Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins, elected as the first county DA of color in Texas back in 2007, has some amazing ideas for law enforcement – the best part is, he’s actually seeing them get passed by the state legislature. And he’s not done yet.
Professor Paul Butler, former federal prosecutor in the District of Columbia and author of the new book Let’s Get Free, A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice, was in Dallas yesterday to debate Mr. Watkins, an event that I was able to attend in person. The debate was really more of an intelligent discussion, as both men were in complete agreement regarding the seriously broken state of our prison system and its effect on America’s young black male population.
Professor Butler used every opportunity he could to praise Mr. Watkins for his vision, his action, and for the difference he is making in Dallas and in Texas, and hopefully the nation. Butler’s view is that 50 years from now, we will have a different system in place, because this one is no longer viable; however, simply being different does not make a thing better. That’s why we need people like Watkins leading the way towards a better, smarter criminal justice system.
As Butler likes to openly disclose, his job as a federal prosecutor was to “use the power of the government to put poor people in prison.” Eventually, he realized that that was not what he went to law school for. He also pointed out that the mission of prosecutors, and of DA offices around the nation, is to put people in prison, rather than to be interested in the human side of things, the side that would actually want to help people who have committed crimes in order that they would refrain from doing those things in the future and instead become contributing members of society in their communities. But the system changed him, rather than him changing the system. So he left.
Statistics can shock people into realizations, and one of Butler’s stats is that while the U.S. has just 5% of the world’s population, it has 25% of the world’s prison population. Looks like our DA offices and prosecutors are doing one hell of a job!
This is where Craig Watkins is different. He does NOT see his job as the head of the District Attorney’s office for Dallas County as merely a prosecutor, with the only scorecard being one that tracks convictions and sentences, being “tough on crime.” No, he states his purpose as “seeking justice,” improving “public safety,” getting people to “believe in the system, believe in the government, because when they do that, they tend to do the right things as jurists.” What he refers to is the fact that before 1994, the state of Texas required voter registration in order to be eligible for jury pools. Many people of color in Texas were not registered voters. This led to juries that produced few acquittals, long sentences, and (given that the people being charged in these cases were frequently young black men up on minor drug charges) a view in low-income communities that the system was unfair and not to be trusted or supported. There was great tendency to avoid going to trial at all costs, to accept plea bargains that included sentencing very much out of proportion to the crime.
In 1994, a law was passed so that only a drivers license was required for jury pool eligibility. This development led to defendants being less afraid to go to trial, as the juries were more representative of the communities that the crimes occurred in and thereby offered the prospect of a more just trial; Watkins also found as an attorney that when he put police officers of color on the jury, he’d see the juries hand back sentences of 2-5 years rather than the 30 years that he used to see.
Right now, the conviction rate in Dallas County is higher than it’s ever been, so Craig Watkins is not a bleeding-heart liberal pushover who wants criminals to roam the streets. What he and Professor Butler both want, however, is for young black men who mess up on minor drug charges to not be locked up, sent away for a good long while, and return to their communities as hardened criminals who still lack a high school education or other redeeming societal values. They see a future where criminals are rehabilitated, where they are educated, where their lifestyle choices as 18-year-old young men do not determine the outcomes of the rest of their lives. Butler is working toward that future by writing and promoting his book and its somewhat controversial ideas, some of which employ civil disobedience. Watkins is working the legislative system in Texas and had all of his office’s sponsored legislation get passed in near unanimous fashion this spring in Austin.
He’s not done yet, and two years from now in the next state session he’ll be swinging for the fences. He has a vision of “levels” of incarceration: one for hard-core criminal activitity, the other for an “institution of opportunity” – DON’T call it incarceration. It would deter, it would punish, but more importantly, it would prepare people to come back to their communities and contribute to others and to their own lives. After the debate, I asked Mr. Watkins if he has seen the practice of “jury nullification” [whereby a jury, when faced with a clearly guilty person beyond all reasonable doubt, acquits the defendant because althouth technically illegal, the punishment would do more harm than the crime; this is a practice discussed in Butler's book] in action in the juries he has worked with. He said he had never, ever seen it in Texas – but that he IS seeing more and more leniency from juries on minor, 1st-time offences.
To give young men of color (Butler and Watkins repeatedly used the phrase in this context, in case you’re wondering whether or not I’m the one who’s making the sweeping stereotypical over-generalizations that typically arise in discussions dealing with our criminal justice sytem) a better shot at life, rather than putting them behind bars for a long, long time as yet more casualties in our lost war on drugs. That is the dream of Professor Paul Butler, and the vision and action of Mr. Craig Watkins, District Attorney of Dallas County, Texas.
