1NC – Abolition K

1NC - K
The aff is a superficial tweak to the criminal justice system that preserves its legitimacy
and coopts the movement toward structural change.
Karakatsanis 19 – founder and Executive Director of Civil Rights Corps; former civil rights lawyer and
public defender with the Special Litigation Division of the Public Defender Service for the District of
Columbia; a federal public defender in Alabama, representing impoverished people accused of federal
crimes; and co-founder of the non-profit organization Equal Justice Under Law

Alec, 3/28. “The Punishment Bureaucracy: How to Think About “Criminal Justice Reform”.”
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-punishment-bureaucracy The emerging “criminal justice
reform” consensus is superficial and deceptive. It is superficial because most proposed “reforms” would still
leave the United States as the greatest incarcerator in the world . It is deceptive because those who want
largely to preserve the current punishment bureaucracy— by making just enough tweaks to protect its
perceived legitimacy—must obfuscate the difference between changes that will transform the system
and tweaks that will curb only its most grotesque flourishes. Nearly every prominent national politician and the vast
majority of state and local officials talking and tweeting about “criminal justice reform” are, with varying levels of awareness and sophistication,
furthering this deception. These “reform”-advancing
punishment bureaucrats are co-opting a movement toward
profound change by convincing the public that the “law enforcement” system as we know it can operate
in an objective, effective, and fair way based on “the rule of law.” These punishment bureaucrats are dangerous
because, in order to preserve the human caging apparatus that they control, they must disguise at the deepest level its core functions. As a
result, they
focus public conversation on the margins of the problem without confronting the structural
issues at its heart. Theirs is the language that drinks blood . In this Essay, I examine “criminal justice reform” by focusing
on the concepts of “law enforcement” and the “rule of law.” Both are invoked as central features of the American criminal system. For many
prominent people advocating “reform,” the punishment bureaucracy as we know it is the inevitable result of “law enforcement” responding to
people “breaking the law.” To them, the human caging bureaucracy is consistent with, and even required by, the “rule of law.” This world
view—that the punishment bureaucracy is an attempt to promote social well-being and human
flourishing under a dispassionate system of laws—shapes their ideas about how to “fix” the system. But
few ideas have caused more harm in our criminal system than the belief that America is governed by a
neutral “rule of law.” The content of our criminal laws—discussed in Part V—and how those laws are carried out—
addressed in Part VI—are choices that reflect power. The common understanding of the “rule of law” an d the
widely accepted use of the term “law enforcement” to describe the process by which those in power
accomplish unprecedented human caging are both delusions critical to justifying the punishment
bureaucracy. This is why it is important to understand how they distort the truth. I apply these arguments in Part VII, explaining why the
current “criminal justice reform” discourse is so dangerous. I focus on several prominent national punishment bureaucrats
and a new local wave of supposedly “progressive prosecutors.” Finally, in Part VIII, I discuss the new generation of directly impacted people,
organizers, lawyers, faith leaders, and academics on the libertarian left and right who understand the
punishment bureaucracy as a tool of power in service of white supremacy and profit . I explain why this growing
movement must reject the “criminal justice reform” discourse of punishment bureaucrats and speak clearly about
why the legal system looks the way that it does. I urge those interested in changing the punishment
bureaucracy to ground every discussion that they have and every proposed reform that they evaluate
in a set of guiding principles rooted in this movement’s vision . I sketch some of those principles for their consideration
below.

This rhetorical move perpetuates the racial and white supremacist state violence
productive of American globality. 
Rodríguez, 7 – Professor and Chair of Ethnic Studies @ UC Riverside 

Dr. Dylan Rodríguez, “American Globality and the US Prison Regime: State Violence and White
Supremacy from Abu Ghraib to Stockton to Bagong Diwa,” Kritika Kultura 9 (2007): pg. 22-48
The intent of this initial foray into a theoretical project that admittedly exceeds the strictures of a self-contained journal article is primarily suggestive: on the one hand, I wish to examine how

the institutional matrix and technological module of the US prison regime (a concept I will develop in the next section of the essay) is a programmatic (that is,
strategic and structural rather than conspiratorial or fleeting) condensation of specific formations of racial and white supremacist state
violence and is produced by the twinned, simultaneous logics of social ordering/disruption (e.g. the prison as both and at once the exemplar of effective “criminal justice” law-and-
order and culprit in the mass-based familial and community disruption of criminalized populations). On the other hand, I am interested in considering how the visceral and institutionally

abstracted logic of bodily domination that materially forms and reproduces the regime of the American prison is fundamental, not ancillary, to
US state-mediated, state-influenced, and state-sanctioned methods of legitimated “local” state violence
across the global horizon. To put a finer edge on this latter point, it is worth noting that given the plethora of scholarly and activist
engagements with US global dominance that has emerged in recent times, and the subsequent theoretical nuance and critical care provided to treatments of (for example) US
corporate capital, military/warmaking capacity, and mass culture, relatively little attention has been devoted to the constitutive role of the US prison in articulating the techniques, meanings,
and pragmatic forms of state-building within post-1990s social formations, including those of the US’s ostensible peer states, as well as places wherein militarized occupation, postcolonial
subjection, and proto-colonial relations overdetermine the ruling order. In place of considering the US prison as a dynamic, internally complex mobilization of state power and punitive social

ordering, such engagements tend to treat the prison as if it were, for the most part, a self-evident outcome or exterior symptom
of domination rather than a central, interior facet of how domination is itself conceptualized and
produced. In this meditation I am concerned with the integral role of the US prison regime in the
material/cultural production of “American globality.” In using this phrase I am suggesting a process and module of state power that works, moves,
and deploys in ways distinct from (though fundamentally in concert with) American (global) “hegemony,” and inaugurates a geography of biopolitical power more focused than common

scholarly cartographies of American “empire.” For my purposes, American globality refers to the postmodern production of US state and
state-sanctioned technologies of human and ecological domination—most frequently formed through overlapping and
interacting regimes of profound bodily violence, including genocidal and protogenocidal violence, warmaking, racist and white
supremacist state violence, and mass-scaled imprisonment— and the capacity of these forms of
domination to be mobilized across political geographies all over the world, including by governments and states
that are nominally autonomous of the United States. American globality is simultaneously a vernacular of institutional power, an active and accessible
iteration of violent human domination as the cohering of sociality (and civil society) writ large, and a grammar of pragmatic immediacy (in fact, urgency) that orders and influences statecraft
across various geographies of jurisdiction and influence. It is in this sense of globality as (common) vernacular, (dynamic, present tense) iteration, and (disciplining) grammar that the current
formation of global order is constituted (obviously) by the direct interventions of the US state and (not as obviously) by the lexicon (as in the principles governing the organization of a
vocabulary) of US statecraft. American globality infers how the US state conceptualizes its own power, as well as how these conceptualizations of power and American state formation become

immediately useful to—and frequently, structurally and politically overbearing on—other state formations and hegemonies. The prison regime, in other words, is
indisputably organic to the lexicon of the US state, and is thus productive of American globality, not a by-product or reified
outcome of it. In the remainder of this essay, I raise the possibility that the US conceptualization of the prison as a peculiar
mobilization of power and domination is, in the historical present, central to how states, governments, and social
orderings all over the world are formulating their own responses to the political, ecological, and social
crises of neoliberalism, warfare, and global white supremacy. Pg. 22-25
Reformism maintains and strengthens the prison industrial complex- the result is
racist, gendered, and ableist structural violence that results in more incarceration and
the criminalization of poverty, destruction of the welfare state, and perpetual wars.
Abolition creates better alternatives outside of the frame of the criminal justice
system
Brown and Schept 17 (Michelle Brown, Professor of Sociology at the University of Tennessee, and Judah Schept, Associate
Professor in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University, “New abolition, criminology and a critical carceral studies” Punishment
& Society 19(4), 2017, p. 444-446)

Crime Mass incarceration—and the US ‘‘system’’ of criminal justice—depends upon criminalization. While this is problematic
in and of itself for those who value understanding the structural conditions that create harm (and acts defined as ‘‘crime’’), mass
incarceration in the
carceral era depends upon the production of vulnerability through forms of neoliberal dispossession and
its consequent criminalization at an unprecedented scale . This assemblage is apparent in the criminalization
of poverty, addiction, homelessness, and mental illness (Beckett and Herbert, 2009; Wacquant, 2009); children and youth
(Rios, 2011); women (Richie, 2012); migrants (Moran et al., 2013; Mountz and Loyd, 2014; Weber and Pickering, 2011); race (Alexander, 2012);

sexuality (Spade, 2011; Stanley and Smith, 2011); and disability (Ben-Moshe et al., 2014), to name a few categories, creating a
vast swathe of new carceral subjects. To be clear, the carceral subject is a form of life that inhabits states of precarity continuously and is thus
dedicated to projects of survivability. Criminologists must contend with the reality that the discipline’s

interdependency with the state agencies that comprise ‘‘criminal justice’’ is what produces (and
reproduces through reformation) criminalization and the carceral (Morrison, 2004). Normative treatments of
violence as fundamentally interpersonal, individualized, and natural deny the multiple forms of
structural violence inflicted by the neoliberal state through its prosthetic institutions (policing, prisons,
detention, etc.), legislative and administrative policies (dismantling of welfare, criminalizing of
poverty, perpetual wars), and collusions with corporate power to secure accumulation and divest from
the social wage. Without an understanding of these structural relations, most efforts to respond to crime reproduce configurations of violence. A move
away from criminalization means an effort to reconceptualize crime and address violence without sole
reliance (or, in some cases, any reliance) upon criminal justice, specifically law enforcement or imprisonment. In the
US, these efforts are increasingly prevalent across cities where organizers share training, curricula, and workshops that emphasize emergent strategies in pushing
back against community violence, school-to-prison pipelines, imprisonment, and police violence. As Dean Spade writes of abolition in his visionary and definitive

treatment of the killing effects of administrative law upon transgender persons, Across
the country, racial- and economic-justice–
centered feminist, queer, and trans organizations are developing methods of addressing violence that
do not involve the police or criminal courts . This work has been taken up in different forms and with different areas of focus. Groups
working on these strategies in recent years include Safe OUTside the System (SOS Collective) of the Audre Lorde Project in New York City; For Crying Out Loud! and
Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA) in Seattle; The Northwest Network of Bisexual, Trans, Lesbian and Gay Survivors of Abuse, Creative Interventions in
Oakland, Community United Against Violence (CUAV) in San Francisco, Philly Stands Up!, Project NIA in Chicago, and generationFIVE and Generative Somatics,
among many others. Indeed, both authors are active in such nascent community groups in the more remote contexts of urban Appalachia, where regional

organizers are trained by and/or study the curricula of national leaders and key organizational centers in racial justice and abolitionist efforts. Abolition, in this

sense, is again familiar in that it is about understanding more fully—across time and space—that we cannot talk about
the ‘‘root conditions’’ of crime, violence, and precarity unless we are talking about health (Loyd, 2014),
education (Meiners, 2007), economy (Aviram, 2015; Schept, 2015; Wacquant, 2009), and other forms of racial and social justice
at the local and national level, with an understanding that these discussions and modes of organizing have been ongoing historically outside of and
unrecognized by criminology. Following Davis (2003) and Gilmore (2007), we must resist the urge to envision abolition as an

alternative metaphorical and material edifice that can fill the footprint of the prison (Davis, 2003: 107). Rather, seen as a set of
 focus on building up health, education, housing, jobs, and alternative
relationships, abolition and abolitionist reforms

approaches to harm as they also dismantle the prison. In this manner, abolition is predicated upon the nature
and possibility of freedom and emancipated forms of life . A key lesson for criminologists in this pursuit is the acknowledgment of
criminal justice as foundational to the exercise of violence and one of our largest obstacles in the pursuit of social change. Criminology must ask what it offers in
terms of an understanding of the needs of survivability and its contribution to life-extending, liberating work.
 CJR reform fails thru courts
Criminal Justice reform through the courts fails to achieve its goals and is merely
symbolic at best. At worst it distract form issues as politicians coopt the symbolic
reform to bolster political support for them as the problems remain unsolved and
without public option to achieve further change in spite of the failing of the court
reform.
Casper 1983 (Jonathan D. Casper Professor; Research Faculty, Center for Urban Affairs and Policy
Research) “The Impact of Criminal Justice Innovation: Feeley on Court Reform Court Reform on Trial:
Why Simple Solutions Fail by Malcolm M. Feeley Review by: Jonathan D. Casper” American Bar
Foundation Research Journal, Vol. 8, No. 4 pp pp. 959-965) JK (:
Under a banner evoking Jerome Frank's classic account of the gap between the rhetoric describing trial courts and the reality of practice and decision making within them,' Malcolm Feeley, a political scientist, sets out to explain in Court Reform on Trial: Why Simple Solutions Fail2 why so

many many recent innovations in criminal courts fail to achieve their goals . He summarizes a number of studies dealing with a variety of "reforms," including pretrial release (e.g., release on recognizance or ROR)
programs; diversion of defendants from the criminal process into rehabilitative programs; a variety of sentence reforms (e.g., mandatory-minimum-sentence laws of the "use-agun-go-to-prison" variety or determinate sentence laws); and the federal speedy-trial act. The book is not based

why reforms often fail

on substantial original research; rather it is a summary of the work of others and includes an attempt to distill a "theory" that will help us to understand and how they might be made to succeed. The book is written clearly and

dashed expectations and unintended

can provide readers not familiar with the literature on innovation in courts with some useful summaries of social science research. Feeley's thesis about why

consequences often accompany court reform i reform s straightforward and contains few surprises. He follows suggestions of the researchers he summarizes and argues that

proponents have typically attempted to alter the behavior of courtroom participants (judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, etc.)

without taking sufficient account of the reasons for their current behavior . Settled patterns for case dispositions (e.g., the importance of plea bargaining, the

the role of characteristics like prior record in pretrial

development of "going rates," which embody expectations about sentences certain kinds of defendants can expect to receive),

release decisions, a particular pace for dispositions, and so forth, all tend to have developed and to be
maintained because they serve the perceived needs, goals, and preferences of those who work in
criminal courts learning to be a member of a criminal court by and large involves
. Indeed, as Heumann has so nicely shown,3

learning why certain ways of doing business are preferable to procedures learned in law school. These
behavior patterns serve a variety of ends keeping up with burdensome case loads, providing lawyers (e.g.,

with opportunities to convince their clients that fees are earned, protecting participants from criticism if

reforms and their proponents did not acknowledge

decisions turn out badly) as well as the shared sense of justice of members of the courtroom culture. Feeley offers many examples in which

the extent to which the status quo reflected deeply embedded behavior patterns . Thus, reformers tend
simply to tell courtroom participants to stop doing what they have been doing and to start doing
something else. The Michigan Felony Firearms statute," for example, told prosecutors and judges that every defendant who used a firearm in the course of committing a felony should be sentenced to prison and should receive an additional sentence of two
years beyond the term imposed for the underlying offense. Although armed robbers had routinely been sentenced to prison, defendants charged with felonious assault involving firearms had not often received prison terms in Detroit prior to passage of the law. Most cases were family or
neighborhood disputes that involved the discharge of a weapon but no injuries, and few judges, prosecutors, or defense attorneys regarded them as serious. To send all such defendants to prison would entail what many courtroom participants regarded as an injustice and might greatly
increase the number of trials, since the going rate would be so drastically changed. Given the conflict between the values and needs of courtroom participants and the requirements of the new "reform," those who supported it ought not, Feeley argues, be surprised that it met resistance
and evasion. To take another example, proponents of a "speedy" trial often assume that long delays are undesirable, while many court practitioners believe delay serves a variety of useful functions, including nudging parties toward settlements, providing time for clients to come up with

As with sentence laws, an attempt to "reform" the pace of litigation that fails to
fees, and providing important flexibility for arranging schedules.

take account of the many reasons why judges and attorneys prize delay will encounter serious
resistance. Such reactions to reform-evasion, resistance, adaptative behavior, or perhaps flexible implementation (depending on where one sits)-make up the bulk of Feeley's account. The remainder is the argument that reform efforts will inevitably produce such
results if they do not take account of the beliefs, incentives, and needs of those who work in courts, as well as the suggestion that reform that introduces innovation in the context of the advancement of legal rights (i.e., that is mandated by appellate courts) is more likely to meet with
compliance than that coming from legislators, administrators, or interest groups. It is not evident what audience Feeley wishes to reach. Nothing noted here, and indeed almost nothing in the book, will strike those who study about or work in criminal courts as novel. Many studies he
summarizes contain the very arguments that Feeley draws from them, and those who work in criminal courts already understand their own incentive structures and the adaptive strategies available to deal with unwanted meddling by "outsiders"--whether they be appellate courts, "fuzzy-
headed" due process liberals, or supervisory judges and prosecutors. If one knows little about courts, the book may serve as a useful introduction to some of the attempts at and the difficulties with reform. Beyond the question of audience, Feeley's treatment of his subject raises many

Presumably such a
issues, a few of which will be discussed here. The book's theme is that reform is difficult because successful attempts to modify behavior must become integrated into the norms and values of those who work in courts.

process will take a good deal of time. Yet much of the evidence that Feeley cites to support his
argument that reforms "fail" is based on before-and-after studies of innovations in which the "after"
period is a matter of months or a year or two. Thus, his evidence on the failure of the Michigan gun law is drawn from a study that
examined sentencing in a sixmonth period after the law went into effect.' The data cited by Feeley dealing with the effects of Massachusetts's use-a-gun-go-to-
prison statute (the Bartley-Fox statute) nearly all deal with what happened in 1976, the year after its implementation. The "failure" of the most sweeping sentence
reform examined, the California determinate sentence law, to achieve its myriad and complex goals is demonstrated by reference to studies6 that looked at its
effects in the first year and a half of its existence. It is as though Feeley has not read his own theory or at least has not taken it seriously. If criminal courts have
settled ways of doing their crucial business-inducing defendants to agree to be convicted without trial by offering them sentence concessions that comport with
shared expectations of a going rate-who would expect that a "reform" that potentially altered such disposition routines would have a substantial effect in only a
year or so? Feeley might be arguing that such reforms cannot be "successful" because they were introduced by "outsiders" and did not adequately modify the
incentive structure of court participants. Thus, he might be arguing that small shortrun impact will never be translated into the large-scale changes that many
supporters of such innovations said they desired. But surely his own theory would suggest that one cannot know this by looking at what happens in the first six
months or year after an innovation has been introduced To put the argument another way, Feeley is much more sanguine about the prospects for effective reform if
it is based on what Scheingold calls a "strategy of rights,"' that is, if new procedures are adopted as a matter not simply of reform or noblesse oblige but as a matter
of entitlement. The
primary example of such reform in courts is the "due process revolution" in which the
administration of justice-from encounters of suspects with police through the conditions within prisons-
was the subject of reforms emanating from appellate courts. Assuming for the moment that such
reforms were indeed "successful" or "effective," would we have been able to know if we had looked at
what happened a few months or a year or two after Miranda or Mapp?' Indeed, a series of impact
studies similar to those cited by Feeley were conducted, and the results look strikingly similar: police
officers routinely engaged in adaptive behavior that undercut the influence of the decisions. It does not require any 9

review of social science evidence to know that other reforms emanating from courts in the past 25 years-for example, school desegregation, elimination of schoolhouse religion,
reapportionment-took a good deal more than a year or two to be effective. My point is not that Feeley is necessarily wrong in his assertion that these sentence reforms have ultimately failed
to produce the large-scale shifts in behavior that some of their proponents desired. Rather, it is doubtful that the evidence he reviews warrants this conclusion. His very theory of courtroom
behavior suggests that his evidence is likely to be inadequate. This discussion suggests that Feeley's characterization of the "success" or "effectiveness" of reforms may not rest on an adequate
evidentiary base, even though his assertions about why failure is likely seem plausible. A more fundamental issue involves the very notion of "success" or "effectiveness." Feeley, like most who
attempt to study or characterize the effects of innovation, too often assumes that the goals of particular reforms are easy to discern and provide a clear and convenient measuring rod against

The litany of ways in which this premise is typically misleading is

which to assess effectiveness. This is clearly not true of many reforms.

well-known: innovation are often the product of compromise and different supporters may have
different goals; discerning what these goals were from the language of a statute or administrative order
or from legislative history is often difficult; manifest goals may paper over hidden agendas; knowledge of
difficulties in getting others to change their behavior may lead to attempts at reform by indirection. These issues
suggest that using supporters' goals as yardsticks against which to measure whether a reform is "successful" or "effective" is difficult and can be misleading. Indeed, Feeley is aware of many of these issues. For example, his discussion of the effectiveness of the California determinate

A related
sentence law appropriately acknowledges the difficulty of knowing whether it was "supposed" to reduce sentence disparities. Yet he too frequently falls back on formulations that assess whether an innovation was, in some global sense, a success or failure.

issue involves the whole question of "symbolic" as opposed to "real" reform . In no policy area is the
role of symbolic politics so pervasive as in criminal justice reform As his . Feeley acknowledges this point but does not take it as seriously as he might have.

cases document, many of the reforms discussed follow a similar pattern: a "problem" is identified and
publicized; a constituency concerned about the problem emerges (sometimes a large group of citizens,
as in the case of many mandatory-minimum-sentence laws; sometimes a narrower coalition of elites, as
in the case of the ROR and diversion movements); a "solution" is proposed and adopted; but the
behavioral change one might anticipate if the manifest or expressed goals of the participants are
taken seriously does not appear to follow. These are the typical "failures" that Feeley discusses and laments. If such reforms are evaluated in terms of the purposes articulated in their provisions, their legislative
history, or the expectations of some of their supporters, a judgment of "failure" or "ineffectiveness" seems appropriate. But from the standpoint of many of their most crucial proponents (e.g., Governor Rockefeller and members of the state legislatures in New York, Massachusetts, and

To the extent that the proposals served the function of mobilizing public support
Michigan), such a judgment may be far off the mark.

for officeholders by reassuring citizens that something was being done about drug dealing or firearms
use, they may have been highly successful. Such support typically emerges from the adoption of
innovative policies, not from their actual implementation. Although an outside observer may postulate a
series of goals for innovations and appropriately attempt to measure their success in terms of them-the
approach taken by Feeley and much of the research he summarizes-one should be very sensitive to the
symbolic functions of innovations Mandatory-minimum-sentence laws, determinate sentencing, .

sentence guidelines, and speedy-trial rules may serve to create or bolster political support, quite
independent of what happens after they are adopted in terms of the actual "solution" of the
"problem" to which they are ostensibly directed . This is not to argue that all criminal court reforms are the product of cynical calculation, manipulation of symbols to produce support and quiescence,
though in my view the type of mandatory-minimum-sentence legislation discussed by Feeley does indeed fall in this category. I don't believe that the proponents of such legislation care very much whether the crime reduction effects so often advanced as justification for such policies are
achieved, and few can be so naive as to believe that they will be. It is the symbolism of such get-tough policies and their ability to attract support that lies behind legislative support for such laws. Not all court reforms are the subject of such cynicism and manipulation as underlies the
general area of "sentence reform." But any account of reform must be especially sensitive to the issues of symbolic politics and to the many and quite varied notions of "success" that may be critical to understanding and evaluating what happens after such innovations are adopted