the room of American criminal justice.
Notice that this also leads to the conclusion that the effects of displacement might be well beyond
displaceable crimes. A jurisdiction might adopt a harsh three-strikes law in order to send a general
message to the public: “don't mess with our jurisdiction.” This would be an especially likely strategy with
high-profile legislation that tends to focus public attention . As Barkow points out, symbolism plays an
important role in the structuring of American criminal law. But the question remains: what exactly are jurisdictions
symbolizing when they enact tough criminal laws? In sum, the competition hypothesis comes out of this correspondence alive and even
strengthened. In
a decentralized government, jurisdictions take into account the policies of neighboring
jurisdictions when designing key elements of their criminal justice system.
States must react to other states—crime policy will not reflect states’ own needs
"Decentralizing Crime Control: The Political Economy Perspective," Michigan Law Review vol. 104, p.
1749
In an article recently published on the pages of this Law Review, The Market for Criminal Justice:
Federalism, Crime Control, and Jurisdictional Competition (“The Market”),1 I put forward a theory of
crime control in a decentralized government. Specifically, I made three distinct claims. First, criminal
justice policies affect the geographic decision of criminals as to where to commit their crimes. Other
things being equal, criminal activity will tend to shift to areas in which the expected sanction is lower.
Second, local jurisdictions attempting to lower their crime rates will react to policies adopted by
neighboring jurisdictions and try to keep up with their neighbors' sanctioning levels. In other words, the
optimal expected sanction for a certain jurisdiction cannot be derived from the characteristics of that
jurisdiction alone; it must incorporate the expected sanctions of neighboring jurisdictions.
Permutation: Do Both
Pemutation: do both--Federal action is necessary to complement state action, policy
success is based on their mutual dependency, and proving that state action alone isn’t
necessary to get their net benefits or solvency
Robert Schapiro, Professor of Law at Emory University, 2009
“Not Old or Borrowed: The Truly New Blue Federalism” Harvard Law and Policy Review, vol 3.1,
https://harvardlpr.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2013/05/3.1_3_Schapiro.pdf (accessed
5/14/2020)
As the next Part argues, the achievements of blue state federalism accord with this polyphonic
conception. In particular, the progressive policies advanced by states do not presuppose exclusive state
authority. To the contrary, the state programs generally assume an important, complementary role for
the federal government. As blue state federalism advances, then, it will be important to keep in mind
that the federal government continues to play a vital role in governance. A truly progressive federalism
does not rely on judicially crafted visions of appropriate local and national regions. Rather, progressive
federalism empowers democratically accountable governments to meet the needs of the people while
ensuring human rights for all. In almost every conceivable area, states recently have taken the lead in
promoting important policies. This Part reviews a few of these efforts. Without in any way deprecating
the significance of these state initiatives, this Part also contends that in each instance, the state
measures are intended to complement, rather than substitute for, federal policies. The success of the
state programs in no way depends on the federal government’s abandonment of the relevant areas,
much less on a court’s invocation of the United States Constitution to divide state and federal authority.
These instances of blue state federalism thus align with the polyphonic conception of federalism.
Permutation best solves democracy by protecting both positive and negative rights—
central policies are best for safety
5/11/2020)
Both the empirical evidence and political theory suggest democratic participation will be enhanced by
giving more weight to local governments in the assignment decision, thus favoring the decentralized
institutions of economic or cooperative federalism. The value of economic fairness pushes in the
opposite direction, leading us to favor democratic federalism and to assign a number of activities to the
central government, particularly redistributive policies. For the protection of personal rights and
liberties, matters are less clear. On the one hand, what Berlin (1969) calls “negative rights” which cannot
be transgressed, are perhaps best protected by local jurisdictions coupled with the free choice of
citizens as to their place of residence. For that choice to be meaningful, local governments will need to
be assigned responsibility for providing important public services as well, particularly police protection.
On the other hand, “positive rights” such as equal access to achieve one’s full potential will be best
protected within democratic federalism with a strong central government assigned responsibility for
equal access to education, health care, and perhaps a safe physical environment.
Permutation Solves: Cooperative Federalism
Expanded federal CJS oversight doesn’t stop states and the federal government from
working together
Kami Chavis, Associate Professor of Law at Wake Forest University, 2011
"Cooperative Federalism and Police Reform: Using Congressional Spending Power to Promote Police
Accountability," Alabama Law Review, Vol. 62, https://ssrn.com/abstract=1852591 (accessed
5/11/2020)
Expanding the federal government's role does not mean, however, that states and the federal
government cannot work cooperatively to resolve important issues related to police accountability.
Cooperative-federalism regimes operate in numerous contexts outside of the criminal justice system
and may achieve the appropriate balance of federal and local involvement with respect to reforming
local police departments. To address this dilemma, I argue that federal funds issued to states pursuant to the COPS program should be
conditioned upon the enactment and implementation of police accountability measures aimed at institutional reform. A provision such as the
one proposed in the next section would allow the federal government to articulate minimum standards related to police accountability that
states would have an incentive to adopt. Such an amendment, however, as discussed below, would leave to the states and localities the power
to determine how best to achieve these minimum standards, thus, encouraging local experimentation and avoiding rigid uniform standards.
State agencies can implement federal law—this works in criminal justice because it
ensures minimum standards
5/11/2020)
Cooperative federalism describes regulatory regimes that "invite state agencies to implement federal
law." The concept that the federal government and states can cooperate is not a new one, and models
of cooperative federalism exist in various regulatory contexts. Federal-state cooperation within the
context of institutional police reform, however, is a novel concept. In a cooperative-federalism regime,
Congress and the relevant federal agency (here the United States Department of Justice), provide the
basic framework within which the local police agencies act with respect to setting standards for
promoting police accountability. Rather than adopting a set of uniform standards, these federal
standards are merely minimum requirements, and the local agencies are free to supplement these
minimum standards with measures specifically tailored to the local jurisdiction. According to Phillip J.
Weiser, a key rationale for cooperative federalism is the recognition that value of "diversity in federal
regulatory programs outweigh the benefits of demanding uniformity in all situations." Cooperative
federalism rejects the development of a single federal standard, but "presumes the supplementation of
a uniform minimum standard should be left to the states." Also underlying the concept of cooperative
federalism is the notion that the federal, state, and local entities should share authority.
Permutation Solvency: Cooperative Federalism

Cooperation between federal and state governments necessary to solve policing
5/11/2020)
Indeed, the rationale for cooperative federalism is highly relevant in the context of police accountability.
As noted above, while policing and issues related to law enforcement have historically been viewed as
local issues, there is a strong federal interest in assuring that these agencies respect the rights of citizens
and that there are appropriate measures to hold local law enforcement officials accountable. States,
unfortunately, have not risen to the challenge of protecting these rights and thus, the federal
government necessarily retains a role in remedying institutional failures under its pattern or practice
authority. It is this tension between the need for diversity among local jurisdictions and the need for
minimum national standards that elucidates the need for a cooperative-federalism regime in the police-
accountability context.
Federal government can intervene in policing policy to assist interstate evolution,
increasing innovation and checking against bad outcomes
5/11/2020)
Cooperative federalism allows for a level of interstate competition that is absent in situations where the federal government articulates a single
national standard. Competition
and information sharing among states is beneficial because as states and local
entities experiment with different approaches to addressing an issue such as institutional police reform,
creative solutions may begin to evolve." Although a single approach ultimately may evolve, the federal government
can avoid a premature selection of an inferior standard . Former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis articulated the
benefits of federalism when he noted that states can serve as "laboratories" for innovative social experiments. This principle is especially sound
when discussing police practices. Generally, when states are not bound by a single standard, they
may, on their own, develop
innovative solutions to policy questions. However, in areas such as police reform, where states and local
governments may have failed to enact measures that meet federal minimum standards, the federal
government can work in conjunction with states to develop creative strategies for addressing these
issues. Allowing the necessary federal intervention, while respecting the omnipresent federalism
concerns inherent in the context of institutional police reform, necessitates implementing a carefully
constructed regime.
Permutation Solvency: Stops Race to the Bottom
State competition without federal oversight causes a race to the bottom, encouraging
states to externalize criminal behavior onto other states
"The Market for Criminal Justice: Federalism, Crime Control, and Jurisdictional Competition," Michigan
Law Review vol. 103, pp. 1874–75
This Article has aimed to point out the unique dynamics that a decentralized criminal justice system,
such as the one in the United States, might create. Using tools of positive public choice theory, I have
demonstrated that in a decentralized criminal justice system local units have an incentive to lower their
crime rate by displacing crime to neighboring jurisdictions. More specifically, I have identified two ways
jurisdictions can achieve this goal. The first focuses on ex ante deterrence and aims to increase the
expected sanction in any given jurisdiction to a level that is higher than that of its neighboring
jurisdictions. The second focuses on the ex post displacement of individuals who have demonstrated by
past behavior that they have a high propensity to commit crimes. This analysis led to a normative
discussion according to which the United States might be engaged in a race to the bottom in the context
of its criminal justice system. To the extent that this type of race is in fact taking place, this could have
significant implications as to the role of the federal and state governments as regulators in the area of
criminal justice.
Permutation Solvency: Federal Oversight Good

States need federal support to solve crises
Gary Gerstle, Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge, May 6, 2020
"The New Federalism," The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/new-
federalism/611077/ (accessed 5/10/2020)
Ultimately, the states cannot do it alone. There are too many of them, and some will always go rogue.
States are also resource-poor relative to the federal government, barred by the Constitution from
minting their own money and prohibited by their own state constitutions (in many cases) from ending
their fiscal years in the red. Without federal assistance, some are likely to be bankrupted by pandemic
expenditures and forced to lay off so many public workers that they will no longer be able to perform
the most elementary tasks of government. It is also unlikely that a state, or a consortium of states, can
become the prime mover in developing drug therapies and a vaccine. Here, too, the federal government
must take the lead. Thus, the states cannot succeed without the federal government recovering
something of the esprit that animated it from the Great Depression through the first decades of the Cold
War. And yet something about the new federalism will endure. States have once again become the
innovators in American political life and the institutions that are taking their democratic remit seriously.
If Americans emerge from the current darkness with their faith in their fellow citizens and their
government intact, the states will have lit the way. Somewhere, Louis Brandeis must be smiling.
Strong federal checks are necessary to mitigate impacts of executive power

Greg Goelzhauser, associate professor of political science at Utah State University, and David M
Konisky, Associate Professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University,
Summer 2019
"The State of American Federalism 2018–2019: Litigation, Partisan Polarization, and the Administrative
Presidency," Publius, https://academic.oup.com/publius/article/49/3/379/5530676 (accessed
5/10/2020)
The political combat that characterized the first year of Donald Trump’s presidential administration
continued unabated in 2018 and early 2019, with important implications for federalism. Amidst the
ongoing federal investigation of the Trump campaign, Russian interference in the 2016 election, and the
personal and business conduct of President Trump and numerous individuals around him, the Trump
administration maintained an active policy agenda, mostly through use of the administrative tools of the
presidency. As has been the case for many presidents relying on unilateral action, the federal courts at
times put the brakes on Trump administration efforts, and state and local governments are using their
discretion to enact their own policies that often conflict with the goals of the Trump administration.
Responses to Supreme Court Counterplan
A2: Death Penalty CP

Perm – do the Aff and <insert CP text>, we should try to stall immediate scheduled
executions while trying to eliminate the practice all together because reform is a
necessary component toward the goal of abolition
Kim Kelly, op-ed columnist, 26 December 2019, “What the Prison-Abolition Movement Wants”, Vogue,
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-is-prison-abolition-movement, accessed 4/18/20
Why do we take prison for granted? Esteemed American author, activist, and professor Angela Davis posed the question in her 2003
treatise Are Prisons Obsolete?, a work that encouraged readers to interrogate their understanding of the U.S. prison system. Davis, an
abolitionist, rejected the idea of stopping at reform, arguing that focusing on making small
improvements inside the walls decenters the larger goal of decarceration, the process of freeing people
from institutions like prisons and detention centers. “Prison abolitionists are dismissed as utopians and idealists whose
ideas are at best unrealistic and impracticable, and, at worst, mystifying and foolish,” Davis wrote. “This is a measure of how difficult it is to
envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their
communities and families. The prison is considered so ‘natural’ that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it.” Sixteen years later, society at
large is still struggling to provide an answer to her query, or to meaningfully address the plague of mass incarceration, even as conversations
around criminal justice reform and abolishing the death penalty have picked up steam in the political arena. However, prison
abolitionists — those fellow “utopians” and “idealists” Davis mentioned — have not only been able to
imagine a world without cages, but have spent decades working to bring that vision closer to reality, in
places as far-flung as Washington’s Walla Walla State Penitentiary and New York City’s notorious Rikers
Island. So what does it actually mean to envision that kind of world? Prison abolition is at its core an ideological and political organizing
project that seeks to not only tear down existing prisons and jails, but to create an equitable society which addresses the core problems that
lead to incarceration, thereby rendering imprisonment — itself a form of punitive torture — obsolete. Its proponents view restorative justice
and community investment as more humane, equitable means of addressing social ills and reducing violence. They seek to end the
criminalization and persecution of marginalized communities, particularly those living in poverty. As Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary on
prison slavery, 13th, laid out with wrenching precision, the U.S. criminal justice system was crafted from the beginning as an instrument of
racist terror (it’s no surprise that DuVernay identifies as a prison abolitionist herself), whereas the abolition movement operates from an
explicitly intersectional, racial-justice-focused perspective. The movement has been around for decades, and came to prominence in California
in the 1990s with the founding of the Critical Resistance project, a national anti-prison organization with an abolitionist focus that was
cofounded by Davis and professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore. An influential model laid out by the Prison Research Education Action Project in a 1976
pamphlet highlighted three pillars of abolition: moratorium (a ceasing of construction on new prisons), decarceration, and excarceration
(diverting people away from situations that may bring them into contact with law enforcement and the prospect of prison). Examples of
excarceration can include decriminalizing drug use, decriminalizing sex work, or effectively combating houselessness. Prison
abolition
differs from the prison-reform movement in that its focus is on overhauling the entire system, not
making improvements to existing structures — though some abolitionists incorporate elements of
reform into their work as a form of harm reduction for the people who are currently in prison . Prison
abolitionists call for dismantling the police (and Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and redistributing the resources used to fund them
back into housing, health, and economic opportunities for underserved communities who suffer most from systemic inequality and deprivation.
No solvency – the CP may halt federal executions, but won’t affect the legality of the
states’ engagement in the practice
NCSL Criminal Justice Program, 24 March 2020, “States and Capital Punishment”, National
Conference of State Legislatures, https://www.ncsl.org/research/civil-and-criminal-justice/death-
penalty.aspx, accessed 4/19/20
Capital punishment is currently authorized in 28 states, by the federal government and the U.S. military .
In recent years, New Mexico (2009), Illinois (2011), Connecticut (2012), Maryland (2013), New Hampshire (2019) and Colorado (2020) have
legislatively abolished the death penalty, replacing it with a sentence of life imprisonment with no possibility for parole. The Nebraska
Legislature also abolished capital punishment in 2015, but it was reinstated by a statewide vote in 2016 .
Additionally, courts in Washington and Delaware recently ruled that the states' capital punishment laws are unconstitutional. States across
the country will continue to debate its fairness, reliability and cost of implementation . Since 2015, 25
states enacted 65 new laws addressing state systems of capital punishment. Trends include expanding
or limiting aggravating factors, modifying execution methods and procedures, changing trial and
appellate procedures, modifying laws to comply with litigation outcomes and repealing the practice all
together. Search recent enactments by topic, state, year, and keyword with NCSL's Capital Punishment Enactment Database.
Turn – SCOTUS decisions against the death penalty actually galvanizes public support
for it
Jefferey Jones, senior editor, 30 June 2006, “Support for the Death Penalty 30 Years After the Supreme
Court Ruling”, Gallup, https://news.gallup.com/poll/23548/support-death-penalty-years-after-supreme-
court-ruling.aspx, accessed 4/19/20
PRINCETON, NJ -- July 2nd marks the 30th anniversary of the

landmark Supreme Court decision Gregg v. Georgia, which
effectively reinstated the death penalty in the United States. Four years earlier, the 1972 Furman v.
Georgia decision struck down most state statutes on the death penalty, formalizing what had been a
practical moratorium on executions in the country since 1968 . A review of historical Gallup poll data shows that those
developments had a noticeable impact on Americans' support for the death penalty. Today, roughly two
in three Americans say they favor the death penalty for convicted murderers . One of Gallup's longest standing
trend questions measures basic support for the death penalty. In 1936, Gallup first asked Americans the following: "Are you in favor of the
death penalty for murder?" In that poll, 59% of Americans were in favor of and 38% opposed the death penalty. Gallup has updated that or
similarly worded questions 35 times since 1936 and support has varied over time. However, more Americans have favored than opposed the
death penalty for convicted murderers in all but one poll. In the 1930s, approximately 60% of Americans said they supported the "death
penalty" or "capital punishment" in response to several different wordings of the question. Beginning in 1953, Gallup standardized the question
wording to read, "Are you in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder?" At that time, 68% of the public indicated they were
in favor of the death penalty. Throughout the late 1950s and into the 1970s, Americans' support for the death
penalty declined. The percentage of Americans in favor of the death penalty ranged from 42% to 54% during this period. The year 1966
marked the only time more Americans said they were against the death penalty (47%) than said they were for it (42%). There was much
discussion about the constitutionality of the death penalty during this time, in part focusing on whether
it violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, not to mention a long
list of problems in its application to specific cases. In part because of these concerns, no executions took
place in America between 1968 and 1977. During that time, the Furman v. Georgia (1972) decision held
that sentencing in death sentences could be "cruel and unusual" if they were found to be arbitrary, too
severe for the crime, or not more effective than a less severe penalty . However, the ruling stopped short of declaring
the death penalty unconstitutional; rather, it voided existing death penalty statutes if they could lead to arbitrary sentencing. In response
to the Furman decision, many states crafted new death penalty laws which included sentencing
guidelines and other reforms. In 1976, the new Georgia law was put to the test in the Supreme Court in
the Gregg case. The Court ruled that the death penalty was in fact constitutional under the Eighth
Amendment. Public support for the death penalty began to increase in 1976. A May poll conducted
shortly before the Gregg decision was released found 66% of Americans in favor of the death penalty,
the highest since 1953. On January 17, 1977, Gary Gilmore was executed in Utah, marking the first execution in the country since 1968.
Support for the death penalty remained in the mid-60s for the duration of the 1970s. As the use of the death penalty increased in the 1980s,
public support for it grew, pushing past 70% in 1985 and reaching a high of 80% support in 1994. Support has declined since then, and has
remained at about the two-thirds level for the better part of this decade. Gallup finds lower support for the death penalty when respondents
are asked whether it or life imprisonment is the better punishment for murder. In May, 48% favored life imprisonment and 47% the death
penalty. Support for the death penalty on this measure has usually exceeded 50%, but been substantially lower than on the historical Gallup
question.
Only legislative action can eliminate the practice of the death penalty
Jesselyn McCurdy, ACLU Legislative Office, 30 September 2011, “Joining the Movement: Congress
Takes Action to Abolish Federal Death Penalty”, American Civil Liberties Union,
https://www.aclu.org/blog/capital-punishment/joining-movement-congress-takes-action-abolish-
federal-death-penalty, accessed 4/19/20
It's been more than a week now since the execution of Troy Davis. Protesters may no longer be standing vigil and the story may no
longer be making front-page headlines. But one thing is certain: millions of Americans' eyes have been opened to the
injustice of the death penalty system in this country — and we aren't going to forget. Davis was executed last
week in Georgia, despite serious concerns that he was wrongly convicted in 1989 of killing of a police
officer. His story garnered international media attention. The world watched until the final moments when the U.S. Supreme Court
denied his last-minute stay of execution . Many of us have responded to Davis' execution by taking action this week, calling on
our leaders to abolish the death penalty once and for all. Observers speculate that the Davis case will reignite the movement to abolish the
death penalty — a silver lining in what is otherwise a tragic example of a failing justice system. Congress
took action last week, too, by
introducing a bill to abolish the death penalty under federal law. This bill would prevent federal courts
from sentencing anyone to death and though it does not officially impact state courts, it may influence
them. Currently, there are 58 people on federal death row who have been convicted and sentenced in
federal courts. Our justice system is broken and has previously sentenced 138 wrongfully convicted people to die. We know we will never
have a perfect system, and we can't accept a process that allows for the execution of an innocent person. There has never been a better time
join the movement and protect innocent lives. Contact your representative and express your support of H.R. 3051 to abolish the death penalty
under federal law. Or take action to end the death penalty in your state now.
Symbolic wins are not enough, vote for the best solvency mechanism for lowering
overall state-sanctioned executions
Liliana Segura, investigative journalist, 3 December 2019, “The Abolitionists: A Push to Repeal the
Death Penalty Gains Ground Across Western States”, The Intercept,
https://theintercept.com/2019/12/03/death-penalty-abolition/, accessed 4/19/20
It would be the
second time in as many years that opponents of capital punishment here would make a
push for repeal. The press conference had been organized to announce a statewide education campaign to get out the
word as to why the death penalty should be eliminated. During the 2019 legislative session, the
abolition effort — spearheaded by Rep. Jared Olsen and Sen. Brian Boner, both Republicans — had come tantalizingly close to
fruition before the full Senate shot it down . Olsen was undeterred; he has vowed to bring the measure back
next year and is convinced that it can succeed . The 32-year-old, ruddy-faced representative is a lawyer with a libertarian
streak. He’s been in the Legislature for three years and has focused largely on bills to create business and banking opportunities around
cryptocurrency. It was Herman, a local Catholic leader, and Sabrina King, director of campaigns for the American Civil Liberties Union of
Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota, who approached him about taking on the abolition legislation. Until then, Olsen told the roughly
two-dozen people gathered outside, he had been a proponent of capital punishment. Then he started doing
research. He
contemplated the morality of it . He learned that more than 160 defendants sentenced to death across
the country had been exonerated, a fact that he found unconscionable. And he learned just how much money
Wyoming — the least populous state in the nation — was spending to defend the practice: roughly $1
million a year in a state that has not executed anyone since 1992 . None of it, Olsen decided, made any sense — and
certainly not to a fiscal conservative wary of government overreach. The state had spent millions, he told the crowd, “fruitlessly trying to
defend a broken system.” “As we educate people and they learn about those exonerees, they learn about the
moral considerations, they learn about the unfairness in how the death penalty is applied, I think that
minds and hearts will change,” Olsen continued. There’s a strong majority in the state House in favor of abolition, he noted, and just
two additional votes in the Senate would get the bill through to the governor. “If we educate the people, we educate our
representatives. And if we do all of that, the days of the death penalty are absolutely numbered. And in
2020, we will abolish the death penalty in Wyoming. ” The politics in Wyoming reflect a nationwide sea
change in anti-death penalty advocacy. Abolition there has become a solidly bipartisan issue, with
conservative lawmakers increasingly focused on the death penalty as a fiscal nightmare — often noting,
correctly, that it is far more financially prudent to sentence a defendant to life in prison, avoiding the costly staffing and court scrutiny that
comes with a death sentence. Atop that foundation, some lawmakers, like Olsen, are more vigorously embracing and speaking out about the
other troubling aspects of capital punishment that have long formed the backbone of the abolitionist movement: the moral ramifications, the
ongoing victimization of the families of the murdered who twist in the wind as the wheels of justice turn slowly forward, and the disturbing
frequency with which we incarcerate — or even execute — people for crimes they did not commit.
A2: Juvenile Life w/o Parole CP

Perm – do the Aff and <insert CP text>, we need a combination of legislative judicial
reform and judicial flexibility
Carolyn Hamilton, professor of law @ Essex, May 2011, “Guidance for Legislative Reform on Juvenile
Justice”, UNICEF and The Children’s’ Legal Centre,
https://www.unicef.org/policyanalysis/files/Juvenile_justice_16052011_final.pdf, accessed 4/16/20
Article 40(1) of theCRC provides that every child alleged as, accused of or recognized as having infringed the
criminal law shall be treated in a manner which takes into account the desirability of promoting the
child’s reintegration and the child’s assuming a constructive role in society . This article mirrors Article 14(4) of the
ICCPR, which requires States to take account of the desirability of promoting the rehabilitation of children in conflict with the law. It is
important that juvenile justice legislation contains sections or articles which make it clear that the
purpose of any action taken in relation to a child who is recognised as having committed a criminal
offence is to be directed towards reintegration of the child . This principle is further complemented by
additional principles listed below that all also contribute to promoting the child’s reintegration into society:
respect for the child’s sense of dignity and worth , prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading
treatment and punishment, diversion from judicial proceedings and deprivation of liberty as a measure
of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time.
No Solvency – the criminal justice system is producing a racist youth incarceration

system, the CP doesn’t change the cause
Lincoln Blades, political reporter, 14 January 2018, “The Criminal Justice System Discriminates Against
Children of Color”, Vogue Politics, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/criminal-justice-system-
discriminates-children-of-color, accessed 4/16/20
In late 2017, the Washington Post published a story on juvenile incarceration that stated fewer young people are going to jail,
with the number of incarcerated juveniles falling to the lowest level seen since the United States
government began tracking the data in 1997. In that year, approximately 1 in 400 young people were
sent to juvenile justice facilities, but in 2015, that number dropped significantly to 1 in 1,000 . At first
glance, these figures suggest a historic moment for a "forward-thinking" society, but upon closer
inspection, there is a far more insidious truth present: while overall youth incarceration is down,
according to analysis by advocacy organization, The Sentencing Project, incarceration of black youth has
risen. Their research revealed that in 2001, black kids were four times as likely as white kids to
incarcerated as a juvenile, and are now five times as likely to be incarcerated than white kids and 300%
more likely to just be arrested for simple assault, which is among the most common reasons teens are
arrested. Changes are occurring but not necessarily in the communities the most in need of change. And the difference between punishing a
youth offender as a child, or sentencing them as an adult, has major consequences, too. In October 2016, WNYC released a
report stating that almost 90% of New Jersey children whom were tried as adults in criminal court cases
were either black or Latinx, though white children and black children commit the same crimes , Laura Cohen,
the director of the Criminal and Youth Justice Clinic at Rutgers Law School explained in an interview with WNYC. Even with that known,
prosecutors don't attempt to try white children as adults as often as they do to black and brown children. Similar troubling patterns exist in
many states all across the nation. An analysis by the Miami Herald last year showed that in Florida, half of all youth arrests and two-thirds of the
juveniles transferred to the adult system are black, despite African-Americans only comprising 17% of the state's population. In 2008, Neelum
Arya and Ian Augarten published a report for the Campaign for Youth Justice citing that African-American
children comprise 62%
of all children prosecuted in the adult criminal system, making them nine times more likely to receive an
adult prison sentence than a white child, despite the fact that black youth only comprise 17% of the
overall juvenile population in America. Because state data on juvenile transfers — or the instance when it is deemed that a child
should be tried in an adult court — is so limited, it is difficult to relay the facts uniformly but recent research outlines the overrepresentation of
black youth in adult courtrooms. Sending juveniles to adult jails often works to entrench children in more negative behavior and greatly harm
their ability to be effectively rehabilitated. These children are exposed and subjected to the increased violence of adult jail, and learning
criminal behavior from the adults around them, they develop and internalize even more troubling patterns of conduct. This is why the
recidivism rate is 34% higher for children rooted into the adult justice system, as compared to offenders
left in the juvenile system. By using the adult justice system as an overtly punitive response to black and
brown children, and then sending them back into communities that are already subject to over policing,
discrimination, and systemic disadvantage, we are setting them up to remain connected to
institutionalization for the rest of their lives.
Turn – the CP just creates more life with parole sentencing, youth incarceration has
structural causes the CP doesn’t solve
Eric Martin, social science analyst, 1 March 2017, “Hidden Consequences: The Impact of Incarceration
on dependent Children”, National Institute of Justice, https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/hidden-
consequences-impact-incarceration-dependent-children, accessed 4/16/20
There is particular concern that a parent's imprisonment will lead to a cycle of intergenerational criminal
behavior. One statistic indicates that children of incarcerated parents are, on average, six times more
likely to become incarcerated themselves.[12] But risk factors rarely present themselves across all children, and these behaviors
are difficult to understand or predict. One study, for example, found that children of incarcerated mothers had much higher rates of
incarceration — and even earlier and more frequent arrests — than children of incarcerated fathers.[13] Although we need more research on
this relationship, this differential may speak to the likelihood that the mother, on average, is a primary support for the child.[14] Research
on depression and aggression among children of incarcerated parents has been mixed and highly
differentiated by gender, age, race, and family situation. One study, for example, found that African-
American children and children who have both a mother and a father incarcerated exhibited significant
increases in depression.[15] Another study found that, for the most part, parental incarceration was not associated with a change in
childhood aggression — but the findings were decidedly mixed. Twenty percent of sampled children did see an increase in aggression; boys who
tended to be aggressive before a parent's incarceration were most at risk for a trajectory of increased aggression. Interestingly, there were
some decreases in aggression: About 8 percent of the children saw a return to a stable home upon parental incarceration if their father had
lived in the home prior to incarceration and had drug and alcohol issues.[16] Regardless of the reason, if we as scientists choose which studies
to believe and which to ignore on the basis of personal preconceptions rather than scientific merit, how much easier will it be for practitioners
to do the same, leading them to reject future scientific advances in psychology and criminal justice?
Reducing youth incarceration requires legislative changes and reform, court decisions
don’t change the structures that create those cases
Nate Balis, director of Juvenile Justice Strategy Group, no date, “Reducing Youth Incarceration”, The
Annie E. Casey Foundation, https://www.aecf.org/work/juvenile-justice/reducing-youth-incarceration/,
accessed 4/16/20
At the local level, Casey incarceration

reduction efforts assist participating jurisdictions to: analyze their juvenile systems
and identify causes of unnecessary overreliance on incarceration; implement reforms to safely and cost-
effectively reduce confined populations and improve youth outcomes ; establish rigorous data collection and analysis
systems that enable local leaders to identify trends, determine what’s working (and not working), and support a process of continuous
improvement. Though each jurisdiction’s reform plans are targeted to local needs and conditions, common strategies include: using a
dispositional matrix to ensure equal treatment of youth, divert low-risk youth from the court system and minimize unnecessary placements into
residential custody; improving probation practices to reduce residential placements due to probation rule violations and to better address the
underlying needs of youth; engaging families and making them partners in formulating case plans for their children; increasing
use of
evidence-based treatment models and other community alternatives to residential or correctional
placements; improving legal representation for youth . Promising targets for state-level reform include: enacting new
rules to prohibit correctional commitments for youth not involved in serious and/or chronic offending ;
changing the financing of state/local juvenile corrections systems to ensure adequate funding for community-based non-residential supervision
and eliminate incentives that encourage unnecessary confinement; expanding
the use of objective decision making tools
(such as validated risk assessment, structured decision making ); reducing the bed capacity of state
correctional institutions and/or private facilities under contract to states ; reducing lengths of stay in residential or
correctional facilities in line with best practice research. At the state level, Casey identifies states with strong interest in and capacity for reform,
and provides them with intensive consultant support to identify areas for improvement and implement effective reforms.
Non-Unique – states are already making parole reforms now

Josh Rovner, juvenile justice advocacy associate, February 2020, “Juvenile Life Without Parole: An
Overview”, The Sentencing Project, https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/juvenile-life-
without-parole/, accessed 4/04/2020
Eliminating juvenile life without parole does not suggest guaranteed release of these offenders . Rather, it
would provide that an opportunity for review be granted after a reasonable period of incarceration, one
that takes into consideration the unique circumstances of each defendant . In Montgomery, the Court ruled that
“allowing those offenders to be considered for parole ensures that juveniles whose crimes reflected only transient immaturity – and who have
since matured – will not be forced to serve a disproportionate sentence in violation of the 8th Amendment.”35) In many other countries the
period before a mandated review is 10 to 15 years .36) If adequate rehabilitation has not occurred during these years in
prison, as decided by experts, the individual may remain in prison and his/her case be reviewed again in another few years. Nor is it
appropriate to eliminate life sentences in name only, replacing them with excessively lengthy prison
terms that can reasonably expected to last for an offender’s entire life . There is mounting support for such reform in
select states. Motivated by the Miller decision, the state of California (home to one of the largest populations of JLWOP defendants) now
affords prisoners a meaningful chance at parole after 15 to 25 years if their crime occurred when they were a juvenile. Reforms are underway in
other states as well. Sentences that close the door on rehabilitation and second chances are cruel and
misguided.
A2: Mandatory Minimums CP

Perm – do the Aff and <insert CP text>, legislative banning of mandatory minimums
and increased judicial flexibility are necessary for creating an equilibrium between the
separation of powers
Kieran Riley, attorney, Spring 2010, “Trial By Legislature: Why statutory minimum sentences violate
the separation of powers doctrine”, Public Interest Law Journal, Vol. 19 Number 2, Boston University,
https://www.bu.edu/pilj/files/2015/09/19-2RileyNote.pdf, accessed 4/17/20
The separation of powers is one of the core foundational ideals of the U.S. Constitution , and its guarantee of
fairness and protection must continue as long as the Constitution stands. Over time, however, application of the separation
of powers doctrine has eroded. The current system of criminal law in the United States is an unbalanced
regime in which the legislative and executive branches share incentives and tacitly cooperate with each
other, to the exclusion and increasing marginalization of the judiciary. This is especially true in the area
of criminal sentencing, where the legislature has created statutes that establish terms of punishment for
certain crimes by mandating minimum prison terms for the violation of those statutes . These mandatory
minimum sentences provide plenary decision-making power to prosecutors of the executive branch,
sentences place an absolute bar on a judge’s ability to set a sentence lower than while heavily restricting
the discretion of the judiciary . Mandatory minimum that written in the applicable statute. Although the constitutionality
of such mandatory minimum sentences has been challenged under the separation of powers doctrine in
certain circuit courts, the Supreme Court has not decided what separation of powers requires when the
government proceeds in a criminal action . This Note demonstrates that separation of powers requires all three
branches of the government to participate in criminal sentencing. Specifically, it shows that statutory
mandatory minimum sentences are unconstitutional because they aggregate all of the sentencing power
in the legislative and executive branches and deny judges sentencing discretion in violation of the
separation of powers doctrine . Part II discusses the history of sentencing procedure in the United States, examining what led to the
enactment of statutory mandatory minimum sentences. Part III explains the current sentencing regime at the federal level. Part IV discusses the
separation of powers doctrine as described in our founding documents, including the Federalist Papers and the Constitution. Part V argues that
mandatory minimum sentences violate the separation of powers doctrine, contradict
numerous federal statutes, provide
judges no discretionary outlet in sentencing, and are destructive to society on a policy level. Part V also
argues that the optimal sentencing system is one in which mandatory minimum sentences are abolished,
federal judges are required to rely on sentencing guidelines that establish an advisory range for prison
terms, and meaningful review is conducted at the appellate level for the reasonableness of a trial
judge’s sentence.
No solvency – mandatory minimums are an aspect of many sentencing laws, the CP

doesn’t get rid of the method
Eric Sterling, drug policy researcher, 2018, “Mandatory Minimums and Sentencing Reform”, Criminal
Justice Policy Foundation, https://www.cjpf.org/mandatory-minimums, accessed 4/17/20
Although Congress passed mandatory minimum laws in 1986 with the directive to the Justice
Department to focus on "major drug traffickers," that has not been the case. In its most recent
comprehensive study, the U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in 2011 that “high-level” suppliers or
importers made up only 10.9% of federal defendants , wholesalers of any amount -- 21.2%, street-level dealers --
17.2%, and couriers -- 23% sentenced for drug offenses. Only 2.2% were managers or supervisors. The
rest of federal drug defendants were other low-level offenders, even marginally-involved friends and
family of the accused. Excessively long sentences are not only unjust but extremely expensive and wasteful. In FY 2015, the average
cost of incarceration of a federal prisoner was just under $32,000. The federal prison budget has risen from less than $3.7 billion in 2000 and
less than $5 billion in 2006 to about $7 billion in 2017. This exceeds the $5.5 billion allocated by the federal government to care for all the
homeless people in the U.S. (It was estimated that on a January night in 2014 there were more than half a million homeless people in America's
shelters and streets.) Mandatory
minimum sentences have persisted for decades despite opposition by
citizens and judges. But over the last few years, South Carolina and Rhode Island have eliminated at
least some drug mandatory minimums completely, presenting a model for federal reform . CJPF has been
educating the public about the need for reform for decades. In the summer of 2015, Criminal Justice Policy Foundation Executive Director Eric
E. Sterling called on President Obama to address mandatory minimums during his remaining months in office. While hopes were high for
reform to pass in the 114th Congress, President Obama's advocacy was inadequate and no legislation was enacted before Congress adjourned
in 2016. On October 4, 2017, Senator Chuck Grassley, the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, with 10 other Senators introduced a new
sentencing reform bill, S.1917. Attorney General Jefferson B. Sessions, a career prosecutor before his election to the Senate, has been a
prominent defender of mandatory minimum sentences. At the Department of Justice, he has brought into senior leadership others who share
his view. Jared Kushner, son-in-law to President Donald Trump, has been meeting with Senators about sentencing reform. The position of the
Administration at the end of 2017 on the new sentencing reform legislation has not been announced.
Turn – judicial developments are used to pass new laws or amendments that
circumvent judicial reform
Jordain Carney, political reporter, 18 December 2018, “Conservatives scramble to change criminal
justice bill”, The Hill, https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/421985-conservatives-scramble-to-change-
criminal-justice-bill, accessed 4/17/20
Conservatives are launching an eleventh-hour effort to make changes to a White House-backed criminal
justice reform bill. The Senate is expected to take a final vote on the measure Tuesday night — but first they will have to beat
back proposed changes that bill supporters are characterizing as “poison pills” meant to sink the
comprehensive legislation. Senators are scrambling to defang the battle, which is threatening to put a spotlight on GOP infighting, and
allow Republicans to bypass forcing their members to take tough votes. Supporters of the legislation say they are in talks to see if they can get
an agreement to work in some amendments from GOP senators that are considered noncontroversial. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said there was
broad, “general” talk “about a manager’s amendment” to work in some of the proposed changes, but no agreement had been reached. “During
the period of time where people were reading it for 24 hours, we found two or three things we wanted to change,” Durbin said. “We do have
some provisions that I think are acceptable all around that we would like to add to the bill either by UC [unanimous consent] or manager’s
amendment.” He pointed to amendments from GOP Sens. James Lankford (Okla.), related to faith-based activities, and Ted Cruz
(Texas), who is looking to add additional crimes that would exclude an individual from earning credits that
reduce a sentence. Both provisions would need unanimous consent to be included in the final bill. The Senate’s criminal justice bill takes
a House-passed prison reform measure and folds in a handful of alterations to sentencing laws and mandatory minimums for some drug-
related felonies. It also would make the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act retroactive. In a major boost to supporters, who have been stuck in legislative
limbo for years, President Trump threw his support behind the bill in November, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) agreed to
give the legislation a floor vote after a furious lobbying campaign from the White House, advocates and members of his own caucus. But the
decision to move forward with the legislation has done little to quell opposition from the bill’s most ardent Republican opponents.
McConnell acknowledged on Tuesday that there is an appetite among his caucus to make further
changes to the legislation. “With respect to the substance of the legislation, a number of members
continue to have outstanding concerns that the bill currently leaves unaddressed ,” McConnell said from the
Senate floor. “Members will have the opportunity to debate and vote on the pending germane
amendments before we vote on final passage.” GOP Sens. Cory Gardner (Colo.) and Pat Toomey (Pa.) tried to offer
amendments on Tuesday and make them available before a vote, but both efforts were blocked. Gardner attempted to attach a marijuana
measure to the overall bill but was blocked by Grassley. Toomey, meanwhile, was blocked by Durbin when he tried to bring up his amendment
on the Crime Victims Fund. Republican senators who say they are still weighing the bill warn that they are hearing concerns from law
enforcement groups, and that those reservations are impacting their thinking. “I’ve been glad to see there have been some changes made
along the way, changes that address some of the serious concerns that I and others have raised,” said Toomey, who said he hasn’t decided
whether he will support the bill. “I do think there is still room for more improvement.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said in a statement that he has
“heard significant concerns from local law enforcement, federal prosecutors and constituents” and that if those issues aren’t addressed through
the amendment process, “I will vote no on this bill when it comes before the Senate for final passage.” The biggest remaining hurdle is how to
navigate around votes on three amendments from Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and John Kennedy (R-La.), who are both fiercely opposed to the
legislation. Because McConnell teed up the amendments late last week, the Senate will have to vote on them before they can get to a final vote
on the criminal justice bill. The
Cotton-Kennedy amendments would include requiring that victims or families of
victims be notified when a criminal is released. Another change would be to make publicly available
rearrest data for those released, as well as information on prior offenses by those released and the
crimes for which they were imprisoned. The Kennedy-Cotton amendments would also add
approximately 10 offenses to a list that excludes someone from being eligible for the bill’s earned-time
credits that are designed to shorten sentences .
Mandatory minimums are the creation of legislative action that restricts judicial
flexibility – only a legislative solution can change this
James Cullen, staff researcher, 5 October 2018, “Sentencing Laws and How They Contribute to Mass
Incarceration”, Brennan Center for Justice, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-
opinion/sentencing-laws-and-how-they-contribute-mass-incarceration, accessed 4/17/20
Mandatory minimums are a legislative creation that restricts judicial flexibility – only legislative action to undo this can solve A lot of the debate
on criminal justice reform focuses on mandatory minimums. What are they and why do people — including us — think they’re unfair? Simply
put, anyone convicted of a crime under a “mandatory minimum” gets at least that sentence. The goal of
these laws when they were developed was to promote uniformity; it doesn’t matter how strict or
lenient your judge is, as the law and the law alone determines the sentence you receive. Regrettably, the
adoption of mandatory minimums has not led to a fairer system. In fact, it's had the opposite effect. By
tying judges’ hands, mandatory minimums effectively took power away from judges and gave it to
prosecutors, who could threaten to charge defendants with crimes that would “trigger” a mandatory
minimum. Facing a harsh sentence from which there’s no other escape, a defendant can often feel
coerced into admitting their guilt — even sometimes falsely confessing . Interestingly, federal judges
have come to dislike mandatory minimums, especially in drug cases. Mandatory minimums often apply
to nonviolent drug offenders, forcing judges to harshly punish those who pose the least physical danger
to communities. While the goal of mandatory minimums may have been fairness, they’ve instead
caused an imbalance in the courtroom that has helped drive mass incarceration . While mandatory minimums
have been in place in some states since the 1950s, their use grew after the 1984 Sentencing Reform Act, which added
significant mandatory minimums for many federal crimes and abolished federal parole. States followed,
and soon mandatory minimums became a standard response to drug epidemics and crime spikes. What
started as a well-intentioned attempt to impose uniformity became too restrictive, creating new
disparities and injustices in the process.
Symbolic wins are not enough, vote for the best solvency mechanism for lowering the
overall practice of mandatory minimum sentencing
Kay Whitlock, member of LBGT unit @ AFSC, no date, “Corrupting Justice: A Primer for LBGT
Communities on Racism, Violence, Human Degradation, and the Prison Industrial Complex”, American
Friends Service Committee, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/corrupting-justice.pdf, accessed
4/17/20
In such a climate, “get

tough” ideology justifies the steady expansion of state-sponsored violence. This, in
turn, legitimizes, even normalizes abuse of power and the brutal mistreatment of any human being or
group of people labeled as “enemy.” For instance, the federal government launches a pre-emptive war
on Iraq, “outsources” certain high profile prisoners in the “war on terrorism” to countries, such as Egypt ,
that routinely use torture (this process is called “rendition”) and operates military and civilian prisons in which the degradation, humiliation,
and mistreatment of prisoners is well-documented. Local
police forces become increasingly militarized. Conditions of
confinement are inhumane in many jails and prisons throughout the United States, violating
international human rights standards. In such an atmosphere, it’s hardly surprising that our society now
invests so much in prisons and policing—at home and abroad—and so little in human needs, human
rights, and civic infrastructure. And it’s hardly surprising that the prisons we build are made not only of
concrete, bricks, and steel, but also of social, economic, and geopolitical policies that declare some
people to be unworthy, and, therefore, expendable .
A2: Net Benefit

The First Step Act is proof progressive criminal justice reform can be led by a
bipartisan Congress
German Lopez, senior correspondent, 11 December 2018, “The First Step Act, Congress’s criminal
justice reform bill, explained”, Vox, https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/12/3/18122392/first-
step-act-criminal-justice-reform-bill-congress, accessed 4/19/20
President Donald Trump and Congress may be on the verge of passing actual bipartisan legislation that
would ever so slightly ease mass incarceration — after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday announced that
he will allow a vote on the measure this month. The bill, known as the First Step Act, would take modest steps to reform
the criminal justice system and ease very punitive prison sentences at the federal level . It would affect only the
federal system — which, with about 181,000 imprisoned people, holds a small but significant fraction of the US jail and prison population of 2.1
million. The
bill has come a long way since it was introduced earlier this year, when it passed the
Republican-controlled House of Representatives . Back then, the bill made no effort to cut the length of prison sentences on
the front end, although it did take some steps to encourage rehabilitation in prison that inmates could use, in effect, to reduce how long they’re
in prison. But Senate Democrats and other reformers took issue with the bill’s limited scope, and eventually managed to add changes that will
ease, albeit fairly mildly, prison sentences. So although the bill would have already allowed thousands of people to earn an earlier release from
prison, it would now let thousands more out of prison early, and could cut many more prison sentences in the future. Even
though
Trump ran on a “tough on crime” platform in which he promised to support harsh prison sentences, the
president has come to support the legislation — in large part thanks to the backing of key advisers, including
son-in-law Jared Kushner. And the bill now has support from a wide array of groups, including the
American Civil Liberties Union, the Koch brothers–backed Right on Crime, and other organizations on
both the left and right. That doesn’t mean the bill has skated by without opposition. Some Senate Republicans, led particularly by Sen.
Tom Cotton of Arkansas, have taken issue with the mild reforms in the First Step Act, even as Republican senators like Chuck
Grassley (IA) and Lindsey Graham (SC) have come on board. That opposition seriously endangered the bill: With Congress
in the last few days of its current session, and with other legislative priorities on the calendar, McConnell had indicated that he may not allow
the bill to come up for a vote — because he feared that lawmakers just wouldn’t have enough time to work out their differences without
causing serious rifts within the Republican caucus. But McConnell, on Tuesday, said
that the legislation will move forward .
What comes next remains to be seen. But at this point, the First Step Act is the closest Congress has gotten to passing
significant criminal justice reform in years .
The legal system is inherently exclusionary – legislative action is the only way to
transform that
Katherine Beckett, professor of law @ U Washington, January 2018, “The Politics, Promise, and Peril
of Criminal Justice Reform in the Context of Mass Incarceration”, Annual Review of Criminology, Volume
1, https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-criminol-032317-092458, accessed
4/19/20
The dramatic uptick in the assessment of legal financial obligations by criminal justice institutions
similarly illustrates how criminal justice contact can affect everyday life and exacerbate inequality even
absent conviction and incarceration (Beckett & Harris 2011, Eisen 2015, Greenberg et al. 2016, Harris 2016, Harris et al. 2010,
Martin et al. 2017). The imposition of fees, fines, and other legal costs has increased notably as courts and
other penal institutions struggle to fund their expanding operations (Harris et al. 2010). This trend, combined
with the rise in the number of people who are convicted each year, means that millions of mainly poor
people now carry criminal justice–related debt (Harris et al. 2010). Yet many people who are never convicted
are also assessed legal fees and fines. For example, a recent study found that fines imposed on people arrested but not convicted
of a misdemeanor offense or traffic violation far outstrip those imposed on people convicted of a felony offense in Alabama (Greenberg et al.
2016). Similarly, parents are charged for the cost of their children's detention in at least nineteen states and numerous other counties (Hager
2017). In summary, someof the deleterious effects of criminal justice contact do not involve conviction and
incarceration. Moreover, the growth of the penal system has meant that a variety of control-oriented
institutions play a significant and often adverse role in the everyday lives of the poor . This body of scholarship
thus suggests that it is not just the growth of incarcerative institutions but rather the expansion of penal institutions more generally that
adversely impacts poor people and enhances inequality over time. For this reason, some scholars use the term carceral state to highlight the
adverse and stratifying role of criminal justice institutions in the lives of the disadvantaged (e.g., Hernandez et al. 2015).
Grassroots movements have the ability to pressure legislative solutions

4/19/20
Dagan & Teles (2014, 2016) are also pessimistic about the prospects of the alternative advocated by Gottschalk (2015), Alexander (2014), and
others: a grass roots social movement for progressive penal change. Specifically, Dagan & Teles (2014, p. 267) argue that a broader movement
that frames the carceral state as a civil and human rights issue would “almost certainly require an exceptionally unlikely direct mobilization of
mass incarceration's victims.” Although currently and formerly incarcerated people likely cannot generate and sustain such a movement alone,
it remains to be seen whether grass-roots movements led by the people and communities that are
disproportionately affected by both violence and mass incarceration could change the narrative (and
policy) on these issues in deeper and more lasting ways than bipartisan elites are willing to do . Indeed, a
growing number of visible and effective reform organizations are run by formerly incarcerated people
and/or their family members. And as Forman (2017) notes, …the public role of these activists may have a ripple
effect. Each time a formerly incarcerated person appears before a legislature, speaks at a news
conference or writes about life in prison, walls of shame and stigma begin to totter, and others find it
easier to speak up. In a nation in which nearly a third of people have been arrested by age 23, these
voices could have a profound collective impact . Moreover, the recent mobilization of progressive crime
survivors who favor progressive penal reform (Stillman 2015) and their role in securing a variety of recent
reforms suggest that the grass-roots mobilization of those most affected by violence and mass
incarceration could be a powerful force for change. Voter's recent support for some progressive ballot
initiatives suggests that this mechanism may be a promising tool for any such movements that do
materialize in states in which the ballot initiative process is available and the legislature remains mired
in gridlock.13
Judicial solutions aren’t durable – implementation and circumvention

4/19/20
Historically, prisoners and advocates of criminal justice reform have often turned to the courts for relief .
Although the courts provided little recourse to prisoners seeking protection in the early and mid-twentieth century, they did play an important
role in protecting prisoners’ rights in the 1960s and 1970s. However,
the enactment of the Prison Litigation Reform Act in
1986 has severely limited the ability of prisoners and their advocates to use the courts to address
conditions of confinement or other relevant issues (Schlanger 2016). It is in this context that recent events in California loom
large. In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Plata that overcrowded conditions in California state
prisons violated the Eighth Amendment and ordered the removal of roughly 40,000 inmates from its
prisons (Simon 2014). The number of people admitted to California state prisons dropped markedly in the wake of this ruling. And as Simon
(2014) argues, the Court's abundant references to prisoners’ right to dignity, its recognition of the affront that California prison conditions
represented to this right, and imposition of a population cap as a means of addressing overcrowding in Brown v. Plata may mean that this ruling
will serve as the legal basis of the nationwide dismantling of mass incarceration. Yet there
are also several reasons to be
skeptical that this will occur. First, as Simon (2013) acknowledges, the State of California was technically
compliant with previous court orders to address overcrowding and unconstitutionally cruel conditions
but also continued to reveal “deliberate indifference” to the humanitarian needs of prisoners. Second, in
the wake of Brown v. Plata, the state prison population did shrink, but the state notably increased
allocations for jail construction, and the jail population has grown markedly (Rubin 2015). Indeed, California's
incarcerated population in 2015 was only 9% smaller than in 2011; ongoing jail construction in many California counties and cities may mean
that the net decline is even smaller in the near future.14 Third, studies suggest that prison overcrowding litigation does
not reduce prison overcrowding but does increase corrections spending and incarceration rates ,
presumably by serving as a catalyst for prison (or jail) construction (Guetzkow & Schoon 2015; see also Schoenfeld 2010). Nor have the
courts served as an effective vehicle for improving prison conditions in recent decades, consistently
ruling, for example, that the widespread use of solitary confinement does not violate the Eighth
Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment (Reiter 2015).15
Grassroots movements have the ability to push for progressive elected candidates
Daryl Atkinson, executive director of Forward Justice, 3 October 2019, “Activists formerly
incarcerated: Dems need to show real commitment on justice reform”, USA Today,
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/policing/community-calls/2019/10/03/ex-incarcerated-dems-
need-real-commitment-justice-reform/3844099002/, accessed 4/19/20
An examination of the criminal justice reform proposals of the Democratic presidential candidates shows similarities in policy priorities. Most, if
not all, favor ending cash bail, prohibiting private companies from operating prisons, legalizing marijuana and reducing or eliminating
mandatory minimum sentences. Yet,
nagging questions remain: Who is fully committed to fixing these problems?
In other words, which candidate will take action when they stop campaigning and start governing? It’s
important to examine more than policy positions and take a look at candidates in their entirety. Some have prioritized criminal justice reform
throughout their careers. Others have announced policies during this campaign that are at odds with their legislative votes. Others still have
made controversial decisions while they worked within the criminal justice system. But most have not been heavily involved in
the movement to end mass incarceration. We are leaders of a national network of formerly incarcerated people who are driving
the movement to reimagine justice. Each of us has been previously incarcerated and has felt the impact of the harsh punishment and
destructive policies that have made our communities less safe. We are subject matter experts not only because of our lived experience, but
because we have spent decades working to fix the destructive policies and systemic failures that we experienced firsthand. At long last, the
American public has started to recognize the harmful impact of tough-on-crime policies. It is no longer a risk for Democrats to say that mass
incarceration must end — a testament to the tireless work and dedication of thousands of advocates and practitioners, many of whom have a
criminal record or have returned to their communities after incarceration. It also is not politically audacious to issue position papers on
eliminating mandatory minimum sentences or providing better services for people reentering society. In this day and age, the fact that we
cannot punish our way into public safety has been definitively concluded. But those running for the highest office in the country must go above
and beyond these safe ideas if they want to show that they’re committed to more than just political rhetoric. After all, even the current
president has claimed to be a criminal justice reformer. To set themselves apart from politics as usual, candidates must speak directly to the
constituencies that have the most at stake on every issue, including mass incarceration. There are plenty of criminal justice reform groups out
there just like ours, and activists are waiting for the opportunity to talk to candidates about policy. Democrats have given time to groups that
deal with gun-control issues and that are led by survivors of mass shootings and family members who have lost loved ones. Beto O'Rourke of
Texas met with a little over a dozen veterans in South Carolina to talk about issues that affect them. Sen. Elizabeth Warren spent time in
Philadelphia taking questions from teachers. Activists in the criminal justice movement deserve the same. Mass incarceration and
overcriminalization is an issue that affects the families of 2.2 million people in our jails and prisons and 70 million adults with a criminal record.
This election is an important moment in the movement to end mass incarceration. We have achieved
victories across the country by electing progressive prosecutors, eliminating cash bail and restoring the
right to vote for people who have served their sentences. The next president has a chance to accelerate
these reforms and mark an end to the tough-on-crime era. With such high stakes, the bare minimum
won't do. Candidates must make a compelling case not only to the nation at large but especially to those
most impacted by criminal justice issues. We are formerly incarcerated. But we are citizens. We vote. And, we are
influencers in progressive movements that address mass incarceration and related issues. Candidates
who commit to direct engagement with us will send a message of hope to energize an army of
supporters whose numbers have unfortunately and regrettably grown way too big .
Judges and courts are not the most accountable – subject to bias and political pressure
Megan Stevenson, professor of law @ George Mason, 19 November 2018, “Roadblock to Reform:
Judicial Selection and Criminal Justice Reform”, American Constitutional Society,
https://www.acslaw.org/analysis/reports/roadblocktoreform/, accessed 4/19/20
Summary: Judgesignoring risk assessment recommendations If Kentucky judges had followed the
recommendations associated with the risk assessment in all cases, the pretrial release rate among low-
and moderate-risk defendants would have jumped up by 37 percentage points after risk assessment was
made mandatory. Instead, the pretrial release rate for low- and moderate-risk defendants increased by
only 4 percentage points, from 63% to 67% . The median judge in Kentucky grants release without
monetary bail to only 37% of defendants with low or moderate risk status. In other words, the median
judge overrules the presumptive default associated with the risk assessment about 2/3 of the time . If
judges had followed the recommendations associated with the risk assessment, there would have been up to a 25% increase in the diversion
rate among risk assessment-eligible offenders after risk assessment was adopted statewide. Instead, the diversion rate remained virtually
unchanged, dipping just slightly from 34% to 33%. The median judge in Virginia diverts only about 40% of those who
were recommended for diversion by the risk assessment instrument . The Politicized System of Selecting
State Court Judges Judges are people. They come with their own beliefs about what kind of criminal justice response is appropriate in
each particular circumstance. But being a judge is also a job. Understanding judicial incentives requires
understanding the process by which judges are hired, retained, and promoted. Almost all state court
judges must obtain and keep their positions by means of highly politicized election and appointment
schemes. This is very different from the federal judicial system, in which, after judges are nominated by the President and confirmed by the
Senate, they become largely insulated from political pressure by lifetime terms. Even after gaining office through election or appointment,
almost all state court judges must routinely seek re-election or re-appointment on a regular basis. Trial
court judges, who decide criminal cases, are often especially exposed to these political pressures.
Twenty-nine states elect their trial court judges, while two use a system of legislative appointment and
reappointment. Such systems, combined with relatively short terms for most trial court judges, mean
that judges are routinely confronted with the reality that voters or legislators will be passing judgement
on their judicial records. The incentive to avoid being characterized as “soft on crime” – and thus at risk
of losing their position–is powerful.
Pressure on elected officials the best way to ensure criminal justice reform
Ames Grawert, researcher for Brennan Center of Justice, 2019, “Ending Mass Incarceration: A
Presidential Agenda”, NYU School of Law, https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2019-
08/Report_Justice_Presidential_Agenda.pdf, accessed 4/19/20
With racial and economic inequality front and center in the national debate, leaders aspiring to the Oval
Office must articulate a clear, ambitious vision for building a more just society. Candidates will likely
disagree over the most direct path toward that goal. But ending mass incarceration remains an essential
component of any vision for a stronger American society . Reducing our unacceptably high prison population will
strengthen communities, reinvigorate the economy, and address continuing racial disparities in our justice system. That means
developing a comprehensive criminal justice platform should be an early goal for any candidate hoping
to demonstrate a commitment to racial and economic justice. Considering the broad popularity of
reducing incarceration, candidates must think big or risk being for- gotten by the wayside in the
contentious election season. Half measures won’t meet the need or the urgency of this moment. But the
solutions proposed in this report will.
Elected officials are key to pass progressive reforms

Timothy Head, executive director of Faith & Freedom Coalition, 22 January 2020, “What should
criminal justice reform look like in 2020?”, The Hill, https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/479328-
what-should-criminal-justice-reform-look-like-in-2020, accessed 4/19/20
Reducing incarceration has to start in communities, with programs that target juveniles, reduce homelessness, help people access mental
health and substance abuse services, and increase employment opportunities. These programs cost far less than incarceration. Ensure prompt
and fair outcomes for both the accused and the victim. Nearly
half of the over 16,000 people in Michigan’s jails are pretrial
detainees awaiting trial. Effective reforms increase pretrial releases and reserve prison and jail resources
for those who represent a flight risk or public safety threat. Additionally, resources like counseling, legal
representation, and compensation for victims of crimes sorely lack in states throughout the country . The
First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill passed last year, has already made progress toward reducing mass incarceration and
reducing recidivism. As of this week, all
inmates have been assessed using a risk and needs assessment tool so that
they can be assigned to the right rehabilitation and recidivism reduction programs. To take justice
reform to the next step, we need the support of legislators on both the federal and state levels . The Judeo-
Christian values our country was founded on personal balance responsibility with forgiveness and mercy. Solutions that approach
criminal justice with this mindset prioritize public safety and the wellbeing of both offenders and victims.
Citizens are pushing for more progressive candidates on criminal justice

Timothy Williams, reporter for the NYT, 20 August 2019, “The Criminal Justice Debate Has Changed
Drastically, Here’s Why”, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/us/politics/criminal-
justice-reform-sanders-warren.html, accessed 4/19/20
Marijuana would be decriminalized, mass incarceration would be reversed and the death penalty would
be eliminated as part of sweeping changes that leading Democratic presidential candidates have
proposed to make to the criminal justice system , which has become a dependable political foil for its inefficiency and excesses
but has also proved resistant to change. Both liberal and centrist candidates are backing the overhauls, and some
progressives are going further, pushing mainstream boundaries with proposals like ending solitary
confinement in jails and prisons, paying inmates a living wage for work they do in prison and legalizing
supervised injection sites for intravenous drug use. Until recently, such ideas were considered so radical
in the United States that they would have been immediately dismissed even among reform-minded
lawmakers. But they are now being instituted or seriously considered in cities and states across the
nation. Experts say the changing debate reflects a seismic shift in how the American public views
criminal justice issues. “This is a conversation that is unrecognizable from 10 years ago — even five years
ago — when these kinds of proposals wouldn’t have been floated in back rooms, let alone in public,” said
Adam Gelb, president of the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan research organization. This week, the leading progressives in the
Democratic field elevated some of those ideas in the presidential race.
Generic A2: SCOTUS CP

SC decisions don’t resolve the inequalities they try to address – we need different
rules and laws, not new interpretations of the ones we have
Alec Karakatsani, founder of Civil Rights Corps, 9 November 2019, “The Criminal Justice System Is Not
Broken. It’s Doing What It Was Designed To Do”, The Intercept,
https://theintercept.com/2019/11/09/criminal-justice-mass-incarceration-book/, accessed 4/01/20
The American legal system has never been an institution of radical social change. To the contrary, it has been an
instrument of ruling class oppression. The legal system, from its founding, was about preserving distributions of wealth and property and white
supremacy. If you go back and read old Supreme Court cases, you’ll see in every era the Supreme Court and the federal courts and the state
courts are reproducing the sort of power dynamics of that era into what’s called legal decision-making, and passing it off as legal reasoning.
We need to build a movement that changes the power dynamics so that our society demands that our
legal system create different rules. The best example of this might be Brown v. Board of Education,
maybe the most celebrated legal decision in American Supreme Court history. Sixty years after Brown,
you have schools that are just as segregated, if not more segregated, in some parts of the country than
they were before Brown. Why? Because if you don’t attack the underlying systems of oppression that
lead to a problem, a court ruling isn’t going to solve them. A contrary example might be same-sex marriage. Very
smart lawyers brought those cases 40 years ago, and they essentially lost everywhere, including in the
U.S. Supreme Court. Then years after that, other lawyers, and actually some of the same lawyers, using
the same words, challenged same-sex marriage bans again. This time, they prevailed. It wasn’t because
the 14th Amendment changed, or because they became better lawyers. It was because there had been a
movement in our society that changed the way we think about same-sex marriage . What we in the criminal
system need to understand is that we need to be part of a social movement that changes the way we think about human caging. And until we
are part of that movement, I don’t suspect that the courts are fundamentally going to alter this architecture of mass incarceration.
CP doesn’t solve – backlash to court decisions

Michael Klarman, professor of law at Harvard, 31 March 2011, “Courts, Social Change, and Political
Backlash”, Phillip A. Heart Memorial Lecture,
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=hartlecture,
accessed 4/04/20
I am in the process of writing a book on the

backlash phenomenon: Court decisions on highly charged issues that
produce massive resistance to ruling, arguably set back the cause that the decision seems to advance, at
least in the short term, and possibly have larger, often unpredictable effects on politics as well. Let me talk
in detail about 3 of these examples and then talk a little about how and why the backlash dynamic works the way it does. Then will finish up by
offering just a few brief thoughts on normative implications, though want to emphasize that mostly what I am doing today–and in the book–is
describing and explaining backlash. My normative thoughts–what one ought to do if persuaded by my descriptive account-- are more tentative
and ambivalent. First illustration of backlash phenomenon is Brown v. Board and massive resistance. Before Supreme Court decided Brown,
Black voter registration in deep South increased tenfold in decade following WWII Cities even in Deep South were integrating minor league
baseball teams, hiring black police officers, and putting blacks on juries, often for first time since 19th century Politicians like Big Jim Folsom in
Alabama were winning elections on populist economic platforms while downplaying race. After Brown, progressive racial reform ground to a
halt and politics moved far to the right as politicians competed against one another to occupy most extreme point on segregationist spectrum.
In Mississippi, black voter registration fell from 22,000 to 8,000 in years after Brown. Desegregation of higher education became far more
controversial with grade school desegregation lurking in the background. Race riots now erupted in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi when
blacks tried to desegregate those universities, whereas before Brown, most southern states had peacefully desegregated higher education
pursuant to the Court’s ruling in Sweatt v. Painter in 1950. Progress in integration of athletic competitions also ground to a halt. In early 1954,
Birmingham city council had rescinded ban on integrating sporting competitions, hopeful for spring training visit from Jackie Robinson and
Brooklyn Dodgers. Within two weeks of Brown, Birmingham voters had restored that ban in referendum by margin of 3-1. 2 Brown unleashed a
political backlash in the South that destroyed moderates like Big Jim Folsom, induced politicians to take the most extreme segregationist
positions they could devise, and helped create or revive the political careers of racial demagogues such as George Wallace, Ross Barnett, and
Bull Connor. Second example:Furman. Opinion polls in 1960s showing decreasing support for death penalty.
In 1966, one and only poll showed plurality opposed, 47 to 42 percent . Urban riots and assassinations in
1968 increased support, which stabilized at about 50 to 40 in favor , in 1969, 1970, and 1971. Then CA Supreme
Court invalidated death penalty under state const’n early in 1972 and US Supreme Court followed suit
under federal const’n in June 1972. By the fall, Gallup polls showed 10% margin in favor becoming 25%
In CA that fall, a voter referendum restored the death penalty by a margin of 66 to 34%, the largest
margin in favor of death penalty since polling began on the issue in CA. At the national level, 25%
became 35% within another year or two. In the four years after Furman, 35 states enacted new death
penalty legislation. The Supreme Court’s ruling against the death penalty perversely but almost surely
increased support for the death penalty…
CP doesn’t solve – backlash to court decisions especially that don’t compromise

Michael Klarman, professor of law at Harvard, 31 March 2011, “Courts, Social Change, and Political
Backlash”, Phillip A. Heart Memorial Lecture,
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=hartlecture,
accessed 4/04/20
Why backlash? Briefly note a few reasons why prominent Court decisions sometimes have this effect . Emphasize: I’m
not being normative here. I’m offering a description of what I think happened, not a prescription for what should have happened. (1) Most
importantly, on most issues like abortion or death penalty, there are compromise positions that might
appeal to swing voters, but Supreme Court failed to reach that position in these cases. E.g., on gay marriage
that position is civil unions, yet Goodridge said those weren’t good enough On abortion, Court in Roe had available at least two different
compromises that almost surely would have reduced the backlash effect of the ruling: 4 (a) Limit abortion right to first trimester–public opinion
favored abortion decision to be made between woman and doctor by 60 percent in first trimester, but only by 28% in second. Roe pretty much
protects unfettered abortion right through second trimester. (b) Strike down antiquated 19th century abortion restrictions, like the law in
Texas, which forbade abortions except where woman’s life was at risk, but sustain therapeutic abortion laws, like the one in GA, which
permitted abortions where woman’s life or health was at risk, where there was strong chance of fetal deformity, or where pregnancy was result
of rape or incest. Interestingly, there is evidence that on both these issues, a majority of Court was initially prepared to take the position that
would have been less likely to generate backlash, but in neither case did it ultimately do so. On
death penalty, compromise
position might be to bar it for some sorts of crimes –e.g., rape, but not murder, or permit it for certain murders
(e.g., of a police officer) but not others–to impose certain procedural restrictions–e.g., bifurcated trial, mandatory appellate review, guiding jury
discretion with mitigating and aggravating factors. Furman
does none of those things–it threatens to simply abolish
the death penalty across the board. Turns out that in 1972, most Americans have trouble with death penalty but still want to be
able to execute Charles Manson (Timothy McVeigh, if that helps) Furman threatened to take that option away, and the country revolted against
it. This observation about failure of Court in these cases to reach the compromise position that appeals to
median voter naturally raises question of why. Let me say a few words about that and then go back to other factors that help explain
backlash. One possibility is that something in nature of judicial decision making–commitment to principled
adjudication–makes it difficult to reach compromise position that appeals to most people .
Courts don’t effect change – they reflect the progress society is already making
Heather Gerken, professor of law at Yale, 7 July 2015, “The Supreme Court is a Partner in
Transformation, not the Sole Agent”, The New York Times,
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/07/06/is-the-supreme-court-too-powerful/the-
supreme-court-is-a-partner-in-transformation-not-the-sole-agent, accessed 4/04/20
There’s long been a debate about the relationship between the Supreme Court and change within the legal academy. During the heady days of
the Warren Court, law professors touted Brown v. Board of Education as the paradigm of the productive role
that the court could play in effecting change . It was precisely because judges stood above politics, many thought, that they
could serve as the nation’s conscience. The court can’t affect social change top-down, but it has been an integral
part of the process of change. The conventional wisdom has shifted dramatically. Scholars have questioned the
efficacy, even the wisdom of the court’s intervention in Brown. They began to notice that much of the
work of integration was done by organizers, not lawyers, and pushed through Congress, not the courts .
The much-maligned Roe v. Wade eventually displaced Brown as the paradigm of judicial intervention, and worries about a political “backlash”
to judicial decisions came to the fore. We’ve thus reached a point where the
conventional wisdom against judicial
intervention has become as powerful as the opinion once favoring it . The truth, of course, is somewhere in the
middle. The court can’t effect social change top-down, but it can’t sit on the sidelines, either. That’s
because social movements are almost always rights-oriented. Supporters cast their claims in rights-
based terms, and movement leaders inevitably look to the courts for validation. The best way to
understand the relationship between politics and law, then, is as interlocking gears moving us forward.
Advocates push for change in the political and social sphere, which in turn creates space (and pressure)
for the courts to effect change in the legal sphere . Rights are invoked by advocates before they have been recognized by
judges. Think about the same-sex marriage movement. While much of the work was done on the democratic and social front, it rested on
appeals to constitutional values, which all but inevitably morphed into appeals to the courts. Indeed, courts served as important sites of
politicking for the same-sex marriage movement precisely because they are thought to be above politics. Perhaps, then, our paradigmatic case
for thinking about the relationship between change and the court shouldn’t be Brown or Roe but Windsor, Obergefell’s precursor, which
invalidated the federal refusal to recognize same-sex marriages. While Obergefell puts the court at the center of the debate, Windsor
emphasized the crucial role that the people themselves played in creating the constitutional right to marry.
SCOTUS only creates change when government and society already support said
change
Mark Tushnet, professor of law at Georgetown, 31 July 2006, “The Role of Courts in Social Change:
Moving Forward?”, https://lawreviewdrake.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/lrvol54-4_tushnet.pdf,
accessed 4/04/20
We can look forward to the role of courts in social change from two perspectives: first, projecting what may happen over the next several years;
and second, anticipating with some pleasure what we think likely to happen. My comments here look forward in the former sense and only
incidentally in the latter. The reason is that, as I will argue, what courts are likely to do with respect to social change is unlikely to please
everyone. This is because the social changes in the future are likely to reflect the complexities and contradictions of American society and
culture. Beyond acceptance, of course, lies actualization. It is one thing for the courts to say that you have a
right, but it is another for you to enjoy that right . Gerald Rosenberg has argued that constitutional reform
litigation achieves its most lasting results when the end sought has support in the political system, either
directly, as when Congress and the presidency finally embraced the civil rights agenda in the mid-1960s,
or indirectly, as when the outcome can be reached by the use of resources available in relatively
unregulated markets (which political actors are unwilling or unable to regulate after the courts have
spoken).35 That, however, is a story for another time.
Responses to Depolicing Disadvantage
Depolicing isn’t real

Depolicing doesn’t impact police action—studies prove
American Psychological Association. October 27, 2015. Negative publicity reduces police motivation but
does not result in depolicing. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151027154941.htm
(Accessed 5/11/2020)
Recent negative publicity surrounding police after several shootings of unarmed civilians appears to
have diminished some officers' motivation to be in law enforcement but does not decrease willingness
to carry out their duties, according to a study published by the American Psychological Association.
advertisement "It appears that officers in our sample have been affected by negative 'Ferguson-type'
press," said lead author Scott Wolfe, PhD, of the University of South Carolina. "Some officers indicated being less motivated to perform their
duties." The study appears in the journal Law and Human Behavior. The research is notable in light of recent comments by FBI Director James
Comey attributing the rise in homicides in some cities to police apprehension at the prospect of cellphone videos and the possibility that such
recordings could go viral. As a result, he said, some police may be reluctant to engage in face-to-face encounters in their communities. The
White House has disagreed with this assessment. This so-called "Ferguson effect" refers to the hypothesis that recent increases in violent crime
can be ascribed to negative publicity associated with police actions, such as the August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri,
and the subsequent riots. While
there is no empirical evidence yet to support the "Ferguson effect," according
to Wolfe, he and co-author Justin Nix, PhD, of the University of Louisville, examined whether the
negative publicity surrounding these events might have had a negative effect on police willingness to
engage in community partnerships, where police work together with residents to identify local problems
and develop strategies to combat them . The study used data from a February 2015 survey of 567 deputies at a mid-sized sheriff's
department in the Southeastern United States serving 393,000 residents. All sworn deputies were asked to complete a questionnaire on a
password-protected website and were guaranteed anonymity. Participants were asked to indicate the extent to which they agreed that
negative publicity during the prior six months made them less motivated at work or caused them to be less proactive on the job than they were
in the past. "The
results indicate that there appears to be a relationship between reduced motivation as a
result of negative publicity and less willingness to work directly with community members to solve
problems," said Wolfe. However, this effect appears to be spurious once participants' perceptions of
departmental fairness and confidence in their authority as a police officer were taken into account .
Statistical evidence of depolicing is sporadic and short-term

Stephen Rushin. Professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. 30 Apr 2017. De-Policing.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2757809 (Accessed 5/11/2020)
We failed to find any consistent relationship between the introduction of mere scrutiny and crime rates .
A full breakdown of these results can be found in Appendix C. It is important to note that this finding does not disprove a relationship between
the introduction of external scrutiny and changes in crime rates. We
simply lack sufficient evidence to make a definitive
statement either way. We actually found that the introduction of public scrutiny coincided with an
apparent increase in rates of all index crime offenses.179 However, these increases in crime were, by
and large, statistically insignificant— particularly when we introduced our control variables .180 Because of
our inability to make any definitive determination about the relationship between mere scrutiny and crime rates, we will spend the remainder
of this Part evaluating the relationship between external regulation and crime rates. We found that the introduction of external regulation to a
police department via § 14141 was associated with a statistically significant increase in the frequency of several crime categories—particularly
property crimes.181 This finding is consistent with claims made by critics that external regulation may, at least initially, make officers less
aggressive or less ef fective in combatting crime. Upon
a more detailed examination, we found that this apparent
uptick in crimes was concentrated in the years immediately after the initiation of external regulation and
diminished into statistical insignificance over time.182 This suggests that external regulation may come
with growing pains. The subparts that follow walk through the data.
Evidence supporting the Ferguson effect has been reversed and points to other causes
for crime increases
Lois Beckett. Writer at the Guardian. 13 May 2016. Is the 'Ferguson effect' real? Researcher has second
thoughts. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/13/ferguson-effect-real-researcher-
richard-rosenfield-second-thoughts (Accessed 5/11/2020)
Samuel Sinyangwe, a co-founder of Mapping Police Violence and Campaign Zero, called the
conservative focus on the Ferguson
effect “a reactionary attempt to undermine the movement”. “It has been the attempt to put across this
narrative that any criticism of the police is dangerous to society,” he said. That kind of political rhetoric
has been used against civil rights advocates in the past. Opponents of the 1964 Civil Rights Act argued
that “civil rights would engender a crime wave ”, Yale political scientist Vesla Weaver wrote in an article on how arguments
about crime were used to attack and undermine African Americans’ fight for equal rights. A closer look at many of the statistics Mac Donald
used to bolster her thesis showed they did not provide sufficient evidence of a nationwide crime wave, criminologist Frank Zimring argued last
year. When Rosenfeld analyzed St Louis’s crime data, he found the increase in homicides there could not have been
caused by a “Ferguson effect”, because the greatest increase came early in the year, months before
Michael Brown’s death or the protests that followed. Rosenfeld’s research was widely cited in articles
debunking the Ferguson effect. But that paper only looked at the evidence for the effect in one city.
With funding from the National Institute of Justice, the justice department’s research arm, Rosenfeld did
a new study early this year that looked that more broadly at homicide trends in the nation’s 56 largest
cities and found an overall 17% increase in homicide. As a result of that broader national analysis he
said, he has had “second thoughts” about the Ferguson effect. “My views have been altered.” Looking at
the additional homicides in large cities, he found that two-thirds of the increase was concentrated in 10
cities: Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Washington, Nashville, Philadelphia, Kansas
City and St Louis. Those 10 cities had somewhat higher levels of poverty than the other cities he
examined. But, he said, the “key difference” was that “their African American population was
substantially larger than other large cities”: an average of 41% in those 10 cities, compared with 19.9% in the others. Separate
analyses looked at two of these cities in 2015 and early 2016. A FiveThirtyEight assessment of Chicago crime data
concluded that the city’s increase in gun violence was statistically significant, that the spike dated back
to the release of the video of the police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, and that it was
closely correlated with a drop in police arrests. Researchers in Baltimore found a similar correlation
between a drop in arrests and an increase in violence in the wake of protests over Freddie Gray’s death,
and concluded that while the Ferguson effect played no role in Baltimore’s rising violence, a “Freddie
Gray effect” may have been a significant factor.
Violent attacks don’t cause depolicing

Valerie Richardson. Writer at the Washington Times. May 4, 2017. EXCLUSIVE: FBI report finds officers
'de-policing' as anti-cop hostility becomes 'new norm'
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/may/4/fbi-report-officers-de-policing-anti-cop-hostility/
An unclassified FBI study on last year’s cop-killing spree found officers are “de-policing” amid concerns
that anti-police defiance fueled in part by movements like Black Lives Matter has become the “new
norm.” “Departments — and individual officers — have increasingly made the decision to stop engaging
in proactive policing,” said the report by the FBI Office of Partner Engagement obtained by The Washington Times. The report,
“Assailant Study — Mindsets and Behaviors,” said that the social-justice movement sparked by the 2014 death of 18-
year-old Michael Brown at the hands of an officer in Ferguson, Missouri, “made it socially acceptable to
challenge and discredit the actions of law enforcement.” FBI spokesman Matthew Bertron said the study
was written in April. “Nearly every police official interviewed agreed that for the first time, law
enforcement not only felt that their national political leaders [publicly] stood against them, but also that
the politicians’ words and actions signified that disrespect to law enforcement was acceptable in the
aftermath of the Brown shooting,” the study said. As a result, “Law enforcement officials believe that
defiance and hostility displayed by assailants toward law enforcement appears to be the new norm.”
The report examined 50 of the 53 incidents last year in which officers were killed in the line of duty,
excluding the three cases that involved minors or perpetrators who remain unknown . Most of the assailants
who used deadly force against officers did so in an effort to avoid being taken into custody, but 28 percent were motivated by
hatred of police and a desire to “kill law enforcement,” in some cases fueled by social and political
movements. “The assailants inspired by social and/or political reasons believed that attacking police
officers was their way to ‘get justice’ for those who had been, in their view, unjustly killed by law
enforcement,” the study said. The perpetrators said their animus toward police was based on their own
experiences as well as “what they heard and read in the media about other incidents involving law
enforcement shootings.” Those charged in the July 2016 shootings of police in Dallas and Baton Rouge
“said they were influenced by the Black Lives Matter movement, and their belief that law enforcement
was targeting black males,” the report said.
Depolicing evidence is limited to a few selection hotspots, not a national trend

Lois Beckett. Writer at the Guardian. 13 May 2016. Is the 'Ferguson effect' real? Researcher has second
thoughts. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/13/ferguson-effect-real-researcher-
richard-rosenfield-second-thoughts (Accessed 5/11/2020)
Violence has many complex causes, and decades of exhaustive research has shed only partial light. Even
the dramatic drop in violence and crime since the early 1990s – the most basic fact about crime in
America – is . In trying to understand 2015’s murder trends, Rosenfeld looked for reasons why cities that
already struggled with high levels of violence might see “a precipitous and very abrupt increase”.
Rosenfeld considered two potential alternative explanations: the US heroin epidemic, and the number
of former inmates returning home from prison. Neither of these explanations quite lined up with the
increase in violence, he said. For instance, the country has been in the midst of a heroin epidemic since
2011. Why there would be a four to five year lag before the epidemic caused murders to spike? “That
led me to conclude, preliminarily, that something like a Ferguson effect was responsible for the
increase,” he said. What exactly that effect might be is far from clear , he said. The fierce debate over the “Ferguson
effect” or Comey’s “viral video effect” has described the dynamic in several ways, including criminals being “emboldened” by protests agains
the police, and “de-policing”, or police drawing back from proactive activities, in the wake of increased public scrutiny. One Chicago officer said
that police were drawing back not because of public scrutiny via cell phone videos, but because of their fear that city officials would no longer
protect officers who made honest mistakes while doing a difficult job. Rosenfeld
said he has only seen clear evidence of
decreases in proactive police activity in Chicago and Baltimore. He said he believed “de-policing” was
not a major factor in other cities – and that even in Chicago, changes in proactive police activity could
only be responsible for some of the increase in shootings and violence. One potential link between
public attention to police violence and increased violent crime in the community, he said, might be if
intensified community mistrust of the police make offenders think “that they can commit crime with
impunity. They don’t think the community is willing to cooperate with the police and investigations or
they think the community is less likely to contact the police when victimized.” “We don’t yet have the
data to understand the mechanism for the Ferguson effect,” he said .
Public distrust turn

Depolicing is caused by public distrust, not increased accountability—reform solves
SHAILA DEWAN. Writer at NY Times. MARCH 29, 2017. Deconstructing the ‘Ferguson Effect’
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/us/politics/ferguson-effect.html (Accessed 5/11/2020)
The problem might not be officers demoralized by protests, but a community demoralized by the
perception that the police are unjust. “In cities where there was more concern about police violence,
homicide and other violent crimes rose more,” said Neil Gross, a sociologist at Colby College. He
measured this concern — imperfectly, he acknowledged — by tracking surges in Google searches for
terms like “Black Lives Matter” and “police brutality.” This “other Ferguson effect,” he said — the
damage to trust in law enforcement — will not be solved by easing up on calls for accountability. “The
idea that if we just stopped caring about police violence, crime would go down, makes no sense,” Mr.
Gross said. The recent crime increases are also correlated with higher racial segregation and lower
educational attainment. Timing-wise, they might be attributable to the heroin trade. If criminals were
emboldened by a police pullback, one would expect all kinds of crime to increase. But Mr. Gross said
homicides and shootings had risen much more than other violent or property-related crimes — more
evidence that something else is going on. What if the police are pulling back not because they feel under
siege, but because the protests have made them more sensitive to community concerns? What if they
are just doing what the critics want? It is possible to draw that conclusion from a new, yet-to-be-
published study of 118 police departments in Missouri by Professor Pyrooz and his co-authors. The
number of traffic stops, car searches and arrests declined from 2014, the year Mr. Brown was killed, to
2015, especially in communities with a larger share of African-Americans. When the police did conduct a
search, they were more likely to find contraband, suggesting that they were using better judgment. The
changes were unrelated to fluctuations in crime. Scholars like to call such pullbacks “de-policing,” which
sounds like something no community would want. But Professor Pyrooz argues, “Some places are
overpoliced, and de-policing is actually a good thing.”
Public distrust of police among minorities is the real cause of depolicing

JULEYKA LANTIGUA-WILLIAMS. Writer at the Atlantic. SEPTEMBER 29, 2016. Has the 'Ferguson Effect’
Finally Been Debunked? https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/has-the-ferguson-
effect-finally-been-debunked/502265/ (Accessed 5/11/2020)
So, which is it? Are police neglecting their sworn duty to protect or are citizens scrutinizing their
methods more? Two sets of data released this week suggest that neither may be a sufficient
explanation. They point, instead, to an alternative: That citizens in black neighborhoods are losing
confidence in police. Three sociologists who studied over 800,000 911 calls in Milwaukee concluded that
following a publicized death of a black man at the hands of police calls to the emergency dispatch
dropped precipitously, especially in black neighborhoods. “High-profile cases of police violence against
unarmed citizens can undermine the legitimacy of legal authority,” they wrote. Pew Research Center
also released a report Thursday that looks at the “racial confidence gap” in how police officers are
perceived by the general public. Researchers concluded that whites, blacks, and Latinos show some level
of criticism about the performance of their police force, with only 26 percent of all respondents saying
they “have a lot of confidence” in the police. The low confidence is most pronounced among blacks.
Only 14 percent have a lot of confidence, and they “are about half as likely as whites to have a positive
view of the job their local police are doing,” per the report. They are also 25 percent more likely than
whites to link the deaths of blacks in interactions with police to a broader society-wide problem instead
of viewing each as an isolated incident. By comparison, a third of Latinos have a lot of confidence in
police. Are highly publicized incidents of police brutality and police shootings making black Americans
less likely to reach out to police? Do residents of affected communities fear calling 911 to report crimes?
Might the fear of a situation ending tragically prevent even people who might be in some danger from
involving their local police force? The Pew report offers some insight into these hard-to-answer
questions. Three quarters of white respondents rate police work as “excellent” in terms of using the
“right amount of force for each situation.” Only a third of blacks share this view, and two thirds say the
police do only a “fair or poor job” in this regard. Among Latinos, two thirds say police are doing “at least
a good job,” while just over a third rate them as “only a fair or poor.”
Increased accountability and decreased public trust result in the best enforcement
Radley Balko. Opinion writer at Washington Post. July 19, 2018. Was there a ‘Ferguson effect’ in
Baltimore? Don’t be so sure. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2018/07/19/was-
there-a-ferguson-effect-in-baltimore-dont-be-so-sure/ (Accessed 5/11/2020)
While the USA Today article did find a decline in police activity that corresponded with a rise in crime,
there’s good reason to be skeptical that one caused the other . If you look at the line graph comparing police actions and
shootings that accompanied the report, it’s true that there are stretches over the 41-month period that the paper analyzed in which police
actions decline dramatically while shootings go up. But there
are also stretches were police actions increase along with
shootings. And there are others where both decrease from previous months. We can also look to other
cities. In 2013, when a federal judge required New York police to dramatically scale back the use of “stop
and frisk,” there were widespread predictions that crime would soar across the city. Instead, New York
has seen some of its lowest crime rates on record. And when the NYPD engaged in what appeared to be
an organized “slowdown” in late 2014, crime declined . In contrast to New York, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and others
have pointed to Chicago, where the murder rate appears to have spiked shortly after the city entered into an agreement with the ACLU that
required police officers to document and record such stops. Sessions cited a paper that claimed to prove this statistically and dubbed it the
“ACLU Effect.” But as we documented here at The Watch, critics have poked holes in that paper and pointed to other possible causes for the
rise in murders, including fluctuating funding for anti-violence intervention groups, that seem to be much more closely tied to the city’s murder
rate. Sowhat else might have contributed to the spike in murders in Baltimore? One possibility is the
alternative Ferguson Effect noted earlier. The general idea is that in places with a long history of police
misconduct, abuse, unnecessary shootings and racial profiling, there’s a corresponding mistrust among
police and the areas they serve, particularly in the minority communities that get the brunt end of such
abuses. I’ve noted before the work of sociologist and historian Randolph Roth, who has argued that
historically, violent crime has gone up when there’s widespread mistrust in government legitimacy. If
that’s true, one could see how the problem would be compounded in communities where there’s ample
distrust of the one government entity with whom people most often interact. And there’s some data to
back this up. A 2016 study found that 911 calls from black neighborhoods in Milwaukee dropped 20
percent after the high profile police beating of a black man. Murders in the city then soared to rates that
surpassed similar stretches in both prior and subsequent years .
Public distrust in minority communities is the greater cause

JULEYKA LANTIGUA-WILLIAMS. Writer at the Atlantic. SEPTEMBER 29, 2016. Has the 'Ferguson Effect’
Finally Been Debunked? https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/has-the-ferguson-
effect-finally-been-debunked/502265/ (Accessed 5/11/2020)
Those numbers reflect both broad-based concern, and its concentration in the black community. As the
sociologists noted in their examination of 911 calls, history and research suggest “that African American
communities would be more affected than white communities” by police shootings and other incidents
of brutality. Frank Jude was brutally beaten by off-duty police officers in Milwaukee, but his story did not become known for months.
Following news reports in a local paper, demonstrators organized to pressure authorities to bring the officers involved to justice. The study
looked at 911 call patterns during the year prior to the story breaking and the year following. They
chronicled a stark correlation: “We estimate that the police beating of Frank Jude resulted in a net loss
of approximately 22,200 911 calls reporting crime the year after Jude’s story broke.” Over half of the
total decline came from black neighborhoods. The racial confidence report from Pew offers some
sobering numbers that help put the conclusions in the Milwaukee study into a national context. Only a
third of blacks say police do an “excellent or good job” in treating racial or ethnic groups equally,
compared with three quarters of whites. Just under a quarter of blacks say the local police does “only a
fair job” and about forty percent say they “do a poor job.” And it’s not just the initial incidents; blacks
report a lack of confidence in the ability of law-enforcement agencies to police themselves. Only a third
of blacks in the Pew report say police are doing a good or excellent job in “holding officers accountable
when misconduct occurs.” But 70 percent of whites say the same. This lack of confidence seems to be
exacerbating the historical mistrust experienced by black residents. About 80 percent of respondents in
the Pew report believe “these deaths signal a larger problem between police and the black community.”
Just 54 percent of whites and 66 percent of Latinos say the same. Neither of the studies links this lack of
confidence to upticks in crime in the areas in which it’s concentrated. But they do suggest that well-
publicized incidents are reinforcing historic distrust, and that this deters citizens from contacting police
to report crimes. And given the reliance of police on their relationship with local communities, they raise
the possibility that the problem in cities grappling with rising crime may be less that officers subjected to
scrutiny are backing off from proactive policing, than that communities subjected to repeated abuses
are losing faith in those who are sworn to protect them .
Public distrust is a greater cause of crime increases

John A.Shjarback. Writer at Elsevier. May 2017. De-policing and crime in the wake of Ferguson:
Racialized changes in the quantity and quality of policing among Missouri police departments.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047235217301289?via%3Dihub (Accessed
5/11/2020)
Advocates for police reform and community violence prevention greeted the hypothesis with some
skepticism. Dante Barry, executive director of the Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, said the idea that increased political activism by
black Americans could lead to increased violence was “anti-democratic”. Mistrust between some black neighborhoods and
police was not some new phenomenon, he said. “The trust factor has always been a factor, for
generations.” Sinyangwe, of Mapping Police Violence and Campaign Zero, said he could not evaluate Rosenfeld’s research before reading
his full report, but noted that New York City, which saw both massive protests over the death of Eric Garner and a as a protest against Mayor
Bill de Blasio, has not seen dramatic increases in crime or murder. “The
reality is we really don’t know what leads to
increase in homicide,” he said. “You have to go into communities and ask them what is going on.” Phillip
Atiba Goff, a leading researcher on racial bias in policing and the president of the Center for Policing
Equity, said in an April interview that one way of interpreting the Ferguson effect is “on its face,
offensive”, but that there is clear research evidence linking perceptions of police legitimacy to how
willing people are to break the law. “If you believe not having police doing proactive stops in
neighborhoods leads to immediate upticks in violent crime, that suggests that the people who live in
that neighborhood are just waiting to commit acts of violence until they’re not being watched by the
hall monitors that wear badges and guns,” he said. The suggestion that some Americans “can’t control
their base instincts” without someone with a badge surveilling them is the kind of logic that led to mass
incarceration and the war on drugs, he said. “A far more reasonable hypothesis is that the decay in
police legitimacy is harming both police morale and community morale,” he said. “When you don’t
believe police are legitimate, you are much more likely to be engage in illegal behaviors and be
uncooperative with law enforcement.”
Depolicing doesn’t increase crime

Police accountability doesn’t increase crime
Richard Rosenfeld. Professor at University of Missouri. March 2019. Did de‐policing cause the increase
in homicide rates? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331981669_Did_de-
policing_cause_the_increase_in_homicide_rates (Accessed 5/11/2020)
Research Summary Widespread protests and demands for accountability in the wake of broadly
publicized police killings of unarmed civilians coincided with the marked upturn in homicide levels,
especially in large U.S. cities, in 2015. Many observers, including prominent political figures, claimed that
de‐policing caused the homicide rate to rise: Fearing increased legal liability and publicity, the police
employed less proactive enforcement and made fewer arrests, producing an increase in homicide levels .
We use structural equation modeling to estimate the simultaneous relationship between arrest and homicide rates between 2010 and 2015 in
53 large cities. We
find no evidence of an effect of arrest rates on city homicide rates for any offense
category for any year in this period, including 2015, the year of the spike in homicide levels . Policy
Implications The results of our analysis reveal that declining rates of arrest did not produce the rise in
homicide levels. But arrests, the chief formal reaction to crime, can play an important supporting role in
crime prevention. Ample research findings have demonstrated the effectiveness of proactive policing
practices, such as targeted patrol, in reducing crime rates. The success of such tactics depends, in turn,
on citizens’ belief that criminal offenders face an appreciable risk of arrest. It is equally important,
however, that residents of communities that have experienced unwarranted police violence believe that
law enforcement is fairly applied. Lack of trust and confidence in the police militates against crime
prevention as a co‐production of police and community and may promote violence as a form of self‐
help.
There is no crime wave or Ferguson effect on crime

John A.Shjarback. Writer at Elsevier. May 2017. De-policing and crime in the wake of Ferguson:
Racialized changes in the quantity and quality of policing among Missouri police departments.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047235217301289?via%3Dihub (Accessed
5/11/2020)
Mac Donald, whose op-ed launched the Ferguson effect debate, said in April that increased homicides in
cities with large numbers of black residents “is exactly what you would predict from the Ferguson effect.
That’s where the Black Lives Matter message that police are racist is going to have the most effect, and
it’s where cops are getting the most pushback from proactive policing – and where policing is most
necessary.” The Obama administration has rejected Ferguson effect because “it goes against a broader
agenda of saying the real solution is social services, fighting racism,” she said. “People are very opposed
to acknowledging the connection between policing and crime,” she said. “You see the Brennan Center
trying to tie itself into knots denying its own data.” In response to criticism of the Brennan Center
report, Inimai Chettiar, who oversaw the production of the report, said it “looked specifically at what’s
happening to crime and not the cause. We didn’t look into whether or not there’s a Ferguson effect.”
“There have been a lot of people saying there was a crime wave and there was a murder wave
nationally, and what the report’s results show is that there was not a national murder wave, there is not
a national crime wave. Crime is still the same, however there are pockets that are experiencing higher
murders, and those are serious things that we need to address.” Rosenfeld blamed the FBI’s extremely
slow crime data system for fueling a “largely rhetorical – largely evidence-free debate”. The FBI’s full
national crime numbers for last year will not be released until September, more than a year after the
debate over the year’s crime trends began. In the absence of official national statistics, his research was
based on police department data collected by the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, he said. “That’s simply
unacceptable, that’s unnecessary, and the FBI really needs to get its act together,” he said.
No evidence depolicing is leading increases in crime

MIKE MACIAG. Writer at Governing. SEPTEMBER 2016. Is There Really a ‘Ferguson Effect’?
https://www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/gov-ferguson-effect-homicide-rates.html
But nearly two years after Dotson’s initial remarks, there

is little agreement about what form the Ferguson effect is
taking, or even if it exists at all. Nor is there consensus about whether a national crime wave is actually
occurring. The latest research on the issue, conducted by University of Missouri–St. Louis professor Richard Rosenfeld for the Justice
Department, found a spike in homicides between 2014 and 2015. The number of murders in 56 large cities rose an average of nearly 17 percent
in that one year -- the steepest annual increase since at least the 1980s -- and 12 cities recorded spikes exceeding 50 percent. Most striking was
the revelation that the 10 cities with the biggest increases were characterized by large African-American populations. “The increase is real and
worrisome,” says Rosenfeld, who now thinks the Ferguson effect theory is plausible. The findings come with several caveats: It’s
not yet
known just how widespread the increase in crime is; the one-year jump in the murder rate follows
decades of decline; and recent national trends for other types of crime aren’t yet available. Overall
crime rates in a different sample of 30 large cities reviewed by the Brennan Center for Justice were
essentially unchanged last year. The aspect of the Ferguson effect that’s received the most attention is
the notion that officers are pulling back on enforcement and proactive policing, fueling a crime increase .
In Chicago, shooting arrests dropped last year, but gun violence climbed in the months following the release of a video showing the police
shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. “We have allowed our police department to get fetal, and it is having a direct consequence,” Mayor
Rahm Emanuel said at a meeting in 2015. So far, however, there
is insufficient evidence to support the idea that “de-
policing” has led to a nationwide crime wave. In New York, for example, no relationship has been found
between crime rates and a reduction in aggressive stop-and-frisk police tactics. The city, which started
to curtail the practice drastically in early 2014, has seen overall major felony crimes continue to drop
near historic lows. Ronal Serpas, who co-chairs the group Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime
and Incarceration, recalls warnings about de-policing when police dashboard cameras proliferated in the
early 2000s. De-policing didn’t happen then, and it’s not happening now, he says. “It’s dangerous when
well-informed people keep saying this even though they don’t have any proof of it .”
Depolicing good
Public distrust and lack of accountability cause crime—depolicing is preferable
Radley Balko. Opinion writer at Washington Post. July 19, 2018. Was there a ‘Ferguson effect’ in
Baltimore? Don’t be so sure. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2018/07/19/was-
there-a-ferguson-effect-in-baltimore-dont-be-so-sure/ (Accessed 5/11/2020)
In fact, many of the cities where crime has risen recently have also been the subject of well-documented
reports depicting law-enforcement cultures rife with abuses such as racial profiling, unjustified shootings
and predatory policing, usually with little community outreach, and little to no accountability for even
the most egregious and repeat offenders. The Justice Department reports on police practices in Chicago,
Cleveland and St. Louis County, Mo., were particularly damning. It isn’t difficult to see why residents of
these cities, especially those in high crime areas, might come to fear the police more than they fear the
criminals. We also see evidence for this in the data from sanctuary cities. Studies have repeatedly shown
that such cities have lower crime rates (in fact, they’re especially safer for white people). This is likely
because when a significant portion of the population fears or distrusts the police, they’re less likely to
report crimes, provide tips or cooperate with police investigations. It isn’t difficult to see why
Baltimore’s black and brown residents might be mistrustful of the police. The city was the subject of a
damning DOJ report about police practices there. The city also has a long history of aggressive stop and
frisk policies, and “clearing” streets and street corners with mass arrests for low-level crimes such as
loitering. “Law and order” types sharply criticized the DOJ’s Baltimore report when it came out. But
subsequent news has bolstered its credibility. The city was just rocked by the trial of officers in the Gun
Trace Task Force, one of the most elite police units in the city . The officers who accepted plea bargains from federal
prosecutors testified to incredibly brazen crimes, including stealing from witnesses and suspects, planting evidence and coverups. The city’s
head of internal affairs — the division charged with holding bad cops accountable — was also implicated, as was a deputy commissioner. The
scandal tainted thousands of cases going back a decade. Since then, there have also been multiple
incidents in which body camera footage has appeared to show officers planting drug evidence. Earlier
this year, another officer was caught lying in court. Prosecutors continued to use him, anyway. One
other point: If it is indeed true that Baltimore cops have responded to criticism by refusing to do their
jobs, and have done so while under the impression that their work slowdown will result in more
Baltimore residents — innocent and otherwise — being murdered, robbed and otherwise victimized by
crime. Doesn’t that suggest a rather low regard for the people they’re supposed to be protecting?
Doesn’t it suggest that maybe Baltimore residents ought to be distrustful of the police ?
We are over policing now—depolicing is key to reducing crime

Derecka Purnell and Marbre Stahly-Butts. Writer at NY Times. Sept. 26, 2019. The Police Can’t Solve
the Problem. They Are the Problem. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/opinion/the-police-cant-
solve-the-problem-they-are-the-problem.html (Accessed 5/11/2020)
The reality is this: The police fill prisons. We can’t repair the harm that the 1994 crime bill has done by
promoting mass incarceration without reducing the size and scope of the police. The crime bill
articulated an obsession with punishment and prescribed policing as the cure to a host of social ills. It
provided funding for 100,000 new police officers, $14 billion in grants for community-oriented policing,
$9.7 billion for prisons and $6.1 billion crime prevention programs . The legislation was partly responsible for a 30
percent increase in police officers from 699,000 in 1990 to 899,000 in 1999, and funded over 7,000 school officers. Today, there are
over one million law enforcement officers in the United States But did the plan work? The Government
Accountability Office concluded that while there was a 26 percent decline in overall crime from 1993 to
2000, only 1.3 percent of the decline could be attributed to additional police officers. The majority of
that decrease, the office said, came from other, unspecified factors; smaller studies have found that
everything from preschool to job programs for young people decreases crime rates. Approximately 10.5
million people are arrested each year in this country. While a majority of these arrests ultimately result
in dismissed charges, their impact is devastating. Being arrested, whatever the outcome, can jeopardize
a person’s employment, housing, physical and mental health and parental rights. Politicians promise jail
closings even as they increase police budgets — and, as a result, arrests. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New
York has acknowledged that the 1994 crime bill was a mistake and wants the city’s Rikers Island jail to
close by 2026. Yet New York's transportation agency just announced a plan to hire 500 police officers to
combat fare evasion and manage homeless people in the subway. Free public transportation, living
wages and quality housing would be better responses to these issues than increased policing.
Nationwide, nearly half of the people whom the police arrest multiple times have incomes below
$10,000 a year. It’s important to put this in historical perspective: Since it originated with efforts to
prevent labor organizing and to patrol slaves, modern policing has punished the poor. No number of
diversity workshops, body cameras and community policing initiatives will change that .
Depolicing is key to undo discriminatory practices

J.D. TUCCILLE. Writer at Reason. June 25, 2019. U.S. Cops Are Facing a Recruitment Crisis. Will It Force
Them to Change Their Ways? https://reason.com/2019/06/25/u-s-cops-are-facing-a-recruitment-crisis-
will-it-force-them-to-change-their-ways/ (Accessed 5/11/2020)
The proposals were largely ignored at the time and pushed aside by the Trump administration's
renewed emphasis on law-and-order policing even as crime rates continue their three-decade decline.
But reformist ideas about restrained, less-intrusive policing aren't just philosophically attractive to those
of us who care about liberty—they may help thinning police ranks reconcile with a hostile population.
Unfortunately, improvement isn't inevitable. Bad ideas abound, too. "Contemporary researchers and
police believe that they can…predict a crime before it happens—using computer algorithms," Reason's
Ron Bailey warned in 2016. Police in some communities already adjust how they interact with people
they meet based on risk scores assigned by computer algorithms. Cops like predictive policing because it
lets them target anticipated trouble spots. But such tactics can become self-fulfilling. "This creates a
vicious cycle where police are sent to certain locations because the program predicts these locations to
have the most crime, and the police begin to believe these same locations have the most crime because
these were the locations to which they were sent," cautions the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Dozens
of cities have already deployed predictive policing software, Vice reported earlier this year. That means
there's a good chance police will soon have a risk assessment appended to your name that will affect
how much violence they bring to traffic stops and appearances at your door. So, which will it be? Will
law enforcement agencies rein-in their excesses and start interacting with the people around them as
humans to be protected rather than as enemies to be dominated? Or will they instead assess us as
committers of crimes that have yet to occur? With their ranks diminishing and morale in the pits,
policing will certainly change—for better or worse.
A2 Recruiting crisis
Militarized policing is deterring recruits
J.D. TUCCILLE. Writer at Reason. June 25, 2019. U.S. Cops Are Facing a Recruitment Crisis. Will It Force
Them to Change Their Ways? https://reason.com/2019/06/25/u-s-cops-are-facing-a-recruitment-crisis-
will-it-force-them-to-change-their-ways/ (Accessed 5/11/2020)
"Some potential hires are ineligible to be considered because of prior arrests and convictions on minor
criminal charges, such as possessing an open container of alcohol in public," PERF's Wexler points out.
"This situation is especially prevalent in agencies that have practiced strict 'zero tolerance' policing in the
past." That last point may offer a key to improving relations between the public and what used to be
known as "peace officers," by pursuing a less confrontational approach to policing. "This militarized
transformation of American law enforcement—and all that comes with it…should not be a part of the
American landscape," former Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief of Police Stephen Downing wrote for Reason five years ago.
He went on to propose a program including ending drug prohibition, doing away with federal provision of military equipment and training to
police departments, dumping civil asset forfeiture and its incentives to official banditry, reining-in search procedures, and establishing effective
civilian oversight. "With
these kinds of reforms in place we could begin to heal our communities; diminish the
mass incarceration of people of color; allow more parents to be with their children and fewer children to
be sent to foster homes; recognize that addiction is a health rather than a criminal-justice problem, and
supplant prison with treatment; abate the arms race between the police, gangs, and cartels; end police
profiling; and restore the requirement of reasonable suspicion as an irrevocable feature of constitutional
policing," he added. Downing's proposals parallel, in many ways, the 2015 recommendations of the
President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing. While stopping short of a retreat on drug prohibition,
the task force's report noted, "law enforcement cannot build community trust if it is seen as an
occupying force coming in from outside to impose control on the community." The report called for less-
brutal tactics, consent-based searches, demilitarized police forces, and civilian oversight, among other
changes.
Policing doesn’t matter

There isn’t sufficient evidence for an increase in crime when police productivity drops
Stephen Edward Simonds Jr. Professor at Naval Postgraduate School. March 2017. THE FERGUSON
EFFECT—ARE POLICE ANXIETIES TO BLAME? https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=800967 (Accessed
5/11/2020)
Theoretically, big data should offer possible correlations between police productivity and the increase or
decrease in crime. Likewise, data relating to productivity should offer independent insight into the
existence of a Ferguson Effect regardless of reported crime. The reality is that access to this type of big
data is not readily available to the public. If the open data project matures into its intended vision, such
data may provide insight into the existence of a Ferguson Effect. Currently, however, the data is
insignificant and lends no insight whatsoever. The FBI acknowledges a need for better data collection
and “recently announced that the National Incident Based Reporting System, or NIBRS, would become
the Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) standard by January 1, 2021.”88 NIBRS was implemented in
1989 to accommodate the increased volume of information being collected about crime. The system
“provides for 52 offense classifications,” and provides better insight into national crime. Due to the
voluntary nature of NIBRS, participation from law enforcement has grown at a slow pace, which in turn,
has “caused the FBI to maintain both the SRS and NIBRS.”89 Moreover, “the FBI will conduct a NIBRS
modernization study to “assess the current law enforcement agencies practices and evaluate a possible
updating of NIBRS.”90 This study aspired to close those gaps and offer a more complete picture of
national sentiment by employing big data analytics for police productivity. Limitations in data prevented
the research questions from being answered but highlighted a need for better data collection methods.
A2 Reforms solving distrust now

Piecemeal reforms aren’t improving police relations now
Derecka Purnell and Marbre Stahly-Butts. Writer at NY Times. Sept. 26, 2019. The Police Can’t Solve
the Problem. They Are the Problem. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/opinion/the-police-cant-
solve-the-problem-they-are-the-problem.html (Accessed 5/11/2020)
Reformers on both sides of the aisle praised President Trump for signing the First Step Act last year as a
measure toward ending mass incarceration. The act is a modest, underfunded criminal justice reform
package that a coalition of over 150 black led organizations opposed. Last week, White House
economists announced a plan to use the police to get homeless people “off the street.” This direction is
misguided. Police officers cannot solve underlying causes of homelessness or other social problems.
They can only temporarily manage these issues with punishment and more violence. And even more
misguided ideas are being proposed. After a movement against police violence erupted in 2014,
scholars, nonprofit groups and politicians reimagined police officers as youth mentors, mental health
professionals, and social workers — against the wishes of many police officers. But the police do not
help vulnerable populations — they make populations vulnerable. Excessive force is the No. 1
investigated complaint against police officers, and sexual violence is the second. People with mental
illness are 16 times more likely to be killed by the police. People of color, people with disabilities,
immigrants, queer and trans people, those with mental illness and the homeless disproportionately
experience violence from officers, who kill an average of nearly 1,000 people annually, and sexually
assault, physically assault, harass, and surveil hundreds of thousands more Philanthropists and
politicians have called for more “community policing,” the idea of having police departments develop
partnerships with community groups to ease tensions between law enforcement and residents. In the
last 10 years, the Department of Justice included “community policing” in its consent decrees with
police departments accused of misconduct in Baltimore, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans,
Newark, Puerto Rico and Ferguson, Mo., and Oakland, Calif. But community policing is an empty phrase.
A Washington Post report showed that law enforcement use of force increased in half of police
departments with consent decrees. Asking police officers to strengthen community relationships —
including by doing things like playing football with children or handing out ice cream — does not reduce
their power to harm anyone.
Social justice turns economic growth

Economic injustice is the bigger detriment to growth and only CJR can solve
ANDRE PERRY. Fellow at Brookings Institution. MARCH 28, 2019. You Can't Have an Equitable Economy
While Ignoring Police Violence. https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/03/pittsburgh-police-
shooting-antwon-rose-jobs-economy/585841/ (Accessed 5/11/2020)
Here’s what I mean: Based on the Brookings Institution’s latest annual Metro Monitor, Pittsburgh’s
economy grew in notable ways between 2016 and 2017, the most recent years in the 2019 report. The
metro ranked ninth in the nation for shared prosperity and tenth in percentage change in economic
productivity, with a 2.2 percent growth rate. Living standards in metro Pittsburgh improved by 3.2
percent, the sixth best improvement in the country. However, the city ranked 75th on the inclusion
index and 65th in improvements in relative poverty, with only a marginal reduction of 0.6 percent.The
median earnings of whites in Pittsburgh increased while the earnings of people of color decreased
during the same period. The gap in earnings between whites and people of color grew by $2,703.
Similarly, the relative poverty of white individuals decreased while more people of color became poor
between 2016 and 2017. Out of the 100 cities studied, Pittsburgh, ranked 88th and 82nd in the racial
median earnings and relative poverty gap respectively. When the ten-year changes in inclusion in
Pittsburgh are studied, these disparities become even greater . With a median income gap of $5,349 between whites and
people of color, Pittsburgh ranks 96th among the 100 metro areas. An increase in the relative poverty gap by 5.4 percentage points, due to a
decline for white and an increase for people of color, led to the city being ranked 94th in the area. The
employment rate gap
decreased by 1.8 points, but Pittsburgh was only ranked 48th since nearly half of the other metros
showed greater degrees of improvement. Though Pittsburgh has outpaced the national averages in
improvements related to prosperity, stagnation and increasing gaps in well-being across racial groups
highlight how people of color are being told to get over it. But black residents are not simply “getting
over it.” Students walked out of their classes on Monday, March 25, to protest the acquittal of the police
officer who killed Antwon Rose. A crowd of roughly 1,000 young people took to the streets of downtown
Pittsburgh, chanting, “Three shots in the back, how do you justify that?” in front of city hall and the
county courthouse buildings. Captains of industry as well as local elected officials should have joined
them. Philanthropy helps by stewarding money to groups that help disrupt racist systems, but the reality
is that we aren’t going to “non-profit” our way into an inclusive economy. How we treat people inside
the workplace bares itself outside of it . Business leaders don’t need billboards to show what they think of Black families; a lack of
inclusion reveals everything we already know.
The relationship between crime and economic growth is spurious

JIM NEWTON. Writer at UCLE Blue Print. Fall 2018. THE ECONOMY AND CRIME.
https://blueprint.ucla.edu/sketch/the-economy-and-crime/ (Accessed 5/11/2020)
What about during economic growth? There, we can look to the 1950s or the 1980s and 1990s, two
periods of muscular economic expansion. The 1950s are particularly instructive, as growth in that
decade was, at least by later standards, shared across the landscape, rather than concentrated among
the wealthy. In the 1950s, crime fell during the early years of the decade, then rose in the later years,
with no obvious connection to the state of the economy. In the 1990s, an explosive if uneven period of
economic growth and opportunity, crime fell dramatically. The economy was healthy during the 1960s,
so crime, if it were connected to prosperity, should have declined. It did not “Why,” the National
Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence asked in 1969, “have urban violent crime rates
increased substantially during the past decade when the conditions that are supposed to cause violent
crime have not worsened – indeed, have generally improved?” And then, during the economic ups and
downs of the 1970s, crime marched steadily upward. Finally, there is the Great Recession that began in
2008-9, with spikes in unemployment and growth, followed by a long, slow recovery. In 2010, the first
full year of the recession, violent crime fell by 6 percent. Property crime fell by 2.7 percent. Taken as a
whole, those results suggest a kind of data gibberish: When the economy was bad, in the 1930s, crime
fell; when it was good, in the 1950s, crime held steady. It increased during the economically healthy
1960s and increased again during the up-and-down 1970s. It fell during the expansion of the 1990s and
the contraction of the 2010s. Statistically speaking, what that strongly suggests is that crime is not
affected by the economy. There may be those who are forced to steal to avoid starvation, but they are
to be pitied and helped and are a far cry from what really causes fear and victimization in our lives. What
does that mean for efforts to thwart crime? It suggests that they should not be directed toward the
economy, and argues that police cannot resort to a popular excuse of previous eras – that crime will
rise, whatever police do, during hard times.
Crime doesn’t hurt the economy

JOHN ROMAN. Writer at City Lab. SEPTEMBER 24, 2013. The Puzzling Relationship Between
Crime and the Economy. https://www.citylab.com/life/2013/09/puzzling-relationship-between-crime-
and-economy/6982/ (Accessed 5/11/2020)
But as the figures below show, the relationship between crime and the economy is not as obvious as it
seems, and focusing on that relationship obscures more important predictors. Looking at the
relationship between GDP and crime back to the earliest reliable crime data from 1960 supports both
positions, suggesting there is no relationship between economic growth and crime. In the first part of
the series, rising GDP is associated with rapidly increasing crime. In the second part, it is associated with
declining crime. In the middle, there is no relationship at all. Most macroeconomic data show the same
pattern. Consider consumer confidence data going back to the inception of the University of Michigan
Consumer Sentiment data in 1978. Again, the consumer confidence data show no relationship between
consumer sentiment and crime rates. That, however, is because the relationship was strongly negative
prior to 1992 (meaning more confident consumers=less crime). After 1992, the pattern reverses, and the
better the economy, the more crime there is. The bottom line: Crime is episodic and there is no singular
effect of the economy on crime. In order to understand and prevent crime, it is therefore necessary to
understand what type of period we are in. It’s also necessary to understand what forces are at work
locally, rather than focus on the national picture. Next week, I will address that point.
Strong department culture key

Cultivating an ethical work culture is the only solution to depolicing
Steve Albrecht. Psychology Today. Dec 13, 2016. Should We Discipline Cops for “De-Policing”?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-act-violence/201612/should-we-discipline-cops-de-
policing (Accessed 5/11/2020)
Here’s the new speech chiefs need to give at every briefing: “We will not be deterred. We will not stop
our mission. Bad people will not run the streets hurting our citizens or our cops. We will do business,
legally and ethically, but assertively, the way we always have – stopping cars and people, making arrests,
putting bad guys who need to go there in jail or prison. We will assume that everything we do is being
videotaped. We will assume that our professional methods and tactics will get second-guessed. We
already know that some people will hate us forever. Too bad. We will still do our jobs, safely and
assertively, in the face of danger. I expect it from you and the citizens deserve it from all of us.” Field
supervisors must stay vigilant for signs of de-policing on their squads. It’s a coaching issue, not a
discipline issue. It requires supervisors to use support, praise for assertive behavior, and examples
where good things happened to cops who did more than just wait to be called. De-policing is a
workplace culture issue, not a discipline issue. It doesn’t happen in every department and not every
officer feels the need to wait out this current period of “all cops are horrible” in the uneasy seat of a
patrol car. Things cycle in police work. There will be a time where law enforcement is fully respected
again. Until then, each Chief’s message to his or her troops should be: get out there and get after it.
Crime does not stop economic growth

Crime does not significantly impact economic growth
Erik Braun. Professor at Erasmus University. August 2014. The effect of crime on economic growth.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d87e/93fee220e9fe3adada34f9bb4ec7b096010a.pdf (Accessed
5/11/2020)
This thesis has established that there is no statistically significant effect of crime on economic between
2004 and 2012. The results of the regression analysis fail to support the hypothesis that total crime has a
statistically significant negative impact on economic growth when included in the augmented Solow
growth model adjusted to technological progress. The observations suggest that, statistically, the
accumulation of capital stock offsets the effect of crime. By increasing the government consumption,
this might discourage people to engage in criminal activities due to different reasons, but the most
plausible one being financial stability. Nevertheless, even if crime is not statistically significant it still
alters some determinants, population growth contributing more to an economic growth, while savings
contributing less. The results also fail to support the second hypothesis that crime has a statistically
significant negative impact on economic growth . The results suggest that even if crime does not have a statistically significant
effect on economic growth, it stresses the importance of savings, even though they contribute less to an economic growth, and it affects the
population growth which contributes more now. These
findings are similar to the results of testing the first
hypothesis. In addition, crime stresses the importance of political stability and FDI inflows enhancing
their contribution to an economic growth. The amount of crimes committed is not high enough to exert
a statistically significant effect on economic growth, but they still have an effect on economic growth.
The aim of this thesis was to explain the magnitude of the effect of crime on economic growth,
depending on the type of crime. The findings from the regression analysis suggest that different types of
crime do not have any statistically significant effect on economic growth, but similar to the results from
testing the first two hypotheses, the presence of different types of crime has an effect on the
determinants. The biggest effects on economic growth, as expected, have the homicides, followed by
domestic burglary, robbery and violent crime .
Slowdowns don’t matter

Police union slowdowns don’t increase crime
Andrea Cann Chandrasekher. Professor at American University. 12 September 2016 .
The Effect of Police Slowdowns on Crime. https://doi.org/10.1093/aler/ahw008 (Accessed 5/11/2020)
Though police strikes have been well studied, there are almost no articles written on the public safety
consequences of police work slowdowns—labor actions where police officers reduce their ticket-writing and/or arrest
productivity for a temporary period. This article fills the current void by presenting evidence on the 1997 New York City Police Department work
slowdown, to my knowledge the longest documented police slowdown in U.S. history. Drawing
on several, originally collected
data sources from the NYPD and other city agencies, the article assesses the impact of the slowdown on
ticket enforcement, arrest enforcement, and crime. The findings indicate that, at least in the context of
contract-motivated slowdowns where the union may be motivated to garner public support for pay
increases, the effects on public safety may be limited. Specifically, in the case of the 1997 slowdown,
ticket-writing for all categories of tickets fell dramatically but arrest enforcement for all types of serious
crime stayed the same or increased. Accordingly, the crime effects were mostly concentrated in the area of minor criminal
disorder (misdemeanors and violations). Only two categories of serious crime (larcenies and assaults) were affected and those crime increases
were minimal.
Social justice and police accountability are necessary for economic growth
ANDRE PERRY. Fellow at Brookings Institution. MARCH 28, 2019. You Can't Have an Equitable Economy
While Ignoring Police Violence. https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/03/pittsburgh-police-
shooting-antwon-rose-jobs-economy/585841/ (Accessed 5/11/2020)
Many city officials and corporate leaders, including those in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, claim they
want inclusive economies, which is jargon for hiring black and brown people for high-paying jobs. But
you can’t have economic inclusion without social justice; the two are inextricably linked. The criminal
justice system and policing practices offer the most glaring examples of this. The profits from private
prisons have come at the expense of black communities’ earning potentials. Higher incarceration rates
from racially discriminatory policing have hindered black communities from gaining the skills and jobs
that generate middle-class incomes. State-sanctioned murder takes black people out of economies and
fosters distrust of critical government agencies among those who need them most. You can’t take a city
seriously that talks about creating jobs, growing a high-tech economy, and nurturing inclusion if it’s not
also addressing a racist criminal justice system . Just as the billboard is emblematic of the attitudes toward black lives, the
jitney involved in the Rosfeld-Rose case is emblematic of how intertwined our social and economic lives are. Before the proliferation of Uber
and Lyft, black folk who had limited employment options used the jitney service to transport folks who had limited transit options. Black folk
are still driving and using jitneys for reasons similar to why Rose was killed: Black
labor isn’t valued in the economy just like
our lives don’t matter to police. Economic growth without inclusion is industry’s way of saying, “Get over
it.”
Body cameras don’t link

BWCs do not cause depolicing
Danielle Wallace. Professor at University of Seattle. May 2, 2018. BODY‐WORN CAMERAS AS A
POTENTIAL SOURCE OF DEPOLICING: TESTING FOR CAMERA‐INDUCED PASSIVITY.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1745-9125.12179 (Accessed 5/11/2020)
Contentious debate is currently taking place regarding the extent to which public scrutiny of the police
post‐Ferguson has led to depolicing or to a decrease in proactive police work. Advocates of the
“Ferguson effect” claim the decline in proactive policing increased violent crime and assaults on the
police. Although police body‐worn cameras (BWCs) are touted as a police reform that can generate
numerous benefits, they also represent a form of internal and public surveillance on the police. The
surveillance aspect of BWCs suggests that BWCs may generate depolicing through camera‐induced
passivity. We test this question with data from a randomized controlled trial of BWCs in Spokane (WA)
by assessing the impact of BWCs on four measures: officer‐initiated calls, arrests, response time, and
time on scene. We employ hierarchical linear and cross‐classified models to test for between‐ and
within‐group differences in outcomes before and after the randomized BWC rollout. Our results
demonstrate no evidence of statistically significant camera‐induced passivity across any of the four
outcomes. In fact, self‐initiated calls increased for officers assigned to treatment during the RCT. We
discuss the theoretical and policy implications of the findings for the ongoing dialogue in policing.
BWCs don’t cause depolicing

EurekAlert. March 25, 2019. Despite general support for police use of body-worn cameras, impacts may
be overestimated. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-03/cajr-dgs032019.php (Accessed
5/11/2020)
Police use of body-worn cameras is growing rapidly in the United States. New research that looked at 70
studies of body-worn cameras concludes that while officers and citizens generally support using the
cameras, the devices may not have had significant or consistent effects on most measures of behavior
by officers or citizens, or on citizens' views of the police. The study, by researchers at George Mason
University's (GMU) Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy, appears in Criminology & Public Policy, a
publication of the American Society of Criminology. "Expectations and concerns surrounding body-worn
cameras among police leaders and citizens have not yet been realized by and large in the ways
anticipated by each," according to Cynthia Lum, professor of criminology, law, and society at GMU, who
led the study. "It's likely that body-worn cameras alone will not be an easy panacea for improving police
performance, accountability, and relationships with citizens." Researchers examined 70 empirical
studies of body-worn cameras published in the United States and globally through June 2018. The
studies addressed the impact of body-worn cameras on officers' behavior and on officers' attitudes
toward body-worn cameras, as well as the impact of the devices on citizens' behavior, and citizens' and
communities' attitudes toward body-worn cameras. The studies also considered the impact of body-
worn cameras on criminal investigations and on law enforcement organizations. The researchers found
that in general, officers seem supportive of body-worn cameras, especially as they gain more experience
with them. However, the devices have not produced dramatic changes in police behavior, the study
concludes. Other findings from the study: Body-worn cameras seem to reduce complaints against
officers, but it is unclear whether and to what degree these changes reflect citizens' reporting behaviors
or improvements in officers' behavior or their interactions with citizens. It is also unclear if the devices
improve citizens' satisfaction with police encounters, as might be expected if the cameras affected
police behavior substantially. Wearing body-worn cameras has not led to de-policing, also known as a
"Ferguson effect" in which officers pull back from being productive in their duties. Cameras do not seem
to discourage police contacts or officer-initiated activities, and arrests seem as likely to increase or
decrease with use of the devices. Citizens are also generally supportive of police using body-worn
cameras, but it's unclear that their use improves citizens' views of police, their behaviors toward police
officers, or their relationships with police.
Responses to Fear of Crime Disadvantage
Non Unique—Fear of Crime High Now – Media

Media and local news are creating higher rates of Americans fearing crime
Scott McLemee, Intellectual Affairs Columnist, March 20, 2020, “Fear Factors,” Inside Higher Ed,
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/03/20/review-fear-itself-causes-and-consequences-fear-
america (Accessed April 20, 2020)
That certain news media outlets create audiences sharing common disposition and surveillance systems -- excluding some topics from
discussion, cycling repeatedly through others, giving every issue a certain polarizing spin -- is another point well made by the authors but much
too familiar from experience. More
interesting, I think, are the findings about the relationship between news
consumption and fear of crime. The researchers say they have asked about the same set of crimes since
2015 and found that "fear of every crime increased from year to year," despite the FBI's report that
"crime is down almost 50 percent since 1993, a remarkable achievement that Americans seem to have
missed." Inquiries about whether survey respondents or their close friends or family members had been
the victim of crime found that those who had been victims were not (as a group) more likely to fear
crime than those "fortunate enough to escape such victimization." But people who watched their local
TV news broadcast expressed "fear of all types of crime that is 26 percent higher than those who never
watch," and consuming either crime drama or "true crime" programs also corresponded to a higher level
of fear. The really remarkable finding, though, concerns the effect of watching partisan news programs.
"On average," the authors say, "a person who watches Fox News every day is 30 percent more fearful of
crime than someone who completely avoids the network," but daily viewers of MSNBC are also "18
percent more afraid of all types of crime than those who never watch." The reader might suppose that
the networks' audiences are afraid of different crimes, but the numbers don't back this up. "The effects
of Fox News were slightly stronger and were more pronounced with regard to fear of terrorism, but
otherwise, the general trend was that more partisan news viewing equated with greater fear of all types
of crime," full stop.
Non Unique—Fear of Crime High Now—Polls

Public confidence in our criminal justice system is low – polls prove
NPSF, National Police Support Fund, January 29, 2020, “Are Elected Officials Helping or Hurting
Police?” National Police Support Fund, https://nationalpolicesupportfund.com/are-elected-officials-
helping-or-hurting-police/ (Accessed April 20, 2020)
Let’s dive into the complicated relationship between police, politicians, and judges to explore how each group works with — and sometimes
against — one another. Public Support vs. Political Actions One incentive for elected officials to work with their local police force is that support
for police remains strong among the public, with more than 50% of the public saying they have confidence in the police as an institution,
according to a recent Gallup poll. The same poll found that only 23% of Americans have confidence in the criminal justice system, and just 11%
have confidence in Congress. It’s clear that these organizations could benefit from working with the police to re-establish their own trust with
the public. Given
the disparity in public conflict among organizations, as we’ve discussed before there are
several ways that judges and politicians have worked to undermine the important work police officers
do: In Minneapolis, late-night crime is up 53% because of a police shortage and the City Council’s failure
to make law enforcement a priority in the city. The city’s Police Chief says the number of officers has not
kept pace with the city’s rapidly-growing population, and the department struggles to respond to
emergency calls. A Seattle drugstore, Bartell Drugs, had to close one of its locations in the city because
the cost of repeated vandalism became too high. Both the business owner and police officers blamed a
police shortage for the continued robberies that led to the store’s closing. Like in Minneapolis, the
Seattle City Council seems uninterested in adding more police officers or considering how the police can
help address crime in the city. “It is extremely frustrating to constantly hear nothing but attacks and
second-guessing from Seattle City Council members who frequently make accusations based on their
own biases and with no regard to fact,” one officer told Seattle’s Fox Q13 News. Bartell Drugs CEO Kathi
Lentzsch echoed those comments to Seattle’s KIRO 7. “It’s a concern. I think we’re sweeping it under
the rug. The city council, the mayor, the state, the judicial system, the community — we all have to
come together to figure this out,” Lentzsch said.
Non Unique—Fear of Crime High Now—A/T Crime Rates Dropping

Fear of crime is high now – demographics shape perception not rate of crimes
Kenna Carlsen, Master’s degree in criminology and research team leader with the Loss Prevention
Research Council (LPRC), April 17, 2020, “Running Scared,” Loss Prevention Media,
https://losspreventionmedia.com/running-scared/ (Accessed April 22, 2020)
What Is Fear of Crime? First, it’s important that we understand what fear of crime is and what it is not. While its definition has
long been debated in the criminological literature, it is generally considered to be “an emotional
response to the real or perceived threat of crime.” It would be logical to assume that people in high-
crime areas are also those most afraid of crime victimization. However, this isn’t always the case.
Individual characteristics, demographics, and backgrounds all play a vital role in shaping fear of crime.
Researchers have identified two key factors influencing fear: perceived risk and perceived
consequences. Perceived risk is amongst the strongest predictors of fear. The idea is simple—people
who think that they are at a high risk of crime are more likely to be afraid of it. As we will explore later,
however, perceived risk and actual risk don’t always align in a way that we would expect. The perceived
consequences of crime also influence fear of crime. Serious offenses such as sexual assault, robbery, or homicide obviously
have devastating consequences—the more serious these consequences, the more fearful people tend to be.
Non Unique—Fear of Crime High Now

Fear of crime high now- statistics do not change perception
Rebecca Edwards, SafeWise lead safety reporter, March 27, 2020, ”The State of Safety in America
2020 “ https://www.safewise.com/state-of-safety/ (Accessed April 14, 2020)
Nearly 40% of all Americans reported a personal experience with either violent or property crime in the
past 12 months.*That’s a 73% jump from 2019. Numbers like that are startling—especially in
comparison to FBI crime trends that show a steady decline in crime . The FBI reported a drop of nearly 4% in the rate of
violent crime across the country between 2017 and 2018 (the most recent year with complete data available). Our State of Safety report shows
a 50% increase in the number of people who told us they’d had a personal experience with violent crime in the past year. When it comes to
property crime, the FBI found a 6% decrease in the rate of property crime, but respondents to our survey reported an 86% increase in personal
experience of property crime. America
suffers from a big disconnect when it comes to our perception of crime
and safety and the reality of what’s happening in our world. At SafeWise, we’re committed to a better
understanding of the gaps and finding proactive safety solutions for individuals, families, and
communities. That’s why we conduct the annual State of Safety study. See what other surprising results
we discovered. *Experience with crime self-reported at 38% in the State of Safety survey. What Is the
State of Safety? Life in the US is supposed to be about apple pies, baseball, and living the American
Dream—not stressing about safety. But alarming headlines and devastating acts like mass shootings put
a lot of Americans on edge.¹
Non Unique—COVID
No uniqueness – fear of crime high now due to COVID insecurities
Tarek Osman, Experienced Researcher and Author of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt
on the Brink (2010), April 18, 2020, “Transformative trends on the horizon,”
http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContentP/4/367254/Opinion/Transformative-trends-on-the-horizon-.aspx
(Accessed April 18, 2020)
Another area is security. Crime rates will rise in the comingmonths in the countries hardest hit by the economic
consequences of the coronavirus spread. And again, many states, especially those with weak institutions, will
fail this test. The third area concerns perception. The coming months will see a rise in fear of what the future
will bring, and a need from large sections of society to sense a strong state. And here also many states will
fail. This will not only reflect weak institutions. Decision making will be confused, for the situation is novel and there is no
blueprint for how to deal with exponential demands on national social security systems. The complexities of decision making will be
exacerbated in countries where there are acute ideological differences regarding the role of the state and the social contract. Some
observers think social solidarity will prevail. Yes, but up to a point, and largely in societies with high cohesion.
But as the pains increase and difficult choices about prioritisations, taxation and sharing burdens stare
societies in the face, decisions on public policy will become fraught. Amidst all of that, many states will
gradually lose their standing in the eyes of their people.
Non Unique—COVID
COVID-19 fears increasing authoritarianism now
J.D. Tuccille, contributing editor at Reason, April 1, 2020, “Will Pandemic Fears Grease the Way for
Authoritarian Gun Controls?,” https://reason.com/2020/04/01/will-pandemic-fears-grease-the-way-for-
authoritarian-gun-controls/ (Accessed April 10, 2020)
Draconian bills to restrict self-defense rights have a life of their own in Congress. There's always one
lurking in the background, individually unlikely to become law, but ready to be deployed if a suitable
high-profile crime or convenient crisis emerges to ease its passage. And that brings us to the "Gun
Violence Prevention and Community Safety Act of 2020," a far-reaching bill hovering in the legislative
shadows as the COVID-19 pandemic fuels fears around the globe and breaks down barriers to
authoritarian measures. Introduced in the Senate and the House at the end of January by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep.
Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), the bill would impose federal licensing for guns and ammunition, require universal background checks, ban so-called
"assault weapons," outlaw normal-capacity magazines, regulate DIY firearms, and otherwise impose the full wish list of restrictions sought by
those who envision armed government ruling over disarmed subjects.
Non Unique—Authoritarianism High Now – Global Practices

Authoritarianism on the rise now – global practices
Joshua Keating, staff writer at Slate focusing on international affairs and author of Invisible Countries,
January 21, 2020, “Dictators Without Borders,” Slate Magazine, https://slate.com/news-and-
politics/2020/01/authoritarianism-democracy-trump-borders.html (Accessed April 22, 2020)
Major powers like the U.S., Russia, and China were once fairly forthright in divvying up the world into
spheres of influence and ideological blocs. Today, they insist that they are respecting other countries’
sovereignty and not imposing their values abroad, while doing just that. The U.S. has also engaged in
authoritarian acts abroad, and long before Trump. One of Glasius’ primary examples is “digital surveillance such as that
practised by the US National Security Agency and revealed by the Snowden leaks .” The U.S. has long leveraged its dominant
position in the global financial system to compel other countries to comply with its sanctions, launched
covert drone strikes outside of declared battlefields, turned over terrorist suspects for interrogation by
governments with less scrupulous human rights laws, and backed coups as part of the Cold War’s
ideological competition. In recent days, the Trump administration has escalated an international crisis with Iran by assassinating a
senior military official in a foreign country with barely an attempt to ground that action in domestic or international law. The fact that the target
of the strike, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, had himself made a career of expanding the Iranian state’s authoritarian violence to neighboring
countries only highlights how this kind of transnational violence is becoming normalized. We
can argue about whether these
practices by the United States are “authoritarian” themselves, but they certainly provide all
governments with a playbook of how state-sponsored violence and coercion can be projected abroad. It
might seem ironic that globalized authoritarian practices are becoming more common in an era of
backlash to globalization. Some of the same governments carrying out these practices are also
reinforcing their borders, cracking down on international migration, walling off their communications
infrastructure, and stamping out any forms of ambiguity when it comes to citizenship or territorial
control. The borders that these governments enforce serve to control and monitor the activities and
movements of their citizens while leaders are free to reach across those borders to commit (and
sometimes collaborate on) authoritarian practices. If they manage to enrich themselves through these
practices, a world of offshore tax havens and ambiguous legal jurisdictions—a world the British
journalist Oliver Bullough has termed “Moneyland”—is at their disposal.
Non Unique—Authoritarianism High Now—COVID

Authoritarianism on the rise now – COVID Response
Brian Katulis and Trevor Sutton, Brian Katulis and Trevor Sutton are senior fellows at the Center for
American Progress, April 6, 2020, “Don’t Let the U.S. Response to the Coronavirus Crisis Do More
Damage to Democracy,” Center for American Progress,
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/security/news/2020/04/06/482717/dont-let-u-s-
response-coronavirus-crisis-damage-democracy/ (Accessed April 16, 2020)
Democracy throughout the world has been under strain for more than a decade . According to Freedom House’s
recent annual report, 2019 was the 14th consecutive year of democratic decline. Formerly democratic governments such as Turkey and the
Philippines have backslid into soft authoritarianism, often fueled by right-wing populism and xenophobia. Places
once viewed as
central to the democratic order such as Hungary and Poland have seen erosions of civil liberties and the
rule of law as leaders use crony capitalism, attacks on media and civil society, and a politicized justice
system to strengthen their grip on power . Against this backdrop of a global democratic recession, countries such as China and
Russia have sought to reshape the international system. Their strategies include aggressively touting the superiority of
their political models and using “sharp power”—that is, efforts to influence and manipulate the
information environment in other countries—to enhance their own standing in the world and
undermine confidence in democratic institutions. These autocratic countries have used technology and
economic statecraft to extend their reach beyond their borders, often with the goal of immobilizing
open societies by sowing mistrust and discord. We have witnessed this with the spread of disinformation in advance of
elections—as Russia is known to have done in Europe and the United States. The coronavirus crisis—a life-and-death matter
for all countries—will further test democracies’ resilience . Over the next year, China will double down on its efforts to
downplay its initial failure to curb the spread of the virus and present itself as a model global citizen capable of helping to stop the contagion,
for example, by providing medical supplies to other hard-hit countries. Russia will continue to exploit existing political dysfunction and societal
divisions inside democracies, including spreading disinformation about the origins of the virus. These
countries continue to target
America, and their efforts have intermingled with our politics in dangerous ways. Divisive us-vs.-them
politics, compounded by foreign interference in U.S. elections, have raised new doubts about the
legitimacy of our institutions. The COVID-19 crisis intensifies this challenge; the United States has now
become not only the epicenter of the virus globally but also one of the primary sources of misleading
information. Some prominent supporters of President Donald Trump have attacked medical officials
whose expertise is vital in the crisis. The president himself has offered false or irresponsible assessments
of the best way to fight the pandemic such as a claim in February that the United States was “very close
to a vaccine” for the virus.
Non Unique—Authoritarianism High Now – Right Wingers

Authoritarianism on the rise – right wing propaganda
Rick Shenkman, Founder of George Washington University’s History News Network, September 8,
2019, “The Shocking Paper Predicting the End of Democracy,” Politico,
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/08/shawn-rosenberg-democracy-228045 (Accessed
April 22, 2020)
He has concluded that the reason for right-wing populists’ recent success is that “elites” are losing
control of the institutions that have traditionally saved people from their most undemocratic impulses.
When people are left to make political decisions on their own they drift toward the simple solutions
right-wing populists worldwide offer: a deadly mix of xenophobia, racism and authoritarianism. The elites,
as Rosenberg defines them, are the people holding power at the top of the economic, political and intellectual pyramid who have “the
motivation to support democratic culture and institutions and the power to do so effectively .” In
their roles as senators,
journalists, professors, judges and government administrators, to name a few, the elites have
traditionally held sway over public discourse and U.S. institutions—and have in that role helped the
populace understand the importance democratic values. But today that is changing. Thanks to social
media and new technologies, anyone with access to the Internet can publish a blog and garner attention
for their cause—even if it’s rooted in conspiracy and is based on a false claim, like the lie that Hillary
Clinton was running a child sex ring from the basement of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor, which ended
in a shooting. While the elites formerly might have successfully squashed conspiracy theories and called out populists for their
inconsistencies, today fewer and fewer citizens take the elites seriously. Now that people get their news from social media rather than from
established newspapers or the old three TV news networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), fake news proliferates. It’s surmised that 10 million people saw
on Facebook the false claim that Pope Francis came out in favor of Trump’s election in 2016. Living in a news bubble of their own making many
undoubtedly believed it. (This was the most-shared news story on Facebook in the three months leading up to the 2016 election, researchers
report.) The
irony is that more democracy—ushered in by social media and the Internet, where
information flows more freely than ever before—is what has unmoored our politics, and is leading us
towards authoritarianism. Rosenberg argues that the elites have traditionally prevented society from
becoming a totally unfettered democracy; their “oligarchic ‘democratic’ authority” or “democratic
control” has until now kept the authoritarian impulses of the populace in check.
Authoritarianism High Now – Political Ideology

Political ideologies have increased authoritarian tendencies
Austin Sarat, Associate Provost, Associate Dean of the Faculty and William Nelson Cromwell Professor
of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College, April 14, 2020, “Conservative
Authoritarianism Comes Out of the Shadows,” Verdict,
https://verdict.justia.com/2020/04/14/conservative-authoritarianism-comes-out-of-the-shadows
That decision together with Republican acquiescence in President Trump’s frequent attacks on the press
and the judiciary as well as his descriptions of elections whose results he dislikes as fraudulent, suggest
that the party is increasingly comfortable with authoritarianism . Yet neither President Trump nor his
ideological allies on the Court or elsewhere have openly articulated an authoritarian governing
philosophy. All that changed with the March 31 publication of Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule’s essay “Beyond Originalism.”
Because this article was published in a public, not academic, venue, it spoke to a wide readership. It drew immediate responses and stinging
criticism from the political left and also from traditional, never-Trump conservatives. And
justly so. However, these criticisms
underestimated the significance of Vermeule’s argument by treating it as just another move in ongoing
debates over constitutional interpretation. It is in truth the clearest and boldest argument for
authoritarian rule in the United States offered since Donald Trump’s election.
No Link—Fear of Crime Thesis Wrong

The disad’s thesis is wrong—fear of crime doesn’t hold the sway it did in the 90s
Alex Yablon, Writer for Slate—contributor at Foreign Policy, CityLab, Politico Magazine, the Atlantic, Vice,
and the Trace, February 7, 2020, “The Suburbs Aren’t Scared of Criminal Justice Reform,” Slate,
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/virginia-suburbs-progressive-prosecutors.html (Accessed
March 31, 2020)
The Willie Horton ad that successfully tanked Michael Dukakis’ 1988 presidential campaign worked because it played
on “every suburban mother’s greatest fear,” according to its creator. The infamous ad handed politicians a reliable
strategy for winning in swingable suburbs: manipulate fear of violent crime. For decades, the suburbs have existed
in the American political imagination as a centrist bulwark, where voters concerned above all with property
values and schools shy away from systemic reform. But these voters are proving that the caricature of small-
minded, cautious suburbanites could be out of date , especially when it comes to criminal justice and crime.
In 2019, progressive prosecutors swept Democratic primary and general elections in the prosperous suburbs of northern Virginia: Fairfax, Loudoun, and
Prince William counties as well as the city of Arlington. Amid a blue wave in the state, promises to reduce cash bail, stop seeking the death penalty, and
decriminalize marijuana possession won easily. The prosecutors’ elections in northern Virginia represent the most significant electoral victory for the
reform prosecutor movement outside of big cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, or New York. “I really do think the next frontier of
criminal justice reform runs through the suburbs,” said Steve Descano, newly inaugurated commonwealth’s attorney for Fairfax County, who hopes his
success serves as a model to suburbs around the country: “The response reformers get is, ‘Oh, well, X county isn’t like New York or Chicago.’ I want them
to be able to say, ‘Well, we are like Fairfax County, and look what they did.’ ” Descano unseated Raymond Morrogh, a 12-year incumbent with a more
traditional approach to the job, in a heated Democratic primary fight. Descano promised to do away with cash bail, the death penalty, and marijuana
possession charges. Jonathan Fahey, Descano’s independent opponent in the general election, backed some mild reforms, like offering alternatives to
incarceration, but he made fighting MS-13 gangs a central part of his platform. Fahey stressed his long career as a federal prosecutor and argued Descano
would not have a “constructive relationship” with law enforcement. “Steve Descano’s programs, lack of experience and philosophy,” Fahey said, “will all
make Fairfax County less safe.” Fahey got nods from Morrogh, retiring prosecutors in neighboring Arlington and Prince William County, as well as the
local Republican Party and police union. Descano received endorsements from state Democratic heavyweights, including former Gov. Terry McAuliffe,
and a large donation from a George Soros–funded PAC that supports progressive prosecutor candidates across the country. Descano quickly put his
platform into action. He immediately stopped prosecuting personal marijuana possession, launched a probe into the fatal shooting of an unarmed
motorist by federal law enforcement agents, and joined with local DAs to call for the Virginia legislature to abolish the death penalty. Descano’s victory
amid the northern Virginia wave came two years after a more bare-knuckled Willie Horton strategy failed statewide: Republican gubernatorial candidate
Ed Gillespie lost after running gruesome ads warning MS-13 would flood the state if Democrat Ralph Northam won. Experts see the failure of tough-on-
crime politics in the Virginia suburbs as a national bellwether. “There are some who are fanning the flames, but communities aren’t buying it,” said
Miriam Krinsky, executive director of the nonprofit Fair and Just Prosecution, which advises left-leaning candidates for district attorney around the
country. “There’s
a new normal that’s starting to form among voters and elected prosecutors.” Indeed, a 2018
Gallup poll found Americans’ fear of crime is at its lowest in more than a decade. The electoral success of criminal justice
reform in northern Virginia is the result of decadeslong demographic trends and social pressures that can be found in suburbs around the country,
experts and prosecutors said. Suburbs have seen explosive population growth and economic expansion in recent decades, leading to denser, more
diverse electorates. Fairfax County, with its connections to cosmopolitan D.C. and the federal bureaucracy, has experienced an influx of highly educated
immigrants as well. Descano believes he won because of these changes. “As
an area gets more diverse and densely populated,
there is more interaction with neighbors who don’t have the same life experience that you have,” he said. Suburbs
have also had to contend with public health challenges that were once seen as “urban” problems. Over the course of the past decade, CDC data shows
suburbs went from experiencing lower rates of overdose deaths than rural and urban communities to suffering from higher rates of drug death than
either cities or the country. “The opioid issue in particular was an incredible eye-opener. Most people have a friend, a family member, a neighbor,
someone they know has had an addiction problem or lost someone close to them,” said Descano. “People who live in the suburbs now
start to see that these aren’t issues they can just move away from.” The rise of the mass shooting, which frequently occurs in
suburbs, as the quintessential American horror could have also sapped the effectiveness of more traditional right-wing scare tactics by displacing fears of
a criminal underclass with the plague of poorly regulated guns and hate-fueled ideologies. Descano acknowledged a certain symbolic importance to the
issue in his community, home to the headquarters of the National Rifle Association. “The values of Fairfax County are not the value of the NRA.” While
the politics of crime in the suburbs have shifted, the practice of justice lags behind major cities. A 2019 Vera Institute report found that suburbs have the
nation’s highest arrest rates. According to a 2017 study, racial disparities in arrests for quality-of-life violations surged to “extreme” levels as more poor,
nonwhite people moved into suburbs. Perhaps it’s
not surprising that a number of the incidents that sparked the Black
Lives Matter movement—the deaths of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, for instance—occurred in
suburbs, not inner cities. Descano says that’s due to the fact that it’s harder to push through sweeping reform when suburban counties are split
between municipal governments that don’t necessarily coordinate on policy and may not have the resources for initiatives like conviction integrity units.
“You can wrap your head around reforming a single big city’s DA office” or police department, Descano said. Big cities may be better able to recruit more
progressive, sophisticated criminal justice professionals as well, said Rebecca Neusteter, co-author of the Vera Institute report. Recent history could also
pose an obstacle for progressives. “Suburbs have been used to segregate,” said Andrea Boyles, professor of criminal justice at Lindenwood University
outside St. Louis and author of the book Race, Place, and Suburban Policing: Too Close for Comfort. Suburbs aren’t merely places with
single-family homes and good public schools: As products of midcentury white flight, they “represent safety
as a predominantly white, affluent space. Suburbs were created in the first place so that white populations
could live separately from poor, minority populations but not out of reach of the amenities of the city.”
Descano and his cohort are betting that suburbs have outgrown the segregationist impulse that birthed such
places. During the campaign, he found Fairfax County was just too big and diverse to remain in stasis. “There were days I started on a horse farm, had
lunch at a strip mall, went to a mosque, went to a high-rise, went to a metro station. There’s an incredible diversity of experiences,” he said, which the
voters themselves recognized, meaning that attempts to scare constituents away from reform fell short. “People
have seen the county
grow up and change, and they see that as a benefit. The old, broad, superficial message of fear doesn’t work
anymore .”

The fear of crime trend is going down—it doesn’t hold the same sway it used to
Jessica Pishko, Writer for The Appeal, August 19, 2019, “In Liberal California, a Crusader Against Criminal
Justice Reform,” The Appeal, https://theappeal.org/in-liberal-california-a-crusader-against-criminal-justice-
reform/ (Accessed April 4, 2020)
Law enforcement never fell in line with the reform movement. Instead, since AB 109 passed, district attorneys,
sheriffs, and police chiefs have grumbled among themselves that these reforms were putting pressure on
their counties to house those convicted of low-level crimes, and to improve parole supervision upon release.
Officers are said to feel unmotivated to make “catch and release” arrests. Some prosecutors say they can no longer threaten
people with felony charges if they refuse treatment or plea deals. A deep well of discontent opened, mostly confined to the Facebook
comments of pro-law enforcement groups. “It is important not to underestimate how seriously both prosecutors and
police organizations take the very recent and still emerging popular turn against the politics of ‘fear of
crime,’” Jonathan Simon, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied law enforcement trends in California, told
The Appeal.

Dropping crime rates make people support criminal justice reform. People don’t fear
crime like they used to
The Florida Times-Union Editorial Board , News outlet/organization, March 24, 2020,
“Wasting money, wasting lives” https://www.jacksonville.com/opinion/20200324/wasting-money-wasting-
lives (Accessed April 15, 2020)
Most prisoners in Florida will return to their communities. Because so many state prisons are located in North Florida, many released ex-
offenders will head for the nearest big city — Jacksonville. So it is in the interest of everyone that the ex-offenders are prepared for a life
outside of crime. But
crime has fallen, some say. Isn’t that due to all the people behind bars? That’s a false
analogy. Crime has fallen just about everywhere in recent years. According to the Pew Research Center:
Violent crime has fallen sharply in the U.S. in the last 25 years, down 51 percent from 1993 to 2018,
according to FBI statistics. Property crime also fell sharply, down 54 percent from 1993 to 2018. Crime
has fallen in states that do not have Florida’s broken system of stuffing people behind bars and slashing
funds for rehabilitation. Public perception is at odds with these statistics. Gallup polls show that 60
percent of Americans think crime has increased. The reason for the disconnect is debatable. Perhaps
people remember the violent instances reported on TV (“If it bleeds, it leads”), and believe they are
representative. Even in Jacksonville, with its state-leading murder rate, overall crime generally has been
down.
No Link—Sentencing Reform
Unnecessary incarceration on the rise – the public wants reform
Wendy Sawyer, Research Director at the Prison Policy Initiative, and Peter Wagner, Executive
Director of the Prison Policy Initiative, March 24, 2020, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020,”
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html (Accessed April 12, 2020)
The fourth myth: People in prison for violent or sexual crimes are too dangerous to be released
Particularly harmful is the myth that people who commit violent or sexual crimes are incapable of
rehabilitation and thus warrant many decades or even a lifetime of punishment. As lawmakers and the
public increasingly agree that past policies have led to unnecessary incarceration, it’s time to consider
policy changes that go beyond the low-hanging fruit of “non-non-nons” — people convicted of non-
violent, non-serious, non-sexual offenses. If we are serious about ending mass incarceration, we will have to change our
responses to more serious and violent crime. Recidivism: A slippery statistic How much do different measures of recidivism reflect actual failure
or success upon reentry? (expand) Recidivism
data do not support the belief that people who commit violent
crimes ought to be locked away for decades for the sake of public safety. People convicted of violent
and sexual offenses are actually among the least likely to be rearrested, and those convicted of rape or
sexual assault have rearrest rates 20% lower than all other offense categories combined. More broadly, people
convicted of any violent offense are less likely to be rearrested in the years after release than those convicted of property, drug, or public order
offenses. One reason: age is one of the main predictors of violence. The risk for violence peaks in adolescence or early adulthood and then
declines with age, yet we incarcerate people long after their risk has declined.
No Link—Sentencing Reform
We have public support on our side—sentencing reform is popular
Nielsen Scarborough, The Nielsen Company conducts over 210,000 surveys a year throughout the
United—professional research company, August 23, 2018, “Poll Shows Americans Overwhelmingly
Support Prison, Sentencing Reforms,” Committee on the Judiciary,
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/releases/poll-shows-americans-overwhelmingly-support-
prison-sentencing-reforms (Accessed April 22)
A recent poll, conducted by the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland, once again indicates
overwhelming support for reforms to America’s criminal justice system . Questions put to poll respondents
correspond to specific provisions currently under debate in Congress, like those contained in the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act and
the FIRST STEP Act. “This
country has a clear and concrete desire to make our system of justice fair and
workable,” Grassley said. “We are working on a deal to legislate the exact reforms that this poll shows have great
support. Americans across the country, the President of the United States and a vast bipartisan coalition in Congress want justice and
opportunity for every American. In fact, President Trump has made this a priority, having several meetings over the last few weeks on criminal
justice reform. It’s
time that the United States Senate deliver on an important presidential priority that
enjoys broad public support.” Responses according to the types of reforms: Mandatory Minimum Sentencing - 75
percent of those surveyed support changing the 20 year mandatory minimum for a second drug offense to 15 years
while giving judges discretion to increase a sentence; - 70 percent of those surveyed support changing
mandatory life sentences for a third drug offense to 25 years while giving judges discretion to increase a sentence .
These mandatory minimum sentencing adjustments are included in the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act. Retroactive
Sentencing Adjustments - 74 percent (64% of Republicans, 84% of Democrats) of those surveyed support making
retroactive adjustments for sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine offenses. (NOTE: This disparity was
reduced by the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, a bill led by then-Senator and current Attorney General Jeff Sessions).
No Link—Ending Mass Incarceration Popular

There’s major public support for ending mass incarceration
Michael Waldman, President at the Brennan Center for Justice, and Adureh Onyekwere, Senior
Research and Program Associate at the Brennan Center for Justice, May 16, 2019, “Ending Mass
Incarceration: Ideas from Today's Leaders,” https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/policy-
solutions/ending-mass-incarceration-ideas-todays-leaders (April 25, 2020)
And mass incarceration simply is not necessary to keep our communities safe . Today, crime and murder
rates remain near record lows nationwide. Our cities — many of which suffered under a wave of violent crime in the early
1990s — are largely safer than they have been in years. No one is entirely sure what caused the steady
crime decline of the past two and a half decades. But it is clear that it owes little to harsh policies and
the resulting increase in incarceration. In fact, 27 states have reduced both imprisonment and crime together from 2006 to 2014.
It is increasingly clear that reform and safety go together. For all these reasons, the politics of crime and
punishment have changed fundamentally , in ways hard to imagine in an earlier era . Today, polls show
widespread support for a less punitive approach. Once incendiary moves such as marijuana legalization or an end to the
death penalty are finding political success and rising popularity. In red, blue, and purple states, lawmakers are beginning
to respond and act. At long last, a vibrant public conversation is underway. A 2015 Brennan Center publication, Solutions: American
Leaders Speak Out on Criminal Justice, offered proposals from a bipartisan array of elected officials and
advocates and helped move criminal justice reform to the center of the 2016 election. Since then, the nationwide
consensus in favor of a new direction has only hardened . For the first time, the opportunity for truly
transformative change is in view. Last year, Congress took a step forward by overwhelmingly passing the bipartisan First Step Act. It
shortened some of the most extreme federal drug sentences and expanded programming for incarcerated people. But in recent years,
we’ve also seen the country’s leadership take grave steps back, from expanding immigration detention
to reinstituting draconian federal charging policies. The First Step Act — which needs to be fully funded and
implemented — will not fix our deeply broken system. But with both Democrats and Republicans committed to reform,
it represents a new baseline. This breakthrough shows it is possible to make even bigger changes — and
that the politics can align.
No Link—Ending Mass Incarceration Popular

Even victims of violent crime overwhelming support ending mass incarceration, the
plan’s reform is popular
Danielle Sered, Executive director of Common Justice, January 22, 2020, “To end mass incarceration,
U.S. needs alternatives to prison for violent crimes,” USA Today,
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/policing/2020/01/22/end-mass-incarceration-u-s-needs-
prison-alternatives-violent-crimes/4466214002/ (Accessed April 25, 2020)
These long overdue victories have been powered by a combination of advocacy and organizing to
address the vast racial disparities in the criminal justice system and reduce the number of people
America incarcerates. But there is a problem. As consensus and momentum to end mass incarceration have
grown, the reform narrative, though compelling, has been based on a fallacy: that the United States can
achieve large-scale, transformative change by changing responses primarily to nonviolent offenses. That is
impossible in a nation where 55% of people incarcerated in state prisons in 2016 (the latest available Bureau of Justice Statistics data) were
convicted of violent crimes. To truly have an impact on mass incarceration, we need to reckon with that reality. For
moral as well as
practical reasons, that reckoning should start with what survivors of crime , like that young man I sat across from a
decade ago, actually want — and need. As a survivor of violence , including rape, and as someone who has lost
loved ones to murder, I count myself among this population . Since starting Common Justice (an alternative program that
brings victims and those who have harmed them together) in 2008, I have interviewed hundreds of survivors about what
they need from the criminal justice system. What I have found runs contrary to almost every story we
have been told about who survivors are and what they want. On the surface, definitions of "justice" can seem disparate.
While some survivors state they want vengeance, others ask that the person who committed the crime
receive mercy. Some ask for apologies. Others want to face the person who hurt them. But what all
survivors I have talked to have in common is that they want safety — for themselves and others . And on
the whole, many no longer believe that prison is the best way to deliver that safety . A 2016 poll by the Alliance for
Safety and Justice found that nearly 70% of survivors prefer that the people who hurt them get alternatives like
community supervision and treatment. Survivors often choose alternative programs when viable options
are made available. When given the choice at Common Justice, 90% of survivors pick alternatives over incarceration
for the people who harmed them. Alternatives are very pragmatic. Survivors know that the temporary removal of
someone who has hurt them does not change the conditions that made violence likely in the first place.
They have seen people go off to prison and come back, and they know many return worse than when they left. And this matters, because
they also know that almost everyone who goes to prison will come home. For more and more survivors,
no amount of “tough on crime” rhetoric can refute their lived experience . They have paid the price of prison’s
failure with their own pain. There is hope in the fact that there is bipartisan support to reduce incarceration .
But it’s time to acknowledge that just as we cannot incarcerate our way out of violence, we cannot
reform our way out of mass incarceration without taking on the question of violence.
No Link—Forensic Reform Popular

The public increasingly supports forensic science reform like the plan
Innocence Staff, Staff writers who work for the Innocence Project which works to free wrongly
convicted people through forensic science, July 9, 2019, “A Year of Groundbreaking Policy Victories:
21 Reforms in 17 States,” Innocence Project, https://www.innocenceproject.org/a-year-of-
groundbreaking-policy-victories-21-reforms-in-17-states/ (Accessed April 18)
Over the last 12 months, the Innocence Project’s policy team —in collaboration with the Innocence Network and other
key partners – has reached new heights, passing 21 reforms in 17 states . The Innocence Project typically works in
partnership with members of the Innocence Network, impacted people and exonerated men and women, and other key partners, from the
Hotel Trades Council in New York and the Culinary Workers in Nevada to the Nebraska Victims Assistance Academy. Additionally, our
community throughout the country has voiced their support for our bills to their elected officials,
playing a critical role in the adoption of these laws. We could not have achieved this success without
them and we are incredibly grateful for their ongoing commitment. “This degree of unprecedented state-level reform
across the country resulted from the work of so many, especially wrongfully convicted people, who generously
advocated for these reforms in state after state, and is reflective of what appears to be a growing
acknowledgment by policymakers that the criminal justice system requires wholesale reform,” said Rebecca
Brown, Director of Policy, Innocence Project. We worked to change how police identify suspects and record
interrogations; create systems to track jailhouse informants and their testimony; provide accountability
for prosecutors; ensure that states compensate the innocent; updated laws according to changes in
science and more.
No Link—Forensic Reform Popular

Public support for mass use of forensic testing for violent crime is high—the public
isn’t concerned with privacy when it comes to stopping criminals
Paige St. John, Staff writer for the LA Times, November 24, 2019, “DNA genealogical databases are a
gold mine for police, but with few rules and little transparency,” LA Times,
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-11-24/law-enforcement-dna-crime-cases-privacy
Sacramento prosecutor Schubert said

the rules guard against uses that might backfire and restrict DNA
searches even further. “I don’t want some cop out there doing genealogy on a car [burglar],” Schubert said.
“We’re identifying people through other people. ... I recognize there are privacy rights.” But most police
agencies are like Orlando, which has no DNA policy. Det. Fields said he was guided by “common sense” in the two cases he has searched
consumer DNA — the July hunt for a serial rapist, and a 2018 arrest of a man for the unsolved murder of a college co-ed. Fields had spent half a
dozen years looking for leads in the 2001 murder of Christine Franke. A
Virginia based forensics service, Parabon Nanolabs, used
DNA found on Franke’s body to predict the race and facial characteristics of her killer . But Fields could get no
further until the day Sacramento announced its arrest of the suspect in the Golden State Killer case. Parabon called Fields offering to replicate
the methods to look for Franke’s killer. “I said, absolutely,” the detective recalled. “Parabon turned that case around overnight and came up
with two family matches, actually three, immediately.” What Parabon provided were GEDMatch accounts of two second and third cousins of
the suspected killer — the same information any other user of the DNA registry would see. The results show the number of genome locations
that match, with each match called a centimorgan. A mother and son would share about 3,400 centimorgans; a suspect’s second cousin once
removed might have 123 in common. Field’s team then used traditional genealogy to trace those relatives back to a common ancestor from the
1890s. They then built out a huge family tree of every descendant of that ancestor, and started going down the branches. But eight branches
had no DNA, so investigators asked 15 people to provide it. Fields declined to say how these people were convinced. The defense lawyer for the
man Fields subsequently arrested said it was by lying. “They went to Georgia, said there was an African American female murdered who was
more than likely related to them,” said Orlando lawyer Jerry Girley. Relatives were told that by providing their DNA, Girley said, “their loved one
could rest in peace.” Instead, Orlando police days later arrested the son of one of the elderly women tested. “She is devastated,” Girley
said. “Give them an inch, and they’ll take it to Mars,” he said. “I tell people, ‘Don’t put your DNA in the
system.’ (Police) see it as a side door around the 4th Amendment.” The suspect in that case, Benjamin Lee Holmes,
has pleaded not guilty. He is jailed awaiting trial, which is set for next year. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine found
more than 90% of those polled online favored police access to consumer DNA when it comes to murder cases.
“None of us want violent criminals roaming the street,” said medical ethicist Amy McGuire, one of the Baylor researchers
and also an advisor to FamilyTreeDNA.
No Link—Reforms
The plan is popular—people support the plan’s reform
Timothy Williams, Political writer and staff writer for the NY Times, and Thomas Kaplan, Political
writer and staff writer for the NY Times, August 21, 2019, “The Criminal Justice Debate Has Changed
Drastically. Here’s Why.” NY Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/us/politics/criminal-justice-
reform-sanders-warren.html (Accessed April 22)
At the same time, Mr. Trump himself serves as an illustration of the bipartisan embrace of changing the
country’s criminal justice system. Last year, he signed into law the First Step Act, a criminal justice overhaul
that has been among the most prominent bipartisan legislative achievements to occur during his
presidency. His re-election campaign has even paid for Facebook ads promoting the legislation. Michael
S. Dukakis, who was famously attacked over his record on crime when he was the Democratic presidential
nominee in 1988, offered a warning to Democrats. Though violent crime has declined since then, he said the issue
could still resonate with voters. “The challenge for whoever the Democratic nominee is going to be is to do a much better job than I
did of defending this,” he said. Still, opinion polls have shown that there is wide support for various types of
criminal justice reforms among both Democrats and Republicans. And the landscape is shifting quickly.
No Link—Don’t Seek Legal Protection and Like the Plan

No Link—The public favors criminal justice reform like the aff. Many people don’t even report
crimes proving a lack of faith in the criminal justice system now
Michael Maciag, Data editor for Governing.com, August 12, 2016, “Who Crime Victims Are and How They
View Justice Reform, Key takeaways from recent surveys about crime's impact on victims.” Governing.com,
https://www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/gov-national-crime-victimization-survey-data.html
(Accessed March 30, 2020)
Most crime victims don't seek help. Only a third of victims in the ASJ survey sought and received medical,
economic or other assistance following a crime. Of the victims that did report receiving help, they got it from
various places: 1 in 4 from a law enforcement agency; 35 percent from hospitals; 40 percent from friends or family members. It’s
particularly important for teenagers and young adults to seek help because they’re especially vulnerable to trauma and other long-term effects of crime,
and are more likely to become involved with criminal activity. Groups experience the effects of crime in different ways. In the ASJ survey, only 3 in 10
victims said they felt “very safe” in their communities. The impact that crime has on people, though, varies across demographic groups. According to the
survey, 43 percent of black victims said their lives were affected by crime ,
compared to just 38 percent of Hispanic victims and 23
percent of non-Hispanic white victims. People who have been victimized by crime more than once and
victims who witnessed violence against others are particularly vulnerable to post-traumatic stress disorder
and other mental illnesses. Six out of 10 victims of any crime and three-quarters of victims of violent crimes
reported witnessing another person being hit or assaulted over the past decade , according to the ASJ survey. Crime
victims favor rehabilitation over punishment. The Alliance for Safety and Justice, which advocates for state-
level policy reforms, asked victims about their views on policy. By a roughly 2-to-1 margin, victims of most
genders, races and political parties said they want the justice system to focus more on rehabilitation than
punishment. While victims who are black or Democrats preferred rehabilitation by the widest margins,
victims who were men, white or Republicans support rehabilitation by the narrowest margins. Similar results
were found when victims were asked whether they preferred long prisons sentences or shorter sentences
focusing more on prevention and rehabilitation programs. All groups surveyed favored prevention and
shorter sentences.
No Link—Bipartisan Support
Democrats and Republicans support the plan, they’re new rhetoric will provide shielding for
the plan and sway public opinion
Maggie Astor, Political reporter for The New York Times, May 16, 2019, “Left and Right Agree on Criminal
Justice: They Were Both Wrong Before,” NY Times,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/us/politics/criminal-justice-system.html (Accessed March 31, 2020)
It is not unusual for divisive issues to, gradually, become subjects of agreement. But the
shift evident in the report is rarer: a
wholesale reversal of bipartisan consensus. For many years, Republicans cast Democrats as “weak on crime,”
nowhere more effectively than in the 1988 presidential race. George Bush’s campaign used the case of Willie Horton, a black
prisoner who had raped a white woman after a Massachusetts law allowed his temporary release from
prison, to tar the Democratic nominee, Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Historians have drawn a line between those attacks
and Democrats’ decision, under President Bill Clinton, to endorse an unsparing approach to criminal justice that disproportionately incarcerated African-
Americans. Now,members of both parties are denouncing that approach as unsparingly as they once promoted
it. “After decades in which fear of crime and ‘tough on crime’ were the ultimate wedge issue, now there’s a
competition to see who can have the most transformative reform,” Mr. Waldman, the Brennan Center president, said. “In
three decades, to go from Willie Horton to ‘how do we end mass incarceration’ is a long leap.”
Link Turn—Policing Reform—Authoritarianism

The plan’s policing reform is a prior question to reducing authoritarianism
Andrew Goldsmith, Professor of law and criminal justice at Flinders University, 2005, “Police reform and
the problem of trust,” Theoretical Criminology/Sage Publications,
http://www.slcdocs.com/ODHR/Website/Right%20to
%20Safety/Literature/PoliceReformAndTheProblemOfTrust.pdf (Accessed April 1, 2020)
Police reform is widely undertaken in developing and postauthoritarian countries. The starting point for
analysis of this phenomenon, it is suggested, is the absence of public trust in police that characterizes police–
community relations in these countries. Without public trust in police, ‘policing by consent’ is difficult or
impossible and public safety suffers. The nature of trust is examined in general terms and related to the
problem of trust in governance. Then, the problematic nature of trust of the police is considered; structural
features as well as performance aspects are invoked to explain distrust of police. In the penultimate section, the
question of how to build trustworthy police forces is examined in the light of what has been learnt about the
difficulties of maintaining or establishing trust in police. Process as well as substantive improvements each play a role here. In
addition to building trust, ways of institutionalizing distrust are needed . The article concludes by pointing to some inherent limits or
constraints upon trust-building, including the impact of the wider environment in which policing occurs, and the need to trust the tools we use for
building trust.
Impact Denied – Authoritarianism on the Rise Now

Authoritarianism on the rise on a global scale – COVID
Nick Cohen, Staff Writer, March 31, 2020, “Authoritarian Leaders May Use COVID-19 Crisis to
Tighten Their Grip,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/coronavirus-is-a-
chance-for-authoritarian-leaders-to-tighten-their-grip (Accessed April 13, 2020)
Additionally, citizens may feel more willing to give governments the benefit of the doubt in the current
circumstances, preferring an entrenching of the status quo to weak or divided government . Krastev compared
the current crisis to the financial crisis of 2008 and the migration crisis of 2015, and said that while then the responses in Europe were driven by
anxiety, this time the dominant emotion is fear, which is much more direct. “This
makes people ready to tolerate everything,
because when the danger is everywhere, you believe only the government can help you,” he said. The
terrifying situation in which anyone, anywhere, can be a potential threat is a perfect mobilising force for
authoritarians, and many have explicitly compared the current situation to a state of war, applying
military terminology to civilian life, and implying that the kind of restrictions applicable in wartime,
when questioning the government could be seen as unpatriotic or even traitorous, should now apply .
“Just as in wartime, a state of emergency could extend until the end of hostilities. Today, we confront
not a military power but are in a war-like state to defend our people against a pandemic the likes of
which we have not seen in a century ,” said Orbán’s spokesman Zoltán Kovács earlier this week, defending the Hungarian
measures.
Impact Denied—Data/Statistics
Empirically Denied—fear of crime has dropped nationally because of data and statistics
Jon Schuppe, Writer for NBC News, writes about crime, and justice,” November 15, 2018, “Criminal justice
reform finally has a chance in Congress. Here's what the First Step Act would do,” ABC News,
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/criminal-justice-reform-finally-has-chance-congress-here-s-what-
n936866 (Accessed March 31, 2020)
President Donald Trump’s support has put Congress within reach of passing the most sweeping set of changes to
the federal criminal justice system since the 1990s, when fear of crime drove the enactment of draconian sentencing
practices that shipped hundreds of thousands of drug offenders to prison. This is no small feat. Reformers have been trying to get
this done for years, but something always got in the way: partisan bickering, election-year politics, ambushes
by opponents. Amid Washington gridlock, the First Step Act stands out. The measure, which could go to a vote during the
lame-duck session of Congress between now and January, contains several changes to the way the federal government treats drug offenders,
both those who are in prison now and those who will face a judge in the future. If
it is passed, thousands of federal prisoners
would have access to more help preparing for life after the end of their sentences. Thousands of well-
behaved prisoners would win freedom earlier. And thousands of people who are arrested for drug crimes in
the future would become eligible for exemptions from harsh mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Still, the
bill stops short of what many reformers say is needed to curb prison spending, relieve staff shortages and
overcrowding, and make the justice system fairer. That is why they say the First Step Act is exactly that: a start. It’s also worth
noting that the federal prison system, with 183,000 inmates, is tiny in comparison to America’s total incarcerated population of 1.5 million.
State prison systems make up the vast majority of that population, and that is where reform efforts have been spreading for years. Many
states, both red and blue, have cut their prison populations while also seeing drastic reductions in crime.
“The only reason we’ve gotten to the point of these federal reforms, which we think will be transformative, is
the fact that states have applied them and have data they can point to that can persuade the tough-on-crime
crowd,” said Mark Holden, chairman of Freedom Partners, which makes conservative arguments for criminal justice reform. “It is hard to
argue against that, and it’s all based on data.”
Impact Denied—A/T Democratic Peace Theory

Democracies are more likely to go to war than authoritarian regimes—democratic
peace theory isn’t true
Emily Velasco, Science writer in Caltech's Office of Strategic Communications, July 18, 2018,
“Democracies More Prone to Start Wars – Except When They're Not,” Cal Tech,
https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/democracies-more-prone-start-wars-except-when-theyre-not-
82879 (Accessed April 25, 2020)
What kind of political leader is most likely to start a war—an invective-spewing dictator or the elected
head of a democratic nation? Surprisingly, science says it's probably not the autocrat. Leaders of
democratic nations actually have stronger incentives to start and exacerbate conflicts with other
countries than their autocratic counterparts , suggests a new study published by the American Journal of Political Science. The
difference boils down to public pressure , say the study's authors, Michael Gibilisco of Caltech and Casey Crisman-Cox of Texas
A&M University. Because of pressure from voters to not back down and appear weak, democratic leaders
tend to act more aggressively in international conflicts. An autocrat , on the other hand, is answerable to no
one and can back down from a conflict without facing personal consequences. "If an elected leader
makes a threat during a conflict with another country and the threat isn't followed through, they may
face a decrease in approval ratings, or they may lose an election," says Gibilisco, assistant professor of political science.
In democracies, he notes, voters can punish their leaders for appearing weak—these punishments or
consequences are known as "audience costs" in political science parlance. To avoid those costs, leaders
in representative governments become more aggressive during disputes.
Impact Turn—Fear of Crime Good

Fear of crime can be channeled for productive social outcomes—reduces crime and risky
behavior
Michigan State University, Research study on the effects of fear of crime, August 12, 2014, “Scared of
crime? Science shows that healthy fear of crime is a good thing,” Science Daily,
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140812122329.htm (Accessed March 31, 2020)
In the past half-century, fear of crime in the United States has fueled "white flight" from big cities, become known as a quality of life issue and
prompted scholars and law enforcement experts to address ways of reducing this fear. But
a study by a Michigan State
University criminologist challenges this longstanding theory by arguing that a healthy fear of crime is, in
fact, a good thing. The study, published online in the journal Justice Quarterly, suggests adolescents who
are more fearful of crime are less apt to become victims and offenders of violent acts. Essentially, fearful
youth tend to avoid potentially dangerous people, locations and activities such as drug-fueled parties,
said Chris Melde, MSU associate professor of criminal justice. Instead of trying to reduce this fear, Melde
said law enforcement agencies should focus on direct anti-crime initiatives and providing details on
which crimes are most likely to occur, and where. This would help citizens become better informed on
issues that could affect their routine activities and safety. "If we're going to reduce crime and
victimization, we should present people with an accurate assessment of crime and delinquency in local
areas," Melde said. "Policies aimed at fear reduction are not likely to be effective crime-reduction
strategies." Melde studied more than 1,600 youth from across the United States during a one-year
period. He found that respondents who reported more fear were less likely to be involved in violent acts
such as assaults, robberies and gang fights. Interestingly, the results held for both victims and offenders.
That's because the two groups often come from the same pool of people, which is called the "victim-
offender overlap." While there are "pure" victims, Melde noted, disentangling victim from offender can come down to determining who
started a street fight.

We can make the choice to blunt the impact of fear of crime and turn it into
something productive
Joanna Bourke, author of Fear: A Cultural History (Virago), and is professor of history at Birkbeck
College, June 23, 2010, “Turning fear of crime to our advantage,” The Guardian,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/jun/23/fear-crime-advantage
The government and mass media stoke our fears of crime. They encourage the scapegoating of minority
groups and young people, and wrongly suggest that increasing surveillance of public places, expanding
the powers of law enforcement agencies, and the wholesale incarceration of criminals are the solution.
They deflect attention from more considered responses to the causes of crime, such as the
disenfranchisement felt by many youth, their concerns about mounting unemployment, and fears that they will be condemned to a
lifetime spent in menial, unfulfilling labour. Community outreach is a vital component in the fight against crime, as is pressuring local and
national governments to consider long-term, redistributive policies to tackle fundamental inequities. By
recognising the ways in
which fear is being peddled to us, we can blunt, if not eradicate, its negative impact. Most importantly, fear
can be a positive emotion. There is nothing inherently wrong about fear. We can employ it to forge
communities of solidarity – towards vulnerable people , for instance. It can stimulate attention and sharpen
judgment, encouraging us to pay more attention to other people within our communities who feel
economically or socially disenfranchised. Much of the human urge to creativity depends upon fear. Fear
of crime should encourage us to think more creatively about what kind of society we aspire towards.

Fear of crime is productive—the disad over determines fear of crime as always bad
Dr. Jonathan Jackson, Methodology Institute and Mannheim Centre for Criminology, London School of
Economics and Political Science, August 2009, “Fear of crime can have a positive effect too, argues new
study,” London School of Economic, http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-
archive/newsAndMedia/news/archives/2009/08/functionalfear.aspx (Accessed April 22, 2020)
The study finds that some people who admit to being worried about falling victim to crime manage to translate
their worry into a form of problem-solving – leading them to take practical action against crime, which can
range from installing alarms or hiding valuables to answering the front door with caution. When neither their fear of crime nor
the actions they take reduce their quality of life, concludes the report's author Dr Jonathan Jackson, it is logical to
conclude that the fear has had a partly beneficial effect and should be classified as 'functional fear'.
Moreover, strategies to reduce fear of crime risk reducing some people's natural defences against crime . The
study, Functional Fear and Public Insecurities About Crime, is newly-published by the British Journal of Criminology, and is co-authored with
Emily Gray of the Research Institute for Law, Politics & Justice. Dr Jackson analysed responses from 2,844 Londoners who were asked how
worried they were by crime and whether the quality of their life was affected – both by worry itself but also by the precautions they took. They
were also asked about the precautions they took – for example, how often they avoided public transport – and to what extent they felt safer as
a result. The respondents were classed in three groups – the unworried, who reported no anxiety about crime even if they took precautions, -
the 'dyfunctionally worried' and the 'functionally worried'. The dysfunctionally worried were those who reported fear of crime, took
precautions and who said their quality of life was impaired by either or both while the functionally worried said they worried about crime and
took precautions but did not feel either had an effect on their quality of life. Overall, 73 per cent of people were unworried, 20 percent were
dysfunctionally worried while eight per cent were functionally worried and so could be said to experience some benefit from fear of crime. The
analysis also found that women were more likely than men to experience both functional and dysfunctional
worry, but that age did not appear to be a significant factor . Recent victims of crime were more likely to feel
dysfunctional worry. Dr Jackson said: 'Of course no one would deny that the fear of crime can be destructive and
paralysing. But this research suggests that some people and communities have the potential and the willingness to
convert worry about crime into constructive action. 'For too long, research into fear of crime has
assumed that everyone who experiences fear is damaged by it – overlooking the individuals who take
precautions and successfully manage the risks. Given the political currency of the fear of crime, this has
risked exaggerating the extent to which fear of crime is a social problem.
States Counterplan and Federalism Disadvantage

The states counterplan and federalism disadvantage work together to answer affirmatives that use the
federal government (a topically necessary mechanism) to solve criminal justice issues that are essentially
or mostly state-and-local-level issues. For example, affirmatives using the federal government to
mandate local police reform, require states to restore voting rights to felons convicted of state crimes,
mandates federal review of state-level sentencing, would all be strategically appropriate for negatives to
run states and federalism.
The states counterplan utilizes an interstate compact, which states have the legal authority to create, to
carry out the plan mandates. There is evidence in the file that states solve crime better--particularly
state-level crimes, and also that the federal government will model good state policies.
The federalism disadvantage argues that we are currently in a period of restored balance between the
states and the federal government. Strong federal overreach disrupts this balance, affecting our entire
political system, which is modeled internationally. The impacts range from case turns (federal control of
the criminal justice system is bad) to war, economics, and even a national power grid scenario.
Affirmative answers to the states counterplan rely most strongly on a permutation that argues states
and the federal government working together are the best model of "cooperative federalism," that
federal control is necessary for protecting civil rights, and that federal reinforcement of a variety of
policy areas is necessary. Affirmative answers to the federalism disadvantage range from uniqueness
and link takeouts to impact turns stressing the importance of strong federal control. Some evidence also
questions the theoretical and historical validity of federalism itself.
Responses to Federalism Disadvantage
No Link: Flawed Interpretation
The disadvantage is based on a misunderstanding of federalism--strong central

government is necessary
Jenna Bednar, professor of political science at the University of Michigan, April 17, 2020
"Of course Trump’s authority isn’t ‘total.’ Here are 3 myths about how federalism works," Washington
Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/17/course-trumps-authority-isnt-total-here-
are-3-myths-about-how-federalism-works/ (accessed 5/13/2020)
But Haley is wrong when she suggests that governors can handle the pandemic and that “our
Constitution has it right: Keep control and decision-making close to the people.” In doing so, she
promotes the outdated concept of dual federalism, which equated federalism with states’ rights and
states’ ability to make effective policy on their own. The founders designed a system with a strong
central government capable of coordinating state action. They did not intend states to meet national
emergencies on their own. As John Jay wrote, “a good national government,” with its capacity to unite
and coordinate the states, is “necessary” to deter foreign invasion.
The line between federal and state power is vague

Jenna Bednar, professor of political science at the University of Michigan, April 17, 2020
"Of course Trump’s authority isn’t ‘total.’ Here are 3 myths about how federalism works," Washington
Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/17/course-trumps-authority-isnt-total-here-
are-3-myths-about-how-federalism-works/ (accessed 5/13/2020)
The president’s statements sent people scrambling to dust off their Constitutions. But the Constitution
only loosely defines the divisions of authority. While the 10th Amendment says that any powers not
assigned to the federal government or “prohibited” to the states “are reserved to the States
respectively, or to the people,” that is not an “insurance policy,” as one law professor put it. In practice,
the federal and state governments share a great deal of policymaking. This relationship has evolved —
and continues to evolve.
Non-Unique--Cyclical
Non-unique: Historically federalism expands and recedes
J. Richard Broughton, Associate Professor of Law, Texas Wesleyan University School of Law, 2004
"Habeas Corpus and the Safeguards of Federalism," Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy vo. 2, pp.
134-5
Even in the wake of Brown v. Allen, the Court has often paid lip service to federalism. During the Warren Court
era, however, federalism proved secondary (if important at all) to the Court's inflated understanding of
its own role in protecting federal constitutional rights. Fay v. Noia was a primary culprit in the effort to maintain broad and
independent federal powers of review on habeas, refusing to give effect (except in the most narrow of circumstances) to state procedural rules
that precluded review of a prisoner's constitutional claims. Justice Brennan there explained that, while
federalism justified limits of
federal review in which a prisoner had deliberately bypassed state procedural rules, mere “inadvertence
or neglect” was not enough to elevate the state's interest in orderly procedure above the ““federal
policy” of making habeas widely available for unconstitutional restraints . Townsend v. Sain applied similar reasoning,
referring to the state's interest in orderly procedure that was recognized (though rendered virtually meaningless) in Noia, but concluding
nonetheless that federal courts had broad powers, consistent with the purposes of habeas review, to grant evidentiary hearings to prisoners
who had not deliberately bypassed state procedures. The
tide slowly began to turn in the 1970s with the advent of the
Burger Court. Subsequently, the Rehnquist Court offered even more sweeping changes in federal habeas
doctrine that were driven largely by concerns about the delicate balance of federal-state power in
habeas litigation. This modern trend in habeas jurisprudence began amid Congress's failure to enact a
variety of more federalism-friendly habeas reform proposals and has continued into the post-AEDPA habeas regime.
Non-Unique--Policies
Federal criminal justice legislation has overrun states on sentencing, drug policy, and
juvenile justice
Summer 2019
5/10/2020)
Criminal justice reform is a focus of attention at the state and federal level, but in contrast to other
policy areas in recent years there is evidence of bipartisan support and federal action. At the federal
level, a bipartisan coalition passed the First Step Act of 2018 (P.L. 115-391). Its panoply of provisions includes
a reduction in enhanced sentencing for prior drug felonies. While federal law already dictates that
convicts can spend a portion of their sentence in home confinement, the Act spurs implementation by
dictating that the Bureau of Prisons “shall, to the extent practicable, place prisoners with lower risk
levels and lower needs on home confinement for the maximum amount of time permitted.” Among
other stipulations, the bill also largely prohibits the use of restraints on pregnant women, limits the use
of solitary confinement for juveniles, increases opportunities to earn good time credits, facilitates
prisoner placement near families, instructs the Bureau of Prisons to assess opportunities to provide
evidence-based treatment for opioid and heroin addictions, and requires extensive data collection on
matters such as prisoner demographics and the use of treatment programs. Although the Act is
necessarily limited to addressing criminal justice reform at the federal level, it also authorizes grant
programs for state and local governments to provide reentry and education programs. Congress also
passed a less noticed but important law with its Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 2018 (P.L. 115-385). After
languishing in Congress for years, the bill—also passed with bipartisan support—reauthorizes and modifies the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention Act of 1974. Its purpose is “to assist State, tribal, and local governments in addressing juvenile crime through the provision of
technical assistance, research, training, evaluation, and the dissemination of current and relevant information on effective and evidence-based
programs and practices for combating juvenile delinquency.” The 2018 modification increases available funds for grant program
implementation. Furthermore, the
bill requires participating state and local governments “to identify and reduce
racial and ethnic disparities among youth who come into contact with the juvenile justice system.”
Among other stipulations, grant recipients must collect and analyze data on racial disparities to identify
points in the system at which differences arise and develop plans to eliminate those disparities. The bill
also further limits juvenile detention and placement in adult facilities.
Non-unique: Trump is crushing state environmental regulatory efforts

Summer 2019
5/10/2020)
As part of the EPA's proposed rewrite, the agency also challenged the ability of California to establish its
own fuel economy standards. California has for decades received a waiver from the EPA to establish its
own guidelines, and more than a dozen states have adopted these more stringent standards over the
years to address their own air quality problems. Federalism scholars have long regarded this feature of
environmental policy as an important illustration of a regulatory race to the top, in what David Vogel
once called the “California effect” (Vogel 1995). Under the proposed rule, the EPA is considering
whether to revoke California’s waiver altogether. At the time of this writing, the federal government and
California’s negotiations to resolve this issue had stalled, suggesting that the EPA may proceed with its
plans to rescind California’s waiver.
Federalism Impact Answers

U.S. federalism isn’t modeled abroad – countries look to Europe or South Africa
instead.
Andrew Moravcsik, Professor of Politics and director of the European Union Program at Princeton
University, January 31, 2005
"Dream On America," Newsweek, http://www.people.vcu.edu/~dbromley/civilreligionandiraqLink.html
Once upon a time, the U.S. Constitution was a revolutionary document , full of epochal innovations—free elections,
judicial review, checks and balances, federalism and, perhaps most important, a Bill of Rights. In the 19th and 20th centuries, countries around
the world copied the document, not least in Latin America. So did Germany and Japan after World War II. Today? When nations write
a new constitution, as dozens have in the past two decades, they seldom look to the American model.
When the Soviets withdrew from Central Europe, U.S. constitutional experts rushed in. They got a polite
hearing, and were sent home. Jiri Pehe, adviser to former president Vaclav Havel, recalls the Czechs' firm decision to adopt a
European-style parliamentary system with strict limits on campaigning. "For Europeans, money talks too much in American democracy. It's very
prone to certain kinds of corruption, or at least influence from powerful lobbies," he says. "Europeans would not want to follow that route."
They also sought to limit the dominance of television, unlike in American campaigns where, Pehe says, "TV debates and photogenic looks
govern election victories." So it is elsewhere. After American planes and bombs freed the country, Kosovo
opted for a European
constitution. Drafting a post-apartheid constitution, South Africa rejected American-style federalism in
favor of a German model, which leaders deemed appropriate for the social-welfare state they hoped to
construct. Now fledgling African democracies look to South Africa as their inspiration , says John Stremlau, a
former U.S. State Department official who currently heads the international relations department at the University of Witwatersrand in
Johannesburg: "We can't rely on the Americans." The
new democracies are looking for a constitution written in
modern times and reflecting their progressive concerns about racial and social equality , he explains. "To
borrow Lincoln's phrase, South Africa is now Africa's 'last great hope'."
Federalism doesn't prevent wars

Pietro S. Nivola, former senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution, October 1, 2005
"Why Federalism Matters," Brookings Institution, https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-federalism-
matters/ (accessed 5/11/2020)
Where truly profound regional linguistic, religious, or cultural differences persist, however, federating is
by no means a guarantee of national harmony . Canada, Spain, and the former Yugoslavia are wellknown cases of federations
that either periodically faced secessionist movements (Quebec), or have had to struggle with them continually (the Basques), or collapsed in
barbarous civil wars (the Balkans). Iraq seems headed for the same fate. The Sunni minority there is resisting a draft constitution that would
grant regional autonomy not only to the Kurds in the north but to Shiite sectarians in the oil-rich south. So far, proposed
federalism for
Iraq is proving to be a recipe for disaccord, not accommodation. In much of America’s own history,
federalism did not ease this country’s sectional tensions. On the contrary, a long sequence of
compromises with the southern states in the first half of the nineteenth century failed to prevent the
Civil War. Then, through the first half of the twentieth century, additional concessions to states’ rights
did little to dismantle the South’s repulsive institution of racial apartheid. Southern separatism was
subdued by a military defeat, not diplomatic give-and-take, and only further assertions of central power
—starting with the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision in 1954—began altering the region’s
corrosive racial policies.
Localism Turn: Federalism Undermines Cities

Federalism destroys urban city empowerment
Katherine Levine Einstein and David Glick, Assistant Professors of Political Science at Boston
University, 2017
"Cities in American Federalism: Evidence on State-Local Government Conflict from a Survey of Mayors,"
Publius: The Journal of Federalism, Volume 47, https://academic.oup.com/publius/article-
abstract/47/4/599/3752388?redirectedFrom=fulltext (accessed 5/12/2020)
More generally, our findings confirm that state governments—and vertical federalism— pose a significant
constraint on urban policy innovation (Schragger 2016). Moreover, our evidence suggests that regulations, rather than a
lack of financial support, compose the most important dimension of contemporary state-local conflict .
Mayors were far more likely—by a margin of fifteen percentage points—to select the “much less” category when they were asked about
autonomy from their state government as opposed to financial support. Moreover, partisan effects were consistently stronger in the autonomy
models than in the financial support models. This suggests that dissatisfaction with Republican state governments—
especially among Democratic mayors—is more a consequence of perceived state legal overreach than
financial stinginess. Of course cities would like more money, but for many this is a secondary concern. Indeed, a potential next question
is how much, if any, financial support cities would trade for fewer regulatory restrictions. Going forward, scholars of state-local
relationships should continue to focus on the emergence of these new state regulations of cities and
unpack how and when states choose to engage in preemption.
Cities are key to policy innovation and federalism undermines this

Katherine Levine Einstein and David Glick, Assistant Professors of Political Science at Boston
University, 2017
"Cities in American Federalism: Evidence on State-Local Government Conflict from a Survey of Mayors,"
Publius: The Journal of Federalism, Volume 47, https://academic.oup.com/publius/article-
abstract/47/4/599/3752388?redirectedFrom=fulltext (accessed 5/12/2020)
Many scholars who lament the health of America’s federalism point to policy innovation at the state and
local level as bright spots (Conlan 2006; Shipan and Volden 2008; Pickerill and Bowling 2014). Much of this activism, real or
aspirational, takes place at the city level . Our results reveal that rising partisan polarization spurs states to
obfuscate urban innovation. In keeping with widespread media reports of state preemption laws targeting left-leaning cities,
Democratic mayors in Republican states, of which there are many, were much more unhappy with restrictions from their state government.
These findings suggest that rising Republican dominance in state-level elections may foment increasingly antagonistic relationships between
state and city governments. This
is problematic, because it challenges one of the central purported benefits of
federalism; when different levels of government have different opinions, values, and priorities,
federalism can help to effectively divide policy responsibilities such that jurisdictional preferences and
needs are adequately represented. Our partisan mismatch results mean that the places that most want
—and potentially need—to pursue policies different from those at the state level are unable to do so.
Localism Turn: Empowering State Governments Destroys Localism

Empowering state governments allows corporations to push preemption laws,
undermining municipal governments
Lydia Bean, fellow at New America Foundation, and Maresa Strano, policy analyst at New America
Foundation, July 11, 2019
"Punching Down Part One: State Preemption Unleashed," New America,
https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/reports/punching-down/part-one-state-preemption-
unleashed/ (accessed 5/10/2020)
These industry- and conservative-organized groups refer to a cross-state coalition of socially conservative and economically
libertarian special interests, consultants, and politicians. This coalition, masterminded and run by three networks, the American Legislative
Exchange Council, the State Policy Network, and Americans for Prosperity—what State Capture author Alex Hertel-Fernandez dubbed the
“right-wing troika”—serves an anti-regulatory and culturally white, Christian, and conservative policy agenda .
According to Vanessa Zboreak, “the overarching sentiment stressed by ALEC, that conservative causes will be best (and most swiftly) served
by eliminating local control, has permeated the last two years of legislative sessions in many of the states in which the legislature
switched party control in 2012.” Model or “copycat” bills have been key to the troika’s success, and they have been equally important to the
emergence and spread of the new preemption. Special interests can stuff their anti-regulatory policies into model
legislation thanks to their alliance with the ubiquitous ALEC. ALEC’s local government counterpart, the
American City County Exchange (ACCE), provided the template for many preemption laws . In some cases, the
language of model bills, in particular those that undercut labor workplace equity and local economic regulation, are deliberately crafted
to conceal their true origin and purpose. As a consequence, legislators can end up voting against their
own policy preferences on preemption matters and otherwise. Yet the new preemption is not confined to
Republican-controlled states, nor is it a distinctly Republican Party strategy. States with Democratic-majority
legislatures and governors are executing the new preemption, too , although the targeted policies are different. In
Republican states, preemptive action is about both economic deregulation and social conservatism, while in Democratic states, the new
preemption is enabled by legislators trading away local democracy as a bargaining chip. Both Democratic and Republican-held state capitals are
awash in business lobbyists pressing for bans on local regulation. For instance, the state of New York preempted New York City’s plastic bag tax,
a move strongly encouraged by the American City Council Exchange in the name of “business and consumer choice.” In 2018, California
passed a law to preempt local soda taxes that was engineered by the beverage industry in response to multiple
communities raising taxes on sugary drinks. In that case, California lawmakers were opposed to the law on the grounds that these local taxes
promoted public health and raised revenue for public services, so the American Beverage Association and other interested parties had to resort
to unseemly tactics (the terms extortion and blackmail abounded in the surrounding news coverage) to leverage a win for their preemption bill.
In sum, conservativestate power only created the opportunity for the new preemption; corporations and
special interests provided the money and infrastructure to realize it.
Localism Turn: Cities Impacts

Cities key to survive collapse of the nation-state, climate change mitigation, and global
crises
Robert Muggah, Research Director at Igarapé Institute, and Benjamin Barber, Senior Fellow at
Fordham School of Law Urban Consortium, 2016
"Cities are key to our survival in the twenty first century," Global Challenges,
https://globalchallenges.org/cities-are-key-to-our-survival-in-the-twenty-first-century/ (accessed
5/12/2020)
There are ominous signs of nation states going rogue. Consider the cases of Austria, France, Hungary,
the Netherlands and Poland where angry right-wing populist administrations are threatening to take
charge. In Russia and the Philippines, the current regimes can be characterized as strong-man
autocracies. Against this grim backdrop, cities are a promising alternative for fostering effective and
pragmatic democratic governance from the ground up.
Survival of cities key to solve global crises

Robert Muggah, Research Director at Igarapé Institute, and Benjamin Barber, Senior Fellow at
Fordham School of Law Urban Consortium, 2016
5/12/2020)
The future international landscape is marked with volatility and uncertainty. There is a seismic re-
ordering of international order underway that stretches from the U.S. and Europe to South and East
Asia. There are no simple solutions and many potential flash points. But the truth is that the road to
democracy, sustainability and stability runs not through nation states, but cities. Rather than standing
still, city residents are already rolling-up their sleeves to get things done. Now is the time to empower
mayors to take these efforts on a global scale.
Localism Turn: Cities Impacts

Cities are developing interconnected networks now to address climate change,
immigration, inequality and terrorism
Robert Muggah, Research Director at Igarapé Institute, and Benjamin Barber, Senior Fellow at Fordham
School of Law Urban Consortium, 2016
5/12/2020)
While some political leaders speak of throwing up walls, cities are busily getting connected with one
another. In an interconnected globalized world, cities are the most interdependent of political entities.
They are transactional, trade-oriented and open, and defined by physical, intellectual and digital bridges
rather than borders. Bound together by dense exchanges of ideas, capital and people, and facing
common challenges like climate change, migration, inequality and terrorism, city networks are the new
normal.
Preemption undermines local policies for racial, economic, and health equity
Lydia Bean, fellow at New America Foundation, and Maresa Strano, policy analyst at New America
Foundation, July 11, 2019
"Punching Down Part One: State Preemption Unleashed," New America,
https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/reports/punching-down/part-one-state-preemption-
unleashed/ (accessed 5/10/2020)
The prevailing normative argument for what constitutes bad preemption goes one step further. That
argument asserts that preemptive action to undermine a locality’s ability to advance or protect racial,
gender, economic, and health equity should also be denounced by both progressives and conservatives
on the grounds that equity is a core value of democracy. Indeed, an interactive mapping tool set up by
the Partnership for Working Families to track preemption shows that “state preemption follows a
pattern of mostly white, male legislatures ignoring or overriding concerns of the women and people of
color who are more likely to suffer harm because of states preempting local laws and regulations, such
as those that would strengthen gun control.”
Corporate Control Turn

States rights think tanks use federalism to entrench corporate control
Malkie Wall, research assistant for Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress, et al, July 22,
2019
"Corruption Consultants," Center for American Progress,
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/democracy/reports/2019/07/22/472363/corruption-
consultants/ (accessed 5/13/2020)
Many state policies in place today are the brainchild of ALEC. This tax-exempt, corporate-funded
organization lives by the motto “Limited Government, Free Markets and Federalism” but mainly pushes
state policies that protect and put money in the pockets of corporations. ALEC is one of the most
influential corruption consultants at the state level. As described previously, the organization serves as a
conduit for businesses and conservative activists to influence state legislators. Corporate
representatives and legislators sitting on ALEC’s policy “task forces” draft “model bills” on a variety of
issues. ALEC, in turn, feeds these model bills to state legislators, along with research services and
political advice. For state lawmakers, who often arrive in office with little experience and lack time and
resources for developing policy agendas, model bills provide easy templates. Introducing legislation
provided by special-interest groups also allows these groups to build rapport with lobbyists and
potential political donors. ALEC’s lavish retreats—which are frequently paid for by its corporate
members—further massage those relationships.
Corporate control destroys democracy and state economies

2019
In manipulating the lawmaking process, corporations and special interests have, at times, caused serious
damage to state economies and democratic systems. Through the use of corruption consultants, these
well-heeled and influential players appear to be more intent on helping themselves become richer and
more powerful than on generating ideas that help everyday Americans.
The laboratory of democracy argument is flawed—empowering states leaves them

vulnerable to corporate control, undermining democracy
2019
However, this mantle of states being laboratories of democracy has not always been used for the public
good. Unfortunately, states can also be used as a testing ground for policies that skew political and
economic power toward corporations or billionaires and away from everyday Americans. In too many states,
this is precisely what is happening today. Across the country, conservative lawmakers are adopting policies that make
corporations and billionaires richer while hurting American families. These legislators are accomplishing this by
implementing irresponsible tax cuts, depriving governments of revenue for public goods and services, and making communities and workplaces
less safe through deregulation and attacks on unions. To maintain power and keep bad policies in place, lawmakers
further corrupt
democratic processes to skew elections in their—and their wealthy donors’—favor . Many harmful state policies
are byproducts of corporate lobbying and conservative special-interest groups that act as what this report calls “corruption consultants.” In this
report, “corruption” describes the exploitation and manipulation of the lawmaking process to benefit the rich and powerful. Under current law,
this activity need not be illegal. In exchange for money—in the form of membership dues or donations—groups and corporations gain
unprecedented access to and influence over lawmakers. For their part, overworked and underpaid state legislators are often grateful for
research assistance, political advice, and networking opportunities with potential funders. This, in turn, leads to policies that benefit the
superrich at the expense of everyone else. One notable example is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization funded by
corporations, wealthy donors, and philanthropic foundations that serves as a hub for its funders to closely interact with state legislators. ALEC
offers lawmakers low membership fees to incentivize them to join. Meanwhile, corporations must shell out thousands of dollars to become
members. But they are not complaining. For corporations, ALEC’s high membership fees are well worth the cost. In
addition to getting
special access to and face time with legislators, corporations can draft model bills that carry out their
agendas and deliver them straight to willing state legislators. ALEC is successful in part because it
recognizes the importance of social ties; its corporate-sponsored conferences and retreats create
opportunities for state legislators to mingle with political leaders and corporate lobbyists, generating
incentives for members to come back year after year.
Corporate Control Turn—Racism Impact

Corporate control hurts poor and people of color hardest
2019
Dangerous policies promoted by corporations and special interests have cost everyday Americans their
jobs and financial well-being, not to mention their ability to make their voices heard in the democratic
process. The results of this profit- and power-driven approach to state governance has been painful for
working families—particularly for employees who work in unsafe conditions. Moreover, those who are
hardest hit tend to be people of color and low-income Americans. Building off their success in
conservative states, corporations and special interests are now working to export their policies across
the country and to the federal level. After using states as a testing ground, they are seeking a nationwide
takeover. In other words, those who misused the laboratories of democracies to experiment with
harmful laws at the state level are scaling up.
Pandemics Turn
Federalism undermines response to pandemics
Ed Kilgore, Columnist at Intelligencer, April 1, 2020
"Federalism Is a Bad Prescription for Handling the Coronavirus Crisis," New York Magazine,
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/federalism-is-a-bad-prescription-for-handling-
coronavirus.html (accessed 5/13/2020)
But even federalism enthusiasts acknowledge that our relatively decentralized system makes
coordination of emergency measures across state lines difficult — particularly with a Republican
administration inclined to defer to corporations and Trump-friendly states in designing and
administering its response. And the system can expose health-care workers, our first line of defense
against the pandemic, to inadequate resources and (in some cases) poor state and local leadership. The
problems associated with federalism in an emergency are already becoming more evident as the Trump
administration refuses to exert national leadership, as Richard Kreitner observes: Instead of prematurely
celebrating the leadership shown by states and cities as some kind of triumph of the American system,
we ought to recognize it as a desperate grasping for the usual exceptionalist narrative at a time of
systemic, world-historical national failure. Juliette Kayyem, a Homeland Security official under Obama,
wrote in The Atlantic that Trump’s abandonment of the states calls to mind the weaker union of the
Articles of Confederation, under which states constantly put up trade barriers with one another. States
are already vying over precious resources—competition that raises the costs for everyone. It’s not
inconceivable, once the virus spreads widely through Red State America—where denialist political and
media figures have been consistently downplaying the seriousness of the pandemic—that armed
checkpoints will go up on roads between states. It is almost as if the union is effectively dissolving before
our eyes into its 50 component parts.
Failure to contain Covid-19 causes the worst domestic mortality rate in U.S. history
Jim Geraghty, senior political correspondent for National Review, April 13, 2020
"Sketching Out a Worst-Case Scenario for the Coronavirus Pandemic," National Review,
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/sketching-out-a-worst-case-scenario-for-the-coronavirus-
pandemic/ (accessed 5/12/2020)
That said, the United States has endured close to 2,000 deaths a day for the past several days — we’re
now experiencing something close to one new 9/11 every 36 hours. It is hard to imagine how anyone
could look at that number of deaths and the prospect of tens of thousands more and construe it as
anything less than an epic tragedy, one of the worst in our history.
Global pandemics could kill a billion people – turns their modeling arguments
Bill Gates, Microsoft Corporation Chairman, 2011
"Pandemic Risk," World Development Report,
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTNWDR2013/Resources/8258024-1352909193861/8936935-
1356011448215/8986901-1380568255405/WDR14_bp_Pandemic_Risk_Jonas.pdf (accessed 3/25/2020)
Even though we can't compute the odds for threats like bioterrorism or a pandemic, it’s important to
have the right people worrying about them and taking steps to minimize their likelihood and potential
impact. But bioterrorism and pandemics are the only threats I can foresee that could kill over a billion
people.
Racism Turn
Failure on race means presumption is against federalism—we should not subordinate
racial justice to an abstract principle
Guy-Uriel E. Charles, professor of Law at Duke University, and Luis Fuentes-Rohwe, professor of
Law at Indiana University, 2015
"Race, Federalism, and Voting Rights," University of Chicago Legal Forum,
https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3049&context=facpub (accessed
5/10/2020)
Perhaps closer to reality, Shelby County is a legerdemain that is completely uninterested in
representation and is simply intent on redrawing the federalism line as reset fifty years before. If so, the
federalism enterprise ought to be subjected to critical inquiry. We must inquire why the project of racial
equality must take a back seat to the federalism project. We must inquire why the Court is
disempowering Congress as the political body that has best protected the electoral interests of people
of color and empowering the states, the sovereigns that have historically shown a lesser inclination to
extend these crucial protections. If federalism is to be redeemed, it must first prove that the states will
actively compete with the federal government to protect the rights of racial minorities. Though history
has not been kind to federalism, we ought to keep an open mind. However, in the immortal words of
Ronald Reagan, we should trust, but verify.
Courts exaggerate the importance of federalism to implement a partisan and racist
agenda
Lynn Adelman, United States District Court Judge in the Eastern District of Wisconsin and former
Wisconsin state senator, Summer 2018
"Laundering Racism Through the Court: The Scandal of States’ Rights," Dissent,
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/laundering-racism-through-court-scandal-states-rights-
federalism (accessed 5/12/2020)
The Court majority’s attachment to federalism , as evidenced in Shelby County and NFIB, is clearly motivated by a
conservative political agenda. Unlike the related doctrine of separation of powers that was designed to prevent tyranny
and secure liberty, federalism in the American system of government does not have a distinguished lineage . Historian Shlomo
Slonim points out that neither preservation of the states nor the rights of states was the product of any
profound theory of political science. In fact, one of the major purposes of the Philadelphia Convention was to abridge state
sovereignty. In creating a nation, the founders aimed to curb state power and to subordinate states to national
authority. Federalism was shaped not by design, but by the parochial demands of two groups of states,
the smaller states and the slave states, both of which sought protections for their own insular interests .
Moreover, the Court applies federalist ideas selectively. It is more likely to support states’ rights when the
policies that the states are supporting are substantively conservative. This was the case in both Shelby County and
NFIB. In Shelby County, the states sought control over the rules governing voting so that they could make those rules more restrictive, and in
NFIB, the states opposed providing healthcare to poor non-elderly adults. In contrast, in 2005, in Gonzales v. Raich, where the issue
involved a conflict between a California law allowing seriously ill residents access to medical marijuana and Congress’s criminalization of the
same, the Court rejected California’s federalism-based claim .
Racism Turn
Even good arguments in favor of federalism don’t outweigh the racist consequences
5/10/2020)
These are strong arguments in favor of reconceptualizing federalism as capable of redeeming people
and not states. We are certainly open to this possibility. But at least in the context of voting, the early
returns across the states are not very promising. We can look to North Carolina, or Indiana, or
Wisconsin, or Texas, to name a few states. Following Shelby County, each of these states moved to
change their electoral laws in ways that were inimical to the electoral liberty interests of the voters of
color in their states. These states are not engaged in protecting the rights of people of color, far from it.
If we are going to empower the states as the primary guarantors of racial liberty, we must ensure that
they are up to the task. That task is not about ascertaining whether the states are or are not engaged in
racial discrimination. If we are engaged in that debate we are not engaged in the task that modernity
expects of federalism. The question for federalism in the 21st century is whether the states will compete
with the federal government to represent their citizens of color in the same way that they ostensibly
compete to represent their white citizens.
Their theoretical arguments for federalism ignore the practical historical result of
entrenching racism
Lynn Adelman, United States District Court Judge in the Eastern District of Wisconsin and former
Wisconsin state senator, Summer 2018
"Laundering Racism Through the Court: The Scandal of States’ Rights," Dissent,
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/laundering-racism-through-court-scandal-states-rights-
federalism (accessed 5/12/2020)
By federalism, these legal conservatives mean that the authority of the federal government is limited, that states are sovereign bodies, and that
courts should enforce limitations on federal power and bolster the power of states. On its face, the conservatives’ attachment
to federalism may not seem particularly objectionable. After all, the founders did divide power between the federal
government and the states so as to facilitate policymaking by those legislators most familiar with the issues in question. It is becoming
clear, however, that the practical consequences of the conservatives’ attachment to federalism are far
from benign. For African Americans, particularly those living in states of the former Confederacy, the
impact of federalist doctrine as implemented by the Supreme Court has been no less than devastating—
so much so that the justices’ view that it is justified by the principle of state sovereignty is indefensible.
Racism Turn
They need to prove federalism is proactively anti-racist—it’s not enough to just say
federalism doesn’t discriminate or that the potential to redeem it exists
5/10/2020)
The redemption of federalism is an intriguing and worthwhile project. It would be salutary and
productive to get beyond the states' rights as racism meme. And it is not fair to federalism's advocates
to constantly tar them with the putridity of the past. But redemption is not cheap. If federalism is to be
redeemed, federalism must work for people of color as well. And if federalism is to "work" for people of
color, it is not enough for proponents of federalism to show that the states will no longer engage in
rampant racial discrimination. Our task here is to introduce a distinction between an argument for
states' rights premised on the idea that the states (or many of them) are no longer engaging in racial
discrimination and an argument for states' rights in which the states are actively representing the
interests of their citizens of color. From our perspective, the argument for federalism cannot be
premised on the idea that the states are no longer discriminating against racial minorities. It is not
sufficient to simply say that the states are indifferent.
Even if federalism originally made sense, its failure to address contemporary racial
tensions weakens it
5/10/2020)
It may very well be the case that we as a nation have never been full-throated nationalists and it is certainly the case that we as a
nation have never subscribed to racial equality uber alles as a constitutional principle. Nevertheless, even granting
these points, it does not follow that Reconstruction and the Reconstruction Amendments contributed
nothing to federalism. The modern Supreme Court has yet to wrestle with the history of Reconstruction or to offer its account of the
relationship among race, the Reconstruction Amendments, and federalism. Maybe the Reconstruction Amendments do not add much to the
federalism debate. Maybe the federalism balance forged at the Founding was the proper balance , though such a
conclusion would take a very narrow view of what Reconstruction sought to accomplish. Regardless of the answer to the inquiry about the
relationship between federalism and Reconstruction, these questions were front and center in Shelby County and they deserved to be
addressed. Givenhow race has affected our understanding of federalism from the Founding, through
Reconstruction, and through the Civil Rights era, the Court's analysis in Shelby County is, at the very
least, incomplete. Moreover, given how critical federalism is to the Court's decision in Shelby County,
the failure to wrestle with these admittedly difficult questions weakens the Court's analysis and makes
the federalism project less compelling.
Responses to Abolition Kritik
Perm
Prison abolition must also center improving the conditions of those currently trapped
in the system
Angela Davis, “Are Prisons Obsolete?”, 2007, The Anarchist Library,
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/angela-y-davis-are-prisons-obsolete, Ch. 5 The Prison Industrial
Complex, accessed 5/8
Radical opposition to the global prison industrial complex sees the antiprison movement as a vital means of expanding the
terrain on which the quest for democracy will unfold. This movement is thus antiracist, anticapitalist, antisexist, and antihomophobic. It calls
for the abolition of the prison as the dominant mode of punishment but at the same time recognizes the
need for genuine solidarity with the millions of men, women, and children who are behind bars . A major
challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for
people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system. How, then, do we accomplish
this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners-calling for less violent conditions,
an end to state sexual assault, improved physical and mental health care, greater access to drug
programs, better educational work opportunities, unionization of prison labor, more connections with
families and communities, shorter or alternative sentencing and at the same time call for alternatives to
sentencing altogether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place
of the prison in our future?
Abolitionism means chipping away at the PIC’s power – the perm does that
Critical Resistance, community abolitionist organization, no date, “The CR Abolition Organizing
Toolkit”, Critical Resistance, http://criticalresistance.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/CR-Abolitionist-
Toolkit-online.pdf, accessed 5/11/20
A HELPFUL DISTINCTION TO MAKE is between abolitionism and reformism. In a very clear way, abolitionism and reformism differ
in terms of ideals. The abolitionist keeps a constant eye on an alternative vision of the world in which
the PIC no longer exists, while the reformist envisions changes that stop short of this . This simple difference
often comes from more deeply rooted differences in how the PIC is critically understood. Abolitionist analysis leads to the
conclusion that the PIC is fundamentally unjust and must be brought to an end. Reformist analysis
typically leads to the conclusion that the PIC can be made just if certain changes are made . Both the
abolitionist and the reformist might be for the same change, but they consider and push for these changes in really different ways because of
their different understandings and ideals. As an example, consider the change of trying to get third-party monitors inside prisons. Reformists
might try to get monitors inside mainly because they want to see less brutality by guards against prisoners. Their underlying understanding
might be that the brutal conditions of prisons would mostly disappear if it were not for a lack of professional accountability on the part of
prison guards and administration. Abolitionists, on the other hand, would begin with the belief that prisons are brutal and dehumanizing at
their core. Participating in a campaign for monitors, however, could still be possible. Abolitionists could push for the campaign to be tailored
towards their own ends. Public education could be presented with an approach that demonstrates the fundamental injustices of prisons. Trying
to get monitors inside prisons could also be tied to larger goals that lead more towards the direction of abolitionism. For instance, trying to get
monitors could be connected to trying to get other changes inside prisons that guarantee prisoners the right to organize and have greater self-
rule. This is exactly what happened during the 1970s at a prison in Massachusetts. The monitors came into the prison while the prisoners
organized and governed themselves during a guard strike. Because prisoner organizing is a necessity for getting closer to abolition, such a
reform would be a significant advance, even for abolitionists. Abolitionist
steps are about gaining ground in the constant
effort to radically transform society. They are about chipping away at oppressive institutions rather than
helping them live longer. They are about pushing critical consciousness, gaining more resources, building
larger coalitions, and developing more skills for future campaigns. They are about making the ultimate
goal of abolition more possible.
The perm solves best – reform and abolition are dual priorities
Julia Sudbury, co-founder of Critical Resistance, 8 September 2009, “Reform or Abolition? Using
popular mobilizations to dismantle the ‘prison industrial complex’, Center for Crime and Justice Studies,
https://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/publications/cjm/article/reform-or-abolition-using-popular-
mobilisations-dismantle-‘prison, accessed 5/8
Popularising the concept of ‘abolition’ is also central to the anti-prison movement's radical critique of imprisonment. By adopting this term,
activists make deliberate links between dismantling prisons and the abolition of slavery. Taking the analogy further, these ‘new abolitionists’
identify the abolition of prisons as the logical completion of the unfinished liberation marked by the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution,
which regulated, rather than ended slavery. In this sense, abolition of the prison-industrial complex is seen as central to contemporary struggles
for racial justice. Abolition
exists in productive tension with efforts to reform the penal system. While
abolitionists point out that reform in isolation of a broader decarcerative strategy serves to legitimate
and even expand the prison-industrial complex, we also work in solidarity with prisoners to challenge
inhumane conditions inside. Described by Angela Y. Davis as ‘non-reformist reforms’, these efforts are
assessed first in terms of whether they contribute toward decreasing or increasing prison budgets and
the reach of the criminal justice system . For anti-prison activists, however, reform is not the primary objective.
Rather we work toward dual priorities. First, we aim to transform popular consciousness, so that people
can believe that a world without prisons is possible. Second, we take practical steps toward dismantling
the prison-industrial complex. These steps include campaigns for a moratorium on prison expansion, mobilising community power to
prevent the construction of proposed new prisons, shrinking the system through decarcerative efforts and creating community-based
alternatives to imprisonment. By
helping the public to imagine the possibility of shrinking the prison-industrial
complex and ending their reliance on imprisonment, the anti-prison movement has created a new
political climate in which closing prisons is a viable solution to the current economic crisis . For a nation in
which being ‘tough-on-crime’ has been a prerequisite for election, this is a significant achievement. Given the success of the US anti-prison
movement in mobilising popular support to confront mass incarceration, academics and nonprofits should pay more attention to the role of
popular movements in shaping criminal justice policy and consider how they might use their own resources to facilitate and support grassroots
popular protest.
Reducing the power of the CJS is moving toward abolitionist goals

Julie Lewin, executive assistant to Connecticut Commissioner of Correction, 1976, “6. Excarcerate”, in
Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, Prison Research Education Action Project, access by
Prison Policy Initiative, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/instead_of_prisons/index.shtml, accessed
5/10/20
Abolitionists could spin off a long list of reasons why such reports could be regarded with suspicion: (1) Many of those who produce these
reports are in the forefront of the reformist movement. They represent prevailing economic and political power arrangements. (2) Instituting
reforms of decriminalization, modernization of the courts and community alternatives to incarceration still permits the legal and penal
apparatus to focus on the same powerless class as before. (3) What passes for liberal and humane improvements of the system simultaneously
contributes to the efficiency and acceptability of the control apparatus in a less crude form. While
critical political analysis is
crucial to all social change work, it should not limit the use of materials or programs that can correctly
be perceived as vehicles to move us toward abolition . Regardless of the systems-connections of the authors, portions of the
above reports serve as valuable interim proposals, useful in beginning the move from incarceration to
excarceration. Belief in the long range goal of abolition, should not detract from shorter range strategies
that provide the potential for gradually diminishing the role of prisons. Some reformist options can be
utilized as interim abolition strategies as long as we consistently move toward our long range goals. If
the proposed options prove inadequate to the need, we can recast them, discard them or create new
alternatives. The recommendations are not envisioned as ends in themselves. They are part of a continuum strategy-a
social change process which moves us both closer to abolition and at the same time brings desired relief
to those who would otherwise be caged. Abolitionists must remember that many forms of excarceration are still considered
punishment by the affected individuals-though a much lesser punishment than that of prison. We hope that gradual reductions in the
degree and type of punishments can, in the long range, lead toward the total elimination of sanctions.
Abolitionism doesn’t have a feasible alternative – reform is better

Roger Lancaster, professor of cultural studies @ George Mason U, 18 August 2017, “How to End Mass
Incarceration”, Jacobin, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/mass-incarceration-prison-abolition-
policing, accessed 5/11/20
Abolitionist arguments usually gesture at restorative justice, imagining that some sorts of community
institutions will oversee non-penal forms of restitution. But here, we are very far out on a limb. Such
models might more or less work in small-scale, face-to-face indigenous or religious communities. But, in
modern cities, it is implausible to think that families, kinship networks, neighborhood organizations, and
the like can adjudicate reconciliation in a fair, consistent manner. In short, abolitionism promises a heaven-on-earth
that will never come to pass. What we really need to do is fight for measures that have already proven humane,
effective, and consistent with social and criminal justice . Consider Finland. In the 1950s, it had high crime
rates and a punitive penal system with high incarceration rates and terrible prison conditions . In these
regards Finland then was much like the United States today. After decades of humanitarian and social-democratic
reforms, the country now has less than one-tenth the rate of incarceration as the United States. Its
prisons resemble dormitories with high-quality health care, counseling services, and educational
opportunities. Not coincidentally, its prison system does not breed anger, resentment, and recidivism . Finland’s
system aligns with that of other Nordic and Northern European nations, all of whom remained continuously on the path of reform. There,
small-scale penal institutions are insulated from public opinion, with its periodic rages against lawbreakers, and prioritize genuine criminological
expertise. They have expressly rehabilitative aims, working not only to punish but also to repair the person and restore him to society. Penalties
top out at around twenty years, consistent with the finding that longer sentences have neither a rehabilitative nor a deterring effect. Many
Scandinavian prisons have no walls and allow prisoners to leave during the day for jobs or shopping. Bedrooms have windows, not bars.
Kitchens and common areas resemble Ikea displays. Rather than call for the complete abolition of prisons — a policy
unlikely to win broad public support — the American left should fight to introduce these conditions into
our penal system. We should strive not for pie-in-the-sky imaginings but for working models already achieved in Scandinavian and other
social democracies. We should demand dramatically better prison conditions, the release of nonviolent first
offenders under other forms of supervision, discretionary parole for violent offenders who provide
evidence of rehabilitation, decriminalization of simple drug possession, and a broad revision of
sentencing laws. Such demands would attract support from a number of prominent social movements, creating a strong base from which
we can begin to build a stronger, universal safety net. Institutions become “obsolete” only when more effective and
more progressive alternatives become available . The poorhouse disappeared when its functions were replaced by social
security, public assistance, health care clinics, and mental and psychiatric hospitals. We see no such emergent institutions on
the horizon today that might render prisons a thing of the past . What we see instead are examples of criminal justice
systems that have continued reforming, modulating, humanizing, shrinking, and decentralizing the functions of the prison. Creating just such a
correctional system, based on genuinely rehabilitative goals consistent with our view of social justice, should be a main task of socialists today.
Perm solves best – have to look at prisons as only a part of a system of control, and
abolition extends to more than CJS
Critical Resistance, community abolitionist organization, no date, “The CR Abolition Organizing
Toolkit”, Critical Resistance, http://criticalresistance.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/CR-Abolitionist-
Toolkit-online.pdf, accessed 5/11/20
IT’S EASY TO SEE HOW FIGHTING THE PIC IS FIGHTING TO TEAR DOWN CAGES. And
if abolition is about getting rid of all the
cages, part of the problem is figuring out where they all are . Different approaches to abolition make
different cages easier and/or harder to see. A cage isn’t only four concrete walls; cages are all the things
that restrict self-control and make someone exposed to harm . Cages work physically, emotionally, and structurally
(meaning they have to do with patterns of how we live, not someone’s personal politics or feelings). We believe that if you can’t get rid of all
the cages, you haven’t abolished the PIC. We also believe that if you don’t get rid of all the cages, the ones left standing will create new ones. If
we only tear down the concrete cages but not the structural cages like white supremacy, heterosexism
and imperialism, the PIC will reappear in new forms. There isn’t a set of rules for what politics people must share to be allies
in abolition. But starting from certain sets of interests places certain limits to the ways you fight for abolition, and shapes how broad you think
that fight is. The more we understand the different places we’re coming from, the faster we can find ways to get to where we want to be.
Reform is necessary in the continuum process of abolition

Fay Honey Knopp, Quaker minister and prison abolitionist, 1976, “1. Time to Begin” in Instead of
Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, Prison Research Education Action Project, access by Prison Policy
Initiative, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/instead_of_prisons/index.shtml, accessed 5/10/20
As with all social change, prison abolition produces many paradoxes. We work in the here and now: a
quarter of a million prisoners
suffer in cages; plans or construction are underway for the building of hundreds upon hundreds of jails and prisons while
the economy declines for the poor and the powerless. To move from this shocking reality toward the vision of a just, prisonless
society, requires a host of in between strategies and reforms . These interim, or abolishing-type reforms, often
may appear to contradict our long range goal of abolition, unless we see them as part of a process—a
continuum process—moving toward the phasing out of the prison system . If interim strategies become ends in
themselves, we will reinforce the present system, changed in detail only. Modern reforms attempt to mask the cruelty of caging. Our goals are
not diverted by handsome new facades, the language of "treatment" and prison managers who deftly gild the bars. Present reforms will
not abolish the cage unless they continue to move toward the constant reduction of the function of
prisons. The abolitionist's task is clear—to prevent the system from masking its true nature. The system dresses itself up: we undress the
system. [36] We strip it down to the reality: the cage and the key. We demystify. We ask the simple but central political question: "Who
decides?" We raise the moral issue: "By what right?" We challenge the old configurations of power. We begin to change the old, begin to create
the new.
No Alternative Solvency
Abolitionism fails – idealism disregards tangible progressive reforms and doesn’t
grapple with social realities
Nicolas Carrier and Justin Piché, 2015, “Blind Spots of Abolitionist Thought in Academia: On
Longstanding and Emerging Challenges”, Champ pénal/ Penal field (academic journal), Vol. XII,
https://journals.openedition.org/champpenal/9162?lang=en, accessed 5/10/20
Abolitionist thought, as it manifests itself within academic communications, thus presents a complexity in both its aims
and the logics that sustain them. Despite the richness of analyses offered by its interlocutors, abolitionist work continues to be the
object of harsh and ill-informed critiques, mobilizing caricatures of abolitionist ends, logics and praxes (Ryan, Sim, 2007). With this said, not
all critiques directed at abolitionism are misguided, rhetorical or Machiavellian . It is our contention that the
marginality of abolitionism, in the realm of scholarship and elsewhere, is at least partly the result of failures to adequately confront a set of
longstanding and emerging challenges, compromising its very tenability. Perhaps the last comprehensive critical self-assessment of abolitionism
has been Saleh-Hanna’s (2000) chapter “Taking Too Much for Granted: Studying the Movement and Re-Assessing the Terms”. In it, she
dedicates considerable space towards reviewing and responding to critiques concerning prison and penal abolitionism debated in criminological
literature during the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, which include accusations from its critics that it is a hopelessly utopian pursuit that will
never be realized. Saleh-Hanna (2000, 49-63) also notes how its
proponents are said to romanticize criminalized harms
and populations, fail to advance alternatives that would deal with the ‘dangerous few’ in ways that
would keep communities safe, prefer activism over working towards tangible solutions, and hold the
naïve belief that the abolition of penality will lead to a ‘crime-free society’ . In many instances, Salah-Hanna turns
the tables on penal abolitionism’s critics, noting that penal reform is a utopian pursuit whose promises have not been achieved in practice. She
goes further by illustrating that penal abolitionists, like neo-Marxist radical criminologists, are concerned about the damage stemming from
criminalized harms while also locating such acts within social structures that shape them. She notes that they
have participated in
the development of practical alternatives to penality like peacemaking criminology and restorative
justice to work towards peace amongst those in conflict, while making it clear that what penal
abolitionists seek to abolish is penality and this need for punishment. The response to crime is the
target, not necessarily crime itself (63). With regards to the ‘dangerous few’, Saleh-Hanna admits, penal abolition needs to work
harder at refining its stance… and in figuring out what can be done in response to this matter (62). 5Much has changed since Saleh-Hanna’s
(2000) assessment of penal abolitionism. Still, abolitionists
have not satisfactorily confronted some critiques that
have been forwarded to prison and penal abolitionism, including the irresolution , illustrated in Saleh-Hanna’s
(2000) text, of the problem of the ‘dangerous few’ . In this paper, we revisit some old critiques directed at abolitionism, but also
identify emerging blind spots and challenges characterizing contemporary abolitionist thought that
could undermine its viability as a social movement , amalgam of theoretical perspectives, and political stance. Our
discussion is structured around the following themes: the ‘dangerous few’; the carnival of punishment; the problems with community; racism,
capitalism and punishment; and legal pluralism. This engagement stems from the collision of our abolitionist sensibilities with our sociological
ones – a collision in which neither are obliterated. If academia offers the privilege of indulging in abolitionist communications, then an academic
discussion of some its problems and unsolved dimensions ought not to be interpreted as a negation of its possibility.
Abolitionism fails – abolitionist politics are unfeasible and don’t pursue what they
claim to
Bill Keller, founding editor-in-chief of Marshall Project, 13 June 2019, “What Do Abolitionists Really
Want?”, The Marshall Project, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/06/13/what-do-abolitionists-
really-want, accessed 5/7/20
She added, “When

we talk about abolishing prisons and abolishing law enforcement, it’s actually reducing
the power and the reach of those entities.” One of the liveliest abolition debates concerns parole and probation, which get less
attention than incarceration but regulate the lives of 4.5 million Americans, twice as many as are confined in prisons and jails. Because a
parolee can be returned to prison for a technical infraction such as a missed appointment or a trace of drugs in a urine sample, the parole-to-
prison pipeline is a major feeder of mass incarceration. Vincent Schiraldi, the co-director of the Columbia University Justice Lab, ran the New
York City probation department when Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, was mayor. Schiraldi estimates
that the borough of Manhattan alone spends roughly $16 million a year for supervision of ex-offenders.“If probation didn’t exist, who would
spend that $16 million inventing probation?” he asked. “Who would spend that $16 million to hire a bunch of people—with guns and badges
and civil service protections—to drive in every day from Queens and Long Island to help those people, who mostly live in Harlem, learn how to
live in Harlem?” Experts have proposed a range of replacements for the supervisory bureaucracy. One option, already practiced in New York
City for parolees regarded as less risky, is to replace parole officers with ATM-like kiosks that scan fingerprints. Check in once a month, answer a
few questions on a computer screen and get on with your life. Schiraldi’s version of abolition favors a more human approach: outsourcing
supervision to organizations that would be paid to help the formerly incarcerated navigate the outside world. Years ago, when he was running
Pennsylvania’s corrections department, Horn offered an even more radical suggestion: give parolees vouchers they can use to buy education,
housing, drug treatment or other services and let them decide what help they need to reenter society. These are services the current
bureaucracy performs poorly, if at all. Horn concedes that to prepare prisoners for such an independent life would require transforming prisons
into prep schools, devoted to graduating people with marketable skills and control of their demons, especially addiction. Although polling
is scarce, it’s a fair bet that “abolition” is not a voter magnet . The electorate may want the system to be
less cruel and more rehabilitative, but voters also want a professional answering that 911 call when their
kid gets shot—and not a member of neighborhood watch . The bipartisan coalition that has found common ground on
criminal justice would be severely strained by such a lurch to the left. The conservative attack ads write themselves. But in recent years,
with crime near historic lows, the iniquities and unintended consequences of American punishment
have so captured public concern that even President Donald Trump coughs up an occasional platitude
about “giving our fellow citizens a chance at redemption.” There is a place for higher aspirations, if only to keep moving
the middle. Closing Rikers was a radical idea, until it wasn’t. The #cut50 campaign was mocked as unrealistic until people realized that it was
essentially restoring incarceration to 1980s levels.“I don’t think that in my lifetime we’ll ever abolish prisons, but it’s a really important
question, why we put people in prisons,” said Travis, adding that the
abolition debate is “a healthy tension that is really
challenging the pace of reform and the status quo.” To paraphrase Robert Browning, a movement’s reach should exceed its
grasp, or what’s a heaven for?
Abolitionism has no solution for the most difficult problems in criminal justice
Some of these activists were responsible for capturing statementsthat led to Flanagan’s fall from grace . During a public
lecture he gave at a small Canadian university, they asked him to clarify a statement he made several months before
about child pornography. His response, captured on a smartphone and soon ‘viral’ on the web, was: I
certainly have no sympathy for child molesters, but I do have some grave doubts about putting people in
jail because of their taste in pictures (Visher, 2013). The downfall was immediate: he got fired from CBC, the University of Calgary
announced that he would soon retire, various political and public figures disowned him, while the mass media communicated catchy variations
of ‘Flanagan okay with child pornography’ (the text placed on top of the video posted on the web). Some media concluded that since Flanagan
was questioning the need to imprison adults consuming pornographic pictures, he was saying that child porn shouldn’t be a crime (Green,
2013). This
simple slip ‘no prison time = no crime’ testifies to the colossal cultural stature of the opponent
of prison abolitionism, the least radical form of abolitionism in the penal field . The successful strategy employed by
the activists has been to effectively punish an individual through the exposure of his opposition to the involvement of the State towards
currently criminalizable events that he considered to be devoid of manifest aggression, an opposition consistent with his right-wing
libertarianism. Making
massively public a discourse critical of incarceration in relation to pornographic
material involving minors was a penal enterprise seen by a local legal order as a means to justice. If
abolitionist thought is to become more robust, and if abolitionism means abolitionism rather than
minimalism, then the Flanagan story shows at least two things. Firstly, abolitionist thought needs to take
stock of the fact that ‘the community’ dispossessed from the legitimate use of physical force from the
perspective of the State is still replete with various punitive orders. Secondly, the story suggests both
the difficulty and the necessity to discuss the abolition of prisons, of punishment, or of detention in
relation to the situations that are most likely to arouse contemporary anxieties, such as those involving
forced sexual interactions, children, death, cannibalism, seriality, and political violence . If abolitionism is to
move from the margins to become a significant political force, we think it must find ways to grapple with these and other challenges we have
identified above. Otherwise abolitionism
continues to risk being ‘defined-out’ as irrelevant radicalism, while
guarding itself against the forces of cooptation that aim to ‘define-in’ its revolutionary ideas to further
entrench the existing order (Mathiesen, 2006). Facing these challenges are not easy tasks, but such is the work of thinking and
speaking the ‘impossible’
US criminal justice is not unique – criminalization is inevitable in a world of crime and

retributive public attitudes
Andrew Neilson, director for Howard League of Penal Reform, 4 March 2020, “Should Prisons be
Abolished?”, New Internationalist Magazine, https://newint.org/features/2020/02/10/should-prisons-
be-abolished, accessed 5/11/20
I agree that harms which are termed ‘crimes’ by the state are in part the result of a political choice. The system is geared towards punishing
poverty and disadvantage. As the French author Anatole France once remarked: ‘The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.’ There
are certain serious violent harms by some
individuals however – including murder and sexual violence – where the incapacitating function of
incarceration will trump other considerations. This is not to ignore the failure of prisons to safely
address serious harm, but to see incarceration as a necessary evil in some circumstances. Efforts should
then be directed to reducing the use of imprisonment, which should be viewed as a ‘last resort’. At the
same time, I recognize that abolitionism offers a powerful critique of the danger of some reform initiatives. Expanding community sentencing
and ‘alternatives to custody’, for example, brought more people into the criminal justice system, rather than reduce the prison population as
they were intended to do. The
context both reformers and abolitionists work in, however, is one of punitive
populism. There is strong support among many voters for ever-longer prison sentences and a popular
view that prisons are ‘holiday camps’, despite the fact that prisons in England and Wales face record levels of
violence and self-injury behind bars. The extent to which the media and government fuel punitive populism is for discussion on
another occasion. While prison is a relatively modern concept, human history is a litany of violence meted out in order to punish and control
other human beings. Iaccept there is inherent racism in the criminal justice system; many poor white people
suffer too. Can high incarceration rates be explained away as ‘white supremacism’? The US jails more
people than anywhere else in the world, but other countries with disproportionately high prison
populations include Thailand, Turkey and Rwanda . Figures suggest the 1.7 million individuals imprisoned in China is a
number proportionately closer to the prison population in England and Wales than the United States – and yet reports from human rights
activists suggest more than a million Muslim Uighurs are detained in secretive ‘re-education camps’ in
Xinjiang. Nevertheless, we concur that societies everywhere should prioritize care, community and genuine safety for everyone. There are also
avenues for abolition we can agree on – for example, when it comes to children. No child should be behind prison bars. And if we can’t imagine
a world without prisons, even as a distant ideal to strive slowly towards, then we are only imprisoning ourselves.
Abolishing/closing prisons only redistributes inmates to other facilities or economic

conditions that made them susceptible to criminalization in the first place
Fay Honey Knopp, Quaker minister and prison abolitionist, 1976, “1. Time to Begin” in Instead of
Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, Prison Research Education Action Project, access by Prison Policy
Initiative, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/instead_of_prisons/index.shtml, accessed 5/10/20
The most common cry for abolition is one using such slogans as "Tear Down the Walls" and "Free All Prisoners." These anguished demands have
been issued by a wide range of persons including judges, physicians, prisoners, ex-prisoners and anarchists, to name a few. Very often this
graphic message is accompanied by calls for community alternatives, or if none can be satisfactorily developed—no alternatives at all. Doing
nothing is seen as a better response than imprisonment. The demand for immediate abolition of prisons speaks to the
urgency of freeing prisoners from oppressive situations . It admonishes us to act swiftly to end imprisonment. Such
demands also serve to raise public consciousness to the need for fundamental change. Mere repetition of slogans, on the other hand,
does not suggest a process for crumbling those walls, and it may even play into public fear. The myth that prison protects is
widespread. To a public immersed in the myths of prison protection, the image of prison walls suddenly being torn down
can create unnecessary fear and a backlash that ultimately may inhibit change . Nevertheless, it is important to
observe that the closest anyone has come to abolishing an existing prison system, involved a relatively
abrupt strategy. The almost total abolition of juvenile prisons in Massachusetts occurred because of a
rare combination of personal creativity and the power invested in that person by the legislature . Dr. Jerry
Miller, Director of the Department of Youth Services, in three years emptied all but one juvenile prison in
Massachusetts by "transferring" the young prisoners into a variety of community alternative living
situations. Miller believes "swift and massive change" is the only sure way to phase out juvenile
institutions: "Slow-phased winding down can mean no winding down," and often insures they'll "wind
up" again. [1] Individual prison closings have been cited by some prison changers as examples of "Tearing
Down the Walls." This is usually not the case. For instance, Vermont's Windsor Prison was shut in August 1975, leaving
Vermont the only state other than Alaska without a maximum security institution. However, dispersement of 22 prisoners into
"secure" federal institutions in other states and the balance of the population into smaller community
prisons merely re-distributed prisoners--it didn't abolish caging . The walls still stand.
Abolitionism is too vague to garner traction for its goals

Mike Larson, researcher for York Centre for International and Security Studies, 30 March 2011,
“Considering Abolition”, Transform Harm, https://transformharm.org/considering-abolition/, accessed
5/11/20
There is a recurring discussion in the abolitionist literature regarding the prefix that should accompany ‘abolition’. A recent addition to this
ongoing dialogue, published in Contemporary Justice Review, is Piché and Larsen’s (2010) article ‘The Moving Targets of Abolitionism: ICOPA,
Past, Present and Future’. To briefly summarize, I would say that ‘abolition’
on its own is a bit too vague – there are many
systems and institutions that have been the targets of abolitionist movements, and while there are
definitely links between these institutions (slavery, colonialism, torture, and the prison, for example), it seems important to
specify an objective. The question that Justin and I ask is “What is to be abolished?”. We outline three approaches to this question –
three orientations or objectives for the movement. These three approaches roughly reflect the evolution of debates at the International
Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA) over the years. The first was prison abolition. This has the advantage of being a
straightforward objective, insofar as it targets a specific institutional setting . Prison abolition is (or was) closely
related to the decarceration and community justice movements. Its weakness is its scope, in that it does not address the
laws, ideas, and practices of ‘the system’ more generally . There is a consensus that efforts to abolish prisons must be
located in a broader project. This recognition led to the adoption of penal abolition as a new objective . This remains
the defined goal of ICOPA. Penal abolitionism focuses on the prison as an institutional setting as well as the
constellation of ideas and practices that are informed by systematized punitiveness. Penal abolitionist
efforts have targeted some so-called community justice alternatives as being sites of net-widening – spaces
that, despite their original objectives, have become co-opted and incorporated into the retributive criminal justice
system. A key resource for this discussion is Stan Cohen’s (1985) text Visions of Social Control, which chronicles the various ways in which
destructuring efforts became ‘Trojan horses’ for an array of community-based punishments that actually led to the expansion and
intensification of the ‘Master Patterns’ of social control. Thomas Mathiesen’s (1974;1990) treatises on the politics of abolition have also been
influential – particularly his theory of The Unfinished, which describes abolitionism as an ever-evolving process as opposed to a fixed end point.
Mathiesen catalogues the various ways in which abolitionist efforts can and have been co-opted by ‘the system’ . The
ideal abolitionist initiative, according to the theory of the unfinished, is a ‘competing contradiction’ – something that is neither a simple
external critique of the system nor an effort to work with or change the system from within. Instead, the goal is to offer an alternative that
occupies the space ‘between reform and revolution’, and is resilient to co-optation by the system. Mathiesen describes various routes to co-
optation, one of which is the adoption of system language, which allows an organization to be defined according to system logics and rendered
either incorporated or irrelevant. I point this out because
penal abolitionist debates often morph into discussions
about reform vs. revolution. As an ideal-type, the ‘reformists’ tend to represent organizations that
pursue community justice and service delivery projects that work with, supplement, and / or fill gaps in
the existing system. These groups risk becoming examples of the net-widening that Cohen warned about, not
least because their funding structures and access to populations (or ‘clients’) tend to become tied to formal structures and state initiatives. On
the other hand, they can and do contribute to the amelioration of the ‘pains of imprisonment’. The
‘radicals’, on the other hand,
tend to focus on advocacy and ‘short-term negative reforms’ geared towards critiquing the existing
system and reducing its scope. While they can lay claim to a purist outlook, they are open to being
‘defined out’ by system proponents, and have a hard time influencing policy debates .
DA’s to the Alt

Framing DA: CJS analysis rooted in the 13th Amendment as the source of the problem
obscures potential solutions
Patrick Rael, professor of history @ Bowdoin College, 9 December 2016, “Demystifying the 13th
Amendment and Its Impact on Mass Incarceration”, Black Perspectives,
https://www.aaihs.org/demystifying-the-13th-amendment-and-its-impact-on-mass-incarceration/,
accessed 5/6/20
The Thirteenth Amendment did nothing to promote mass incarceration in freedom, but neither did it do
anything to limit abuses of the criminal justice system that stopped short of actual slavery. The law had
long distinguished between slavery and incarceration, and no one intended the Thirteenth to erase that
distinction. Its only intent had been to prohibit the holding of people as property . When civil rights advocates in
the 1870s began arguing that discriminatory laws conferred a “badge of servitude” on blacks, they were roundly rebuffed because the
measures were race-neutral on their face. Upon emancipation, the freedpeople quickly learned that this was a distinction without a difference.
This is what people mean when they claim that emancipation “didn’t matter.” But it did. Mass incarceration was the product not
of slavery but of freedom—of a liberal order premised on individual rights of property, particularly in
self-ownership. Liberal legal regimes had destroyed slavery by defining it as a barbaric rejection of the
modern, only to then promote forms of mass incarceration as legitimate if unfortunate necessities of life
in “freedom.” “13TH” makes the laudable case that racially-specific, for-profit exploitation of a criminalized underclass should be no more
legitimate than was slavery. But in mischaracterizing the role of the Thirteenth Amendment it underplays the depth of the problem in both
history and the present. There was no need for secret language or tricky loopholes. Southern state governments worked openly to pass the
legal mechanisms that criminalized blackness and poverty, from black codes and apprenticeships laws to vagrancy provisions and convict lease
systems. The culprit was not the persistence of an old and rejected labor regime, but the emergence of new ones, which the state found much
easier to justify. Slavery
and mass incarceration are not the same. All forms of racial oppression are not
forms of slavery; rather, slavery is one form of racial oppression. Mass incarceration is another. While it
may help to end it by associating it with an institution we abolished, it is not the remnant of a barbaric
and outmoded system but the product of modern society. The problem isn’t the persistence of slavery;
the problem is how a system that has always promised justice for all always seems to find ways to deny
it to some. If we can only see ongoing racial oppression as a remnant of slavery, then we can’t see it as a problem of our own age. And if we
can’t understand mass incarceration as a problem of our own age, we can’t critique the mechanisms that foster racial and economic inequality
in a system that is supposed to be blind to both. But
just as it became possible to topple a world in which slavery was
an unquestionable norm, so too it can become possible to topple a world in which mass incarceration
and other systematic forms of inequality are an unquestioned norm. We need only think such a world
into existence.
Cede the Political DA: Abolitionism’s view of human nature and its political stance
makes it anti-state reform – dooms the potential of its movement
Within academic communications, abolitionist

thought mobilizes an implicit conception of social change that
posits the need for the support of consciousnesses, resulting notably in an also implicit sociology of law,
which treats law as mirroring the conceptions (or misconceptions) that individuals have of criminalized
situations and ‘criminal justice’. More simply, abolitionism operates with the assumption that the prison,
punishment and detention are perennial institutions because they are seen as legitimate ones by an
unenlightened ‘public’.18 As a result, abolitionist thought seems largely unable to observe law as being a
powerful mode to enact social change in itself, particularly when going against the positions of the
majority – however socially constructed – is seen as desirable . For instance, abolitionists regard the abolition of the
death penalty in many countries as an abolitionist achievement, part of the socio-historical thread of their own contemporary struggles.19 Yet
the fact that, in many national and historical contexts, the death penalty was actually repealed as the result of a top-down, countermajoritarian
reform, imposed with limited popular support and usually in direct contravention of majority public opinion (Garland, 2010,130) troubles the
conception of social change animating most forms of abolitionism.
Ivory Tower DA: Abolitionism is too academically confined to actualize its goals
Given the importance that abolitionist thought places on changing the ways in which we look at criminalized events and desirable ways to react
to them, the
virtual absence of abolitionist thought in mainstream mass media is oddly left
unproblematized. This is perhaps a corollary of the fact that the scale used within abolitionism is typically that of the
community-as-tribe, which makes sense in its politics of autonomy, proximity and participatory
dialogue. Although contemporary individuals certainly still live in settings where communities, or a sense of belonging, are the products of
territoriality, nearness and relatively unavoidable interactions, one does not know about, nor experience oneself as part of, society without
various processes of symbolic mediation. The
abolitionists’ common refusal of the societal scale does not magically
erases society as an order sui generis, which communicates reflexively about itself at multiple scales,
including communicating about ‘wrongness’ by mobilizing the grammar of criminalization . If indeed penal
spectatorship (Brown, 2009) and other forms of sequestrated experiences (Giddens, 1991) produced by mass mediated realities take part in the
symbolic organization of, or meaning ascribed to, lived experiences based on proximity,20 then abolitionists
need to reflect on the
fact that their presence is almost entirely limited to specialized academic networks of communications,
as well as activist and social circles of narrow diameters . Can abolitionist thought formulate itself in a way that can be
communicated through mainstream mass media, if what is at stake is the production of a new common sense in which the prison, punishment,
and exclusion are represented as unquestionably irrational and immoral? Even
simply questioning publicly the need to
criminalize and punish might prove arduous, if not dangerous, in contemporary society . This is clearly
illustrated by a recent Canadian political controversy, with which we end this contribution.
Crime DA: abolishing the police is both infeasible and doesn’t solve the issue of the
presence of evil
Christopher Rufo, contributing editor of City Journal, 26 December 2019, “Abolish the Police? A
dangerous new idea that is inspiring some criminal justice activists”, City Journal, https://www.city-
journal.org/abolish-police-call-to-action, accessed 5/10/20
The latest call to action from some criminal-justice activists: “Abolish the police.” From the streets of Chicago to the city council of Seattle, and
in the pages of academic journals ranging from the Cardozo Law Review to the Harvard Law Review and of mainstream publications from the
Boston Review to Rolling Stone, advocates and activists
are building a case not just to reform policing—viewed as an
oppressive, violent, and racist institution—but to do away with it altogether . When I first heard this slogan, I
assumed that it was a figure of speech, used to legitimize more expansive criminal-justice reform. But after reading the academic and activist
literature, I realized that “abolish the police” is a concrete policy goal. The
abolitionists want to dismantle municipal police
departments and see “police officers disappearing from the streets.” One might dismiss such proclamations as part of
a fringe movement, but advocates of these radical views are gaining political momentum in numerous cities. In Seattle, socialist city council
candidate Shaun Scott, who ran on a “police abolition” platform, came within 1,386 votes of winning elected office. During his campaign, he
argued that the city must “[disinvest] from the police state” and “build towards a world where nobody is criminalized for being poor.” At a
debate hosted by the Seattle Police Officers Guild, Scott blasted “so-called officers” for their “deep and entrenched institutional ties to racism”
that produced an “apparatus of overaggressive and racist policing that has emerged to steer many black and brown bodies back into, in
essence, a form of slavery.” Another Seattle police abolitionist, Kirsten Harris-Talley, served briefly as an appointed city councilwoman. Both
Scott and Harris-Talley enjoy broad support from the city’s progressive establishment. What would abolishing police mean as a
practical policy matter? Nothing very practical . In The Nation, Mychal Denzel Smith argues that police should be replaced by
“full social, economic, and political equality.” Harris-Talley, meantime, has traced policing’s origins back to slavery. “How do you reform an
institution that from its inception was made to control, maim, condemn, and kill people?” she asks. “Reform it back to what?” If cities can
eliminate poverty through affordable housing and “investing in community,” she believes, the police will become unnecessary. Others argue
that cities must simply “help people resolve conflicts through peace circles and restorative justice programs.” Police abolitionists believe that
they stand at the vanguard of a new idea, but this strain of thought dates to the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who
believed that stripping away the corruptions of civilization would liberate the goodness of man. What
police abolitionists fail to
acknowledge is the problem of evil. No matter how many “restorative” programs it administers, even a
benevolent centralized state cannot extinguish the risks of illness, violence, and disorder. Contrary to
the utopian vision of Rousseau and his intellectual descendants, chaos is not freedom; order is not
slavery. In the modern world, civilization cannot be rolled back without dire consequences. If anything
like police abolition ever occurred, it’s easy to predict what would happen next. In the subsequent
vacuum of physical power, wealthy neighborhoods would deploy private police forces, and poor
neighborhoods would organize around criminal gangs—deepening structural inequalities and harming
the very people that the police abolitionists say they want to help. Even Scott, when pressed by a local
journalist about how he would respond to a shooting in his district, conceded that “we live in a world
where it’s not possible to turn anywhere for help on big questions like this but to the police force.” Reform
the police? Sure. Abolish them? Never.
Coalitions DA: Racial critique of prisons obscures its affects universally – fractures
coalitions
Roger Lancaster, professor of cultural studies @ George Mason U, 18 August 2017, “How to End Mass
Incarceration”, Jacobin, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/mass-incarceration-prison-abolition-
policing, accessed 5/11/20
Many activists, journalists, and scholars have highlighted draconian drug penalties as a primary cause of
mass incarceration. To be sure, the war on drugs played a significant role in the prison system’s growth, especially during the 1980s.
But it represents just one element of the larger war on crime and has been slowly winding down since the early 2000s.
Today, drug offenders represent only about 15 percent of sentenced prisoners . While this is by no means a
negligible number, we need a wider perspective . Enhanced penalties for a variety of offenses — drug possession and distribution,
surely, but also violent crimes, repeat offenses, crimes committed with a firearm, and sex crimes — have all fueled the growth of the penal
system. One often-overlooked population is parole violators, who represented 26 percent of prison admissions in 2013. The fact that the parole
system, devised to reduce the prison population, now enlarges it gives us important clues about the self-perpetuating nature of the system
today. Finally, sociologists, criminologists, and critical race scholars have closely scrutinized the racial disparities in arrest, prosecution, and
incarceration rates. Many
conclude that mass incarceration constitutes a modern regime of racial domination
or a new Jim Crow. This perspective highlights important facts . While African Americans make up only 13 percent of drug
users, they account for more than a third of drug arrestees, more than half of those convicted on drug charges, and 58 percent of those
ultimately sent to prison on drug charges. When convicted, a black person can expect to serve almost as much time for a drug offense as a
white person would serve for a violent offense. These statisticsdemonstrate how race-neutral laws can produce race-
biased effects, especially when police, prosecutors, juries, and judges make racialized judgments all along the way. Needless to say, had
the mania for incarceration devastated white middle- or even working-class communities as much as it has black lower- and working-class
communities, it would have proved politically intolerable very quickly. But the racial critique consistently downplays the
effects of mass incarceration on non-black communities. The incarceration rate for Latinos has also
risen, and the confinement and processing of undocumented immigrants has become especially harsh.
And although white men are imprisoned at a substantially lower rate than either black or brown men,
there are still more white men in prison, in both raw and per capita numbers, than at any time in US
history. In mid-2007, 773 of every 100,000 white males were imprisoned, roughly one-sixth the rate for black males (4,618 per 100,000) but
more than three times the average rate of male confinement from the 1920s through 1972. As James Forman Jr argues, the racial
critique’s focus on African American imprisonment rates expressly discourages the cross-racial coalitions
that will be required to dismantle mass incarceration . In his important contribution to this debate, Forman has outlined
the racial critique’s main limitations . First, he argues that this analysis minimizes the historical effect of
spiking crime rates on public opinion and lawmaking. By blaming only white backlash for harsher
penalties, the racial critique obscures substantial levels of black support for these policies . Second, Forman
shows that the often-invoked Jim Crow system makes for a poor analogy with mass incarceration . Jim Crow was
a legal caste system that took no notice of class distinctions among black people. By contrast, today’s punitive system does not
affect all African Americans the same way; rather, it predisposes the poorest and least educated to
incarceration, and the impact of mass incarceration is concentrated in black inner-city neighborhoods. (As Bruce Western has shown, the
risk of going to prison for college-educated black men actually decreased slightly between 1979 and 1999.) Third, because of its
emphasis on drug laws, the racial critique skirts the important question of violent crime . Roughly half the
prisoners now in custody were convicted of violent crimes, and racial disparities among this population are even wider. “[An] effective
response to mass incarceration,” Forman concludes, “will require directly confronting the issue of violent
crime and developing policy responses that can compete with the punitive approach that currently
dominates American criminal policy.”
Morality DA: Some actions are evil or wrong, abolitionism’s abandonment of law
means anything can be forgivable
Joshua Kleinfeld, professor of law @ Northwestern U, May 2016, “Two Cultures of Punishment”,
Stanford Law Review, Volume 68, http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/wp-
content/uploads/sites/3/2016/06/68_Kleinfeld_-_Stan._L._Rev._933.pdf, accessed 5/11/20
Some readers might find Europe’s mildness in punishment intuitively appealing, but I must say, I do not . It
strikes me as utopian in ways that are both dangerous and offensive. The root of the whole system is the
minimization of wrongdoing—both individual responsibility for wrongdoing and the wrong itself—rising
ultimately to the denial of the very existence of human evil. Everything can be forgiven. No one is just a
bad person. That view of human beings is to my mind both extremely naïve as a claim about human
moral psychology and imprudent as a claim about policy: it encourages excessively weak responses to
bad actors. Furthermore, that minimization of wrongdoing and leniency toward wrongdoers has ugly and troubling
implications in a land with Europe’s history . The question it brings to mind is: how could the land of pogroms and
Nazis ever deny the existence of human evil? And then one realizes: no one needs to deny it more. In Germany above all, my
sense after having lived and worked there for some years is that it is a country whose people feel a burning need to deny that there is such a
thing as immutable evil, unforgiveable evil, in order to reconcile themselves to what their culture and people—indeed their families, and their
parents and grandparents—have done. To be evil is to be hateful, and it is not psychologically possible for a people to hate itself. Part
of the
reason Europe embraces ideals of rehabilitation and forgiveness so ardently is because it has stood in
such great need of them. Yet all that said, it must also be said that Europe’s humaneness in punishment—its spirit of love and
community, and above all its commitment to treating every human being as having dignity and therefore rights—does honor to the entire
tradition of Western democracy. It also seems to work: Europe is afflicted neither by the crime nor the punishment crisis that afflicts the United
States. Anecdotally, one
hears reports in Europe suggesting that European criminal systems often struggle to
control or deter certain serious, determined criminals . Yet those struggles do not seem to rise to the level of a significant
problem. American criminal punishment is in my view right in thinking that, among criminal offenders, some are bad and even evil people who
need to be controlled and who warrant severe punishment.
Link Turn – State Reform Good

Punitive criminal justice is not inevitable under the state – Europe reformed
differently from the US, we can implement similar policies
Joshua Kleinfeld, professor of law @ Northwestern U, May 2016, “Two Cultures of Punishment”,
Stanford Law Review, Volume 68, http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/wp-
content/uploads/sites/3/2016/06/68_Kleinfeld_-_Stan._L._Rev._933.pdf, accessed 5/11/20
As American criminal punishment has become more severe and European more mild, the two systems
of punishment have come to represent different cultural possibilities for the modern West. Implicit in
American and European punishment are two visions of wrongdoing and wrongdoers, of the terms of the
social contract, and of the foundations of rights. American punishment pictures serious offenders as
morally deformed people rather than ordinary people who have committed crimes. Their criminality is
thus both immutable and devaluing, a feature of the actor rather than merely the act . The forms of
punishment deployed in response do not just exact retribution or exert social control, they expressively deny offenders’
claims to membership in the community and to the moral humanity in virtue of which a human being is
rights bearing. European criminal punishment expressively denies that any offense marks the offender as a morally deformed
person. Criminality is always mutable and never devaluing, actors are kept at a distance from their acts,
and the forms of punishment affirm even the worst offenders’ claims to social membership and rights.
These conflicting moral visions are not only implicit or immanent in European and American punishment but likely played a
role—albeit not an exclusive role—in causing European and American punishment to diverge . After an enormous mid-
century crime wave, two very different groups took hold of America’s politics of crime: moralists who viewed criminals as evil and
instrumentalists who viewed criminals as dangerous beings. Different as the two groups were, they agreed on policy: for both, the crime
problem was a criminals problem, and the solution was to get rid of criminals. Their alliance inscribed the ideas of immutability and devaluation
into American law. Meanwhile, insulated by its relatively low crime rate, Europe’s politics of crime were driven by reformers and officials who
believed in the intrinsic goodness of all offenders or thought acting on such a belief to be required by human dignity. They inscribed into
European law the idea that no crime reaches the roots of character.
Punitive justice is not an inevitable feature of the CJS – it was created by policy, it can
be dismantled with it too
National Research Council, 2014, “Ch. 4 The Underlying Causes of Rising Incarceration: Crime,
Politics, and Social Change”, The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and
Consequences, Washington, DC: National Academies Press,
https://www.nap.edu/read/18613/chapter/6#111, accessed 5/11/20
The policies and practices that gave rise to unprecedented high rates of incarceration were the result of
a variety of converging historical, social, economic, and political forces . Although debates over crime policy have a
long history in the United States, these various forces converged in the 1960s, which served as an important
historical turning point for prison policy. Crime rates also increased sharply beginning in the 1960s, with
the national homicide rate nearly doubling between 1964 and 1974 . The relationship between rising crime trends and
increased incarceration rates unfolded within, and was very much affected by, the larger context in which debates about race, crime, and law
and order were unfolding. The powerful
institutional, cultural, political, economic, and racial forces discussed in this
chapter helped propel the United States down a more punitive path. Yet the unprecedented rise in
incarceration rates in the United States over this period was not an inevitable outcome of these forces.
Rather, it was the result of the particular ways in which the political system chose to respond to the
major postwar changes in U.S. society, particularly since the 1960s . Unlike many other Western countries, the United
States responded to escalating crime rates by enacting highly punitive policies and laws and turning away from rehabilitation and reintegration.
The broader context provides a set of important explanations for both the punitive path that many
politicians, policy makers, and other public figures decided to pursue and, perhaps more important, why
so many Americans were willing to follow .
Link Turn – Decarceration

Legislative decarceration strategies are necessary and in the direction of abolitionist
goals
Mary Ann Largen, former coordinator for National Organization for Women’s Task Force on Rape,
1976, “5. Decarcerate” in Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, Prison Research Education
Action Project, access by Prison Policy Initiative,
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/instead_of_prisons/index.shtml, accessed 5/10/20
Reforms in SB42 included shortened sentences, a focus on the crime committed rather than on the lawbreaker and only a bare
minimum of discretion accorded to sentencing judges who would be required to specify why a particular sentence was chosen. By no
means a model sentencing act, prison changers perceived SB42 as a realistic first step toward restructuring
the penal code and eliminating indeterminacy . Finally carried over as "old business" into the 1976 legislature, the bill was
battered by a variety of amendments. For a while it seemed that law enforcement lobbying and the political maneuverings of a presidential
election year would either bury the bill or wipe out the reforms the prison change movement had struggled to attain. But a healthy
coalition of ex-prisoner and prison changers, publicly challenged Governor Brown to meet a list of demands which restored
most of the original intent of the bill. Almost all of their demands were met. Ex-prisoners predict it will take at least five years to determine
whether prisoners will actually serve less time under the law. But they point to the relief prisoners will feel in knowing with
certainty the length of time they will serve, when they will be released and that parole need be endured
only for a maximum of one year. Thus the brakes have been applied to unbridled discretion and the California prison movement
can begin working on the next legislative step toward further reduction of penalties. The legislative struggle is long and difficult.
There are no simple solutions to the problems involved with instituting reforms of sentencing
procedures and codes. Determinate sentences eventually will become a reality, not only because conservatives, liberals and prison
reformers are demanding it, but because the overburdened system cannot handle the ever-growing populations that have resulted from
indeterminacy. Though
the pace is slow, strong coalitions, careful campaign planning and unified strategies
can gradually reduce sentencing discretion and disparity . But first, many questions must be answered: What kind of
strategies build a united movement? In this transitional stage where shall the lines be drawn? What is a reasonable length for determined
sentences? What compromises in penal codes are acceptable? What if legislatures abolish parole but institute longer flat sentences? What is
our interim sentencing philosophy? If prisoner-related groups coalesce and begin to find answers to these questions, healthy coalitions for
change can be formed.
Depopulation of prisons is a slow and difficult, but necessary process of abolition

Carrie Pettus-Davis, PhD @ U Chicago School of Social Services, February 2017, “Guideposts for the Era
of Smart Decarceration: Smart decarceration strategies for practitioners, advocates, reformers, and
researchers”, Smart Decarceration Initiative, https://cpb-us-
w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.wustl.edu/dist/a/1278/files/2017/05/Guideposts_akg-1g5n70f.pdf, accessed
5/13/20
Many of those reading this report already know the facts: The United States is the world’s leader in incarceration,
spending $52 billion a year on correctional supervision, and another $948 billion in related social costs .
And growing numbers of people have accepted this reality: Prison does not improve people, and the American society no longer can
afford the costs of mass incarceration. Those costs, of course, reach far beyond how much money is
spent on imprisonment. Research shows that incarceration has rippling effects that are harmful to formerly incarcerated individuals, to
children and families of the incarcerated, to neighborhoods and communities with high incarceration rates, and to overall public safety and
public well-being. Now we must address another reality: The evidence base for alternative criminal justice-related policy and practice
interventions is feeble. As mass incarceration soared while devouring resources, too few resources were applied to creating effective social
innovations to staunch the flow of people into this nation’s jails and prisons. This report, Guideposts for the Era of Smart Decarceration, is part
of SDI’s commitment to transformation. Research and social innovation will be the tools that lead to policies and
practices to substantially reduce America’s overreliance on incarceration—and to ameliorate the racial,
economic, and health disparities within the American criminal justice system . This report catalyzes America’s
commitment to working collectively to usher in an era of sustainable and effective decarceration— smart decarceration. We know this
will only be achieved by bringing together inspiring thinkers and leaders to solidify an actionable, thoughtful, and paradigm-shifting
action plan for reform. This report represents consensus of more than 300 experts in criminal justice reform across disciplines and
sectors. We organized the guideposts and strategies under the four guiding concepts of smart decarceration. We did so to demonstrate the
importance of incorporating the guiding concepts into targeted action. Without a grounding in these concepts, individual strategies can become
fragmented, lose intended focus, or result in unintended consequences. Imposing the guiding concepts on existing strategies also generates
intervention modifications and improvements to meet simultaneous outcomes of reduced incarceration use, reversal of disparities, and
fostering public safety and well-being. Though only representative of the range of actions steps generated through our phased participatory
work, the guideposts and strategies presented in this report highlight the breadth, complexity, and challenge of ushering in an era of smart
decarceration. What is needed to advance these and other strategies in a coordinated and cohesive nature is the development of
comprehensive and integrated implementation efforts to facilitate decarceration- focused policies and
practices at the local, state, and national level. For example, the potential impact of advancing leadership among formerly
incarcerated individuals will only be fully realized when simultaneous effort is aimed at removing unnecessary civic and legal
restrictions from people with criminal convictions . Evidence garnered from social innovations must be disseminated to a
broad range of stakeholders so that evidence-driven decarceration efforts can be properly implemented. The content of this report
demonstrates that smart decarceration will not be successful if reforms are grounded in revising current approaches—entire
paradigms will need to be rejected and reconstructed with collective examination . This report compiles the
current thinking of leaders at a time in which the United States is on the cusp of smart decarceration. Who will do the work to
further guide and sustain an era of smart decarceration? Implementing components of these guideposts into meaningful
action will require the commitment and engagement of state and local officials, community-based providers and organizations, scholars
committed to applied research, and advocates and formerly incarcerated leaders. We hope that this report underscores the kinds of synergies
that can come about from collective action.
Link Turn – Decriminalization

Decriminalizing victimless crimes is a strategy to minimize the scope of power of
criminal law
Julie Lewin, executive assistant to Connecticut Commissioner of Correction, 1976, “6. Excarcerate”, in
Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, Prison Research Education Action Project, access by
Prison Policy Initiative, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/instead_of_prisons/index.shtml, accessed
5/10/20
The notion that we live in an "overcriminalized" society has long been acknowledged .[3] Penal code legislation
has penetrated further and further into the spheres of private morality and social welfare, proving ineffective and corruptive, making hypocrites
of us all.[4] The
process of decriminalization means simply to wipe certain laws off the books, eliminating
criminal sanctions by the stroke of a legislative pen . v The crimes most frequently considered for
decriminalization and upon which we will focus are those which are "victimless." They are defined as: ... offenses that do not
result in anyone's feeling that s/he has been injured so as to impel him/her to bring the offense to the attention of the authorities .[5] ...
behavior not injurious to others but made criminal by statutes based on moral standards which disapprove of certain forms of behavior while
ignoring others that are comparable.[6] The essential factor is that there is no victim to bring complaint. Three categories emerge within this
definition: moral statutes, illness statutes and nuisance statutes. Victimless crimes may be irritating, annoying, or troublesome in general, but
they are not really injurious to anyone in particular .[7] They are "crimes" because the law says they are
"crimes." Among those usually cited are noncommercial gambling, prostitution, "deviant" sexual acts in private
between consenting adults, public intoxication, possession, sale and distribution of illegal drugs, "blue
laws" against doing business on Sundays, loitering, disorderly conduct and vagrancy . Other behavior that could
best be handled thru procedures outside the criminal (in)justice systems are juvenile statutes which include truancy or
running away or "incorrigible," "stubborn" or "ungovernable" behavior. Most juvenile courts have become "in essence criminal courts with
criminal type dispositions."[8] Though juvenile proceedings are intended to be civil in nature, commitment to an institution on a delinquency
petition continues to carry much the same stigma as a criminal conviction.[9] Why decriminalize? Abolitionists advocate
drastically limiting the role of criminal law. We do this not because we wish to encourage certain
behavior, but because we realize that criminal sanctions are not an effective way of dealing with social
problems. There are far too many laws on the books. [10] It would be prohibitively expensive to enforce
them all. This results in unjust and arbitrary law enforcement. Powerless persons are imprisoned while
more powerful persons go free. Blacks and poor people bear the brunt of unequal law enforcement .
Enforcing morality has no rightful place in our penal codes. Morality cannot be coerced thru law. A democratic society should
tolerate a wide range of individual differences. A person's right to do as s/he wishes should be respected
as long as s/he does not infringe upon the rights of others.
Decriminalizing marijuana and providing restitution for the War on Drugs key to
abolitionist goal
Kyle Jaeger, LA-based associate editor, 11 July 2019, “Pete Buttigieg’s Racial Justice Plan Would
Legalize Marijuana and Decriminalize Drug Possession”, Marijuana Moment – Politics,
https://www.marijuanamoment.net/pete-buttigiegs-racial-justice-plan-would-legalize-marijuana-and-
decriminalize-drug-possession/, accessed 5/13/20
Pete Buttigieg, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, released a plan to
address racial injustice on Thursday that includes proposals to dramatically reform federal drug laws . The
“Douglass Plan,” named after historic abolitionist Frederick Douglass, aims to dismantle “racist
structures and systems” in the country as well as make investments into impacted communities. One
institution that has disproportionately harmed people of color is the criminal justice system, Buttigieg
said, and so part of his solution is to slash mass incarceration—in part by legalizing marijuana, ending
the practice of incarcerating people for simple drug possession and expunging records for prior
convictions. “We will, on the federal level, eliminate incarceration for drug possession, reduce sentences
for other drug offenses and apply these reductions retroactively, legalize marijuana and expunge past
convictions,” the plan states. “Despite equal rates of use, Black Americans are nearly four times as likely to be arrested for using
marijuana,” it continues. “Research shows that incarceration for drug offenses has no effect on drug misuse,
drug arrests, or overdose deaths. In fact, some studies show that incarceration actually increases the
rate of overdose deaths.” The drug policy proposals are part of Buttigieg’s plan to “achieve a 50 percent
reduction in incarceration in this country without an increase in crime ,” which he discussed in a speech to the
Rainbow PUSH Coalition Convention earlier this month. “We can do it by legalizing marijuana and eliminating incarceration for simple drug
possession,” he said. “We can do it by abolishing private federal prisons and putting an end to petty fines and fees that criminalize poverty.”
That said, most arrests and incarceration for marijuana and other drugs are carried out at the state level, so while the presidential candidate’s
moves would cut the federal incarceration rate, their overall impact could hinge on the plan’s influence in encouraging local policy changes.
Other aspects of Buttigieg’s Douglass Plan touch on schools, healthcare, small businesses and statehood for Washington, D.C. Meanwhile,
criminal justice reform has been a key part of several presidential campaigns. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) unveiled a similarly bold plan last month,
announcing that he would use his executive authorities to commute the sentences of 17,000 federal inmates, most of whom are serving time
for nonviolent drug offenses, if he’s elected president.
Link Turn – Parole

Deconstructing the system of parole is necessary to address the economic impact of
police and prisons
Mary Ann Largen, former coordinator for National Organization for Women’s Task Force on Rape,
1976, “5. Decarcerate” in Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists, Prison Research Education
Action Project, access by Prison Policy Initiative,
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/instead_of_prisons/index.shtml, accessed 5/10/20
Given choice, abolitionists would much prefer to immediately eliminate the present sentencing structure, abolish criminal law and create a
nonpunitive reconciliatory system for resolving violent collective and individual behavior. Tinkering with a destructive, grossly unfair and
damaging system of criminal law can be fraught with contradictions and danger. But the task of abolitionists is to begin where
we are and move toward our long range goals . Interim sentencing strategies are based on the present reality of the major
intent of sentencing-punishment and retribution. Given this harsh truth-how do we move toward our vision? We see structural and judicial
restraints and uniformity in levying sanctions as crucial next steps if we wish to affect a system that is unrestrained and discretionary.
Gradually reducing sanctions even while advocating their abolition is not contradictory if we continue to
reduce until they are eliminated. Model sentencing acts like the one above, are beginnings, not ends, and are
companion acts to creating community alternatives . Like abolition of indeterminate sentences, abolition of parole is a
long range systems change goal, requiring a series of short term recommendations. The abolition of
parole will not prove beneficial to prisoners, unless it is coupled with much shorter sentences. Parole
abolition is among the most common demands of prison change groups. Among them, The Citizens' Inquiry on Parole and Criminal Justice, in
their 300-page comprehensive Report on New York Parole [14] declare parole to be baseless in theory, "a tragic failure" in practice. They find
no substantial evidence that risk-predictions on which parole release decisions are based are reliable. They document instances of serious
injustice and sometimes public harm, leading them to recommend the ultimate abolition of parole. Subsequently, The
Citizens Inquiry
prepared A Proposed Interim Parole System for the State of New York . [15] This series of short term
recommendations can prove useful until long range goals are attainable. While not a prison abolition document, portions are worthwhile for
abolitionists to examine. The interim system is presented in a form from which legislation can easily be drafted and has
three general
aims: To structurally reduce arbitrariness and injustice and make more visible the exercise of
discretionary power in parole release and supervision. To eliminate prediction as the rationale for
decision making in parole release and supervision. To strengthen the capacity of parole to provide
concrete, useful supportive services to parolees seeking to live a crime free life after release from prison .
Link Turn – Bail

Dismantling the bail system can take many shapes, all towards the goal of the
abolition of its practice
Nick Pinto, reporter for the New Republic, 6 April 2020, “Bailing Out”, The New Republic,
https://newrepublic.com/article/156823/limits-money-bail-fund-criminal-justice-reform, accessed
5/13/20
A coalition of public defenders, bail fund staff, advocates, and activists made the trek to Albany in early 2019 to lobby state legislators for the
the
end of money bail—and as they prepared to fan out in the state capitol, they were determined that New York would not follow
example of California, which had tried to do the same thing the year before. A similar coalition had sought to get
Golden State lawmakers to abolish money bail in the wake of a state appeals court ruling condemning a
pattern among judges of setting unaffordable bails for the purpose of locking up criminal defendants. An
early version of the legislation, known as SB 10, announced its intent to “safely reduce the number of
people detained pretrial, while addressing racial and economic disparities in the pretrial system.” The bill’s
original language asserted a broad presumption that defendants would be released pretrial. It would have limited the use of risk-assessment
The forces most steeply invested in
algorithms and required audits of their use, in order to check for discriminatory outcomes.
California’s existing money bail regime—commercial bail bondsmen, law enforcement, prosecutors, and
judges—all strongly opposed the legislation . For most reform advocates, the bill might not have been perfect—many were
troubled by its explicit endorsement of risk-assessment tools—but it was a huge step in the right direction. But in the final days of the legislative
session in August 2018, the lawmakers who sponsored SB 10 swerved, completely rewriting the bill so as to satisfy judges and prosecutors and
defy most every stated aim of the advocates who had first supported it. The new bill mandated the use of risk-assessment tools and gave
judges unlimited discretion to impose pretrial detention on anyone they suspected might be a risk to commit another crime or fail to make
future court dates. In other words, SB 10 was a textbook illustration of how reforms to money bail can go badly wrong. Most of the groups
pushing for the original bill’s passage were horrified, and began campaigning against the revised legislation. But it was too late; the bill passed
the legislature, and then-Governor Jerry Brown signed it into law on August 28. SB 10 did accomplish the long-sought goal of
ending money bail. (Indeed, commercial bail bondsmen put out of business by the law were the only constituency consistently opposed
to SB 10 in all its guises, and are currently pushing a referendum to overturn the law.) But the legislation provided a stark cautionary saga for
bail abolitionists around the country: In the right set of conditions, the state can enact “reforms” that grant the proximate goal of ending
money bail while maintaining or even expanding its power to keep people locked up without trial. As San Francisco’s new district attorney,
Chesa Boudin, then a public defender, told NPR last year, “The new SB 10 doesn’t actually change the racist system of mass incarceration. It just
expands it.” The members of New York’s reform coalition managed to avoid some of California’s pitfalls—but the New York law that finally
emerged formalized some troubling compromises of its own. When the final round of horse-trading in Albany was over, there was no provision
for judges to jail people based on a guess (algorithmic or otherwise) as to their dangerousness, though judges did get expanded powers to
condition release on mandatory check-ins and electronic monitoring. But in a crucial compromise, reformers had given up on the goal of
abolishing money bail. The legislation had eliminated money bail for most misdemeanors —but it carved out an
exception for sex-offense misdemeanors and people charged with violating an order of protection in domestic violence cases. It also preserved
cash bail for Class-A felony charges. It was, from all perspectives, an imperfect compromise. The district attorneys and police unions, who had
loudly argued that the changes would lead to a return to New York’s lawless bad old days, were dismayed that so many defendants would now
enjoy the presumption of release. And local reformers, united under the banner of ending money bail, were devastated to realize that—after
what many worried would be their single best opportunity to change the law for the foreseeable future—an individual’s access to cash would
continue to determine his or her freedom in many cases. In an effort to palliate these advocates, legislators offered a work-around, passing
legislation to relax the restrictions on bail funds, allowing them to post higher bails and to bail out people facing Class-A felony charges. But to
the work of
many activists—including those working with the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund—this solution was further evidence of how
bail funds could be used to justify a broad, systemwide refusal to undertake comprehensive reform.
“The state is essentially giving bail funds the purpose of posting bail for people who fall into these carve-
outs,” said Simonson. “When bail funds do that, in a sense they’re legitimizing that choice, because
maybe things will still quote-unquote ‘work.’ It can function as legitimizing the rhetoric the state uses to
justify incarceration.”
Link Turn – Community Mediation

Establishing alternatives to criminal court sentencing and trials through mediation is
key to abolitionist community development
Mark Engler, current event writer for Morningside Center, 25 May 2017, “Prison Abolition and
Restorative Justice”, Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility,
https://www.morningsidecenter.org/teachable-moment/lessons/prison-abolition-and-restorative-
justice, accessed 5/13/20
If we abolish prisons, what will replace them? What do we do when people harm one another? One practice that can
serve as a step towards abolition is known as "restorative justice." Paul Tullis, a contributing writer for the New York
Times Magazine, described in a January 4, 2013 article how restorative justice works: Most modern justice systems focus on a
crime, a lawbreaker and a punishment. But a concept called "restorative justice" considers harm done
and strives for agreement from all concerned — the victims, the offender and the community — on
making amends. And it allows victims, who often feel shut out of the prosecutorial process, a way to be
heard and participate. In this country, restorative justice takes a number of forms, but perhaps the most prominent is restorative-
justice diversion. There are not many of these programs — a few exist on the margins of the justice system in communities like Baltimore,
Minneapolis and Oakland, California — but, according to a University of Pennsylvania study in 2007, they have been effective at reducing
recidivism. Typically, a facilitator meets separately with the accused and the victim, and if both are willing to meet face to face without
animosity and the offender is deemed willing and able to complete restitution, then the case shifts out of the adversarial legal system and into a
parallel restorative-justice process. All parties — the offender, victim, facilitator and law enforcement — come together in a forum sometimes
called a restorative-community conference. Each person speaks, one at a time and without interruption, about the crime and its effects, and
the participants come to a consensus about how to repair the harm done. Tullis notes that, in rare cases ,
restorative justice has been
used to address violent crimes, but that the process usually involved less serious offenses: "The methods
are mostly applied in less serious crimes, like property offenses in which the wrong can be clearly
righted — stolen property returned, vandalized material replaced. The processes are designed to be
flexible enough to handle violent crime like assault, but they are rarely used in those situations. " Vanessa
Hernandez of the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington state, argued in an October 24, 2016, article that the U.S. could reduce its prison
population through the use of restorative justice practices: Restorative justice provides an alternative that can help
break the cycle of over-incarceration for many offenses. Restorative practices focus on repairing the
harm that has been done, rather than simply punishing someone who has committed an offense by
locking them up. Restorative practices in the criminal justice system, including peacemaking circles,
mediation, and family conferencing, bring people who have committed crimes together with victims of
crime, their families, and other community members to identify and address the damage caused by
crime... Those who have taken part in restorative justice circles say they empower participants. This can lead to improved outcomes for all
involved. When victims of crime are allowed to take an active role in the disposition of their cases, they are
more likely to feel that their suffering has been recognized and acknowledged by both the offender and
the state. Likewise, when offenders confront the harm their actions have caused others, they often
experience remorse and a desire for change.
Link Turn – Policing

Police aren’t bad because of bad cops, but because of the system of policing – reform
at the structure ensures positive policing in the US
Ronald Davis, director of Community Policing Dispatch, August 2016, “Police Reform vs Policing
Reform”, e-newsletter of the COPS Office, Vol. 9 (8), Community Policing Dispatch,
https://cops.usdoj.gov/html/dispatch/08-2016/police_reform.asp, accessed 5/11/20
Policing in the United States is unique in that it is neither centralized , as is the case in many countries, nor does it
fall under the direct control of the Federal Government . Each of the approximately 18,000 local, state, and tribal law
enforcement agencies in the nation falls under the control of a local governing body, executive, or elected official(s). Local control is
arguably one of the key characteristics that makes the American policing system unique. It is also the characteristic that presents
the greatest challenge to establishing standardized ethical and professional practices within a system
few deny is in need of reform. Yet the discussion of police reform seems to focus primarily on individual
officer behavior and ignores the operational systems that have an even greater impact on policing
outcomes. The great management guru William Edward Deming captured this notion through his 85/15 rule, which says that 85 percent of
the problems in any organization are system-related while only 15 percent are worker-related. Rank-and-file officers do not decide
organizational policies and practices. Nor do officers establish hiring standards or have the power to administer discipline. They also do not
decide whether an agency embraces crime-reduction strategies that result in racial disparities. Yet when disparities or other systemic problems
do occur, rank-and-file officers are quickly demonized and blamed for those outcomes. There
is no question that rank-and-file
officers must be held accountable for their actions. However, if the systems in which they operate are
flawed, even good officers can have bad outcomes. If we are to achieve real and sustainable reform in
law enforcement, our focus must shift from the police (those individuals sworn to uphold the law) to policing
systems (the policies, practices, and culture of police organizations). And through reform, our policing systems must
identify not just the roles and responsibilities of the police but the roles and responsibilities of the
community as well. After all, communities are a vital part of the policing system . In the words of Sir Robert Peel,
the founder of modern law enforcement, “The police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public
who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”
Responses to Biopolitics Kritik
Responses to framing
Subjectivity and activism can arise autonomously, in resistance to the state
Paola Rivetti, Lecturer in Politics of the Middle East & North Africa at Dublin City University, Ireland.
September 8, 2016. ‘Informal Activism and New Subjectivity in Authoritarian Settings: Iran’s “New
Activists.”’ Middle East Institute. https://www.mei.edu/publications/informal-activism-and-new-
subjectivity-authoritarian-settings-irans-new-activists (accessed 5/12/20)
In times of repression, informal networks are useful to keep activism alive, as they offer a way for activists
to organize. Although their activities might be of a lesser scope, evidence points to a strengthening of the resilience
of activists and of their dissent. In conclusion, it seems that authoritarian constraints allow for autonomous
activism and subjectivity to flourish while emptying the regime-sanctioned political infrastructures of
meaning. While this may not bring about broad or abrupt political change, it is an unexpected outcome of authoritarian interventions that
might have longer-term consequences.
Human rights and democracy are universal values not constructed by the state
Francis Fukuyama, director of the International Development program and Professor of International Political
Economy at Johns Hopkins University, and Michael McFaul, June 2007. “Should Democracy Be Promoted or
Demoted?” The Stanley Foundation. http://www.stanleyfoundation.org/publications/other/FukuyMcFaul07.pdf
(accessed 5/11/20)
A second counterargument that is somewhat more difficult to make is that human rights and the democratic institutions
that spring from them are immanently universal. In keeping with the case made by Tocqueville in 5 Democracy in America,
the historical arc toward universal human equality has been spreading providentially for the past 800
years. It has now encompassed not just the Western, culturally Christian world, but has spread and
taken root in many other parts of the world as well—India, Japan, Korea, and South Africa. This suggests
that democracy has spread not as a manifestation of a particular civilization’s cultural preferences, but
because it serves universal needs or performs functions that are universally necessary, particularly at
higher levels of economic development. One can argue, for example, that the procedural rules of liberal
democracy guarantee that governments behave in a transparent, law-governed way and remain
accountable to the people they serve. Even if a culture does not put a value on individual rights per se,
liberal democracy is ultimately required for good governance and economic growth.
Perm
Text: Vote aff to do [the plan] and endorse an understanding of subjectivity as
entanglement.
The perm solves – reform has been successful at mitigating their harms in the past
Bruce Western, Justice Lab, Columbia University. JANUARY 2019. “The Challenge of Criminal Justice
Reform.” Square One. https://justicelab.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/The%20Challenge
%20of%20Criminal%20Justice%20Reform.pdf (accessed 5/11/20)
Reforms have been wide-ranging. The federal government has supported local reentry initiatives, at least since 1999. Prison
over-crowding was relieved through litigation. Legislation and ballot initiatives reduced drug
sentences. Probation and parole agencies cut revocations for technical violations; legislation also
reduced periods of community supervision and periods of incarceration for violations. At the entrypoint to
incarceration, some jurisdictions have reduced or eliminated the use of money bail. Others are re-
examining the use of court-imposed fees. Prosecutorial reform is being pressed both through
convenings among district attorneys, and at the ballot box in DA elections. Beyond direct efforts at reducing
incarceration, quantitative analysis is guiding criminal justice decision-making. Randomized controlled trials are being used to evaluate
correctional programs. Quantitative risk assessment is increasingly used to decide pre-trial detention and classify levels of custody in prison.
Reform of the criminal justice system is possible and has been achieved in the past
Osita Nwanevu, politics reporter in Washington DC, December 17, 2018. “The Improbable Success of
a Criminal-Justice-Reform Bill Under Trump.” New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-
desk/the-improbable-success-of-a-criminal-justice-reform-bill-under-trump (accessed 5/11/20)
Nearly a year and a half later, Trump—who never recanted his support for executing the now-exonerated Central Park Five— is backing
one of the most significant criminal-justice-reform bills in decades , a bipartisan effort called the First Step
Act, which is expected to come to a vote in the Senate this week. “We’re all better off when former inmates can receive and reënter society as
law-abiding, productive citizens,” Trump said in remarks endorsing the bill last month. “And, thanks to our booming economy, they now have a
chance at more opportunities than they’ve ever had before.” That the bill has advanced this far under the Trump
Administration reflects the purchase criminal-justice reform has gained not only among Democrats
but also among conservative Republicans. The bill’s list of supporters includes Ted Cruz and Kirsten Gillibrand, the Koch
brothers and the American Civil Liberties Union. The significant buy-in from the right is the culmination of years of
effort from a cadre of libertarian-leaning conservatives , like the anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist, and evangelicals, such as
Chuck Colson, the founder of the Christian nonprofit organization Prison Fellowship, who have worked to convince others that
the prison system has become too costly, punitive, and government-empowering. Most of their
successes have come at the state level, in places like Georgia and Texas, where Republicans have
worked to reduce the incarceration of nonviolent offenders and boost anti-recidivism efforts. In
Georgia, the incarceration rate for black males has declined by thirty per cent over the past eight
years, and recidivism rates for those who complete vocational training or a G.E.D. while imprisoned have also dropped
sharply—which the outgoing Republican governor Nathan Deal notes happened under his tenure.
Reform is uniquely possible now – organized community efforts for reform can
succeed federally
Shon Hopwood, convicted felon, appellate lawyer, and professor of law at Georgetown University Law
Center. 25 FEB 2019. “The Effort to Reform the Federal Criminal Justice System.” Yale Law Journal.
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-effort-to-reform-the-federal-criminal-justice-system
(accessed 5/12/20)
The federal criminal justice reform community scored an important victory with the passage of the
First Step Act, a federal sentencing and prison reform bill that President Trump signed into law in late
2018. First Step’s passage broke many years of congressional gridlock around criminal justice reform bills, marking Congress’s departure from
forty years of policies advancing the carceral state. First Step’s passage didn’t happen by accident. The federal
reform community is now better funded, more prolific, and more politically diverse than ever before,
and it successfully provided the political cover necessary for congressional members to vote for
reform. This Essay describes the difficult movement for federal criminal justice reform and how the reform community’s efforts led to
passage of the First Step Act. It also explains what risks could stall future federal reforms, while providing a normative analysis of the criteria
the federal justice reform community should use in deciding whether to support particular reforms.
No Solvency
Entanglement doesn’t challenge western metaphysics, but instead reinforces it
Scott Hamilton, The London School of Economics and Political Science, 29 July 2017. “Securing
ourselves from ourselves? The paradox of “entanglement” in the Anthropocene.” Crime, Law and Social
Change. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10611-017-9704-4#Sec3 (accessed 5/11/20)
Upon analysis, however, the quantum implications of “entanglement” are irreconcilable with the classical and neo-Newtonian foundations
upon which the Anthropocene is grounded. Ultimately, entanglement discourses rely upon a thinking and acting
human “I”, still caught within a Western secular cosmology, measuring subjects against objects. Although
it is used as an effective analogy and a desirable ethical aspiration, the danger here is forgetting the representationalist
metaphysics still undergirding entanglement in this Paradox of the Anthropocene. This risks entrenching it
further, albeit under other names or theories. Upon deeper inspection, therefore, the entangled self – anthropos of the ESS –
is still projecting and seeing only itself, relating a calculating human subject to every single referent it
can cognate. As such, it is hoped that [in] recognizing the ethical and agential possibilities emerging from the
grasping of ourselves as dis-entangled from nature and Earth, that a more accountable and responsible
anthropos can emerge. We can take lessons from quantum science and entanglement, but it is in our inability to become it – our
dis-entanglement – that an ethics derived from the context of our political and social world can and must
spur us to act.
The framework of entanglement doesn’t help us to understand natural phenomena

and only intensifies the conceptual foundations of Western metaphysics
Scott Hamilton, The London School of Economics and Political Science, 29 July 2017. “Securing
ourselves from ourselves? The paradox of “entanglement” in the Anthropocene.” Crime, Law and Social
Change. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10611-017-9704-4#Sec3 (accessed 5/11/20)
Although the basics of quantum physics also depends upon statistics and a type of quantum causality to make predictions, “quantum mechanics
is incompatible with the view that physical observables possess pre-existing values independent of the measurement context” ([37], p. 259).
Nature might be manifested in certain phenomena in the macro world, but conceived through
entanglement, these manifestations would be so incommensurable to everyday neo-Newtonian thought
that they would be “irreducibly beyond anything we can experience or beyond anything we can
possibly conceive of” ([38], p. 1653). In other words, quantum uncertainty rules entanglement in a mind-boggling way, while classical
certainty (i.e., causality) rules Newtonian metaphysics so uniformly that today we barely even notice it.
Declaring classical sciences and renderings of nature to be “entangled”, therefore, does not actually make them
so. It actually masks the certainty of a classical Newtonian causality still working beneath the
Anthropocene’s discursive surface. One cannot overcome Western metaphysics simply by reading about
how to overcome Western metaphysics, and then asserting it to be so. This only intensifies the
underlying conceptual foundations that treat quantum entanglement itself as a concept, tool, or object that
can be causally applied to a human subject and its world.
Impact turns
State power is good

Failing states lead to conflict, gender-based violence, and refugee displacement
Charles T. Call, Associate Professor of International Relations in American University, WINTER 2017.
“The Lingering Problem of Fragile States.” THE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY.
https://facdis.wvu.edu/files/d/9e3b1e27-33d9-46b2-b01d-0de884f43390/ctcall-lingering-problem-
fragile-states-washqtrly-final.pdf (accessed 5/12/20)
Most of the crises confronting the United States still occur in countries experiencing mass violence or civil wars.
Syria’s worsening war continues to vex policymakers worldwide, fueling violence all around it and pushing three
million refugees into neighboring countries and Europe. Partly due to past U.S. policies, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya
are fragmented states hosting multiple anti-U.S. terrorist groups. Chief among these is the Islamic
State, or IS, which controls territory, inspires attacks in the West, and carries out horrifying atrocities.
Despite the longest state-building exercise in U.S. history, Afghanistan’s war persists. Mass atrocities in South
Sudan and the Central African Republic reversed years of progress under UN peace operations, deepening questions about the adequacy of UN
peacekeeping for preventing and responding to crises. These events mark a sharp reversal of two decades after the Cold War of steady progress
toward peace. After declining by one-third since 1991, the
number of armed conflicts in the world increased by 25
percent from 2012 to 2014.8 Wars have also become more deadly after many years of decline: annual battle
deaths increased five-fold from 2010 to 2014, and the 101,400 estimated battle deaths of 2014 are the
most in any single year since 1945.9 Many conflicts reflect heightened gender-based violence. For the first
time since the end of the Cold War, data indisputably show the world has become a more dangerous place. The consequences of these wars are
also historic. In
June 2016, the number of global refugees and displaced persons reached an all-time high
of 65 million, an increase of 25 million over a decade earlier. One of every 113 people on earth is now forcibly
displaced.10 The world spent a record $24.5 billion on humanitarian aid in 2014, and that was before 2015′ s European refugee crisis.11
Refugees are now a key election factor in many European countries, the United States, Turkey, Canada, and elsewhere. Fragile and
failing states—not traditional powers—are the source of these unprecedented humanitarian and
security challenges. Fragile states are also the principal locus of terrorist organizations, pandemics like
Ebola, and transnational criminal groups. In 2015, U.S. and UN special reviews highlighted the problems of these countries and
the need for new strategies and resources.12
Legibility of citizens to the state is important for state capacity

Melissa M. Lee, Princeton University, and Nan Zhang, October 20, 2016. “Legibility and the
Informational Foundations of State Capacity.” Journal of Politics.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/688053 (accessed 5/11/20)
Recent research in political science hasstressed the importance of the state in curbing violence and promoting
social and economic development, resulting in an explosion of scholarly interest in the foundations of
state capacity. This article argues that state capacity depends in part on “legibility”—the breadth and depth of the
state’s knowledge about its citizens and their activities—and that legibility is crucial to effective,
centralized governance. We illustrate the importance of legibility through a novel argument linking legibility to the state’s role in curbing free-riding in
collective action dilemmas. We then demonstrate this argument in the context of tax contributions to public goods using an original measure of legibility based on
national population censuses. The article concludes by discussing how future research may leverage our indicator’s exceptional temporal and geographic coverage
to advance new avenues of inquiry in the study of the state. In recent decades, political scientists have witnessed an explosion of interest in the state as a key actor
in social and economic development. Indeed, variation
in the effectiveness of state institutions has been linked to
outcomes ranging from economic growth (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012; North 1981; Rothstein 2011) , to civil war onset (Fearon and Laitin
2003; Hendrix 2010), to tax evasion and other forms of illicit activity (Brautigam, Fjeldstad, and Moore 2008). In addition, moving beyond
a simple classification of“strong” and “weak” states, scholars and policy makers have begun to investigate the conceptual and empirical foundations of state
capacity, with an eye toward improving the effectiveness of public institutions (Chong et al. 2014).
States are key for the provision of basic health services and infrastructure
John Quinn, Prague Centre for Global Health, Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology, et al. Preslava
Stoeva, Tomáš Zelený, Toozy Nanda, Alžběta Tomanová, Vladimír Bencko. 2017. “PUBLIC HEALTH
CRISIS: THE NEED FOR PRIMARY PREVENTION IN FAILED AND FRAGILE STATES.” Central European
Journal of Public Health. https://cejph.szu.cz/pdfs/cjp/2017/03/01.pdf (accessed 5/11/20)
Violence, trauma, war, and conflict decrease the health security for communities. However, identifying links
and determining causation remains a major challenge in the literature. Empirical studies focusing on direct retrospective data of states and the
health of populations may offer a novel approach to the war and health challenge. Aggregate research has shown that health
security
diminishes in war, conflict, and failed and fragile states (1). This article discusses ways to reverse the decline and focuses
on the case of failed and fragile states. While there is no universally agreed definition of state failure, fragility and collapse, some indices and
criteria have been proposed by global institutions, governments and academics (2). Some of these overlaps but do not align, feeding
controversies over the meaning and exact parameters of state failure (3, 4). For the purposes of this article, we define as failed those
states that have lost the ability to provide the most basic of services to their constituencies , and fragile as
those on the brink of losing such ability (5, 6). Such services include functioning infrastructure and institutions that
are expected to provide primary health services, prevention programmes along with key
infrastructure that engenders health for the population.
Failed states cannot provide for public health, and are prone to conflict
John Quinn, Prague Centre for Global Health, Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology, et al. Preslava
Stoeva, Tomáš Zelený, Toozy Nanda, Alžběta Tomanová, Vladimír Bencko. 2017. “PUBLIC HEALTH
CRISIS: THE NEED FOR PRIMARY PREVENTION IN FAILED AND FRAGILE STATES.” Central European
Journal of Public Health. https://cejph.szu.cz/pdfs/cjp/2017/03/01.pdf (accessed 5/11/20)
The concept of health security is not consistently defined in the literature, its meaning being associated with human
security, national
and global public health security, securing and promoting the
health of individuals and communities (7). Every one of these
aspects is affected in failed and fragile settings. Fragile states experience a slow disappearance of state
institutions and reduction in the rule of law, which brings about a deteriorating human and health
security environment, destabilizes surrounding countries and encourages corruption and disrupts
economic practice (8–10). Fragile and failed states have no safe, fair or legally regulated marketplace,
leading to black-market economies and illegal arbitrage becoming widespread for basic goods,
including health service provision. When states experience fragility, failure or collapse, they cease to
deliver basic human and health security or any level of public health. The government loses
credibility, and the state becomes questionable and illegitimate in the hearts and minds of its citizens (11, 12).
Fragile and failed states exhibit an increased propensity for conflict and violence, and a decreased ability
to provide basic public health infrastructure to prevent, diagnose, provide adequate disease
surveillance and combat infectious disease – leading to a significant decrease to health security (13–16).
Figure 1 summarizes the contributing factors to state failure and the potential link to public health crisis. Conflict and war have already been
inextricably linked to the spread of disease and deterioration in health security (13, 17, 18).
Conflict threatens health security as
it leads to an increase in infectious disease, preventable trauma, malnourishment, and mental health
disorders (9, 19, 20). Preventing state failure and conflict, therefore, can lead at least in part to increased health
security. Policy highlights underscore patience of action – gradualism over short lived gains, and tailored responses that address specific
state needs – not a panacea; but informed policy can enhance effective governance through a variety of models attuned to local patterns and
needs, in advisory and supportive ways (21). Taking into account existing studies of the consequences of conflict and state fragility on health
security along with empirical studies would provide a better foundation for such informed and evidenced based policy.
Failed states threaten continuous warfare and human rights abuses

Turkan Firinci Orman, Sociology Department, Baskent University, Turkey. December 17, 2015. “An
Analysis of the Notion of a Failed State.” International Journal of Social Science Studies.
http://www.redfame.com/journal/index.php/ijsss/article/viewFile/1199/1229 (accessed 5/11/20)
"State Failure" term could be traced up to 1990's, based upon Gerald Helman and Steven Ratner‘s (1993) important article ―Saving Failed
State‖ in which they describe the nation-state as losing its national and international function. The writers debate the presence of the state;
comparing contemporary failed states which have lost their authority or are not able to implement their
authority onto their societies, or where the government could not prosecute of the main functions, with the German geopolitical
remnants after the Second World War. Helman and Ratner (1993, 3-5) emphasize that a new phenomenon came in view, wide from Haiti to
Yugoslavia in Europe; to Somali, Sudan and Liberia in Africa and to Cambodia in Asia: The failed nation states which are failing to
survive within the international system. Dragged into the violence and anarchy they endanger their own citizens,
confront their neighbouring countries with the refugee flows and they face political instability and
continuous warfare. Therefore, it is impossible to stay indifferent towards the reality that human
rights violations and due to the right of life being in the first place based upon many other cases of abuse of rights these states should be
given a hand (Helman and Ratner, 1993).
State capacity is important for long-run economic growth

Mark Dincecco, professor of economics at the University of Michigan, and Gabriel Katz. February
2016. “State Capacity and Long‐Run Economic Performance.” The Economic Journal.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/126/590/189/5077805 (accessed 5/11/20)
We present new evidence about the long‐run relationship between state capacity – the fiscal and administrative power of states – and
economic performance. Our database is novel and spans 11 European countries and four centuries from the Old Regime to World War I. We
argue that national governments undertook two political transformations over this period: fiscal centralisation and limited government. We
find a significant direct relationship between fiscal centralisation and economic growth. Furthermore,
we find that an increase in the state’s capacity to extract greater tax revenues was one mechanism
through which both political transformations improved economic performance. Our analysis shows
systematic evidence that state capacity is an important determinant of long‐run economic growth.
States with greater control over their territories see greater reductions in poverty
M. Niaz Asadullah, Faculty of Economics and Administration, University of Malaya, Malaysia, and
Antonio Savoia, May 2018. “Poverty reduction during 1990–2013: Did millennium development goals
adoption and state capacity matter?” World Development.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X17304035#! (accessed 5/11/20)
While poverty reduction remains central in the Post-2015 Agenda, its determinants remain debated in the literature, especially the role of
structural conditions related to governance. This paper provides an assessment of two key dimensions: the global adoption of MDGs and state
capacity. We do so by studying whether they facilitated convergence in income poverty measures, using cross-section and panel methods, with
data on 89 developing economies for the period 1990–2013. We find that poverty headcount and gap measures tended to decrease faster in
countries with initially higher income poverty. Such convergence accelerated after 2000, suggesting that MDGs adoption was instrumental to
poverty reduction. However, this still leaves unexplained substantial variation in poverty reduction performance across countries. Such
variation is explained by state capacity: countries
with greater ability to administer their territories in 1990
experienced faster income poverty reduction and were more likely to have achieved the MDG target. This result is
insensitive to robust regression methods and to a large set of controls (initial level of income, dependence on
natural resources, education and health inputs, dependence on foreign aid, ethnic fractionalization, regional effects and a set of governance
variables). As good governance and effective institutions are included in the Sustainable Development Goals, this result provides empirical
justification for this move, suggesting that more effective states could be crucial to sustain the development
progress achieved so far.
Failed states represent serious security risks to their populations and international
stability
Marina Ottaway Senior Associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, and Stefan Mair. September 2004. “States at Risk and Failed
States.” Carnegie Endowment. https://carnegieendowment.org/files/ottaway_outlook3.pdf (accessed
5/12/20)
Failing and failed states present a grave danger to international stability as well as to the well-being of
their populations. Internationally, they can become safe havens for terrorist organizations, centers for
the trade of drugs and arms, and breeding grounds for dangerous diseases. Regionally, they can spill
instability well past their borders and create a conflict dynamic affecting neighboring countries.
Domestically, they cannot provide security for their citizens or deliver essential public goods. Beyond
these immediate threats, failure of states also means the appearance of a growing number of stateless territories, a phenomenon with which
the governments of Western countries are poorly prepared to deal. Despite all the astute reflections on the importance of non-state actors in
international affairs and on the need to rethink the concept of sovereignty, states are still the central actors and units of
global governance. There is no doubt that failed and failing states present an international threat and require international
intervention. Contrary to the developing consensus, however, such interventions should be narrowly focused, dealing above all with problems
of state security. The ambitious models for intervention that are often advocated—models that emphasize human over state security—are too
complex and costly to be implemented, and even in the best-case scenario would produce results only in the long run.
Rehabilitation is good
Rehabilitation of prisoners promotes their welfare and doesn’t manipulate their
personalities
Jordan Lonsdale, Vancouver Island University scholar, September, 2016. “Is Rehabilitation Wrong?”
Justice in the Justice System? https://ba.viu.ca/sites/default/files/justice-in-the-justice-
system.pdf#page=7 (accessed 5/11/20)
Most offenders have a history of victimization, violence, substance abuse, and other criminogenic factors
that contribute to their anti-social behavior (Farrington 390). There is a far-reaching explanation for most
crimes; these deep-rooted causes are what rehabilitation programs target. Once offenders are caught up in the
criminal justice system, the goal is to identify and target their risk factors—whether they be mental health problems, substance
abuse issues, or uncontrollable sexual desires—to help them live a productive life after their sentence ends. This
goal is primarily intended to benefit society by preventing further crimes. However, it is also intended
to benefit offenders, by giving them the necessary skills to earn a pay cheque and to avoid a dangerous
lifestyle in order to survive. Rehabilitation programs can help offenders become clean, saving them from a
potentially life threatening drug addiction. Further, rehabilitation efforts are often more humane than
prison. Thus, with rehabilitation, we are not merely using criminals for our own ends, but rather also promoting their welfare. Despite Kant’s
concerns, rehabilitation efforts won’t change offenders’ values or manipulate their personalities.
Offenders can be required to participate in treatment programs as part of a community-based sentence or probation
order, but it is up to them to learn something from the programs. We can require offenders to attend every possible
program, but they must be willing to make a change in order for the programs to work. Rehabilitation programs cannot force
offenders to change their attitudes or beliefs, but they can give offenders a set of tools and skills to
facilitate change in their lives if they so choose. Given that offenders still have the ultimate choice as
to whether to adopt the attitudes taught in rehabilitation programs, they are not, in my opinion, being
treated as “mere means” for the end goal of public safety. Offender autonomy is respected by
allowing criminals to reintegrate back into the community and make choices for themselves.
Rehabilitation provides offenders with the knowledge and education to make well-considered decisions.
Rehabilitation programs decrease the likelihood of returning to prison

Jacob Reich, legal assistant, August 17, 2017. “THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF PRISON REHABILITATION
PROGRAMS.” Wharton Public Policy Initiative. https://publicpolicy.wharton.upenn.edu/live/news/2059-
the-economic-impact-of-prison-rehabilitation/for-students/blog/news.php#_edn5 (accessed 5/11/20)
Criminologists have shown that prison

education classes drastically reduce the recidivism rate. In Ohio, for example,
inmates who enroll in college classes have a re-offending rate of 18%, while prisoners who do not take
college courses have a re-incarceration rate of 40%. Prisoners in New York who earn a college degree
while incarcerated are almost half as likely to get arrested after release compared to inmates who do
not earn a degree. [5] By decreasing the re-offending rate, prison education programs ultimately save the state money. For example,
from 2008 to 2009, Nevada decreased the state’s prison population by 1.6%, which saved the state $38 million
and prevented Nevada from spending $1.2 billion on construction costs. When one fewer Nevadan inmate re-offends, the state saves $22,000.
[6] Since about 40% of state inmates and 27% of federal inmates have not completed high school, prison education programs allow inmates to
gain the necessary skills they will need to find work outside of prison. [7] In
addition to educational opportunities, job-training
programs in prison reduce the re-offending rate and prove to be cost-effective. For example, Minnesota’s work-release
program, which permits inmates to work in the community as they approach their release dates, lowers recidivism rates. Minnesota
prisoners who participate in work-release programs are almost twice as likely to find work within the
first couple years of release than inmates who do not have work experience. Prisoners who
participate in work-release programs are 16% less likely to be rearrested and 17% less likely to be sent
back to prison.
Science is good
Legitimacy of scientific knowledge is key to stop pandemics
Patricia Andrews Fearon, psychology researcher at Cambridge University, et al. Friedrich M. Götz &
David Good. 21 APRIL 2020. “Pivotal moment for trust in science – don’t waste it.” Nature.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01145-7 (accessed 5/9/20)
The current COVID-19 pandemic calls for a renewed public trust in science — for better or worse. We urge the global
scientific community to seize this opportunity to build on that trust. Three months into the pandemic, we issued a questionnaire to a panel of
337 US residents who represented a cross-section of the general public. Our aim was to find out how their trust had changed from before the
pandemic (data collected in mid-August 2019). Those reporting “a lot of trust” in the federal government remained at an abysmal 1%, whereas
“strong trust” in science jumped from 41% to 48%.
We found that trust in science was the most important predictor
of compliance with public-health recommendations for limiting viral spread.
Distrust of scientific knowledge is mobilized for political ends, and can promote
prejudice and harm public health
Timothy Caulfield, Canada Research Chair in Health Law and Policy at the University of Alberta. March
20, 2020. “Now more than ever, we must fight misinformation.” Folio.
https://www.folio.ca/commentary--now-more-than-ever-we-must-fight-misinformation-trust-in-
science-is-essential/ (accessed 5/9/20)
The issue of trust is complex and health-care

providers and scientists are still relatively respected voices. But
there is no doubt that even
a modest increase in suspicion toward these key institutions can help fuel the spread of
harmful misinformation. Indeed, any lack of trust in science, public-health officials and health-care institutions
will make it more difficult to combat both the outbreak and the spread of misinformation—a reality that has already had an
impact in countries such as China. This breakdown in trust is happening at a terrible time. But it shouldn’t be a surprise. Fermenting distrust has
become the go-to strategy for selling health products, generating clicks and getting elected. The politics of distrust Politically
driven
positioning by world leaders has clearly played a role in the coronavirus infodemic. We’ve seen the
blaming of both the outside “other” (“the China virus”) and political opponents. (Just a few weeks ago, one
Trump supporter went so far as to claim that the coronavirus was a hoax perpetrated by the Democratic Party. I’m curious if she has the self-
delusion capacity to maintain this position.) In China, U.S. President Donald Trump has been the target. In India, scientifically absurd cures have
been explicitly tied to ideological positions. And in Russia, there appears to be a co-ordinated disinformation strategy aimed directly at eroding
confidence in both our political institutions and health-care systems. This kind of rhetoric both leveragesexisting prejudices
and distrust and seeks to create more of both. Suspicion can breed more suspicion, especially when it is linked to a
political agenda. Indeed, there is some research that suggests that distrust of science is associated with particular
ideological leanings. A study from 2019, for example, found that “vaccine hesitancy and political populism are driven by similar
dynamics: a profound distrust in elites and experts.” A more recent study concluded that Mr. Trump’s anti-vaccination tweets
increased supporters’ concerns, largely because of a willingness to believe the related conspiracy
theories—which are almost always rooted in a narrative of distrust of scientific institutions.
The use of medical science to promote public health is a good thing

Claire Ninde, APC Director. March 20, 2018.
“200 years of public health has doubled our life expectancy.” San Juan Basin Public Health.
https://sjbpublichealth.org/200-years-public-health-doubled-life-expectancy/ (accessed 5/11/20)
With National Public Health Week taking place April 3-9, I ask you to take a trip back in time and imagine yourself living 200 years ago in
1817. Living conditions then were vastly different from today due to poor sanitation, lack of proper sewage
management, non-existent or inadequate treatment of drinking water, no food inspection or municipal
garbage collection, crowded housing and no real understanding of nutrition. People died painfully ,
mostly in infancy or childhood, primarily from diseases such as tuberculosis, pleurisy, typhus, tonsillitis, cholera
and dysentery. With a lack of medical understanding of these ailments, a common treatment was
bloodletting. The average lifespan at the time was around 35 years. Over the last 200 years, U.S. life
expectancy has more than doubled to almost 80 years (78.8 in 2015), with vast improvements in health
and quality of life. However, while most people imagine medical advancements to be the reason for this increase, the largest gain
in life expectancy occurred between 1880 and 1920 due to public health improvements such as control of
infectious diseases, more abundant and safer foods, cleaner water, and other nonmedical social
improvements. This period is actually referred to as the “First Public Health Revolution” and it occurred before the medical interventions
of antibiotics and advanced surgical techniques were in place. Historians have concluded that improved sanitation, public water treatment,
sewage management, food inspection and municipal garbage collection almost eliminated the aforementioned causes of death .
Also,
other social advancements such as greater understanding of nutrition, better housing conditions, air
quality improvements, child labor laws and higher literacy rates also greatly improved overall health
and life expectancy.
Surveillance is good
Surveillance is key to combat pandemics
WHO (World Health Organization) April 2009. “Global Surveillance during an Influenza Pandemic.”
https://www.who.int/csr/disease/swineflu/global_pandemic_influenza_surveilance_apr09.pdf
(accessed 5/9/20)
Importance of surveillance to detect and respond to a pandemic Successful containment or control of pandemic influenza
will rely on early recognition of sustained human-to-human transmission which requires a system for outbreak detection,
rapid data collection, analysis, assessment and timely reporting. Early detection of the start of a pandemic is
crucial to rapidly implement measures to stop the pandemic at its source and to prevent millions of
deaths, social disruption and economic loss. Modelling studies suggest that mass prophylaxis with antiviral drugs combined
with other public health interventions such as movement restriction, social distancing, and vaccination
may successfully contain an emerging pandemic. However, such an approach (i.e. rapid containment operation)
would need to be implemented within the first few weeks that transmission of a pandemic virus began..2,3 The goal of
rapid containment is to delay, if not stop the pandemic. This will provide additional time for countries to implement
public health actions, produce and distribute pandemic vaccines, and allow mobilization of
international resources. As part of national pandemic preparedness planning each country should prepare for
enhanced surveillance to (i) detect the emergence of the new disease, (ii) characterize the disease
(epidemiology, clinical manifestations, severity) and (iii) monitor its evolution. Benefits of global pandemic influenza
surveillance An influenza pandemic will affect every country. Standardized and coordinated international information sharing is crucial
for crisis management at global and national levels. National authorities will need to know how the pandemic
is evolving not only in their own country, but also in neighbouring countries and continents. Sharing of
information at global level will be a benefit to all. The continual flow and aggregation of information provided by
individual countries will contribute to the development of a global picture (see Figure 1) that: ƒ will result in a rapid
accumulation of critical clinical, epidemiological and virological data about the new disease; ƒ will allow health care providers
and public health authorities to modify their strategies for case management, community mitigation, and health
resource allocation; ƒ will disperse the workload among the first affected countries; ƒ will [and] reduce the impact of
inaccurate and unconfirmed rumours; ƒ will enable WHO to serve as a credible and stabilizing source of information and
guidance. Misinformation or lack of information at global or country level will inevitably result in delays in response,
spread of damaging rumours, inadequate resource allocation, misdirected efforts, and ultimately, unnecessary loss of
life.
Surveillance can support public health by using contact tracing to combat pandemics
Alan Z. Rozenshtein, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota, March 23, 2020.
“Government Surveillance in an Age of Pandemics.” Lawfare.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/government-surveillance-age-pandemics (accessed 5/9/20)
For most people—and especially Lawfare readers—the word “surveillance” conjures up images of law enforcement investigations and foreign
intelligence operations. But surveillanceplays a major role in an equally important way of keeping people safe: public health.
One of epidemiologists’ most powerful tools is disease surveillance— the monitoring, at both the population
and individual levels, of who’s been infected and with whom they’ve interacted. And as the outbreak of the novel
coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19, brings American economic and social life to a halt, it is worth asking: What will be the effects
on government surveillance? And while even the precise short-term effects are still hazy, we can already see signs that the outbreak may usher
in a permanent and far-reaching expansion of the surveillance state. Government-mandated disease surveillance has a long history in the
United States, from the first reporting law (in colonial-era Rhode Island, for smallpox, yellow fever and malaria) to the sophisticated programs
that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state public health agencies run today. But COVID-19 could drive surveillance to a
much higher level, for two reasons. First, the COVID-19 pandemic is the most serious pandemic that the United States, indeed the world, has
dealt with since the 1918 influenza outbreak. The
coronavirus outbreak may well prove to be the most socially
disruptive event of the past 100 years—even World War II did not require hundreds of millions of Americans to effectively
shelter in place for an indefinite period. Whether one is chiefly concerned about the public health impact of COVID-19 or the economic and
social toll of the response (or all of the above), this episode will no doubt convince policymakers that drastic
steps may be justified
to stop this outbreak and prevent future ones. Second, technological advances make it possible to collect a vastly larger and
more precise trove of information. Internet-connected thermometers, thermal-imaging cameras (especially when
combined with facial recognition software) and algorithms that scrape and process social media posts can all help detect the
spread of disease in near real time and at an individual level. The ubiquity of GPS-enabled smartphones can allow
health authorities to determine with whom infected individuals may have had contact, thus allowing
for faster and more precise contact-tracing. Governments can use databases of individuals’ phone numbers and email
addresses to proactively notify them of exposure and then use location data to monitor and enforce quarantines.
DNA evidence is good

DNA evidence helps exonerate wrongly convicted Black inmates
Emily Barone, Time reporter. 2017. “The Wrongly Convicted.” Time. https://time.com/wrongly-
convicted/ (accessed 5/11/20)
DNA has played a role in roughly a quarter of exonerations since 1989, the year it was first used to clear David Vasquez, who was falsely
convicted of murder in Arlington County, Va. In the last decade the number of DNA exonerations has held steady at
about 20 cases per year. (Biological evidence is typically tested before trial so the majority of DNA-related exonerations these days are
for convictions that happened decades ago.) But these reasons don’t fully explain why so many false convictions are happening in the first
place. There are underlying issues in the law enforcement and criminal justice system that run far deeper, says Gross. “If you fix problems like
the drug tests, that’s a good thing,” says Gross. “But then the question is why were you stopped in the first place? Why were you asked to step
out of the car? And why were you searched? That’s the real question.” A second report released Tuesday authored by Gross points to the
apparent racial disparity in wrongful convictions. Gross’s analysis found that almost
half of the exonerations in the national
database are black defendants, compared with 39% who are white. Racial bias is particularly stark in
cases where numerous defendants were exonerated together. Separate from the individual
exonerations listed in the National Registry, an additional 1,840 defendants have been cleared in 15
“group” exonerations across the country since 1989. The great majority of these groups were framed
for drug cases that never happened and, likewise, a great majority of these groups were
predominantly black.
Productivity is good
Without productivity growth, there will be lower living standards
Warwick J. McKibbin, senior fellow of economics for the Brookings Institute, and Adam Triggs,
March 2, 2020. “The future will be shaped by what global productivity growth does next.” Brookings
Institute. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/03/02/the-future-will-be-shaped-by-what-
global-productivity-growth-does-next/ (accessed 5/11/20)
Productivity growth is a shadow of its former self. It’s one-tenth of what it was 40 years ago in
advanced economies, and even emerging economies are struggling to replicate the growth of the past.
As the fundamental driver of long-run living standards, weak productivity growth is a serious problem.
Lower living standards, bigger budget deficits, fewer jobs, lower wages, and higher inequality await if
things don’t improve.
Labor productivity helps boost inclusive economic growth and standards of living
ILO, June 28, 2019. “Indicator description: Labour productivity.” International Labor Organization.
https://ilostat.ilo.org/resources/methods/description-labour-productivity/ (accessed 5/11/20)
Labour productivity is an important economic indicator that is closely linked to economic growth ,
competitiveness, and living standards. Labour productivity represents the total volume of output (measured in terms of Gross
Domestic Product, GDP) produced per unit of labour (measured in terms of the number of employed persons) during a given time reference
period. The indicator allows data users to assess GDP-to-labour input levels and growth rates over time, thus providing general information
about the efficiency and quality of human capital in the production process for a given economic and social context. Given
its
usefulness in conveying valuable information on a country’s labour market situation, labour
productivity growth was one of the indicators selected to measure progress towards the achievement of
the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), under Goal 1 (Eradicate [eradication of] poverty and hunger), and it is
included as one of the indicators to measure progress towards the achievement of the Sustainable
Development Goals (SDG), under Goal 8 (Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and
productive employment and decent work for all).1
Long run growth of living standards require growth of worker productivity

Nicholas Oulton, Professor of Macroeconomics, London school of Economics. January 2020.
“Measuring productivity: theory and British practice.” Center for Macroeconomics.
http://www.centreformacroeconomics.ac.uk/Discussion-Papers/2020/CFMDP2020-02-Paper.pdf
(accessed 5/11/20)
According to the much-quoted Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman (1994, chapter 1), “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is
almost everything. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost
entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker. ”2 If you are not convinced that productivity really is as important as
Krugman says, take a look at Table 1 which shows long run growth in labour productivity in Britain as measured by
real GDP per hour worked. Also shown is a common measure of living standards, real GDP per head,
i.e. real GDP divided by the number of people in the population. Relative to the starting point in 1856,
labour productivity in 2016 has been multiplied by a factor of 17.4 and living standards by a factor of
8.8.
Investments in worker productivity improve equity and economic performance

Michael R. M. Abrigo, et al., Phillipine Institute for Development Studies, Sang-Hyop Lee, and
Donghyun Park. December 2017. “Human Capital Spending, Inequality, and Growth in Middle-Income
Asia.” Cornell University ILR School. https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1675&context=intl (accessed 5/11/20)
Asia’s rapid population aging fortifies the case for strengthening human capital investments. Further, the
experience of the newly
industrialized economies suggests that human capital investments will be a vital ingredient of the
transition from middle income to high income. Those investments can also affect equity and public finances. In this paper,
we use data from the National Transfer Accounts to empirically analyze the effect of human capital investment in Asian countries on economic
growth, inequality, and fiscal balance. Our empirical
evidence suggests that human capital investments have a
positive effect on labor productivity and, hence, output. The positive effect is stronger for poorer
households and, hence, beneficial for equity. We also find that such investments can generate sufficient tax revenues to
improve the fiscal balance. Overall, our evidence points to a positive effect of human capital on growth, equity,
and fiscal balance in Asia.
Labor productivity is important to the standard of living for future generations

Stanley Fischer, Vice Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. 6 July 2017.
“Government policy and labor productivity.” Speech at the "Washington Transformation? Politics,
Policies, Prospects" forum. https://www.bis.org/review/r170726b.htm (accessed 5/11/20)
I want to talk tonight about labor productivity growth. Labor

productivity is the amount of goods and services
produced per hour spent on the job. Increases in labor productivity -again, that's the amount of goods and services
produced per hour on the job-are a fundamental factor in determining how fast the economy grows, and how fast the
average standard of living grows. And productivity growth can be influenced by government policy, about which I also want to say
a few words. Labor productivity growth varies a lot from year to year, but it is possible to discern longer historical periods with high or low
productivity growth, as shown in figure 1. For example, labor productivity rose at an average annual rate of 3-1/4 percent from 1948 to 1973,
whereas in the period 1974 to 2016, the average growth rate of productivity was about 1.7 percent. That is to say that, with the important
exception of the information technology (IT) boom beginning in the mid-1990s, the U.S. economy has been in a low-productivity growth period
since 1974. The record for the past five years has been particularly dismal. How much does productivity growth matter? A great deal. The
person who made that clear, in an article published in 1957, 60 years ago, Professor Robert Solow, is here tonight. That is a pleasure, an honor,
a joy, and something of a difficulty for anyone wanting to talk about productivity and its growth in the presence of the master. The reason the
rate of productivity
growth matters so much is that it is a basic determinant of the rate of growth of average
income per capita over long periods.1 To understand that one needs to know only the trick of calculating how long it takes for a
growing economy to double. A good rule of thumb for calculating the time it takes labor productivity (or anything else that is growing) to
double can be calculated by dividing 70 by the growth rate. When
labor productivity was growing at 3-1/4 percent per
year-during the 25 years from 1948 to 1973-it took 22 years for labor productivity to double. Looking again at Figure 1, in
the 42 years from 1974 to 2016, when labor productivity was growing on average at a rate of 1-3/4 percent, it
would have taken approximately 41 years for labor productivity to double. There is a vast difference
between the prospects facing the young in an economy where incomes per capita are doubling every
22 years and an economy in which incomes are on average doubling only every 41 years.
Responses to Capitalism Kritik
Perms
Afropessimism
Perm: Do Both – Marxism is unable to theorize race, Afropessimism is a necessary
intervention
Annie Olaloku-Teriba, student activist, July 2018, “Afro-Pessimism and the (Un)Logic of Anti-
Blackness,” Historical Materialism, http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/articles/afro-pessimism-and-
unlogic-anti-blackness (accessed 5/8/20)
Seemingly without an economic base, racism has increasingly been treated as a purely social relation;
distinct and extricable from class. Consequently, Marxist scholars have instead typically approached the
question of ‘race’ through resistance, emphasising solidarity as instances in which the barrier of ‘race’
has been overcome to achieve working-class unity. This has meant that an interrogation of the crises to
which racialisation responds has been largely left by the wayside. It is into this conceptual space that
Afro-pessimist literature inserts itself. The mistake of this Marxist orthodoxy, Afro-pessimists argue, is in
its attempt to subsume an ostensibly ‘different’ phenomenon of white supremacy under the banner of
capitalism. Thus, it argues, race belongs to the realm of the structurally determined, a global juggernaut
organised around a hierarchy of morphological groups which provides the ‘real’ antagonism of
modernity. As Frank B. Wilderson III intimates, ‘the black subject reveals marxism’s inability to think
white supremacy as the base and, in so doing, calls into question marxism’s claim to elaborate a
comprehensive, or in the words of Antonio Gramsci, “decisive” antagonism’.[29] The United States, he
argues, ‘is constructed at the intersection of both a capitalist and white supremacist matrix’ but
Marxism is impotent in the face of the latter.[30] It is taken for granted that this can be generalised
globally.
Anti-Racism
Perm: Do Both – racism is the logic of capitalism, it is not possible to oppose
capitalism without making the struggle against racism a priority
Peter Hudis, Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Oakton Community College and author of
Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, July 2018, “Racism and the Logic of Capitalism,”
Historical Materialism, http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/articles/racism-and-logic-capitalism
(accessed 5/8/20)
Marx was clearly cognisant of the peculiar role played by race in American slavery – and he was no less
aware of how integral race-based slavery was to capitalism’s origins and development as a world
system. But does this mean that racism is integral to the logic of capital? Might racism be a mere
exogenous factor that is only built into specific moments of capitalism’s contingent history? To be sure,
it is possible to conceive of the possibility that capitalism could have emerged and developed as a world
system without its utilising race and racism. But historical materialism does not concern itself with what
could have occurred, but with what did occur and continues to occur. According to Marx, without race-
based slavery ‘you have no modern industry’ and no ‘world trade’ – and no modern capitalism. Hence,
the logic of capital is in many respects inseparable from its historical development. I am referring not
only to the factors that led to the formation of the world market but to the role played by race and
racism in impeding proletarian class consciousness, which has functioned as an essential component in
enabling capital accumulation to be actualised. Marx was keenly aware of this, as seen in his writings on
the US Civil War and the impact of anti-Irish prejudice upon the English workers’ movement.[13] He took
the trouble to address these issues in Capital itself, which famously declared ‘labour in a white skin
cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.’[14] Racism is not and never has been an
epiphenomenal characteristic of capitalism. It is integral to its very development. The time is therefore
long past for holding onto such notions as ‘there is no race question outside the class question’[15] or
‘the race issue, while important, is secondary to class’. Since capitalism was shaped, from its inception,
by racial factors, it is not possible to effectively oppose it without making the struggle against racism a
priority. And for this very reason, the present situation also makes it increasingly anachronistic to hold
onto forms of identity politics that elide issues of class and a critique of capital. The effort to elevate
ethnic identity and solidarity at the expense of a direct confrontation with capitalism is inherently self-
defeating, since the latter is responsible for the perpetration of racism and the marginalisation of
peoples of colour in the first place. Since race and racism help create, reproduce and reinforce an array
of hierarchies that are rooted in class domination, subjective affirmations of identity that are divorced
from directly challenging capital will inevitably lose their critical edge and impact over the course of
time.
Perm: Do Both – only by focusing on the particularity of antiblackness can we form a

universal struggle to surmount the contradictions of capitalism
(accessed 5/8/20)
Given the aborted and unfinished revolutions of his time and since, Fanon’s insistence on neither getting
stuck in the particular – that is, pride in one’s race and ethnicity (the mark of identity politics) – nor
skipping over it in the name of affirming an abstract, colour-blind advocacy of ‘proletarian revolution’,
takes on new significance. Hubert Harrison’s conception (voiced in the 1920s) that struggles of African-
Americans against racism represent the ‘touchstone’ of American society[39] – later re-cast in Raya
Dunayevskaya’s Marxist-Humanist conception of Black masses as the vanguard of US freedom
struggles[40] – reflects a similar understanding of the relation of race and class to that which we find
within Fanon’s lifelong effort to grasp their dialectical interconnection. In some respects, the debate
between Fanon and Sartre is being replayed today, as seen in the impatience of some on the left who
urge anti-racist activists to ‘get to the real issue’ – as if that were the state of the economy. This is not to
deny that the economy is of central importance. But so is the psychic impact of racism and
discrimination upon the inner-life of the individual. It is only by approaching those struggling for
freedom from the particular nexus-point that defines their lived experience as potentially revolutionary
subjects that we can work out the difficult question of how to surmount the matrix of contradictions
that define modern capitalism. Just as there is no road to the universal that gets stuck in the particular,
there is no reaching-it that rushes over the particular.
Feminism
Perm: Do Both – anticapitalist critique of the ability of a worker to consent opens
space for radical alternatives to carceral feminism inside and outside legal channels
Koshka Duff, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham, July 2018, “Feminism
Against Crime Control,” Historical Materialism, http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/articles/feminism-
against-crime-control (accessed 5/8/20)
Questioning the presuppositions of the debate’s usual set-piece, I have argued that taking sexual
violence seriously, as per the radical feminist analysis, need not entail support for state-power-wielding
strategies. On the contrary, following through that analysis shows real existing liberal states in a pretty
dim light. The punitive state emerges as not merely an inadequate protector, but as itself a perpetrator
– perhaps the biggest single perpetrator – of sexual violence. An advocate of Governance Feminism
might say that this simply adds ammunition to MacKinnon’s critique of the state as ‘male’. Rather than
telling against Governance Feminism, they might say, it shows the urgent need to reform the liberal
state ‘from within’. Of course, there is no simple dichotomy between within and without. To target our
efforts at tempering or counter-balancing the abjectifying powers of police, border, and prison officials
would already be a significant and welcome departure from the trajectory of feminism-as-crime-control,
even while we might work in part through legal channels. I have suggested, though, that MacKinnon’s
account of ‘coercive circumstances’, considered in relation to the capitalist order of (exploitative) work
and (vastly unequal) property, gives us cause to be sceptical about the liberal state’s capacity for
positive transformation. That does not vitiate all strategies that work ‘with’ or ‘within’ the state. They
may create vital breathing space for more radical alternatives. It does require, though, that we be clear-
sighted about their limitations.
Perm: Do Both - Anticapitalism needs to be feminist or problems of sexism will

reemerge
Lydia Cirillo, Feminist Activist and member of the Fourth International and founder of feminist journal
Purple Notebook, 2007, “Feminism of the Anti-Capitalist Left”, International Viewpoint,
http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1308 (accessed 6/11/18)
However, we must renounce the chronological illusion and not believe that we have almost secured
emancipation. If it is true that, where formal equality has been achieved, more complex tasks await
feminism, it is also true that battles already won, problems apparently already resolved and archaic
relations can re-emerge to face us. Violence against women is the clearest example and its greater
visibility has different and complementary explanations. Nowadays, women more frequently speak out
against situations which they put up with in earlier years, public opinion becomes increasingly
scandalised by matters that used to be laughed off; men react, as often occurs in power relations, with a
combination of backward outlooks and punitive violence. Anticapitalist left feminism must not only refer
to the needs and aspirations of proletarian women; it must take on the demands of the entire female
sex. Naturally, since our intervention targets certain milieus, it is obvious that the demands of women
workers, immigrants, unemployed women, female students, women in left parties, movements and
trade unions will be in the forefront.
Perm: Do Both – a feminist critique of power imbalances in consent exposes the

ideological and material constraints on freedom by capitalism
Koshka Duff, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham, July 2018, “Feminism
Against Crime Control,” Historical Materialism, http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/articles/feminism-
against-crime-control (accessed 5/8/20)
The point can be put quite schematically. Liberalism means liberal capitalism; the liberal state maintains
a capitalist economy. Capitalism is based on wage-labour, that is, the sale of labour power as a
commodity. I sell my labour power to someone else, who (if all goes well) exploits me to make a profit.
The reason I sell them my labour power is because otherwise I don't have any way of living, or certainly
of living decently (a core function of the state being to prevent me from using things I cannot pay for).
The reason I sell my labour power to them, and not vice versa, is because of a crucial disparity between
us: they own the means of make useful things, things to satisfy human wants and needs, while I do not. I
therefore contract – ‘consent’ – to be exploited by them, my other option being to starve on the streets.
[65] This is, of course, the ‘double freedom’ to which Marx satirically refers: [The free worker] must be
free in the double sense, that as a free individual he can dispose of his labour-power as his own
commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, i.e. he is rid of them, he is
free of all the objects needed for the realisation [Verwirklichung] of his labour-power.[66] Now, it is
crucial for liberalism that the labour contract remain valid, and that I count as free when I ‘consent’ to it.
No matter how much any particular liberal might want to regulate markets, or support state
redistribution, they cannot give up on this, otherwise they would be giving up on the claim that we
could, in principle, reach an acceptable level of freedom under capital. Then they would no longer be a
liberal in the relevant sense (although they might be holding to the more emancipatory strands of
liberalism’s contradictory inheritance).[67] Maintaining the validity of the wage labour contract,
however, depends precisely on ignoring those material and ideological constraints on freedom exposed
by MacKinnon’s critique of the patriarchal concept of consent. The basic power imbalance between me
and my would-be boss (constituted by our owning and not owning means of production, respectively,
and my subsequent dependence on him for survival) would be enough, on her account, to vitiate much
of the normative force of my reluctant submission. That's before we even start talking about ideology
and social construction, about the ways in which productive, compliant capitalist subjects are moulded.
Prison Abolition
Perm: Do Both, the plan is a non-reformist reform to reduce the power of an
oppressive system, harmonizing well with anticapitalist traditions to build a new
world in the shell of the old
Dan Berger et al, associate professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington at
Bothell, August 24, 2017, “What Abolitionists Do,” Jacobin,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/prison-abolition-reform-mass-incarceration (accessed 4/29/20)
Critics often dismiss prison abolition without a clear understanding of what it even is. Some on the Left,
most recently Roger Lancaster in Jacobin, describe the goal of abolishing prisons as a fever-dream
demand to destroy all prisons tomorrow. But Lancaster’s disregard for abolition appears based on a
reading of a highly idiosyncratic and unrepresentative group of abolitionist thinkers and evinces little
knowledge of decades of abolitionist organizing and its powerful impacts. To us, people with a combined
several decades of experience in the prison abolition movement, abolition is both a lodestar and a
practical necessity. Central to abolitionist work are the many fights for non-reformist reforms — those
measures that reduce the power of an oppressive system while illuminating the system’s inability to
solve the crises it creates. The late Rose Braz, a longtime staffer and member of Critical Resistance
emphasized this point in a 2008 interview. “A prerequisite to seeking any social change is the naming of
it,” she said. “In other words, even though the goal we seek may be far away, unless we name it and
fight for it today, it will never come.” This is the starting point of abolition, connecting a radical critique
of prisons and other forms of state violence with a broader transformative vision. These strategies and
tactics harmonize with, inspire, and are inspired by many other left traditions. Socialists do not fight for
trade unions in order to institutionalize capitalist social relations or build an aristocracy of labor. They do
so in order to create durable structures that undermine the power of employers to exploit workers. And
they do so with a radical humanist tradition in mind as well — to make actual people’s lives better, to
overcome sexual harassment, to reduce workplace injuries, to build solidarity among workers, and,
ideally, “to create the new world in the shell of the old.”
Perm: Do Both – improvement of people’s material conditions beyond, before, and

after they are criminalized is part of the abolitionist mission
Abolitionists know that most people who are incarcerated will eventually be released from prison.
Thousands of people are released from prisons and jails every single day. This is not something that we
have to imagine as a goal for the future. It is a reality that pushes all of us to consider what conditions
will support people’s freedom once they return. Most abolitionists trouble the concept/myth of
“reentry” with an understanding that many people were marginalized from society well before their
incarceration. This strengthens a commitment to ameliorate the conditions for all of those in our society
who live on the periphery and beyond, before and after they are criminalized. There are many critical
questions to ask about abolitionist horizons, the traps of carceral reform, and the barriers we face to
substantive change. There is an urgent need for robust debate on the Left about how to dismantle the
carceral state and what will replace it. But debate must engage what exists in on-the-ground organizing
rather than what exists on bumper stickers or social media.
Perm: Do the plan, then the alt – the punitive turn comes before the neoliberal turn
Roger Lancaster, professor of anthropology and cultural studies at George Mason University, August
18, 2017, “How to End Mass Incarceration,” Jacobin, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/mass-
incarceration-prison-abolition-policing (accessed 4/29/20)
In any case, arguments that link neoliberalism and mass incarceration do not match the actual historical
trajectory or the varied political currents in play. The punitive turn, as I have sketched it, began in the
mid-to-late 1960s, but neoliberal policies did not begin gaining ascendency until the late 1970s.
Certainly, mass incarceration has had large economic effects. Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett
estimated that, during the 1990s, America’s zeal for incarceration shaved two percentage points off
unemployment figures. Roughly 4 percent of the civilian labor force either works for the penal system or
works to put people in prison. If one includes private security positions and workers who monitor or
guard other laborers, the results are striking: in an increasingly garrisonized economy, one out of every
four or five American laborers is employed in what Samuel Bowles and Arjun Jayadev call “guard labor.”
No doubt, the American variant of neoliberalism used these facts to help establish itself. Indeed, one
might conclude that the punitive turn, with its disdain for rule-breakers, losers, and outcasts, paved the
way for the neoliberal turn, with its love of the market.
Answers to Links
Prison Abolition
No link – abolitionist reforms reduce rather than strengthen the scale and scope of
policing, imprisonment, and surveillance to shrink the state’s capacity for violence
Lancaster claims that “with evangelical zeal, abolitionists insist that we must choose between abolition
and reform, while discounting reform as a viable option.” While one could find “evangelical zeal” among
any political movement, it is inaccurate to cast abolitionists as opposed to incremental change. Rather,
abolitionists have insisted on reforms that reduce rather than strengthen the scale and scope of policing,
imprisonment, and surveillance. As Lancaster well knows, the history of the American carceral state is
one in which reforms have often grown the state’s capacity to punish: reforms of indeterminate
sentencing led to mandatory minimums, the death penalty to life without parole, sexual violence against
gender-nonconforming people gave rise to “gender-responsive” prisons. Instead of pushing to adopt the
Finnish model of incarceration — itself a far-fetched enterprise — abolitionists have engaged these
contradictions by pursuing reforms that shrink the state’s capacity for violence. Abolitionist groups have
often led fights for better conditions, connecting them to more transformative political possibilities. And
the pragmatic radicalism of abolitionists has won tangible victories. Starting in 1999, activists with
California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance fought the further growth of the system.
While California built and filled twenty-three new prisons between 1983 and 1999, the state has opened
only two institutions since (one of them a prison hospital). As the state has shifted tack to emphasize jail
construction — partly in response to this organizing — abolitionists have turned their focus to the
county level as well.
No link – capitalism and incarceration are related, but whatever intensifies capitalism
does not necessarily intensify incarceration
Roger Lancaster, professor of anthropology and cultural studies at George Mason University, August
18, 2017, “How to End Mass Incarceration,” Jacobin, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/mass-
incarceration-prison-abolition-policing (accessed 4/29/20)
Scholars who study the penal system have developed a large body of work connecting mass
incarceration to neoliberal economic policies of deregulation and privatization. Some posit a neoliberal
cause and a punitive effect, while others argue that deregulation and privatization exacerbated social
inequalities and therefore fostered a fear of crime, ultimately producing more surveillance, policing, and
incarceration. Bernard Harcourt provides a broader view, meticulously examining how classical liberal
and neoliberal theories approach policing and punishment as market functions and regulators. In my
view, however, he never quite demonstrates a strong connection between such models and present-day
lawmaking, penalties, and practices. No doubt, these analyses express an elemental truth about
capitalism and coercion. “The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist,” as an
apologist for both once put it. But the language that describes society’s humdrum workings cannot
explain systemic changes or historic shifts. Nor should we assume that whatever intensifies capitalism
will also intensify coercive tactics. After all, neoliberalism is a global phenomenon, but the punitive state
remains distinctly American, at least among developed democracies.
Private Prisons
No link – profits merely exaggerate the punishment paradigm which enforces a racist
social order
David A. Liburd, doctoral candidate, September 2017, “The New American Slavery: Capitalism and the
Ghettoization of American Prisons as a Profitable Corporate Business American Prisons as a Profitable
Corporate Business,” City University of New York, https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=3331&context=gc_etds (Accessed 4/30/20)
Typical critique of private prisons is that in order to gain moderate savings, private prisons cut back on
staff costs and training. Research proves that privatized prisons offer less salary to officers; time of
training is limited; and there is fewer staff. This has resulted in frequent employment turnover, along
with increased inmate assaults. The pledge of significant savings falls significantly short. The
corporations that build and manage private prisons have a vested financial interest to continue the
progression of mass incarceration. Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group, the two
largest corporations involved in the prison business, invest a great deal in lobbying for punishing
criminal justice policies and make huge monetary contributions to help finance political campaigns that
promise to aid the reliance on prisons. Issues such as these have caused moral philosopher David
Boonin’s determination that it is the punishment paradigm itself that is morally flawed (Boonin, 2008).
As Buchanan writes, “good economics is better than no economics . . . [but] applied within a bad or
misguided conception of legal process need not promote the structural, procedural changes that may be
urgently required”(Liebhafsky,1976). It may not be the existence of profits and incentives, which sully
the moral legitimacy of private incarceration practices, but rather, that profits exaggerate the negative
moral qualities of the presumed institutional environment already set in place by legislative fiat. Now,
the carceral system had already operated as a secondary institution for social order preservation and
labor control in America during an earlier conversion of regimes and racial control, that of slavery and
Jim Crow in the South. On the day after emancipation was proclaimed, U.S prisons in the south turned
black dramatically as “thousands of ex-slaves were being arrested, tried, and convicted for acts that in
the past had been dealt with by the master alone” (Oshinsky, 1996). Arrests were made for being jobless
and for non-compliance of the condescending rules of racial etiquette. Then came “convict leasing”
initiated by formerly confederate states in reaction to the moral panic of “Negro crime” that offered the
twofold benefit of generating phenomenal resources for the state treasuries, resources that could
supply ample amounts of labor to farm, build, lay railroad tracks, clean, and mine under brutal
conditions. “This is not a figure of speech: the annual mortality rate for convicts reached 16 percent in
Mississippi in the 1880s, where not a single leased convict ever lived long enough to serve a sentence of
ten years or more. Hundreds of black children, many as young as six years old, were leased by the state
to the benefit of planters, businessmen and financiers, to toil in conditions that even some patrician
southerners found shameful and a stain upon our manhood” (Oshinsky, 1996). Prison labor in the guise
of convict leasing and later the chain gang, participated in making the New South economically
prosperous as it “reconciled modernization with the continuation of racial domination” (Lichtenstein,
1993).
No link – the profits for private prisons or prison labor are tiny, the criminal justice
system was built to maintain a racial caste system not to benefit corporations
Allison Bunker, Carolina Justice Policy Center intern, January 10, 2019, “Are Corporations the Cause for
Incarceration? No, but Capitalism Might Be.” Carolina Justice Policy Center,
https://www.cjpcenter.org/are-corporations-the-cause-for-incarceration-no-but-capitalism-might-be/
(accessed 5/11/20)
The practices of private prisons and prison labor are detestable, but they are not very widespread. In
2015, only 8% of people incarcerated in state and federal prisons were in privately owned facilities.
Since 2012 the private prison population had also declined by 8%, in comparison to a 5% drop in total
prison population since 2009. If private prisons were the sole reason for incarcerating people, why
would we lock up the other 92% of inmates? Furthermore, when you follow the money being dumped
into the justice system; it does not predominantly land in the hands of private interests. Each year 182
billion dollars is spent incarcerating people both by the government and families of those incarcerated.
Only 2% of that is spent on private prisons, and only .37 billion is collected by those prisons as profit. The
amount paid to people employed in government owned facilities is more than one hundred times the
profits of private prisons. Similarly, prison labor isn’t very predominant. Two of the largest groups that
incarcerated people are employed via are Federal Prison Industries (FPI), also known as UNICOR and
Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP). FPI is a government owned manufacturing
company that as of 2016 employed a little over 12,000 people in 83 prison factories. From PIECP’s
second quarter report in 2018, they currently employ 4,977 people. While we can’t know if these
numbers encompass all people incarcerated, they would suggest that less than one percent of the 2.3
million people incarcerated in the United States are working for a prison labor corporation.
Furthermore, the FPI mostly contracts for the government, not corporations, and has not been
financially successful. Meanwhile PIECP’s largest project only employs 220 people, and they do not have
any other projects exceeding 150 people employed for a company. In the scheme of corporations these
projects are small and likely not meaningful for their bottom line. The justice system was not built as
broken as it is to benefit a few corporations, it was built to maintain a lower racial caste of people, both
while incarcerated and long after they are released. Even after they leave prison, formerly incarcerated
people are labeled “criminals”, stripped of their voting rights, and under the increased scrutiny of parole
that threatens to reincarcerate them for minor mistakes. Under these conditions the prison system
succeeds in creating, and maintain, a lower racial caste which enables our neoliberal, capitalist system.
Prison Slavery
Turn – blaming capitalists for the exploitation of prison labor falsely absolves
governments
Genevieve LeBaron, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield and
Chair of the Yale University Working Group on Modern Slavery, April 23, 2015, “Slaves of the state:
American prison labour past and present,” Open Democracy,
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/slaves-of-state-american-prison-
labour-past-and-present/ (accessed 4/27/20)
Just as in past, prison labour today is about far more than money. Prison continues to play a central role
in anchoring the increasingly unequal and highly racialised social order that characterises contemporary
US society. The majority of prisoners continue to be predominantly working class people of colour who
have been incarcerated for minor offenses, such as theft, selling drugs, or property related crimes. If
imprisonment is, as Loic Wacquant has described it, ‘the punitive regulation of poverty,’ then prison
labour is one of the most corporeal forms of neoliberal discipline in existence today. It draws in the
unemployed, disenfranchised, and discriminated against, trapping them into disciplines of precarious
waged labour. In keeping with historical precedents, the key architects and beneficiaries of prison labour
remain federal and state governments. It has long been clear who retains the ultimate ownership of
prisoners’ labour, with the Virginia Supreme Court declaring in 1871 that prisoners were ‘slaves of the
state.’ This premise hasn’t fundamentally changed since. Attempts to attribute all blame to profit-driven
corporations wrongly absolve governments of their primary responsibility in the exploitation of prison
labour.
Turn – prison labor has always been about states as a key technology to generate the
power and revenue necessary to impose the capitalist social order and remove
resistance to capitalism
Genevieve LeBaron, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield and
Chair of the Yale University Working Group on Modern Slavery, April 23, 2015, “Slaves of the state:
American prison labour past and present,” Open Democracy,
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/slaves-of-state-american-prison-
labour-past-and-present/ (accessed 4/27/20)
The earliest wave occurred across Northern states in the early to mid nineteenth century, where the rise
of factory work and urbanisation was resulting in labour scarcities and worker rebellions. Prisoners were
put to work in large-scale industrial factories to fulfil capitalists’ need for a productive and disciplined
labour force. Prison factories during this period were penal-social laboratories. ‘The whip made men
living machines’, while managers experimented with different divisions of labour and violent methods of
discipline. As historian Rebecca McLennan has argued, these prison factories played an important role in
quelling widespread resistance to the new industrial social order by habituating them into the disciplines
of waged labour. The second and overlapping wave of prison labour—the convict lease system—
emerged in the Southern states in the wake of the formal abolition of plantation slavery in 1865.
American states leased large blocks of prisoners to private companies, which forced prisoners to pick
cotton, mine coal, and lay railroads. Far from being a mere substitute for slavery, historians like David
Oshinsky have argued that this system of unfree labour was ‘worse than slavery’: it was a brutal strategy
to re-appropriate the labour of former slaves and their children. With convict death rates of over 40% in
some states, prison labour powerfully and publicly reinforced a racially polarised social order. Both of
these systems of prison labour were enormously profitable. According to one study, in 1865-66,
‘American prisoners made goods or performed work worth almost $29 million—a sum equivalent, as a
relative share of Gross Domestic Product, to over $30 billion in 2005 dollars.’ The role of prison labour in
US capitalism has never been just about corporate profits. The key architect and beneficiary of these
prison labour systems have always been states. Prison labour has helped generate the power and
revenue necessary to impose a social order ruled by money and markets. At the same time, the prison
system upholds the market order imposed by governments, incarcerating those who resist or cannot
find a livelihood within it. High numbers of prisoners have been incarcerated for property crime, theft,
or other attempts to create a livelihood outside of low-paid, precarious labour markets. Viewed in this
light, prison labour has historically played an essential disciplinary role, both for individual prisoners and
for capitalist expansion more broadly. It also helped to uphold racialised and class-based social orders
on which economic ‘growth’ was predicated in both the North and the South, until it was outlawed (until
1979) during the Great Depression.
Broken Windows
Broken Windows is key – it gives ideological justification for the police to exclude
affluent areas from scrutiny
R. Joshua Scannell, adjunct instructor in Sociology and Women and Gender Studies at Hunter College,
August 29, 2016, “Broken Windows, Broken Code,” Real Life, https://reallifemag.com/broken-windows-
broken-code/ (accessed 4/21/20)
When CompStat logs arrest information in a server and overlays it on a map, that is not statistics; it is a
work summary report. The “data” collected reflects existing police protocol and strategies and are
reflective of police officers’ intuitive sense of what places needs to be policed, and what bodies need to
be targeted, and not much else. New York City cops don’t arrest investment bankers for snorting their
weight in cocaine because they are not doing vertical patrols in Murray Hill high rises. They are not
doing vertical patrols in Murray Hill high rises not simply because the police exist to protect rather than
persecute the wealthy, but because they have labored for 20 years under a theory of policing that
effectively excludes affluent areas from routine scrutiny. It so much as says so in the name: These high-
rises don’t have broken windows. Similarly, the National Center for Women and Policing has cited two
studies that show that “at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence,”
contrasted with 10 percent among the general population. Those incidents tend not to show up on
CompStat reports.
Turn – broken windows policing is key to the reconfiguring of space at the pace of
capital’s needs
Christina Heatherton, assistant professor of American Studies at Barnard College, 2018, “The Broken
Windows of Rosa Ramos: Neoliberal Policing Regimes of Imminent Violability,” Feminists Rethink the
Neoliberal State, pp. 165-195, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1pwt9qk.9 (accessed 4/23/20)
Broken windows policing, this chapter argues, is a key mechanism through which the social volatility,
necessary for neoliberal regimes of accumulation, is maintained. Indeed, broken windows policing has
flourished within and also has furthered the volatile economic context of neoliberalism. As a specific
regime of capital accumulation, neoliberalism is characterized by a contradictory temporality: the
immediacy of the present (short-term investments) and the potential of unrealized futures (circulations
of fictitious capital and speculative investments). This disjuncture generates ceaseless social and spatial
instability. The dictates of the neoliberal political economy constantly fall out of alignment with the
collective needs and desires of the people whose labors, rents, consumption, and compliance enable it
to function. Neoliberalism therefore requires a method of regulation that can discipline bodies and
reconfigure space at the pace of capital’s needs. Broken windows policing is that mobile practice: a
portable logic capable of reconfiguring space in the name of regulating disorder. It builds on and
expands already existing race, class, and gendered exclusions, renovates them and intensifies them
towards new ends. In an era of mass incarceration, this doctrine has transformed people into the
walking warrants of neoliberal cities. The presiding social logic of neoliberalism, as other essays in this
volume explain, does not imply a dismantling of government but rather constitutes a specific and
strategic technique of governing As the co-author of the broken windows theory, James Q. Wilson has
similarly suggested, broken windows policing is better understood as a type of broken windows
government. Accordingly, broken windows must be regarded beyond the realm of policing procedure
and be understood in its capacity to abet local regimes of accumulation and to reinforce governing
functions of the reconfigured neoliberal state. This chapter argues that broken windows policing has
emerged as the social regulating mechanism used by cities and local states to discipline bodies,
refashion public space, and render cities suitable for regimes of neoliberal capital accumulation. It is a
predictive model of policing appropriate for an era of speculative capital.
Critical Race
Racism is integral to capitalism – efforts by people of color to challenge racism serve
as the catalyst for challenging class relations, race must come first
(accessed 5/8/20)
Most important, Fanon held that while race is a product of class relations, which serves as their mask, it
is not a secondary factor. While race reflects class formations, the reflection is not a one-way mirror
image. The reflection is taken up in consciousness and performs a sort of doubling by mirroring its origin
at the same time as reshaping it. Determinations of reflection are not passive but actively
reconstructive. And since racial determinations are often not superstructural but integral to the logic of
capital accumulation, efforts by people of colour to challenge them can serve as the catalyst for
targeting and challenging class relations. Whereas racial identity is the major focus in Black Skin, White
Masks, national identity takes centre stage in The Wretched of the Earth. But the structure of Fanon’s
argument remains very much the same. In both works, the path to the universal – a world of mutual
recognitions – proceeds through the particular struggles of those battling racial, ethnic or national
discrimination. This separates Fanon’s new humanism from an abstract humanism that skips over the
lived experience of actual subjects of revolt.
Race comes before capitalism – racial hatred is the necessary prerequisite for
neoliberal policing
Christina Heatherton, assistant professor of American Studies at Barnard College, 2018, “The Broken
Windows of Rosa Ramos: Neoliberal Policing Regimes of Imminent Violability,” Feminists Rethink the
Neoliberal State, pp. 165-195, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1pwt9qk.9 (accessed 4/23/20)
The implementation of neoliberal policies required discursive practices to render people simultaneously
less worthy of the state’s shrunken largesse and more deserving of its expanded punitive capacities.
Accordingly, this era saw a shift in sensibilities, whereby the debased conditions of poverty,
homelessness, and unemployment, went from grievable to contemptible. As unemployment grew,
wages continued to stagnate, poverty increased, social services eroded, incarceration rates skyrocketed
throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and popular outrage was redirected towards racialized targets. Rising
conservative reaction coalesced in this period, configuring immigrants, Black communities, welfare
recipients, queer populations, and the homeless as the culprits of urban decline. As immigration
increased, particularly as a result of globalization and U.S.-backed wars in Central America, nativist anger
was stoked against “people coming to take American jobs.” “Welfare queens,” a racist and sexist
moniker for imagined African American women supposedly getting rich on undeserved state subsidies,
encapsulated the vengeance at the heart of the neoliberal ideology. Such constructs incurred the wrath
of people who felt their country was being stolen from them. While white working-class people were,
and continue to be, the largest recipients of welfare and other forms of state aid, this zero-sum
imaginary reconfigured social provisions as unearned racial theft. The neoliberal restructuring of the
state, and the slashing of social services, was therefore popularly received, not with anger, but with
visceral joy.ud
Answers to Impacts
No War
Capitalism develops a commercial peace, as war disrupts trade, destroys capital, and
kills consumers. Empirics prove.
Matthew Shadle, Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Marymount University in
Arlington, Virginia, June 14, 2014, “Capitalism and War: Are They Linked?” Catholic Moral Theology,
https://catholicmoraltheology.com/capitalism-and-war-are-they-linked/ (accessed 8/27/19)
Although it is certainly the case that many industries, and in particular the arms industry, profit from
war, this theory fails for one crucial reason: The number of businesses and industries that will suffer as a
result of war will always far outnumber those who profit from it, through the disruption of trade, the
destruction of capital, and the loss of consumers through war-related deaths. This theory provides no
good explanation for why war profiteers would have more influence on government decision-making
than the much larger number of businesses who will lose out as a result of war. Of course, a government
might give inordinate influence to corporations that benefit from war, but precisely because they are
drawn to war for other reasons. Is there in fact a link between the capitalist economy and war? In their
2001 book Triangulating Peace, the political scientists Bruce Russett and John R. Oneal provide empirical
evidence that the presence of the thick economic ties between nations fostered by global capitalism (as
well as democratic governance and shared participation in multilateral institutions) greatly decreases
the likelihood of war between those nations. Therefore, to an extent, Adam Smith was right. Worldwide,
the incidence of war and the number of war casualties has declined over the past few decades, precisely
during the time of U.S. liberal political and economic hegemony. This decline can partly be explained by
the commercial peace described by Russett and Oneal, although other factors certainly play a role, as
well.
Cap Solves Poverty

Capitalism is necessary to lift people out of poverty
Ricardo Hausmann, Director of the Center for International Development and Professor of Practice of
Economic Development at Harvard University, August 21, 2015, “Does capitalism cause poverty?”
World Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/08/does-capitalism-cause-poverty/
(accessed 8/27/19)
We now know that as the ink was drying on the Communist Manifesto, wages in Europe and the United
States were beginning a 160-year-long rise, making workers part of the middle class, with cars,
mortgages, pensions, and petty bourgeois concerns. Politicians today promise to create jobs – or more
opportunities to be exploited by capital – not to take over the means of production. Capitalism could
achieve this transformation because the reorganization of production allowed for an unprecedented
increase in productivity. The division of labor within and across firms, which Adam Smith had already
envisioned in 1776 as the engine of growth, allowed for a division of knowhow among individuals that
permitted the whole to know more than the parts and form ever-growing networks of exchange and
collaboration. A modern corporation has experts in production, design, marketing, sales, finance,
accounting, human resource management, logistics, taxes, contracts, and so on. Modern production is
not just an accumulation of buildings and equipment owned by Das Kapital and operated mechanically
by fungible workers. Instead, it is a coordinated network of people that possess different types of Das
Human-Kapital. In the developed world, capitalism did transform almost everyone into a wage laborer,
but it also lifted them out of poverty and made them more prosperous than Marx could have imagined.
Capitalism is necessary to lift humanity out of poverty

Steven Horwitz, Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise in the Department of Economics at Ball
State University, June 9, 2016, “Capitalism Is Good for the Poor,” Foundation for Economic Education,
https://fee.org/articles/capitalism-is-good-for-the-poor/ (accessed 8/27/19)
Nothing has done more to lift humanity out of poverty than the market economy. This claim is true
whether we are looking at a time span of decades or of centuries. The number of people worldwide
living on less than about two dollars per day today is less than half of what it was in 1990. The biggest
gains in the fight against poverty have occurred in countries that have opened up their markets, such as
China and India. If we look over the longer historical period, we can see that the trends today are just
the continuation of capitalism’s victories in beating back poverty. For most of human history, we lived in
a world of a few haves and lots of have-nots. That slowly began to change with the advent of capitalism
and the Industrial Revolution. As economic growth took off and spread throughout the population, it
created our own world in the West in which there are a whole bunch of haves and a few have-more-
and-betters. For example, the percentage of American households below the poverty line who have
basic appliances has grown steadily over the last few decades, with poor families in 2005 being more
likely to own things like a clothes dryer, dishwasher, refrigerator, or air conditioner than the average
household was in 1971. And consumer items that didn’t even exist back then, such as cell phones, were
owned by half of poor households in 2005 and are owned by a substantial majority of them today.
Capitalism has also made poor people’s lives far better by reducing infant and child mortality rates, not
to mention maternal death rates during childbirth, and by extending life expectancies by decades.
Capitalist innovation allows the poor to live lives of comfort and dignity
Steven Horwitz, Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise in the Department of Economics at Ball
State University, June 9, 2016, “Capitalism Is Good for the Poor,” Foundation for Economic Education,
https://fee.org/articles/capitalism-is-good-for-the-poor/ (accessed 8/27/19)
The reality is that the rich have always lived well historically, as for centuries they could commandeer
human labor to attend to their every need. In a precapitalist world, the poor had no hope of upward
mobility or of relief from the endless physical drudgery that barely kept them alive. Today, the poor in
capitalist countries live like kings, thanks mostly to the freeing of labor and the ability to accumulate
capital that makes that labor more productive and enriches even the poorest. The falling cost of what
were once luxuries and are now necessities, driven by the competitive market and its profit and loss
signals, has brought labor-saving machines to the masses. When profit-seeking and innovation became
acceptable behavior for the bourgeoisie, the horn of plenty brought forth its bounty, and even the
poorest shared in that wealth. Once people no longer needed permission to innovate, and once the
value of new inventions was judged by the improvements they made to the lives of the masses in the
form of profit and loss, the poor began to live lives of comfort and dignity. These changes are not, as
some would say, about technology. After all, the Soviets had great scientists but could not channel that
knowledge into material comfort for their poor. And it’s not about natural resources, which is obvious
today as resource-poor Hong Kong is among the richest countries in the world thanks to capitalism,
while Venezuelan socialism has destroyed that resource-rich country. Inventions only become
innovations when the right institutions exist to make them improve the lives of the masses. That is what
capitalism did and continues to do every single day. And that’s why capitalism has been so good for the
poor.
Answers to Alts
Revolution
Their strategy is 100 years old, revolution is impossible in a world of mass surveillance
and coercion. Only gradualist politics working with the state can weaken capitalism
Vivek Chibber, professor of sociology at New York University, December 5, 2017, “Our Road to
Power,” Jacobin, https://jacobinmag.com/2017/12/our-road-to-power (accessed 8/27/19)
The Russian road, as it were, was for many parties a viable one. But starting in the 1950s, openings for
this kind of strategy narrowed. And today, it seems entirely hallucinatory to think about socialism
through this lens. This is indubitably true in the advanced capitalist world, but it also holds for much of
the South. Today, the state has infinitely greater legitimacy with the population than European states
did a century ago. Further, its coercive power, its power of surveillance, and the ruling class’s internal
cohesiveness give the social order a stability that is orders of magnitude greater than it had in 1917.
What that means is, while we can allow for and perhaps hope for the emergence of revolutionary
conditions where state breakdown is really on the cards, we can’t build a political strategy around it as
an expectation — we can’t take it as the Left’s fundamental strategic perspective. Today, the political
stability of the state is a reality that the Left has to acknowledge. What is in crisis right now is the
neoliberal model of capitalism, not capitalism itself. If this is so, then the lessons that the Russian
experience has to offer — as a model of socialist transition — are limited. Our strategic perspective has
to downplay the centrality of a revolutionary rupture and navigate a more gradualist approach. For the
foreseeable future, left strategy has to revolve around building a movement to pressure the state, gain
power within it, change the institutional structure of capitalism, and erode the structural power of
capital — rather than vaulting over it. This entails a combination of electoral and mobilizational politics.
Revolution fails – powerful enemies, strategic errors, leadership issues, and violent
repression all destroy the possibility of a democratic, participatory process of building
an anticapitalist society
Erik Olin Wright, professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, December 2, 2015,
“How to Be an Anticapitalist Today,” Jacobin, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/erik-olin-wright-
real-utopias-anticapitalism-democracy/ (accessed 8/27/19)
The results of such revolutions, however, were never the creation of a democratic, egalitarian,
emancipatory alternative to capitalism. While revolutions in the name of socialism and communism did
demonstrate that it was possible “to build a new world on the ashes of the old,” and in certain specific
ways improved the material conditions of life of most people for a period of time, the evidence of the
heroic attempts at rupture in the twentieth century is that they do not produce the kind of new world
envisioned in revolutionary ideology. It is one thing to burn down old institutions; it is quite another to
build emancipatory new institutions from the ashes. Why the revolutions of the twentieth century never
resulted in robust, sustainable human emancipation is, of course, a hotly debated matter. Some people
argue that the failure of revolutionary movements was due to the historically specific, unfavorable
circumstances of the attempts at system-wide ruptures —revolutions occurred in economically
backward societies, surrounded by powerful enemies. Some argue that revolutionary leaders made
strategic errors, while others indict the motives of leadership: the leaders that triumphed in the course
of revolutions were motivated by desires for status and power rather than the empowerment and
wellbeing of the masses. Still others argue that failure is intrinsic to any attempt at radical rupture in a
social system because there are too many moving parts, too much complexity, and too many
unintended consequences. As a result, attempts at system rupture will inevitably tend to unravel into
such chaos that revolutionary elites, regardless of their motives, will be compelled to resort to pervasive
violence and repression to sustain social order. Such violence, in turn, destroys the possibility for a
genuinely democratic, participatory process of building a new society. Regardless of which (if any) of
these explanations are correct, the evidence from the revolutionary tragedies of the twentieth century
shows that smashing capitalism alone doesn’t work as a strategy for social emancipation.
Prison Strike
Prison strikes need political and legal action to achieve any gains
Vauhini Vara, journalist, August 30, 2018, “The Viral Success of a Strike No One Can See,” The Atlantic,
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/08/prison-strike/568948/ (accessed 4/30/20)
For all the public attention, Terpstra pointed out that mainstream lawmakers and political organizations,
including labor unions, haven’t said much. A day after the strike began, Ro Khanna, a Democratic
congressman representing Silicon Valley, tweeted his support. “Instead of focusing on rehabilitation,
inmates are exploited for cheap labor,” he wrote, noting that prisoners working for a dollar an hour are
fighting wildfires in his home state. “That is simply inexcusable.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the
Democratic congressional candidate from New York, wrote, “I don’t believe slavery should exist
anywhere in the United States. Including in our prison system.” But many higher-profile politicians have
remained silent. Terpstra says that this is to be expected. He argues that typical political processes tend
to defang, and eventually kill, movements such as this one. Still, barring successful legal action on the
part of prisoners, conditions aren’t likely to change much without politicians’ involvement. As Christie
Thompson has written at The Marshall Project, several of the most prominent work stoppages of recent
decades have ended with mixed results, and any gains have typically been achieved as the result of
policy changes or legal action.
Empirics
The Marxist strategy of armed critique and critique of arms have both failed, new
analytical lines are necessary
Etienne Balibar, philosopher at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, April 2010, “Marxism and war,”
Radical Philosophy, https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/marxism-and-war (accessed 8/27/19)
This is not to say that the large cycle of Marxist elaborations, continuously intertwining the categories of
politics, war and revolution, have lost all interest. First, they teach a political lesson: more than 150
years after the Communist Manifesto, the ‘peaceful strategy’ (and more radically, the strategy of
pacifist, anti-militarist revolution) and the strategy of ‘armed revolution’, the arms of critique and the
critique of arms, have both failed to destabilize capitalism. It is only capitalism, apparently, that
destabilizes itself by developing gigantic areas of social anarchy, or anomie. This could suggest that the
problem of revolutionary transformation was ill-formulated. More precisely it would suggest that, for
revolutions, ‘war’ is not a strategy, or a strategic instrument, but rather a condition, an element, so that
any ‘revolutionary’ perspective – in the sense of radical social transformation – has to address its
permanent structures of extreme violence just as it has to address the permanent structures of
exploitation. If ‘war’ is a boundary or a limit (Grenze) of historical materialism (as is ‘religion’, partly for
the same reasons), it could become also a condition of possibility for its renewal (or perhaps its
transcendence), provided the initial equation of class struggle and civil war be displaced and
reconceptualized in terms of the contribution of the class struggle and exploitation processes to a
general economy of violence to which other factors also contribute. As a consequence, ‘wars’ in their
different forms are always already ‘normal’ means of politics, but the quest of ‘other means’ to make
politics is permanent, and potentially subversive.
Local Politics
Their Marxist theory cannot account for movements and ideologies which displace
Marxism through a continuation of local and political histories
Etienne Balibar, philosopher at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, April 2010, “Marxism and war,”
Radical Philosophy, https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/marxism-and-war (accessed 8/27/19)
It is also notable that these questions became central in the debates around ‘guerrilla warfare’ which
came to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in Latin America after the victory of the Cuban
Revolution and the attempts at expanding its ‘model’ into a project of continental (or even multi-
continental) anti-imperialist networks of local partisan hotbeds (focos). [26] Many episodes of this
recent history remain obscure, not only because personal controversies and betrayals are still haunting
contemporary assessments of the outcome and the legacies of the revolutionary cycle that, in the end,
was crushed by a combination of military dictatorship, US intervention, divisions and political
adventurism from inside, but because many of the debates remain abstract, ignoring the extent to
which each episode of militarized class struggle was in fact a continuation of local and national histories
under other names. This is essential to understanding the interferences from movements and ideologies
of another descent which, in fact, considerably displaced or affected the Marxist discourse from the
inside. Such was clearly the case, in Latin America, with ‘political theology’ in the broad sense,
particularly in the form of ‘Liberation Theology’, for example. Without such interference, one would not
understand the emergence, in a more recent period, of ‘post-military’ guerrilla movements such as the
Mexican Zapatistas, which have pushed the Clausewitzian notion of the ‘defensive strategy’ to the
extreme, reacting to an increasing militarization of the dominant social order and its preventive
counterrevolutionary techniques waging terror against social movements by willingly dissociating
popular resistance from the seizing of state power – thus giving a new and unexpected content to the
Gramscian idea of a ‘war of position’ in terms of political ‘self-restraint’.
Responses to Feminist Kritik
Permutation Evidence
Permutation – Do Both.
We can include women in policymaking

Joni Lovenduski, University of London, 2005, State Feminism and Political Representation,
http://www.cambridge.org/asia/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521852227&ss=exc, Accessed
5/7/2020
Since the last quarter of the twentieth century there has been a proliferation of (state) agencies
established to promote women’s status and rights, often called women’s policy agencies. WPAs are
sometimes termed state feminist. State feminism is a contested term. To some it is an oxymoron. It
has been variously defined as the activities of feminists or femocrats in government and
administration, institutionalised feminism in public agencies, and the capacity of the state to
contribute to the fulfilment of a feminist agenda. In this book we define state feminism as the
advocacy of women’s movement demands inside the state. The establishment of WPAs changed the
setting in which the women’s movement and other feminists could advance their aims, as they
offered, in principle, the possibility to influence the agenda and to further feminist goals through
public policies from inside the state apparatus. WPAs could increase women’s access to the state by
furthering women’s participation in political decision-making, and by inserting feminist goals into
public policy. Thus WPAs may enhance the political representation of women. WPAs vary
considerably in their capacity, resources and effectiveness, raising questions about the circumstances
under which they are most likely to enhance women’s political representation. To understand them
we need to consider in detail the part they play in processes of incorporating women’s interests
(substantive representation) into policy-making, a requirement that is particularly important when
the decisions are about political representation itself.
We can operate to eradicate patriarchy inside and outside of the legal system
Lynne Henderson, UNLV - William S. Boyd School of Law, 1991, “Law 's Patriarchy,” Scholarly Works,
Paper 876, http://scholars.law.unlv.edu/facpub?utm_source=scholars.law.unlv.edu%2Ffacpub
%2F876&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages, Accessed 5/11/2020
Carol Smart, Catharine MacKinnon, and Zillah Eisenstein all agree that men have shaped and controlled
law as an institution, as a practice, and as a source of meaning in the modern state. Therefore, they each
assert, law contains, produces, and reproduces patriarchy. I agree that "masculine" thought and
patriarchal assumptions have determined much of the content and shape of law, legal thinking, and
judicial and legislative attitudes. For this reason, women who seek to end patriarchy must focus on
dismantling its legal form and eradicating its social, political, and economic manifestations both with and
without law's help.
Permutation – Do Both.
Feminist jurisprudence does not necessarily disavow the law. It can support legal
reforms for equality
George Ukagba, Associate Professor, University of Benin, 2010, “The Kpim of Feminism: Issues and
Women in a Changing World,” p. 514
Feminist jurisprudence focuses on the law and legal concepts, legislations (the legislature), and the
judiciary, and raises questions on them on the basis of being patriarchal constructs, and reflections of
same. According to Patricia Smith, 'feminist jurisprudence challenges basic legal categories and concepts rather than analyzing them as given. Feminist
jurisprudence asks what is implied in traditional categories, distinctions, or concepts and rejects them if they imply the subordination of women. In this sense,
feminist jurisprudence is normative and claims that traditional jurisprudence and law are implicitly normative as well. It is therefore imperative 'to understand
feminist legal theory as a reaction to the jurisprudence of modern legal scholars (primarily male scholars) who tend to see law as a process for interpreting and
perpetuating a universal, gender-neutral public motility.... Feminist legal scholars... (claim) that "masculine" jurisprudence of "all stripes" fails to acknowledge let
alone respond to the interests, values, fears and harms experienced by women'''. It is a post modem school of thought which seeks to challenge the existence and
continuity of the male oriented jurisprudence as well as its claims of universality and neutrality. In view of this, feminist jurisprudence approach law through the
Feminists therefore
feminist lenses recognizing the fact that truth, knowledge, right and justice are concerns not only to the males but also the females.
advance that women are equal with men and should necessarily be considered as such, while laws
recognizing this equality should be promulgated . Hence feminist jurisprudence centers on the political,
social, and economic equality of sexes especially as it relates to power and politics, employment and
work place; and the eradication of all forms of oppression of women in respect of social arrangements,
sexual and domestic violence, and gender based discrimination.
Permutation – Do Both (double bind)
Perm do the Aff through the lens of the alternative. Either the perm solves better than
the alternative or the alternative is a floating pic and should be rejected on face.
Kathleen M. Shaw, Associate Professor of Urban Education and Chair of the Department of Educational
Leadership and Policy Studies at Temple University, Ph.D. in Higher Education from the University of
Michigan, January/February 2004, “Using Feminist Critical Policy Analysis in the Realm of Higher
Education: The Case of Welfare Reform as Gendered Educational Policy,” The Journal of Higher
Education, http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~tkennedy/Courses/38H3/Shaw.pdf, Accessed 5/2/2020
In contrast, these power relations are exactly the target of feminist critical policy analysis. This approach
to policy research is a variant of critical policy analysis, which focuses on the policies and structures that
restrict access to power. Critical policy analysis, when overlaid with feminism, results in sustained
attention to the ways in which the interests of women and the interests of the state intersect and, most
often, contradict each other. As Marshall states, “Policy analysis and feminism intersect over questions
about what is public and what is private and who decides . . . . for social justice, what is the role of the
state. Can the state be relied upon for analyses of inequities?”. Thus, feminist critical policy analysis
directly questions the entire policy analysis process, from the formation of research questions to the
development and use of methodology to the analysis and write-up of results. It assumes that
policymakers (i.e., the state) will act in ways to sustain and build dominance in society. And by calling
attention to this phenomenon, feminist critical policy analysts attempt to create sufficient pressure to
alter these power dynamics.
Link Answers
No Link: The State
The state is not inherently patriarchal. Reformism is a better way to challenge

patriarchy
Deborah L. Rhode, Professor of Law at Stanford University, April 1994, “Feminism and the State,”
Harvard Law Review, 107 Harv. L. Rev. 1181, 107:6, pp. 1185-1186
Moreover, if the state is best understood as a network of institutions with complex, sometimes
competing agendas, then the patriarchal model of single-minded instrumentalism seems highly
implausible. It is difficult to dismiss all the anti-discrimination initiatives of the last quarter century as
purely counter-revolutionary strategies. And it is precisely these initiatives, with their appeal to
"male" norms of "objectivity and the impersonality of procedure, that [have created] leverage for
the representation of women's interests." Cross-cultural research also suggests that the status of
women is positively correlated with a strong state, which is scarcely the relationship that patriarchal
frameworks imply. While the "tyrannies" of public and private dependence are plainly related, many feminists challenge the claim that they are the
same. As Carole Pateman notes, women do not "live with the state and are better able to make collective struggle against institutions than individuals." To
advance that struggle, feminists
need more concrete and contextual accounts of state institutions than
patriarchal frameworks have supplied. Lumping together police, welfare workers, and Pentagon
officials as agents of a unitary patriarchal structure does more to obscure than to advance analysis.
What seems necessary is a contextual approach that can account for greater complexities in
women's relationships with governing institutions. Yet despite their limitations, patriarchal theories underscore an insight that generally informs
feminist theorizing. As Part II reflects, governmental institutions are implicated in the most fundamental structures of sex-based inequality and in the strategies necessary to address it.
Link Turn – Reforms Can Challenge Patriarvhy
Liberal state reform is both possible and effective in challenging patriarchy

Raewyn Connell, former University Chair in the University of Sydney, October 1990, “The State,
Gender, and Sexual Politics: Theory and Appraisal,” Theory and Society, Vol. 19, No. 5, pp. 507-544.
Is the state patriarchal? Yes, beyond any argument, on the evidence discussed above. It is not "essentially patriarchal" or "male"; even if one could
speak of the "essence" of a social institution, this would exaggerate the internal coherence of the state. Rather the state is historically
patriarchal, patriarchal as a matter of concrete social practices. State structures in recent history
institutionalize the European equation between authority and a dominating masculinity; they are effectively
controlled by men; and they operate with a massive bias towards heterosexual men's interests. At the same
time the pattern of state patriarchy changes. In terms of the depth of oppression and the historical possibilities of resistance and
transformation, a fascist regime is crucially different from a liberal one, and a liberal one from a revolutionary one. The most favorable historical
circumstance for progressive sexual politics seems to be the early days of social-revolutionary regimes;
but the later bureaucratization of these regimes is devastating. Next best is a liberal state with a reformist government; though
reforms introduced under its aegis are vulnerable in periods of reaction. Though the state is patriarchal,
progressive gender politics cannot avoid it. The character of the state as the central institutionalization
of power, and its historical trajectory in the regulation and constitution of gender relations, make it unavoidably a major arena for
challenges to patriarchy. Here liberal feminism is on strong ground. Becoming engaged in practical
struggles for a share of state power requires tactical judgments about what developments within the
state provide opportunities. In the 1980s certain strategies of reform have had a higher relative pay-off than they did before. In Australia, for
instance, the creation of a network of "women's services" was a feature of the 1970s, and the momentum of this kind of action has died away. Reforms that have
Equal employment
few budgetary implications but fit in with other state strategies, such as modernizing the bureaucracy, become more prominent.
opportunity and anti-discrimination legislation have been highlighted; decriminalizing homosexuality is

consistent with this.
Alternative Answers
No Solvency - Policymaking
Their theorization of patriarchy does nothing to advance real policymaking

Deborah L. Rhode, Professor of Law at Stanford University, April 1994, “Feminism and the State,”
Harvard Law Review, 107 Harv. L. Rev. 1181, 107:6, p. 1185
Neither can the state be understood solely as an instrument of men's interests. As a threshold
matter, what constitutes those interests is not self-evident, as MacKinnon's own illustrations suggest.
If, for example, policies liberalizing abortion serve male objectives by enhancing access to female
sexuality, policies curtailing abortion presumably also serve male objectives by reducing female
autonomy. In effect, patriarchal frameworks verge on tautology. Almost any gender-related policy
can be seen as either directly serving men's immediate interests, or as compromising short-term
concerns in the service of broader, long-term goals, such as "normalizing" the system and stabilizing
power relations. A framework that can characterize all state interventions as directly or indirectly
patriarchal offers little practical guidance in challenging the conditions it condemns. And if women
are not a homogenous group with unitary concerns, surely the same is true of men.
No Solvency – Restorative Justice Fails
Restorative justice programs are heavily gendered and often re-victimize women
under community norms
Kathleen Daly, Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University and Julie Stubbs,
criminal justice scholar at UNSW, 2005, “Feminist Engagement with Restorative Justice,” Theoretical
Criminology, Vol. 10, No. 1, https://ssrn.com/abstract=699841, Accessed 5/9/2020
Potential problems with RJ These potential problems have been identified by Stubbs (1997, 2002, 2004),
Coker (1999, 2002), Goel (2000), Presser and Gaarder (2000), Shapland (2000), Lewis et al. (2001), Busch
(2002), Acorn (2004), and Hopkins et al. (2004).
Victim safety. As an informal process, RJ may put victims at risk of continued violence; it may permit
power imbalances to go unchecked and reinforce abusive behaviour. Manipulation of the process by
offenders. Offenders may use an informal process to diminish guilt, trivialize the violence, or shift the
blame to the victim. Pressure on victims. Some victims may not be able to effectively advocate on their
own behalf. A process based on building group consensus may minimize or overshadow a victim's
interests. Victims may be pressured to accept certain outcomes, such as an apology, even if they feel it is
inappropriate or insincere. Some victims may want the state to intervene on their behalf and do not
want the burdens of RJ. Role of the 'community'. Community norms may reinforce, not undermine male
dominance and victim blaming. Communities may not be sufficiently resourced to take on these cases.
Mixed loyalties. Friends and family may support victims, but may also have divided loyalties and collude
with the violence, especially in intra-familial cases. Impact on offenders. The process may do little to
change an offender's behaviour. Symbolic implications. Offenders (or potential offenders) may view RJ
processes as too easy, reinforcing their belief that their behaviour is not wrong or can be justified.
Penalties may be too lenient to respond to serious crimes like sexual assault. Critics typically emphasize
victim safety, power imbalances, and the potential for revictimization in an informal process. However,
the symbolic implications are also important. If it appears that serious offences are not being treated
seriously, what messages are being conveyed to offenders? What does it mean to re-privatize male
intimate violence after a history of neglect and decades of legal reform?
Intersectional Feminism Bad / Fails
Their feminist legal analysis is by no means “critical”. Empirically, they end up in ivory
towers and eclipse lived experience
Mae C. Quinn, Professor of Law, Washington University School of Law, 2012, “Feminist Legal Realism,”
Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2001632,
Accessed 5/11/2020
Worse, however, seeming to replicate the practices of the realists, many

contemporary legal feminists have turned increasingly
towards academic debates focusing on supremacy of ideas. Like earlier generations in the standard story, it appears
contemporary feminist legal projects in this country have largely become battles over words, thoughts,
and theories rather than active struggles to improve lived experiences. Sadly, the Feminist Jurisprudence
movement may be falling prey to seeming inevitability and adopting the same destructive patterns that
impaired successes of earlier critical generations. Somewhat paradoxically, they may be abdicating claims of radicalism and creativity in
the process, ensuring their own movement fails to deliver change. For example, despite early assertions that feminist legal work was primarily concerned with
concrete and experience-based issues, it veered in the direction of the “malestream” theorizing it purported to reject. As the movement unfolded throughout the
1990s and into the new millennium, feminist legal conversations grew increasingly abstract and removed from the lives of individual women and other marginalized
persons. Having
arrived, many legal feminists appeared to climb ever-higher into the Ivory Tower to engage
in heady conversations largely inaccessible to the vast majority of persons supposedly embraced by the
feminist agenda. Even when fully understood, the weight of these discourses has provided little forward
movement. And feminist legal work, frequently drawing from the dense work of Judith Butler, has become decidedly less encouraging. Newer legal
feminists have also turned ever away from the reality of lived experiences.
Intersectionality collapses into identity categories in practice because it cannot

account for power relations
Nivedita Menon, professor of political thought at Jawaharlal Nehru University, April 25, 2015, “Is
Feminism about ‘Women’?,” Economic & Political Weekly,
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ee9b/c5bd469101fd881eb9f4835f4fd6873fbcde.pdf?_ga=
2.148807216.669258929.1589337978-1331620808.1589003716, Accessed 5/11/2020
Hill Collins’ idea of “mutually reinforcing vectors” as remaining within the framework of double and
triple burdens borne by already existing “women” has been criticised for its essentialised notion of
identity and for its additive character. For instance, Yuval-Davis, tracking the gradual entry of
“intersectionality” into UN documents, notes the continuous collapse of intersectionality to “identity”
even when more complex arguments are being outlined (2006: 196–97). She points out that too often
intersectionality analysis “does not attend to the differential positionings of power in which different
identity groups can be located in specific historical contexts, let alone the dynamics of power relations
within these groups. Nor does it give recognition to the potentially contested nature of the boundaries
of these identity groupings and the possibly contested political claims for representation of people
located in the same social positioning”.
Intersectional Feminism Bad – General Turns
Fusing intersectionality within feminism ends up becoming a disciplinary academic

exercise
Sirma Bilge, Department of Sociology at University of Montreal, 2013, “Intersectionality Undone:
Saving Intersectionality from Feminist Intersectionality Studies”, Du Bois Review 10(2),
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ce11/6365bc643e8816c0c3901d83fd0f251f8073.pdf?
_ga=2.83203601.669258929.1589337978-1331620808.1589003716, Accessed 5/7/2020
I contend that what may at first appear to be an enthusiastic reception of intersectionality is a significant
reflection of the need by disciplinary feminism to contain it, to neutralize its politics. For disciplinary
feminism to “take on” or “take over” intersectionality serves to marginalize those trying to reconnect
intersectionality with its initial vision which was grounded in the political subjectivities and struggles of
less powerful social actors facing multiple intertwined oppressions. If disciplinary feminism establishes
control of an intersectionality specifically at the expense of less powerful social actors, if
intersectionality is incorporated specifically through the “curatorship” and benefit of White feminist
scholars, the result is a depoliticized intersectionality. To make this argument is not to say that White
feminists should “move over” and leave intersectionality to feminists of color who will make it
transformative and counter-hegemonic again. No! It is to argue that disciplinary feminists, whether
White or of color, should stop doing intersectionality in ways that undo it. One way to undo
intersectionality is to turn it into an overly academic exercise of speculative or normative musings.
Mainstreaming intersectionality in feminist discourse excludes a long history of black

feminist thought
Anna Carastathis, Professor at UCLA, 2014, “The Concept of Intersectionality in Feminist Theory”,
Philosophy Compass,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263725959_The_Concept_of_Intersectionality_in_Feminist_
Theory, Accessed 5/12/2020
This concept is one of the greatest gifts of black women’s studies to social theory as a whole’ (303, emphasis added). The apparent consensus that marks the
‘mainstreaming’ of intersectionality elides its critical impetus, that is, the fact that the
ascendancy or
metaphor emerges as a critique of white solipsism within feminist discourses. Moreover, the construction of a feminist
consensus around ‘intersectionality’ occludes ongoing contestations between ‘mainstreaming’ and ‘critical’ understandings of intersectionality (see Dhamoon;
Carastathis, Reinvigorating Intersectionality) or between a ‘more robust version of intersectionality […] tied to the concerns of […] disempowered groups’ and a
The metaphor of intersecting categories of discrimination was introduced and later
‘sanitized, depoliticized version’.
elaborated by the Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, one of the founders of
Critical Race Theory in the U.S. legal academy. Yet intersectionality has a long history in Black feminism.
Its antecedents include the notions of ‘double jeopardy’ (Beal) or ‘multiple jeopardy’ (King), and
‘interlocking oppressions’ (Combahee River Collective). As early as the 19th century in the United States, Black feminists confronted
the simultaneity of a ‘woman question’ and a ‘race problem’, (qtd. in Guy-Sheftall 45) as Anna Julia Cooper put it in ‘the first book-length black feminist text’, A
By the time that Crenshaw introduced the metaphor of
Voice from the South, published in 1892 (Guy-Sheftall 43; see Gines).
intersectionality to critique dominant conceptions of discrimination in law and in social movements, the
language of ‘intersections’ had already been circulating in contemporaneous antiracist feminist thought
(see Nash, Home Truths). In the wake of Crenshaw’s work, so popular has the concept of intersectionality become that common usage makes it acceptable, in
certain circles, for one to refer to ‘intersectionality’ as a synonym for oppression, without specifying what, in particular, is intersecting, or how. One commentator
Yet flippant or vague
speculates that its (supposed) ‘vagueness and open-endedness […] may be the very secret to its success’ (K. Davis 69).
references to ‘intersectionality’ can serve to obscure what is in fact a profound critique of deeply
entrenched cognitive habits which inform feminist and antiracist thinking about oppression and
privilege. As Crenshaw herself reflects on the itinerary of the concept, intersectionality has had a ‘wide reach, but not [a] very deep’ one: it is both ‘over- and
underused; sometimes I can’t even recognize it in the literature anymore’ (interview qtd. in Berger and Guidroz 76, 65).
Intersectional Feminism Bad - Identity Conflation
In practice, intersectionality conflates experiences with specific identities and tries to

govern victim identification
Nate Hochman, Staff Writer, July 10, 2019, “The Limits of Intersectionality,” National Review,
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/intersectionality-limits-true-premise-wrong-conclusions/,
Accessed 5/12/2020
Thus we begin to encounter the limits to intersectionality theory, which lie not necessarily in the truth of
its assertions, but rather in the fact that its abstraction of social life leaves much to be desired and
unavoidably leads to a number of corrosive outcomes when put into practice. For instance, in assigning
certain experiences to certain groups, intersectionality’s advocates often, in effect, assert a monopoly
on the experiences of those groups. But intersectional feminists do not speak for all women and critical
race theorists do not speak for all black people; indeed, many members of what intersectionality deems
to be a victim class are not convinced that they are as systematically oppressed as they are supposed to
be.
Intersectionality both conflates experiences within identity groups and collapses

Liberal values into relativism
Nate Hochman, Staff Writer, July 10, 2019, “The Limits of Intersectionality,” National Review,
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/intersectionality-limits-true-premise-wrong-conclusions/,
Accessed 5/12/2020
Further, to codify a hierarchy of identities and their corresponding privileges is, as Michael Oakeshott
wrote, to “reduce the tangle and variety of experience to a set of principles . . .[with] no sense of the
cumulation of experience, only of the readiness of experience when it has been converted into a
formula.” As a result, intersectionality’s faithful must twist the external world to fit the theory’s
framework, which insists, for example, that desperately poor rural white Appalachians are are somehow
elevated in societal privilege over the likes of Don Lemon, Oprah Winfrey, or Ta-Nehisi Coates. This
inevitably leads to a politics not just removed from reality, but callous and tribal in its own right. Finally,
and perhaps most important, this new elevation of identitarianism wreaks havoc on the values
necessary to the cultivation of a pluralistic society. Tolerance, individualism, and colorblindness are
“deconstructed” to reveal the oppressive power structures concealed beneath their pretenses.
Classically liberal values are revealed to be tyrannical, the tools of the oppressor; the primacy of gender
and racial status rules supreme.
Intersectional Feminism Bad - Western
Western notions of intersectionality center on hegemonic identity categories with

presumed universal application. This elevates the experiences of Western women at
the expense of voices from the global South
2.148807216.669258929.1589337978-1331620808.1589003716, Accessed 5/11/2020
The first set of questions we come up against when engaging with the idea of intersectionality circulate
around the imperialism of categories, and the manner in which concepts developed in the global North
are assumed to have universal validity. Even when an understanding of politics in the global South
predates a name for a similar understanding developed in the Western academy, it is the earlier
conception that will be named after the later. For instance, in a paper on Ram Manohar Lohia, a Socialist
activist and thinker of mid- 20th century India, who tried to link caste, class, gender and the politics of
language (English versus Hindi) in his life and work, the 21st century writer of the article explicitly uses
the framework of intersectionality. The point here is not about anachronism, and whether or not
concepts can be made to travel across time, because I believe this is possible. Rather, I am suggesting
that the tendency when studying the “non-West,” is to test the applicability of theory developed
through “western” experience, rather than entering into the unfamiliar conceptual fi eld opened up by
thinkers and activists in the former. The assumption is that the concepts emerging from Western (Euro–
American) social philosophy necessarily contain within them the possibility of universalisation—the
reverse is never assumed. Can, for instance, Julius Nyerere’s concept of Ujamaa or the trope of Draupadi
as the ambiguous figure of assertive femininity ever be considered relevant to analyse Euro–American
experience? But Antigone can be made to speak about women and war everywhere.
Intersectionality relies on Western conceptions of identity categories that belies their

very notion of fluidity and fails to translate for non-Western women
2.148807216.669258929.1589337978-1331620808.1589003716, Accessed 5/11/2020
In this second decade of the 21st century, we all know that feminism is not in fact about “women” but
about recognising how modern discourses of gender produce human beings as exclusively “men” or
“women”. In other words, feminism requires us to recognise that “women” is neither a stable nor a
homogeneous category. But nor are caste, race or class, stable or homogeneous categories. Does
intersectionality as a universal framework help us to capture this complexity? I argue that it does not. In
this paper, I will address this question through the intricacies of the terrain that feminist politics must
negotiate, using the Indian experience to set up conversations with feminist debates and experiences
globally. Theory must be located—we must be alert to the spatial and temporal coordinates that suffuse
all theorising. When we in the non-west theorise on the basis of our experiences, we rarely assume that
these are generalisable everywhere, unlike theory arising in the West. But we do believe that
comparisons and engagements with other feminisms are not only possible, but unavoidable. I assume
and address therefore, the lively global feminist voices that surround us.
Intersectional Feminism Bad - Essentialism
The kritik is essentialist, reproducing the same stereotypes produced under patriarchy
Sandra Whitworth, Assistant Professor of Political Science York University 1994, Feminism and International Relations: Towards a
Political Economy of Gender in Interstate and Non-Governmental Institutions, p. 20
Even when not concerned with mothering as such, much

of the politics that emerge from radical feminism within
IR depend upon a 're-thinking' from the perspective of women. What is left unexplained is how
simply thinking differently will alter the material realities of relations of domina tion between men
and women. Structural (patriarchal) relations are acknowledged, but not analysed in radical
feminism's reliance on the experiences, behaviours and perceptions of 'women'. As Sandra Harding notes,
the essential and universal 'man', long the focus of feminist critiques, has merely been replaced here
with the essential and universal 'woman' And indeed, that notion of 'woman' not only ignores important
differences amongst women, but it also reproduces exactly the stereotypical vision of women and
men, masculine and feminine, that has been produced under patriarchy . Those women who do not fit the
mould - who, for example, take up arms in military struggle - are quickly dismissed as expressing
'negative' or 'inauthentic' feminine values (the same accusation is more rarely made against men). In this way, it comes as no surprise
when mainstream IR theorists such as Robert Keohane happily embrace the tenets of radical feminism. It requires little in the way of re-thinking or movement
from accepted and comfortable assumptions and stereotypes. Radical fem inists find themselves defending the same account of women as nurturing, pacifist,
submissive mothers as do men under patriarchy, anti-feminists and the New Right. As some writers suggest, this in itself should give feminists pause to
reconsider this position.
Essentialism reproduces classism, sexism, and homophobia

Kevin Gosine, Brock University Sociologist, 2002 “Essentialism Versus Complexity: Conceptions of
Racial Identity Construction in Educational Scholarship,” Canadian Journal of Education, 271: 81–100,
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/eb1b/94c703b4485221d1677695fc0ad93ac5c952.pdf?
_ga=2.78524819.669258929.1589337978-1331620808.1589003716, Accessed 5/7/2020
Researchers might consider employing postmodern perspectives to highlight the various ways
individuals negotiate, engage, and resist such collective identifications from the multiplicity of subject
positions that comprise a given racial community. Put differently, it is important to account for the
unique ways different social statuses continually intersect to complicate collective strivings for coherent
racial identities. Although collective or intersubjective forms of racial identity can frequently work to
protect and empower racialized youth living within a hostile, Eurocentric environment (Miller, 1999), the
imposition of defensively situated (counter-hegemonic) essentialisms can be, as Yon’s (2000) interviews
with Trevor and Margaret illustrate, just as confining or oppressive as the negatively valued
representations that circulate within the dominant society . In both cases, human subjects are objectified
through the imposition of confining, static labels — a situation that provides fertile ground for intra-
communal classism, sexism, and homophobia. For this reason, it is worthwhile to explore the diverse
effects of these racialized communal forms of consciousness along with the multiplicity of ways in which
individuals negotiate and make sense of them. Accounting for intra-group division, ambivalence, and
rupture exposes the unstable and fluid nature of collective identities.
Intersectional Feminism Bad – Black Feminism
Intersectional feminism conflicts with Black feminist agendas

Tamela J. Gordon, black feminist, and creator of the women’s empowerment group, Sisters with
Aspiration, April 30, 2018, “Why I’m giving up on intersectional feminism,” Quartz,
https://qz.com/quartzy/1265902/why-im-giving-up-on-intersectional-feminism/, Accessed 5/12/2020
I find myself at the end of my intersectional feminist road. It’s time to hop into survival mode, ditch this
dumpster fire, and live by a black feminist agenda. One mapped out by the pros. Audre Lorde, bell
hooks, Patrisse Cullors, Angela Davis, Kola Boof, and all the other sisters who stay convinced that we
need to divest from white feminism and invest in black and brown women, nurture our black magic, and
hold one another to a higher esteem. Black feminism gives me everything I need. Removal of any and all
environments that hold no space for me and my sisters, a sisterhood bonded in dedication towards the
progress and liberation of all of us, and freedom from the respectability politics that strangle us. When I
live life as a black feminist who’s dedicated to a black feminist agenda, I’m doing all the things that I did
before, only, I’m centered inside the collective goal. I can hold space for all my marginalized sisters,
rather than feel as though I have to compete with them for the few vacant ‘minority’ slots reserved at
intersectional functions. In the words of Gabrielle Union, “I don’t want to be at your table at all. I built a
house over there.”
Their White feminist pedagogy corrupts intersectional analysis. Liberal White

feminism cannot be separated from neoliberalism, which just markets the idea of
intersectionality
Sandra Smele, Dept. of Sociology at York University, et al 2017, “Doing feminist difference
differently: intersectional pedagogical practices in the context of the neoliberal diversity regime,”
Teaching in Higher Education, pp. 691-692.
As anti-racist feminists, attending to the neoliberal diversity regime has directly contributed to our
approach to teaching intersectionality – a term that has also been reshaped by neoliberal trends. Petzen
(2012) notes that neoliberal conditions enable the appropriation of political resistance so that
‘theoretical musings on intersectionality can be co-opted into a particular kind of academic and political
currency’ (296), and others have identified intersectionality as having been taken up by academics,
especially academic feminists, in this very manner. Luft and Ward, for example, describe how claiming to
engage in intersectional work ‘can open doors, earn funding, win members, or validate projects’ (2009,
16). Along similar lines, Bilge (2013) identifies how intersectionality has been rendered ‘in tune with the
neoliberal knowledge economy’ (405) through its proclamation as a ‘best practice’ academic tool
belonging to the genealogical canon of (white) academic feminism – that is, feminism that has long been
rooted in liberal feminism. Like diversity then, intersectionality has acquired a positive affective value
within our neoliberal context that serves to obscure the perpetuation of social inequalities, including the
racial inequalities that it was initially intended to address.
Intersectional Feminism Bad – Black Feminism
Intersectionality doesn’t work unless you reconcile intersectional relations

Aspiration, November 21, 2017, “(White) Girl Power aka The List,” Medium,
https://medium.com/pantsuitnation/disclaimer-should-you-be-a-white-woman- who-reads-this-and-
does-not-identify-with-any-of-the-987fccafe126, Accessed 5/12/2020
The truth of the matter is, too many women wake up in the morning, snap on their safety pins, slide into
their pussy hats, protest with Black Lives Matter, and think that proclaiming they are ‘for’ us is enough.
Being ‘for’ anything is never enough. Just because you are for Black women does not mean that your
internal support is in some way strengthening our fight. No, being for Black women is not enough. You
must be with Black women. In order to be with Black women, you must identify our problems as the
problem of all women, not the problems that only Black women are dealing from. The list above should
not be deemed as Black women issues, rather, women’s issues. They must read the above list and
identify with it. White women must resolve their estranged relationship with Black women and
stand with us. Any actions made towards creating an all-inclusive sisterhood that excludes tangible
change between intersectional relations is as worthless as a foul ball on the sideline.
Intersectionality collapses into racial divisions, which we’d have to resolve first
Aspiration, April 30, 2018, “Why I’m giving up on intersectional feminism,” Quartz,
https://qz.com/quartzy/1265902/why-im-giving-up-on-intersectional-feminism/, Accessed 5/12/2020
As the honeymoon wore off, I began to notice some things I hadn’t before. For starters, many white
women announced themselves as intersectional feminists, yet, were still completely detached from the
lives and issues of cis and trans black women and women of color. I also noticed that black women and
women of color weren’t too quick to join the intersectional movement either. Instincts and too many
bad experiences in white-centered environments made them very distrustful of intersectional feminism.
As time progressed, any hope that intersectional feminism would be this magical path to racial and
cultural harmony between white women and non-white women disappeared. Despite the legion of
spaces dedicated to intersectionalism—including my own book club, it always seemed that every
environment was divided by race. I know what sisterhood is and I know what white women think
sisterhood is; they got it all wrong.
Intersectional Feminism Bad – Legal Protections
Their criticism condemns women to suffer gender violence

Meghan Murphy, Editor, May 26, 2018, “Leftists need to stop shaming women for engaging the
criminal justice system in situations of abuse,” Feminist Current,
https://www.feministcurrent.com/2018/05/26/leftists-need-stop-shaming-women-engaging-criminal-
justice-system-situations-abuse/, Accessed 5/10/2020
That leftists often accuse women of “pearl-clutching” or of encouraging a police state, due to their
efforts to protect themselves from male violence, only demonstrates how little they understand about
their own self-professed efforts at building a just world. The hypocrisy of subjecting women to abuse,
but then criticizing them for calling the police should serve as a reminder to women of the priorities of
these groups. After a Toronto writer named Andray Domise, well-known on the Canadian left, was
accused of abuse, a friend of his and fellow activist wrote in his defense: “… Many of our personal
philosophies involve sidestepping the police and courts, and instead embracing alternatives like
transformative justice. Throwing a Black man to the wolves of the criminal justice system is violent, and
does nothing to heal anyone involved including the accuser, the accused and the wider community.” But
accusing victims of “violence” for engaging the criminal justice system in their defense is a disturbing
manipulation of both the word “violence” and the goal of social justice. A man can simultaneously be
impacted by racism and also be abusive or misogynist — one does not cancel out the other. Letting men
off the hook for violence because they are working class or racialized will not right the wrongs of an
unjust world. These men still hold male power under patriarchy, despite facing class or race oppression,
and indeed, have done their own fair share in terms of maintaining that power. Mocking or shaming
women for their efforts to hold their oppressors to account feels a lot more like locker room bullying à la
“Man up!” than it does solidarity.
Gender Binaries Turns
Any feminist methodology that puts women at the center of analysis reinforces
gender binaries and exclusion within feminism
Mari Mikkola, PhD & Associate Professor - Oxford, 2017, “Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender,”
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/, Accessed
5/8/2020
Butler's normativity argument makes two claims. The first is akin to Spelman's particularity argument:
unitary gender notions fail to take differences amongst women into account thus failing to recognise
“the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of ‘women’ are
constructed”. In their attempt to undercut biologically deterministic ways of defining what it means to
be a woman, feminists inadvertedly created new socially constructed accounts of supposedly shared
femininity. Butler's second claim is that such false gender realist accounts are normative. That is, in their
attempt to fix feminism's subject matter, feminists unwittingly defined the term ‘woman’ in a way that
implies there is some correct way to be gendered a woman. That the definition of the term ‘woman’ is
fixed supposedly “operates as a policing force which generates and legitimizes certain practices,
experiences, etc., and curtails and delegitimizes others”. Following this line of thought, one could say
that, for instance, Chodorow's view of gender suggests that ‘real’ women have feminine personalities
and that these are the women feminism should be concerned about. If one does not exhibit a distinctly
feminine personality, the implication is that one is not ‘really’ a member of women's category nor does
one properly qualify for feminist political representation.
Carceral Feminism Turns
They make no distinction in terms of what feminisms they will defend. Carceral
feminism is a specific example of universal calls for feminist analysis can act in
opposition to their goal
Victoria Law, Editor, October 2014, “Against Carceral Feminism,” Jacobin,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/against-carceral-feminism/, Accessed 5/11/2020
This carceral variant of feminism continues to be the predominant form. While its adherents would likely
reject the descriptor, carceral feminism describes an approach that sees increased policing, prosecution,
and imprisonment as the primary solution to violence against women. This stance does not acknowledge
that police are often purveyors of violence and that prisons are always sites of violence. Carceral
feminism ignores the ways in which race, class, gender identity, and immigration status leave certain
women more vulnerable to violence and that greater criminalization often places these same women at
risk of state violence. Casting policing and prisons as the solution to domestic violence both justifies
increases to police and prison budgets and diverts attention from the cuts to programs that enable
survivors to escape, such as shelters, public housing, and welfare. And finally, positioning police and
prisons as the principal antidote discourages seeking other responses, including community
interventions and long-term organizing.
Even mainstream feminists will continue to call for legal protections that end in their
arrest
Victoria Law, Editor, October 2014, “Against Carceral Feminism,” Jacobin,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/against-carceral-feminism/, Accessed 5/11/2020
Mainstream feminists have also successfully pressed for laws that require police to arrest someone after
they receive a domestic violence call. By 2008, nearly half of all states had a mandatory arrest law. The
statutes have also led to dual arrests, in which police handcuff both parties because they perceive each
as assailants, or they can’t identify the “primary aggressor.” Women marginalized by their identities,
such as queers, immigrants, women of color, trans women, or even women who are perceived as loud
or aggressive, often do not fit preconceived notions of abuse victims and are thus arrested.
Impact Answers
Patriarchy Answers – No Root Cause
Claiming patriarchy is the root cause reinscribes the white, gendered subject—This
turns the critique and increases the risk of violence against non-white men
Sunera Thobani, Women’s studies at the University of British Columbia, 2007, “White wars: Western feminisms and the `War on
Terror',” Feminist Theory (2007) 8: 169, p. 180
In the absence of a critique of the racially exclusionary forms of feminisms (including radical feminisms) that can be found in the US, Eisenstein returns to the familiar terrain of white feminists
claiming their own experience as gender victims to present themselves as the natural gender allies of women in the third world. Although Eisenstein does not re-centre the white imperial
subject in quite the manner of Chesler or Butler, she does not fully de-centre it either. Rather, she allows for the feminized imperial subject to be presented as endangered by patriarchy, both
there is considerable criticism of

of American and Muslim men, but not Muslim women as endangered by the racism of white men and women. Predictably then,
anti-racist and anti-colonial male leaders for their sexism, as there is of anti-racist feminists for inadequate comprehension of their oppression,
but little substantive critique is to be found of the racism of white mainstream and radical feminisms.
Disappointingly, this text demonstrates that a rejection of the East/West binary can coexist with the re-inscription of a
white gendered subject position as innocent of, and removed from, its complicities with empire-
building. Eisenstein’s highlighting of male violence in the US is certainly important, especially as patriarchal practices in their Western and ‘secular’ garb are
being removed from scrutiny through the hypervisibility given to these practices in the Islamic context. But simply pointing to the white male
domination of white women does not really challenge the Western racialized-gendered discourse that has
defined non-white men as inherently, and far more, patriarchal and violent. This discourse has now
become most virulently anti-Muslim, but it has been directed in the past against all third world peoples,
most popularly through the Western cultural constructs of Black and third world ‘machismo’. Eisenstein surprisingly ignores this historical tradition of the West as
she argues that a ‘Global Misogyny’ (2004: 150) lies at the core of the current conflict, with white women equally threatened by it.
Patriarchy is not the root cause of war

Joshua S. Goldstein, Professor of International Relations at American University, 2001, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War
System and Vice Versa, 2001, pp.411-412)
I began this book hoping to contribute in some way to a deeper understanding of war – an understanding that would improve the chances of someday achieving real peace, by deleting war
from our human repertoire. In following the thread of gender running through war, I found the deeper understanding I had hoped for – a multidisciplinary and multilevel engagement with the
subject. Yet I became somewhat more pessimistic about how quickly or easily war may end. The war system emerges, from the evidence in this book, as relatively ubiquitous and robust.
Efforts to change this system must overcome several dilemmas mentioned in this book. First, peace activists face a dilemma in thinking about causes of war and working for peace. Many
, if one believes that sexism contributes to war, one

peace scholars and activists support the approach, “if you want peace, work for justice.” Then
can work for gender justice specifically (perhaps among others) in order to pursue peace. This approach brings strategic allies to
the peace movement (women, labor, minorities), but rests on the assumption that injustices cause war. The evidence in this
book suggests that causality runs at least as strongly the other way. War is not a product of capitalism,
imperialism, gender, innate aggression, or any other single cause, although all of these influence wars’ outbreaks and outcomes. Rather, war has in
part fueled and sustained these and other injustices. So, “if you want peace, work for peace.” Indeed, if you want justice (gender and
others), work for peace. Causality does not run just upward through the levels of analysis, from types of
individuals, societies, and governments up to war. It runs downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in attitudes
towards war and the military may be the most important way to “reverse women’s oppression.” The dilemma is that peace work focused on justice brings to the
peace movement energy, allies, and moral grounding, yet, in light of this book’s evidence, the emphasis on injustice as the main cause of
war seems to be empirically inadequate.

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AFFIRMATIVE EVIDENCE FILE INTRO

Finding Arguments in this File

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Punishment – Police Abuse Impacts..................................................................................................73

Mandatory minimums lead to racial inequality...............................................................................129

Topicality "Sentencing" Answers.....................................................................................................276

Responses to States Counterplan............................................................................................................309

Non Unique—Fear of Crime High Now............................................................................................376

Localism Turn: Cities Impacts...........................................................................................................412

Intersectional Feminism Bad – Black Feminism...............................................................................515

Resolved: The United States federal

Criminal Justice Reform

Sentencing debates are therefore concerned with discussions of punishment/justice as well as

Abolish Mandatory Minimums

Ban the Death Penalty

End Felon/Prisoner Disenfranchisement

Impacts: Crime overstated

Crime has been steadily decreasing since 1991

COVID-19 is suppressing crime by up to 42%

Crime rates are decreasing at historic rates

Incarceration Doesn’t Deter Crime

Majority Crime Non-Violent

Violent Crime Decreasing

Violent crime rates are at a 30-year low

Violent crime has been decreasing for the last 2 years

Impacts: Responses to Circumvention

Officer Agency / Stakeholders solves

In 2010,the Department of Justice convened a roundtable of law enforcement officials, policing

Pittsburgh’s consent decree lead to immediate and lasting reforms, improvement in

LA’s consent decree increased officer accountability during stops.

Use of Force Rules

LA’s consent decree lead to substantial quantitative reduction in use-of-force

Increasing officer agency in the reform process increases compliance.

Longitudinal studies of Cincinatti’s DOJ reforms proves no backsliding – significant

Pittsburgh consent decree produced immediate reform with minimal backsliding.

Aff Broken Window Policing

Advantage One: Punishment

The ideology of punishment behind Broken Windows forecloses poverty alleviation

Advantage Two: Black Lives Matter

Ending Broken Windows is crucial to combat and dismantle structural racism

Advantage Three: Sex Work

Criminalization of sex workers makes them more vulnerable to exploitation, sexual

Broken Windows policing is based on enforcing social exclusion

Punishment – Police Abuse Impacts

Punishment – Poverty Impacts

Poverty is the expression of oppression as structural violence

Poverty is systemic violence

Poverty is structural violence that kills 50,000 daily

Poverty is a structural violation of human rights

Black Lives Matter – Eric Garner

Black Lives Matter – Racial Profiling

Broken Windows is racial profiling

Broken Windows targets communities of color for the enforcement of low-level