September 21, 2018 • 42 mins
Paul Butler, a law professor at Georgetown University and author of the book "Chokehold: Policing Black Men," is all about tearing the criminal justice system down. After all, it isn't really about justice. In this interview, Yves talks to him about his time as a prosecutor, mass incarceration, and prison abolition.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're listening to afro Punk Solution Sessions. I'm your host
Brigittad and I'm your co host Eve Jeff Cookee. Acro
punk is a safe place, a blank space to freak
out in, to construct a new reality, to live our
lives as we see fit while making sense of the
world around us. Here at Afropunk, we have the conversations
that matter to us, conversations that lead to solutions. In
(00:30):
our previous episode, in a Box, we talked about mass incarceration,
which is a huge problem in the u s in general,
but particularly affects disadvantaged people disproportionately. In that episode, you
heard from Paul Butler. Now, Paul is the author of
the book Choll called Policing Black Men, and he's a
law professor at Georgetown University. And in that conversation we
(00:51):
talked a lot about his upbringing in Chicago, his time
as a prosecutor and why he decided to stop doing
that work, and his personal experience with the system. And
in that episode you only got to hear a little
bit from him. But now we're gonna bring you the
full interview, So let's get into it. I'm Paul Butler,
I'm law professor at Georgetown and the author of Choco
(01:14):
Policing Black Men. I'm also UH legal analysts on MSNBC
UM and I would like to start to get you
just to talk a little bit about your upbringing in
how you got into this work. I know that you
told a really powerful and impactful story Solution Sessions about
being arrested and being prosecuted for a crime that you
(01:35):
didn't commit. UM, So can you talk a little bit
about that and about about how you got to this point.
Part of it is growing up in a beautiful, loving,
low income all African American community in Chicago, Illinois. I
grew up there in the seventies and eighties and what
Martin Martin Luther King described as the most segregated city
(01:58):
he'd ever seen. I remember once riding my bicycle to
the library, which was literally across the tracks in the
white neighborhood. I was about twelve years old, and when
I crossed those tracks, this cop car pulled up alongside me.
White cop rolls down the window and says, is that
(02:19):
bicycle yours? And I say yeah, is that car yours?
And I speed away and when I get home, I
tell my mom what I said to the cop, she
spanked me. Don't I know what happens to black boys
who talked to the police like that. It was one
of those bankings where the mom cries as much as
(02:41):
the kid. It turns out that she was exactly right.
Literally during the time that that happened, the police, we
now know we're torturing black men. The Chicago police had
an off site location where they attached black men's testicles
to electrodes. Uh, they put poison in their noses to
(03:06):
try to coerce them into confessing to crimes that they
didn't commit. The city of Chicago has paid millions of
dollars now to the victims of that kind of atrocious
police torture. And so why, having experiences like that, would
I decide to, of all things, be a prosecutor. I
(03:27):
actually went into the prosecutor's office as an undercover brother.
I was hoping I could make change from the inside.
But what I learned is that the system is too
broke to fix. We need radical transformation our criminal legal process.
I won't say criminal justice system because there's nothing just
(03:47):
about it, but our criminal legal process is so broke
down we can't think about reform. We have to think
about transformation, and I learned that lesson as a prosecutor
a hard way. During the time that I worked at
the Justice Department, I had the most high profile case.
(04:07):
I was on a team that was prosecuting a United
States senator for public corruption. And during the time that
I was working in that case, I got arrested and
prosecuted for a crime that I didn't commit. It was
a stupid little Fred and Barney dispute about a parking space.
(04:28):
A neighbor had said that I had run up to
her and pushed her, and she was mad at me
because I was using a parking space that she thought
was hers. The thing is, she called the police, and
now it's real clear what happens when folks call the
police on black people. Police rolled up, didn't ask any questions,
(04:50):
just arrested me. People say, well, didn't you tell him
you're a prosecutor. Darn right, idea cops that so you're
probably we know this already. You have the right to
remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used
against you. So I talked about the rest of my book,
(05:11):
Let's Get Free of Hip Hop, theory of justice and
so I hope folks will check that one out if
they want to know the whole story. But I'll tell
you things worked out fine for me. Things worked out
fine because I had the best lawyer in town Michelle Robertson,
African American at that point, best defense attorney in DC,
(05:33):
and now she runs the National Basketball Association Players Association,
and I had her because I could afford to hire
the best lawyer in town. Things worked out fine for
me because I had a kind of social standing. We
made sure that jury knew that I was a lawyer,
that I gone to Yale. Those kind of things shouldn't matter,
(05:56):
but they do, and so I knew how to look
like the kind of black man a DC jury wouldn't
want to send to jail. Things worked out fine from
me because I had legal skills. I had literally prosecuted
people in a courtroom where I was being prosecuted. And
the last reason things worked out fine for me is
because I was innocent, but that didn't seem like the
(06:18):
most important reason. And so when that jury said not guilty,
I could have gone back to the prosecutor's office, but
what had happened was so mind blowing I didn't feel
like doing that work anymore. A lot of things that
defendant who I prosecuted had said to me, like the
(06:40):
cops lie, like there were people who knew the real deal,
but they wouldn't come forward. All of that happened in
my case. So when I look back, of course I
regret it. I regret having to go through that process,
but I don't regret it holy that at prosecution, being prosecuted,
(07:03):
being put on trial. It made a man out of me.
It made a black man out of me. You mentioned
that things worked out for you because you knew the
system and you had this kind of social standing. What
would have happened if you didn't know the system. I
would have been forced to plead guilty to a crime
(07:26):
that I didn't commit. And for me, again, it would
have been fine. Hell, I had a good job, and
I could have gotten another job as a lawyer and
not as a prosecutor. But I could have done something.
So I'm not concerned about people like me. What I'm
concerned about is all of the other young sisters and
(07:46):
brothers who are in the system who don't have the
advantages that I have, and they end up often pleading
guilty because the prosecutor throws the book at them and say,
is that if you go to trial, if you exercise
that constitutional right to get this case heard by a
(08:07):
jury of your peers, if you lose, I'm gonna put
you under the jail. And lots of people just can't
take that risk, and so they end up getting put
on probation or getting locked up simply because the system
(08:30):
doesn't work the way the constitution says. There's no meaningful
right to a jury trial. A lot of the Bill
of Rights when it comes to African Americans is just
words on paper, and unfortunately, the right to a trial
by jury is one of those things that just words
on paper. What we know, the way that African American men,
(08:56):
especially experience lies is that black men have no rights
that the police are bound to respect. There's this stigma
that black men are angry, that they're threatening, and that
they're aggressive. That leads into these types of actions and
(09:17):
things that like, you know, cause people to lock their
doors across the street, or you know, things like shoot
first and ask questions later or or never. What how
can those stigmas change? How can we change those perceptions?
You know, that's when you ask how can we change
the perceptions that black men are are more violent or
(09:42):
more angry. That's kind of like asking, how can we
change the perception that the moon is made of green cheese. Yeah,
it's bullshit and people should know better, and a lot
of people do know better. So what we have to
understand about all these stereotypes about black men that were
(10:06):
prone to crime, criminal, minded, violent, is that those myths
serve a function. Uh, those myths propped up white supremacy.
And one way we know this is by looking at
how stereotypes about black men travel over time and how
(10:28):
they depend on whatever work White supremacy needs stereotypes about
black men to do. And so if you look back
during slavery, there wasn't a stereotype that black men were
violent or dangerous because did that were true, of course,
you wouldn't want them, uh, in large numbers, you know,
(10:48):
living basically in your home, if you were a plantation owner,
living on your land. And so then the stereotypes were
that black men were docile, that we were superstitious, that
we were lazy, that we were stupid. And it wasn't
until emancipation when black people gained their freedom, at least
(11:14):
on paper, that these new stereotypes popped up the African
American men were more likely to commit rape, especially against
white women, that we or drug users and crazy fiends.
And again that was to support Jim craw. The idea
(11:39):
was that if people thought that black folks we're antisocial
and black men were rapists, that justified not only housing segregation,
not only opening the jails to fill them with black men.
(12:04):
That justifies segregated schools, segregated cemeteries, segregated white only, colored
only water fountains, and train compartments. So the only way
that we get rid of these lies that people tell
about black men is to crush white supremacy. And that sounds,
(12:30):
of course, like a huge task, and it is. But
in my new book, Choco, Police and Black Men, I
suggest some places to start. Can you talk about some
of those places that you mentioned to start? Uh? You know,
I've been so inspired by the Movement for Black Lives.
I think it's the most important social justice movement of
(12:53):
our time. And one of its insights is that or
all of the ways that people of color and poor
people and LGBT people are are subordinated, they're all related.
(13:13):
And so you can't talk about the problem of black
men being killed by the police and disproportionate numbers without
also understanding that black girls get kicks out of school
for disciplinary reasons way more than almost anybody else, even
(13:36):
though they don't present more problems. It's just that that's
how people respond when black girls act out way different
than how they respond when white girls act out. You
can't think about those problems without thinking about the fact
that the average net worth of a black woman is
(13:59):
one works of an unmarried black woman one bucks, compared
to the average networks of a white man seventy one dollars.
And that's related to eviction. Some people have said, what
mass incarceration is to black men, eviction is to black women.
(14:19):
And so we have to think of all of these
kind of as symptoms again of this larger disease of
white supremacy. And so in my work I focus on
the criminal legal process, and I've understood that again, what
we do to black people in this country call the
(14:40):
police on them for no reason, we weaponize one. What
we do to black folks is lock them up. More
black people are under the criminal legal process, now under
criminal supervision. More Black people under criminals legal supervision now
than there was waves in eighteen fifty. One way to
(15:06):
resolve that is to abolish prison. So prison abolition is
something that has been endorsed by the Movement for Black Lives,
by some lawyers organizations, and by a lot of people
who have had family members in the system or returning
(15:26):
citizens who have been in the system themselves. And when
you first hear about prison abolition, I know it sounds
a little crazy, especially coming from me, a former prosecutor.
But what we have to ask ourselves is what is
it that we think prison does and are there ways
that we could do that without locking people in cages
(15:47):
like animals. At what we hope prison does is to
keep us safe from people who have hurt us if
they weren't locked up, And we hope that it makes
people who have caused harm accountable for the harm that
they've caused. But those of us who have worked inside
the system, no, the prison doesn't do either one of
(16:10):
those very well. And so the question is can we
use our creativity, our ingenuity, a morality to come up
with better ways, more effective ways of keeping us safe
(16:30):
and of making people who have caused harm responsible for
the harm they've caused, and the answer is yes. The
great news is that their communities all over the country
that are working on ways to resolve conflict, ways to
help people in crisis that don't evolve calling the men
(16:55):
with guns and batons, that don't respond onto people's mental
health issues by locking them in cages. So President abolition
starts to make sense when we understand that people who
are incarcerated now are either addicts or mentally ill. So
(17:18):
if we started giving folks treatment rather than punishment, we
beat a whole lot safer. You know, people say, well,
what about the victims. One thing we have to understand
is when we think about the victim of a crime,
(17:39):
especially the victim of a violent crime, the image in
our minds should be that of a young African American
man or a young African American woman. They're the people
who are the most likely victims in the United States.
And when we talk to those so about what they want,
(18:01):
often it's not hitting the person who calls harm under
the jail. What they want is to feel safe. And
right there in Brooklyn, the home of the original Afro
Pump Festival, right there in Brooklyn, there's a community organization
(18:24):
called Common Justice that's doing amazing work on these issues.
So Common Justice has this deal with the District Attorney
of Brooklyn shout out to Eric Gonzalez now and his predecessor,
who unfortunately died while he was in office, makes this
(18:46):
agreement but with Common Justice that for certain cases of
violent crime, if the victim agreed, then that case left
the d A's office and it went to this give
me the organization called Common Justice, and there the victim
has to consent. And guess what victims do consent Because
(19:10):
folks in Dead Stye, folks in Flatbush, folks in these
stress communities in Brooklyn, they're the main people who get it.
They know that the d A's office isn't gonna do
anything that makes them feel safer. Even if the guys
blocked up, that's not gonna help them. And so what
(19:33):
they do in Common Justice is, first of all, have
the person who has caused harm get the kind of
help that he needs so that he's not gonna hurt anybody. Again.
Often that involves therapy and evolves treatment for addiction or
for mental health disorders, and evolves that do getting in
(19:57):
touch with themselves, and sometimes that's how it works. Sometimes
brothers who are in the middle of what might be
a two year therapy, a two year being forced to
confront your own demon. Sometimes those brothers said, man, I
wish I'd gone to jail, because this stuff is getting
in touch with why I caused. It's hard, This is
too hard. But guess what, it works way better than prison.
(20:23):
And so people who have been in this program, and
the other thing they have to do is to make
it up to the victim in a way that she
feels whole, in a way that she feels even though
whatever this guy did to her it can never be undone,
in a way that she now feels respected and made
(20:44):
as as whole as she can be. And it sounds
kind of like, you know, groovy coom by. Yeah, But
guess what it works. The people who have gone in
this program, they're much less likely to reaffind They're much
less likely uh to hurt anybody then people who have
(21:07):
been locked up in prison. And so we think now
about not being tough on crime, We think about being
smart on crime, and common justice points the way to
being smart on crime not locking up people and throwing
away the key, but giving people the kind of treatment
(21:31):
that they deserve giving victims real respect and not by
saying we're gonna just put this guy in this cage
for a while and we'll see what happens when he
comes out. That doesn't work, we now know. So looking
at evidence based responds us to people who cause harm,
(21:52):
and that leads us away from this rigid punishment regime
and towards you know, we understand that now. For for
drug crimes, when I was a prosecutor, I can't tell
you how many people are locked up for drugs, so hypocritical.
When I when I joined the Justice Department as a prosecutor,
(22:14):
the only reason I stopped smoking weed is because I
got drug tested. And so that shows you that's just
one example of how messed up our our whole and
how hypocritical our whole process is. You know, for drug crimes,
if you look at who actually commits those crimes. Right
(22:37):
here in d C. The National Institute of Health tells
us that black people don't use drugs more than anybody else.
Were about people who use drugs, and direct drugs are
like most kind of social transactions, uh, segregated. So if
you look at people who buy drugs and sell drugs,
(22:58):
it's I kind of segregated transaction. People buy and sell
drugs from people of their own race, but some pcent
of people who do the crime. But then if you
go in d C. Over to the Justice Department next, well,
who's locked up for that crime? People are African Americans.
(23:20):
So we're people who do the crime. Sixty percent of
people who do the time. And so you know, that's
just straight out discrimination, that's just straight out selective law enforcement.
And so again when I'm thinking about abolition, you know
(23:41):
that's where we start. We start with letting people have
alternatives to punishment, uh for using or selling drugs. If
it's up to me, it's legal. If it's up to me,
we serve. We don't mark people in cages for that.
(24:03):
And when I think about abolition, it doesn't mean we
go to every prison in the country and let everybody
out tomorrow. What we understand is that it's a process
of gradual decarceration where we start with again what I
think are the easy cases, like the drug cases and
other kinds of non violent crime, and we work our
(24:26):
way through the system. Again, what's a focus on safety
with a focus on making sure that folks who are
causing harm are going to get the kind of services
that they need so that they don't cause harm anymore.
So abolition movements take a long time, and prison abolition
(24:50):
doesn't mean that everybody gets to go home tomorrow, but
it means that that's our vision, that's our goal, a
world which nobody is put in a cage like animals.
Even if we thought in theory some people might need
to be treated like that, we know everything we know
(25:12):
about American history knows that if we have some policy
of of locking people in cages or executing people, there's
no way that that's going to be done in the
United States. That's not all about race and class. That's
not all about locking up black people. A lot of
(25:35):
people understand this. For the death penalty, a lot of
people are against the death penalty because they know that
is for black folks. It turns out that that's not
only true about the death penalty, that's true about incarceration,
that's true about probation. Those programs are designed for black men.
(25:55):
And so again what we have to understand is that
whatever good do we think prison does, uh, they are
much better ways to get the same results that don't
evolve treating human beings like animals. A couple of things
in thinking about UM what you just spoke on UM.
(26:17):
You mentioned, you know, looking from the inside, that is
evident that lacking people up isn't rehabilitating them. And I
think that even to those of us outside the system
for really paying attention, that that that's evident as well.
Why do you why do people still have these false
ideas of what prison does and what does actually happen
and what does life look like when black men leave prison? Oh? Unfortunately,
(26:42):
when folks leave prison now, they end up right back
there in about the year. So if you look at
the statistics, about sixty of people who come home h
get locked back up within a year and a half.
And that's because they haven't received the kinds of services
(27:05):
or treatment that they need in order to have better
outcomes when they're back at home. People say, oh, well,
it would be too expensive. We'll guess what we spend
that money right now. So if I'm thinking, but why
can't folks get health care, why can't they get consoling,
(27:30):
Why can't they get addiction treatment, Why can't they get
job training? People say it's gonna cost too much money. Well,
prisons way more expensive you know, not far from where
the festival happens. In Brooklyn, they have what you call
million dollar blocks. And those are million dollar blocks because
(27:54):
that's how much money the government spend blocking people up
just on that one block. And so what a lot
of us say is what if what if rather than
spending that million dollars putting people in cages, we spending
on schools, we spending on sending people to college. We
(28:15):
sent it, we spent it on helping people learn how
to be plumbers. I always say in d C. I
don't have a hard time finding a great doctor or
a lawyer. What I have a hard time is finding
a great electrician a great painter. And so for some
folks who may not be thinking about college, we want
(28:37):
to encourage them to think about college. But if that's
not for them, again, they can be an electrician, make
a whole lot of money, and that's the kind of
skill that keeps folks out of prison. The main thing
is with young men just getting under graduate from high school.
To graduate from high school, that dramatically adduces your chances
(29:02):
of being in the criminal legal process. And so why
don't we have the courage the integrity to take care
of our young black men in this way rather than
just kind of sending them down the assembly line to prison.
(29:25):
I have to say it's because I think a lot
of people don't think of black folks is fully human.
And that's just not some kind of abstract statement. If
we look at some of the researchs that's been done,
a lot of folks really think that black people are monkey.
So when Roseanne Barr made that stupid comment about Valerie Jared,
(29:49):
it kind of signed onto this whole history of analogizing
African Americans to non human animals. And unfortunately, some of
the research shows that that's real. And so when we think, well,
(30:10):
why did they keep locking this up? Why is the
main social and legal policy for young African American and
other black men pretty nothing? Cages? What's that all about?
What it's all about is a fear of black men.
(30:30):
What is all about is this anxiety that young black
men cause. And a whole lot of people you touched
on briefly just now that the role that schools play
in sending black men to prison are the step after
that being a black man being in prison. Can you
talk a little bit more about that school to prison pipeline? Yeah,
(30:55):
so for both black boys and girls. When we think
about what I called the chokeho this this fear that
people have about black men and the legal response, which
is to police and prosecute us to death. The joke
(31:19):
old starts really early. So if you look at the data,
it starts for black boys when we're about four years old.
Even at that point, people start giving us what I
call the hard stare. So if you look at who
(31:39):
gets sent to the tension, who gets kicked out of kindergarten,
it's mainly black boys and black girls. We're talking about
five year olds who if it's a little white Susie
ya seeing it sent to the principal office, if it's Javan,
(32:06):
they called the police on them, or what they very
misleadingly called the school resource officer because his resources, his
handcuffs and his power to arrest and his gun, that's
his resource. But that's who gets called on on Gavan.
(32:27):
And that process just kind of repeats itself, uh throughout
the system, and the result is that young black boys
and girls are less likely to finish high school. Then
they're white counterparts. And if you don't finish high school,
(32:49):
if you're a young black man, you're going to jail
in many cases. So if you look at black men
in their forties who don't have high school degrees, they're
more likely to be in jail than they are to
(33:09):
have a job. What kind of effect has the media
attention on police killings of black boys and men had
on the general sentiment amount around how the public thinks
about criminal justice. You know, stories like Calife Brothers, and
how those those conversations have an impact. When I think
(33:31):
about the effect of the viral videos of black men
getting shot down by the police or black girls getting
beat up by the cops, I think that it has
an effect on all those people, especially white folks who
(33:54):
just didn't believe it. When people of color would tell
stories about what the police do and how violent they
are and how disrespectfully they treat us. A lot of
white folks just didn't believe it. Well, now they know.
And the other question is knowing it doesn't make a difference.
(34:19):
You know, the old folks say, when you know better,
you do better. So now that many people know that
everything that black people said about the police, well, guess
what it's true, are they doing better? And I think
it's making a difference. For some. So when we think
(34:41):
about that maddening incident at Starbucks and Philly where the
two brothers has a police called them them because they
were waiting for their friends at the coffee shop. We
know about that because US white folks stepped up. White
(35:03):
folks made that video. White folks and African Americans and
Hispanics and others understood that this was a big deal
and refused to allow one to be weaponized in their names.
And so I think that that's a example of the
(35:27):
success of the movement for Black Lives, which has been
very canny and using media and shining a light on
how violent and me the police are the black people.
So to that extent, a lot of people, now that
they know better, they are doing better. So again, if
(35:51):
we think about the impact of the viral videos of
police violence to the people who didn't believe it, now
the know. But then there's another set people who just
don't care or who thinks that that's what the police
need to be doing, that's how they should be treating
(36:14):
black people. And that's a much larger group than I'd
like to think. And so when we see the results
of some of these cases in which even with the videos,
the police are not held accountable. They're almost never charged,
(36:35):
and when they are charged, they're usually found not guilty.
And so unfortunately a lot of people think, well, either
the police are just doing their jobs, or that's the
kind of treatment that black people deserve. And so for
(36:58):
that set of folks who are firmly committed to white supremacy,
the videos don't make it difference. So you also talked
about healing through music in your panel. What does that
look like to you and what is the importance of
healing and therapy? You know, there's been a lot of
(37:20):
focus recently on trauma and the impact that that has
on communities of color. One amazing statistic I saw is
a study asked people who are imprisoned for various crimes,
(37:42):
have you ever personally seen somebody be killed? And almost
everybody who's in prison has seen with their own eyes
somebody be killed, and most people who are not locked
up haven't seen that. And so that makes us think
(38:06):
very deeply about the way that trauma operates in the
lives of people of color, and especially black women and men.
And one of the one thing that I think art
(38:27):
does is the help us deal with trauma. I think
art is healing, and of course it's not the only
kind of care that we need. People who have suffered trauma,
you know, need therapy, they need healthcare, they need love
(38:49):
in their lives, they need healthy relationships, but they also
need art. And I had an actual, real, vivid example
of that. I had to the honor of speaking at
the Solution Sessions at Afro Punk Atlanta in two and
(39:11):
that meant that I got to go to Afro Park
and the last Sunday of that festival in Atlanta, people
have been waiting all day for so Lange and there
were a lot of African American women at that festival,
(39:34):
a beautiful diverse array of sisters, and Solange came out
and in an hour on that stage in Atlanta, she
healed us. She gave us stuff that that we didn't
(39:54):
even know that we needed. And you can look around
after that performance and see on the faces of of everybody,
but especially black women, that something really good had happened
in that hour. It's one of the most amazing things
that I've ever seen, one of the best concerts I've
(40:16):
ever one of the best performances I've ever witnessed, and
it wasn't just about artistic achievement. It was about something
much deeper. It was about giving us some some food
for our souls. And that's one of the reasons I've
(40:39):
always loved going to the Alpha Punk festivals because there's
something like that that happens at almost every festival. There's
a moment where you kind of feel at one with
all these kind of sweaty black people around you. You
just want to hug everybody. And again, part of that
is a a achievement because of the wonderful artists who
(41:04):
come through the festival. But part of that is it
is soul. I get why they used to call it
soul music, because because that's what it feels like. It
feels like you're feeding your soul. Afro Punk Solution Sessions
(41:26):
is a co production between Afro Punk and How Stuff Works.
Your hosts are Bridget Todd and Eve's Jeff Cope. Executive
co producers are Julie Douglas, Jocelyn Cooper, and quand Latif Hill.
Dylan Fagan is supervising producer and audio engineer. Many many
thanks to Casey Pegram and any Reese for their production
and editorial oversight, and many thanks to her on the
(41:48):
ground Atlanta Crew Ben Bowland, Corey Oliver and Noel Brown.
The Underside of Power is performed by Algiers. Connect with
us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at afro Punk
You're listening to afro Punk Solution Sessions. I'm your host
Brigittad and I'm your co host Eve Jeff Cookee. Acro
punk is a safe place, a blank space to freak
out in, to construct a new reality, to live our
lives as we see fit while making sense of the
world around us. Here at Afropunk, we have the conversations
that matter to us, conversations that lead to solutions. In
(00:30):
our previous episode, in a Box, we talked about mass incarceration,
which is a huge problem in the u s in general,
but particularly affects disadvantaged people disproportionately. In that episode, you
heard from Paul Butler. Now, Paul is the author of
the book Choll called Policing Black Men, and he's a
law professor at Georgetown University. And in that conversation we
(00:51):
talked a lot about his upbringing in Chicago, his time
as a prosecutor and why he decided to stop doing
that work, and his personal experience with the system. And
in that episode you only got to hear a little
bit from him. But now we're gonna bring you the
full interview, So let's get into it. I'm Paul Butler,
I'm law professor at Georgetown and the author of Choco
(01:14):
Policing Black Men. I'm also UH legal analysts on MSNBC
UM and I would like to start to get you
just to talk a little bit about your upbringing in
how you got into this work. I know that you
told a really powerful and impactful story Solution Sessions about
being arrested and being prosecuted for a crime that you
(01:35):
didn't commit. UM, So can you talk a little bit
about that and about about how you got to this point.
Part of it is growing up in a beautiful, loving,
low income all African American community in Chicago, Illinois. I
grew up there in the seventies and eighties and what
Martin Martin Luther King described as the most segregated city
(01:58):
he'd ever seen. I remember once riding my bicycle to
the library, which was literally across the tracks in the
white neighborhood. I was about twelve years old, and when
I crossed those tracks, this cop car pulled up alongside me.
White cop rolls down the window and says, is that
(02:19):
bicycle yours? And I say yeah, is that car yours?
And I speed away and when I get home, I
tell my mom what I said to the cop, she
spanked me. Don't I know what happens to black boys
who talked to the police like that. It was one
of those bankings where the mom cries as much as
(02:41):
the kid. It turns out that she was exactly right.
Literally during the time that that happened, the police, we
now know we're torturing black men. The Chicago police had
an off site location where they attached black men's testicles
to electrodes. Uh, they put poison in their noses to
(03:06):
try to coerce them into confessing to crimes that they
didn't commit. The city of Chicago has paid millions of
dollars now to the victims of that kind of atrocious
police torture. And so why, having experiences like that, would
I decide to, of all things, be a prosecutor. I
(03:27):
actually went into the prosecutor's office as an undercover brother.
I was hoping I could make change from the inside.
But what I learned is that the system is too
broke to fix. We need radical transformation our criminal legal process.
I won't say criminal justice system because there's nothing just
(03:47):
about it, but our criminal legal process is so broke
down we can't think about reform. We have to think
about transformation, and I learned that lesson as a prosecutor
a hard way. During the time that I worked at
the Justice Department, I had the most high profile case.
(04:07):
I was on a team that was prosecuting a United
States senator for public corruption. And during the time that
I was working in that case, I got arrested and
prosecuted for a crime that I didn't commit. It was
a stupid little Fred and Barney dispute about a parking space.
(04:28):
A neighbor had said that I had run up to
her and pushed her, and she was mad at me
because I was using a parking space that she thought
was hers. The thing is, she called the police, and
now it's real clear what happens when folks call the
police on black people. Police rolled up, didn't ask any questions,
(04:50):
just arrested me. People say, well, didn't you tell him
you're a prosecutor. Darn right, idea cops that so you're
probably we know this already. You have the right to
remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used
against you. So I talked about the rest of my book,
(05:11):
Let's Get Free of Hip Hop, theory of justice and
so I hope folks will check that one out if
they want to know the whole story. But I'll tell
you things worked out fine for me. Things worked out
fine because I had the best lawyer in town Michelle Robertson,
African American at that point, best defense attorney in DC,
(05:33):
and now she runs the National Basketball Association Players Association,
and I had her because I could afford to hire
the best lawyer in town. Things worked out fine for
me because I had a kind of social standing. We
made sure that jury knew that I was a lawyer,
that I gone to Yale. Those kind of things shouldn't matter,
(05:56):
but they do, and so I knew how to look
like the kind of black man a DC jury wouldn't
want to send to jail. Things worked out fine from
me because I had legal skills. I had literally prosecuted
people in a courtroom where I was being prosecuted. And
the last reason things worked out fine for me is
because I was innocent, but that didn't seem like the
(06:18):
most important reason. And so when that jury said not guilty,
I could have gone back to the prosecutor's office, but
what had happened was so mind blowing I didn't feel
like doing that work anymore. A lot of things that
defendant who I prosecuted had said to me, like the
(06:40):
cops lie, like there were people who knew the real deal,
but they wouldn't come forward. All of that happened in
my case. So when I look back, of course I
regret it. I regret having to go through that process,
but I don't regret it holy that at prosecution, being prosecuted,
(07:03):
being put on trial. It made a man out of me.
It made a black man out of me. You mentioned
that things worked out for you because you knew the
system and you had this kind of social standing. What
would have happened if you didn't know the system. I
would have been forced to plead guilty to a crime
(07:26):
that I didn't commit. And for me, again, it would
have been fine. Hell, I had a good job, and
I could have gotten another job as a lawyer and
not as a prosecutor. But I could have done something.
So I'm not concerned about people like me. What I'm
concerned about is all of the other young sisters and
(07:46):
brothers who are in the system who don't have the
advantages that I have, and they end up often pleading
guilty because the prosecutor throws the book at them and say,
is that if you go to trial, if you exercise
that constitutional right to get this case heard by a
(08:07):
jury of your peers, if you lose, I'm gonna put
you under the jail. And lots of people just can't
take that risk, and so they end up getting put
on probation or getting locked up simply because the system
(08:30):
doesn't work the way the constitution says. There's no meaningful
right to a jury trial. A lot of the Bill
of Rights when it comes to African Americans is just
words on paper, and unfortunately, the right to a trial
by jury is one of those things that just words
on paper. What we know, the way that African American men,
(08:56):
especially experience lies is that black men have no rights
that the police are bound to respect. There's this stigma
that black men are angry, that they're threatening, and that
they're aggressive. That leads into these types of actions and
(09:17):
things that like, you know, cause people to lock their
doors across the street, or you know, things like shoot
first and ask questions later or or never. What how
can those stigmas change? How can we change those perceptions?
You know, that's when you ask how can we change
the perceptions that black men are are more violent or
(09:42):
more angry. That's kind of like asking, how can we
change the perception that the moon is made of green cheese. Yeah,
it's bullshit and people should know better, and a lot
of people do know better. So what we have to
understand about all these stereotypes about black men that were
(10:06):
prone to crime, criminal, minded, violent, is that those myths
serve a function. Uh, those myths propped up white supremacy.
And one way we know this is by looking at
how stereotypes about black men travel over time and how
(10:28):
they depend on whatever work White supremacy needs stereotypes about
black men to do. And so if you look back
during slavery, there wasn't a stereotype that black men were
violent or dangerous because did that were true, of course,
you wouldn't want them, uh, in large numbers, you know,
(10:48):
living basically in your home, if you were a plantation owner,
living on your land. And so then the stereotypes were
that black men were docile, that we were superstitious, that
we were lazy, that we were stupid. And it wasn't
until emancipation when black people gained their freedom, at least
(11:14):
on paper, that these new stereotypes popped up the African
American men were more likely to commit rape, especially against
white women, that we or drug users and crazy fiends.
And again that was to support Jim craw. The idea
(11:39):
was that if people thought that black folks we're antisocial
and black men were rapists, that justified not only housing segregation,
not only opening the jails to fill them with black men.
(12:04):
That justifies segregated schools, segregated cemeteries, segregated white only, colored
only water fountains, and train compartments. So the only way
that we get rid of these lies that people tell
about black men is to crush white supremacy. And that sounds,
(12:30):
of course, like a huge task, and it is. But
in my new book, Choco, Police and Black Men, I
suggest some places to start. Can you talk about some
of those places that you mentioned to start? Uh? You know,
I've been so inspired by the Movement for Black Lives.
I think it's the most important social justice movement of
(12:53):
our time. And one of its insights is that or
all of the ways that people of color and poor
people and LGBT people are are subordinated, they're all related.
(13:13):
And so you can't talk about the problem of black
men being killed by the police and disproportionate numbers without
also understanding that black girls get kicks out of school
for disciplinary reasons way more than almost anybody else, even
(13:36):
though they don't present more problems. It's just that that's
how people respond when black girls act out way different
than how they respond when white girls act out. You
can't think about those problems without thinking about the fact
that the average net worth of a black woman is
(13:59):
one works of an unmarried black woman one bucks, compared
to the average networks of a white man seventy one dollars.
And that's related to eviction. Some people have said, what
mass incarceration is to black men, eviction is to black women.
(14:19):
And so we have to think of all of these
kind of as symptoms again of this larger disease of
white supremacy. And so in my work I focus on
the criminal legal process, and I've understood that again, what
we do to black people in this country call the
(14:40):
police on them for no reason, we weaponize one. What
we do to black folks is lock them up. More
black people are under the criminal legal process, now under
criminal supervision. More Black people under criminals legal supervision now
than there was waves in eighteen fifty. One way to
(15:06):
resolve that is to abolish prison. So prison abolition is
something that has been endorsed by the Movement for Black Lives,
by some lawyers organizations, and by a lot of people
who have had family members in the system or returning
(15:26):
citizens who have been in the system themselves. And when
you first hear about prison abolition, I know it sounds
a little crazy, especially coming from me, a former prosecutor.
But what we have to ask ourselves is what is
it that we think prison does and are there ways
that we could do that without locking people in cages
(15:47):
like animals. At what we hope prison does is to
keep us safe from people who have hurt us if
they weren't locked up, And we hope that it makes
people who have caused harm accountable for the harm that
they've caused. But those of us who have worked inside
the system, no, the prison doesn't do either one of
(16:10):
those very well. And so the question is can we
use our creativity, our ingenuity, a morality to come up
with better ways, more effective ways of keeping us safe
(16:30):
and of making people who have caused harm responsible for
the harm they've caused, and the answer is yes. The
great news is that their communities all over the country
that are working on ways to resolve conflict, ways to
help people in crisis that don't evolve calling the men
(16:55):
with guns and batons, that don't respond onto people's mental
health issues by locking them in cages. So President abolition
starts to make sense when we understand that people who
are incarcerated now are either addicts or mentally ill. So
(17:18):
if we started giving folks treatment rather than punishment, we
beat a whole lot safer. You know, people say, well,
what about the victims. One thing we have to understand
is when we think about the victim of a crime,
(17:39):
especially the victim of a violent crime, the image in
our minds should be that of a young African American
man or a young African American woman. They're the people
who are the most likely victims in the United States.
And when we talk to those so about what they want,
(18:01):
often it's not hitting the person who calls harm under
the jail. What they want is to feel safe. And
right there in Brooklyn, the home of the original Afro
Pump Festival, right there in Brooklyn, there's a community organization
(18:24):
called Common Justice that's doing amazing work on these issues.
So Common Justice has this deal with the District Attorney
of Brooklyn shout out to Eric Gonzalez now and his predecessor,
who unfortunately died while he was in office, makes this
(18:46):
agreement but with Common Justice that for certain cases of
violent crime, if the victim agreed, then that case left
the d A's office and it went to this give
me the organization called Common Justice, and there the victim
has to consent. And guess what victims do consent Because
(19:10):
folks in Dead Stye, folks in Flatbush, folks in these
stress communities in Brooklyn, they're the main people who get it.
They know that the d A's office isn't gonna do
anything that makes them feel safer. Even if the guys
blocked up, that's not gonna help them. And so what
(19:33):
they do in Common Justice is, first of all, have
the person who has caused harm get the kind of
help that he needs so that he's not gonna hurt anybody. Again.
Often that involves therapy and evolves treatment for addiction or
for mental health disorders, and evolves that do getting in
(19:57):
touch with themselves, and sometimes that's how it works. Sometimes
brothers who are in the middle of what might be
a two year therapy, a two year being forced to
confront your own demon. Sometimes those brothers said, man, I
wish I'd gone to jail, because this stuff is getting
in touch with why I caused. It's hard, This is
too hard. But guess what, it works way better than prison.
(20:23):
And so people who have been in this program, and
the other thing they have to do is to make
it up to the victim in a way that she
feels whole, in a way that she feels even though
whatever this guy did to her it can never be undone,
in a way that she now feels respected and made
(20:44):
as as whole as she can be. And it sounds
kind of like, you know, groovy coom by. Yeah, But
guess what it works. The people who have gone in
this program, they're much less likely to reaffind They're much
less likely uh to hurt anybody then people who have
(21:07):
been locked up in prison. And so we think now
about not being tough on crime, We think about being
smart on crime, and common justice points the way to
being smart on crime not locking up people and throwing
away the key, but giving people the kind of treatment
(21:31):
that they deserve giving victims real respect and not by
saying we're gonna just put this guy in this cage
for a while and we'll see what happens when he
comes out. That doesn't work, we now know. So looking
at evidence based responds us to people who cause harm,
(21:52):
and that leads us away from this rigid punishment regime
and towards you know, we understand that now. For for
drug crimes, when I was a prosecutor, I can't tell
you how many people are locked up for drugs, so hypocritical.
When I when I joined the Justice Department as a prosecutor,
(22:14):
the only reason I stopped smoking weed is because I
got drug tested. And so that shows you that's just
one example of how messed up our our whole and
how hypocritical our whole process is. You know, for drug crimes,
if you look at who actually commits those crimes. Right
(22:37):
here in d C. The National Institute of Health tells
us that black people don't use drugs more than anybody else.
Were about people who use drugs, and direct drugs are
like most kind of social transactions, uh, segregated. So if
you look at people who buy drugs and sell drugs,
(22:58):
it's I kind of segregated transaction. People buy and sell
drugs from people of their own race, but some pcent
of people who do the crime. But then if you
go in d C. Over to the Justice Department next, well,
who's locked up for that crime? People are African Americans.
(23:20):
So we're people who do the crime. Sixty percent of
people who do the time. And so you know, that's
just straight out discrimination, that's just straight out selective law enforcement.
And so again when I'm thinking about abolition, you know
(23:41):
that's where we start. We start with letting people have
alternatives to punishment, uh for using or selling drugs. If
it's up to me, it's legal. If it's up to me,
we serve. We don't mark people in cages for that.
(24:03):
And when I think about abolition, it doesn't mean we
go to every prison in the country and let everybody
out tomorrow. What we understand is that it's a process
of gradual decarceration where we start with again what I
think are the easy cases, like the drug cases and
other kinds of non violent crime, and we work our
(24:26):
way through the system. Again, what's a focus on safety
with a focus on making sure that folks who are
causing harm are going to get the kind of services
that they need so that they don't cause harm anymore.
So abolition movements take a long time, and prison abolition
(24:50):
doesn't mean that everybody gets to go home tomorrow, but
it means that that's our vision, that's our goal, a
world which nobody is put in a cage like animals.
Even if we thought in theory some people might need
to be treated like that, we know everything we know
(25:12):
about American history knows that if we have some policy
of of locking people in cages or executing people, there's
no way that that's going to be done in the
United States. That's not all about race and class. That's
not all about locking up black people. A lot of
(25:35):
people understand this. For the death penalty, a lot of
people are against the death penalty because they know that
is for black folks. It turns out that that's not
only true about the death penalty, that's true about incarceration,
that's true about probation. Those programs are designed for black men.
(25:55):
And so again what we have to understand is that
whatever good do we think prison does, uh, they are
much better ways to get the same results that don't
evolve treating human beings like animals. A couple of things
in thinking about UM what you just spoke on UM.
(26:17):
You mentioned, you know, looking from the inside, that is
evident that lacking people up isn't rehabilitating them. And I
think that even to those of us outside the system
for really paying attention, that that that's evident as well.
Why do you why do people still have these false
ideas of what prison does and what does actually happen
and what does life look like when black men leave prison? Oh? Unfortunately,
(26:42):
when folks leave prison now, they end up right back
there in about the year. So if you look at
the statistics, about sixty of people who come home h
get locked back up within a year and a half.
And that's because they haven't received the kinds of services
(27:05):
or treatment that they need in order to have better
outcomes when they're back at home. People say, oh, well,
it would be too expensive. We'll guess what we spend
that money right now. So if I'm thinking, but why
can't folks get health care, why can't they get consoling,
(27:30):
Why can't they get addiction treatment, Why can't they get
job training? People say it's gonna cost too much money. Well,
prisons way more expensive you know, not far from where
the festival happens. In Brooklyn, they have what you call
million dollar blocks. And those are million dollar blocks because
(27:54):
that's how much money the government spend blocking people up
just on that one block. And so what a lot
of us say is what if what if rather than
spending that million dollars putting people in cages, we spending
on schools, we spending on sending people to college. We
(28:15):
sent it, we spent it on helping people learn how
to be plumbers. I always say in d C. I
don't have a hard time finding a great doctor or
a lawyer. What I have a hard time is finding
a great electrician a great painter. And so for some
folks who may not be thinking about college, we want
(28:37):
to encourage them to think about college. But if that's
not for them, again, they can be an electrician, make
a whole lot of money, and that's the kind of
skill that keeps folks out of prison. The main thing
is with young men just getting under graduate from high school.
To graduate from high school, that dramatically adduces your chances
(29:02):
of being in the criminal legal process. And so why
don't we have the courage the integrity to take care
of our young black men in this way rather than
just kind of sending them down the assembly line to prison.
(29:25):
I have to say it's because I think a lot
of people don't think of black folks is fully human.
And that's just not some kind of abstract statement. If
we look at some of the researchs that's been done,
a lot of folks really think that black people are monkey.
So when Roseanne Barr made that stupid comment about Valerie Jared,
(29:49):
it kind of signed onto this whole history of analogizing
African Americans to non human animals. And unfortunately, some of
the research shows that that's real. And so when we think, well,
(30:10):
why did they keep locking this up? Why is the
main social and legal policy for young African American and
other black men pretty nothing? Cages? What's that all about?
What it's all about is a fear of black men.
(30:30):
What is all about is this anxiety that young black
men cause. And a whole lot of people you touched
on briefly just now that the role that schools play
in sending black men to prison are the step after
that being a black man being in prison. Can you
talk a little bit more about that school to prison pipeline? Yeah,
(30:55):
so for both black boys and girls. When we think
about what I called the chokeho this this fear that
people have about black men and the legal response, which
is to police and prosecute us to death. The joke
(31:19):
old starts really early. So if you look at the data,
it starts for black boys when we're about four years old.
Even at that point, people start giving us what I
call the hard stare. So if you look at who
(31:39):
gets sent to the tension, who gets kicked out of kindergarten,
it's mainly black boys and black girls. We're talking about
five year olds who if it's a little white Susie
ya seeing it sent to the principal office, if it's Javan,
(32:06):
they called the police on them, or what they very
misleadingly called the school resource officer because his resources, his
handcuffs and his power to arrest and his gun, that's
his resource. But that's who gets called on on Gavan.
(32:27):
And that process just kind of repeats itself, uh throughout
the system, and the result is that young black boys
and girls are less likely to finish high school. Then
they're white counterparts. And if you don't finish high school,
(32:49):
if you're a young black man, you're going to jail
in many cases. So if you look at black men
in their forties who don't have high school degrees, they're
more likely to be in jail than they are to
(33:09):
have a job. What kind of effect has the media
attention on police killings of black boys and men had
on the general sentiment amount around how the public thinks
about criminal justice. You know, stories like Calife Brothers, and
how those those conversations have an impact. When I think
(33:31):
about the effect of the viral videos of black men
getting shot down by the police or black girls getting
beat up by the cops, I think that it has
an effect on all those people, especially white folks who
(33:54):
just didn't believe it. When people of color would tell
stories about what the police do and how violent they
are and how disrespectfully they treat us. A lot of
white folks just didn't believe it. Well, now they know.
And the other question is knowing it doesn't make a difference.
(34:19):
You know, the old folks say, when you know better,
you do better. So now that many people know that
everything that black people said about the police, well, guess
what it's true, are they doing better? And I think
it's making a difference. For some. So when we think
(34:41):
about that maddening incident at Starbucks and Philly where the
two brothers has a police called them them because they
were waiting for their friends at the coffee shop. We
know about that because US white folks stepped up. White
(35:03):
folks made that video. White folks and African Americans and
Hispanics and others understood that this was a big deal
and refused to allow one to be weaponized in their names.
And so I think that that's a example of the
(35:27):
success of the movement for Black Lives, which has been
very canny and using media and shining a light on
how violent and me the police are the black people.
So to that extent, a lot of people, now that
they know better, they are doing better. So again, if
(35:51):
we think about the impact of the viral videos of
police violence to the people who didn't believe it, now
the know. But then there's another set people who just
don't care or who thinks that that's what the police
need to be doing, that's how they should be treating
(36:14):
black people. And that's a much larger group than I'd
like to think. And so when we see the results
of some of these cases in which even with the videos,
the police are not held accountable. They're almost never charged,
(36:35):
and when they are charged, they're usually found not guilty.
And so unfortunately a lot of people think, well, either
the police are just doing their jobs, or that's the
kind of treatment that black people deserve. And so for
(36:58):
that set of folks who are firmly committed to white supremacy,
the videos don't make it difference. So you also talked
about healing through music in your panel. What does that
look like to you and what is the importance of
healing and therapy? You know, there's been a lot of
(37:20):
focus recently on trauma and the impact that that has
on communities of color. One amazing statistic I saw is
a study asked people who are imprisoned for various crimes,
(37:42):
have you ever personally seen somebody be killed? And almost
everybody who's in prison has seen with their own eyes
somebody be killed, and most people who are not locked
up haven't seen that. And so that makes us think
(38:06):
very deeply about the way that trauma operates in the
lives of people of color, and especially black women and men.
And one of the one thing that I think art
(38:27):
does is the help us deal with trauma. I think
art is healing, and of course it's not the only
kind of care that we need. People who have suffered trauma,
you know, need therapy, they need healthcare, they need love
(38:49):
in their lives, they need healthy relationships, but they also
need art. And I had an actual, real, vivid example
of that. I had to the honor of speaking at
the Solution Sessions at Afro Punk Atlanta in two and
(39:11):
that meant that I got to go to Afro Park
and the last Sunday of that festival in Atlanta, people
have been waiting all day for so Lange and there
were a lot of African American women at that festival,
(39:34):
a beautiful diverse array of sisters, and Solange came out
and in an hour on that stage in Atlanta, she
healed us. She gave us stuff that that we didn't
(39:54):
even know that we needed. And you can look around
after that performance and see on the faces of of everybody,
but especially black women, that something really good had happened
in that hour. It's one of the most amazing things
that I've ever seen, one of the best concerts I've
(40:16):
ever one of the best performances I've ever witnessed, and
it wasn't just about artistic achievement. It was about something
much deeper. It was about giving us some some food
for our souls. And that's one of the reasons I've
(40:39):
always loved going to the Alpha Punk festivals because there's
something like that that happens at almost every festival. There's
a moment where you kind of feel at one with
all these kind of sweaty black people around you. You
just want to hug everybody. And again, part of that
is a a achievement because of the wonderful artists who
(41:04):
come through the festival. But part of that is it
is soul. I get why they used to call it
soul music, because because that's what it feels like. It
feels like you're feeding your soul. Afro Punk Solution Sessions
(41:26):
is a co production between Afro Punk and How Stuff Works.
Your hosts are Bridget Todd and Eve's Jeff Cope. Executive
co producers are Julie Douglas, Jocelyn Cooper, and quand Latif Hill.
Dylan Fagan is supervising producer and audio engineer. Many many
thanks to Casey Pegram and any Reese for their production
and editorial oversight, and many thanks to her on the
(41:48):
ground Atlanta Crew Ben Bowland, Corey Oliver and Noel Brown.
The Underside of Power is performed by Algiers. Connect with
us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at afro Punk
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