Paul Butler: First you have to try to ask: how did American criminal justice become so inhumane? Photograph: Sam Hollenshead
Paul Butler, author of the new book Chokehold: Policing Black Men, argues the US criminal justice system is institutionally constructed to control African American men. But, he says, that is merely one facet of a pervasive chokehold over black men that can be observed in numerous social and political arenas.
The work has been described by the New York Times as the most readable and provocative account of the war on drugs since Michelle Alexanders The New Jim Crow.
Here, Butler answers questions on some of the books main arguments and grapples with how its series of radical solutions stands in stark contrast to the agenda of Donald Trump.
If you mention the use of a chokehold in the context of modern American policing, the first thing that springs to mind is the 2014 death of Eric Garner in New York. How does that case encapsulate the extended chokehold metaphor you use throughout the book?
The chokehold is a literal mechanism for police use of force. But in the Garner case, it was evocative of so many ills in the criminal justice system: the fact he was arrested for simply selling a tobacco cigarette in the street, the fact he had been harassed by police many times before, the fact the police interpreted his polite conduct as resisting arrest, and the chokehold itself, which was against NYPD regulations. Then, of course, the officer who did it has not been charged with a crime and remains a sworn officer, despite the fact his actions went against NYPD regulations.
So the case, and the chokehold itself, seemed a metaphor for not only how the law fails black people but is also a form of oppression itself.
As a lawyer who went to law school with a goal of helping black people and using my legal skills to make things better, the realization that the law itself was a mechanism to keep African American people down was frightening.
Your prior experience as a criminal prosecutor in Washington DC informs much of your critique of the criminal justice system in the book, and yet you write that you once enjoyed the process of sending other black men to jail. How did you reconcile that on the job?
I had a number of unpleasant experiences with the police as a black kid growing up in Chicago and I was the last person my friends from law school thought would be a prosecutor. But I heard that prosecutors had all this power and so I went to try to change the system from the inside. But I was overwhelmed with the workplace culture, so rather than change the system, the system changed me. I became a hardcore prosecutor in part because the incentives in the prosecutors office are to lock people up for as long as you can.
Lawyers are competitive and ambitious, and the way that manifests itself in a prosecutors office is you want to get tough sentences. I got caught up in that world. You feel like youre doing the Lords work you tell yourselves that youre helping the community.
So how did your perspective change?
There were a few experiences that changed me.
I remember a trial I had in the 1990s where the defendant basically had no defense. He was found with drugs and said he simply didnt know how they had got in his pocket. The majority-black jury found him not guilty. After verdict, I went running after them to find out why. None would talk to me except for the lone white woman, and she said: We knew he was guilty, but he was just so young.
Right there I was forced to reconcile this enormous respect that I gained for the jurors of the district of Columbia with this reality that in some cases they were saying not guilty when they knew otherwise.
You never saw this in cases of violent crime, or even large-scale drug selling, but in drug possession and in low-level sales it was commonplace. And it made me start to think: maybe what theyre doing is right, keeping nonviolent kids out of prison.
Later that decade, I myself was arrested and went to trial over false allegations of [a] misdemeanour assault. A neighbour of mine accused me of pushing her during an argument about a parking space. I was taken to a courthouse with around 150 other black men that day. I thought: Oh my God, what if the judge recognises me? But I dont even think she looked at me. I was just another anonymous, African American man on the lockup list that day.
During the trial, I experienced for myself a lot of things that defendants Id prosecuted said were evidence of how unfair the system was: police lied, witnesses who knew what happened didnt come forward. Now I was forced to confront them myself.
But things were dealt well for me at the trial because I could afford the best lawyer in the city, had legal skills and social standing, and because I was innocent.
The jury took less than 10 minutes to acquit me. But the experience made a man out of me. It made a black man out of me.
The book seems to point to black mens fatal encounters with police as the apex of this chokehold metaphor, but deadly police violence cuts across so many other issues in American society, including mental illness and gun ownership do you think its possible to reconcile them?
I think theyre related in a couple of ways. But first you have to try to ask: how did [the] American criminal justice become so draconian and so inhumane? The answer is, as a way of controlling African American men. So if we think about why we have harsh sentences, why we have a surveillance state, why we have violent policing, why we have 95% of cases settled by plea bargain due to the extraordinary power of prosecutors those were all designed with the idea of controlling black men.
This control has two steps. The first step is the legal construction of every black man as a thug. And the second part is the legal and social response to put down the thug. The supreme court gives the police all this power to control, and of course it doesnt say this power was designed specifically for black men, although its understood thats who the power will be wielded against. But the point about this power is that it is not only used against black men it can be used against others. So all of these practices end up impacting other people, too.
Like many on the left, youre critical of the Obama administrations record on racial justice issues. But do you think, given who has assumed the presidency, that history could look relatively favourably on Obama given his administrations moves to abandon federal private prisons, record number of sentence commutations and consent decrees with major police departments?
Compared to who came next, I think Obama will be remembered extremely favourably by history on almost every front. But I think sometimes Obama himself seemed to suffer from racial fatigue. He didnt have that same swag and confidence when he talked about race as when he talked about other issues of national importance, like healthcare and LGBT equality.
His signature racial justice program, My Brothers Keeper [a public-private mentoring initiative aimed at young men of colour], just missed the mark. He says that he got the idea after Trayvon Martin was killed. You know, Trayvon Martin was killed by a racist neighbourhood watchman, he was basically racially profiled and then hunted down and shot. One wonders how a program about black male achievement is responsive to what happened to Trayvon Martin.
The book devotes a lot of energy to criticising stop-and-frisk policing, a practice that was eventually reformed in New York due evidence of racial bias. But its a policy that Donald Trump has advocated for nationally why you think Trump has been such a vocal proponent?
The point of stop-and-frisk is to humiliate black and brown men. Humiliate them in a way that allows the police to dominate them. And I think thats consistent with Trumps views on the purpose of law and order.
With the Russia collusion investigation, we see Trump and his cronies bemoaning heavy-handed investigations, how much power law enforcement has, how much power prosecutors have, and Trump being very concerned when prosecutors focus on one select group of people. He gets these concerns when they apply to rich white dudes, but hes all for that police power and prosecutor power when it comes to policing black men.
Part of the way that white supremacists like Steve Bannon have championed Trump is because hes always been prejudiced against black people, from the way he operated his real estate business and was accused of not renting to black folks, to his calling for the execution of the Central Park Five [the wrongfully convicted teenagers in an infamous New York City rape case] hes always had this white supremacist baggage that he used as part of his platform.
That said, the book calls for a radical overhaul of the entire criminal justice system, including the abolition of prisons and more direct action protest. Do you think any of that is practically realisable under Trump?
When we think about racial justice for people in America, its always been about abolition: abolition of slavery, then the abolition of formal segregation, the old Jim Crow, and now we need abolition of the new Jim Crow.
The prison experiment has been a failure. We need to start being creative about other ways to do what we think prison does. What we hope prison does is to keep us safe and make people accountable for the harm theyve caused. But those of us who have experience working in the system know that prison doesnt do either one of those well.
I wrote the final chapter in October 2016 thinking Hillary Clinton would be president. Obviously, she lost, and I rewrote the chapter based on Trump. But in some ways, I think his victory motivated activists because it shows the importance of resisting and how much we have to resist. If Clinton had won, people would have been more patient, wanting to give reform a chance. I think Trump has inspired a productive apocalypse. Things are extraordinarily bad, and theyre not going to get better without major agitation.
Read this article:
- The Abolition of Work--Bob Black - Primitivism [Last Updated On: March 25th, 2016] [Originally Added On: March 25th, 2016]
- Part I: The Abolition of Work - Inspiracy [Last Updated On: June 10th, 2016] [Originally Added On: June 10th, 2016]
- Bob Black - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [Last Updated On: June 12th, 2016] [Originally Added On: June 12th, 2016]
- Campaign for the Abolition of Terrier Work - Badger Baiting [Last Updated On: June 16th, 2016] [Originally Added On: June 16th, 2016]
- The Abolition of Work Bob Black [Last Updated On: June 16th, 2016] [Originally Added On: June 16th, 2016]
- The Abolition of Work & Other Essays by Bob Black ... [Last Updated On: June 19th, 2016] [Originally Added On: June 19th, 2016]
- The Abolition of Work - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [Last Updated On: June 19th, 2016] [Originally Added On: June 19th, 2016]
- William Wilberforce: biography and bibliography [Last Updated On: June 21st, 2016] [Originally Added On: June 21st, 2016]
- THE ABOLITION OF WORK - Deoxy [Last Updated On: June 25th, 2016] [Originally Added On: June 25th, 2016]
- The Abolition of Work by Bob Black - Inspiracy [Last Updated On: July 12th, 2016] [Originally Added On: July 12th, 2016]
- Campaign for the Abolition of Terrier Work - About Us [Last Updated On: July 23rd, 2016] [Originally Added On: July 23rd, 2016]
- Abolition - The African-American Mosaic Exhibition ... [Last Updated On: August 14th, 2016] [Originally Added On: August 14th, 2016]
- Granville Sharp (1735-1813) The Civil Servant, Abolition ... [Last Updated On: August 23rd, 2016] [Originally Added On: August 23rd, 2016]
- Abolition of Work - scribd.com [Last Updated On: September 16th, 2016] [Originally Added On: September 16th, 2016]
- THE ABOLITION OF WORK by Bob Black [Last Updated On: September 16th, 2016] [Originally Added On: September 16th, 2016]
- The Abolition of Work and Other Essays: Bob Black ... [Last Updated On: September 20th, 2016] [Originally Added On: September 20th, 2016]
- The Abolitionists: The Abolition of Slavery Project [Last Updated On: September 20th, 2016] [Originally Added On: September 20th, 2016]
- Abolitionism - United States American History [Last Updated On: October 6th, 2016] [Originally Added On: October 6th, 2016]
- Nobel Peace Prize | Nobels fredspris [Last Updated On: November 21st, 2016] [Originally Added On: November 21st, 2016]
- Contract Labour Act, 1970 - Vakilno1.com [Last Updated On: November 23rd, 2016] [Originally Added On: November 23rd, 2016]
- The Abolition of Man - Wikipedia [Last Updated On: November 29th, 2016] [Originally Added On: November 29th, 2016]
- Abolition of the ESA Work-Related Activity Component ... [Last Updated On: December 2nd, 2016] [Originally Added On: December 2nd, 2016]
- Prison abolition movement - Wikipedia [Last Updated On: December 2nd, 2016] [Originally Added On: December 2nd, 2016]
- The Pro-Slavery Lobby: The Abolition of Slavery Project [Last Updated On: December 7th, 2016] [Originally Added On: December 7th, 2016]
- What is Slavery?: The Abolition of Slavery Project [Last Updated On: December 14th, 2016] [Originally Added On: December 14th, 2016]
- The Abolition of Work | The Base [Last Updated On: January 6th, 2017] [Originally Added On: January 6th, 2017]
- Trump's Big Lie About 3 Million "Alien Voters" Cuts Far Deeper Than You Think - Truth-Out [Last Updated On: February 6th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 6th, 2017]
- Equality in Democracy: Tocqueville's Prediction of a Falling America - CNSNews.com [Last Updated On: February 6th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 6th, 2017]
- The question employers are wary to ask: when are you going to retire? - The Conversation UK [Last Updated On: February 6th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 6th, 2017]
- Indian Govt's Abolition of FIPB Will Help Spur Up Foreign Investments - Entrepreneur [Last Updated On: February 6th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 6th, 2017]
- High time for states to invest in alternatives to migrant detention - ReliefWeb [Last Updated On: February 6th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 6th, 2017]
- Indian sex worker groups slam global conference on abolition of prostitution - Reuters [Last Updated On: February 6th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 6th, 2017]
- Donald Trump 'taking steps to abolish Environmental Protection Agency' - The Guardian [Last Updated On: February 6th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 6th, 2017]
- Exploiting black labor after the abolition of slavery - Baraboo News Republic [Last Updated On: February 7th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 7th, 2017]
- Justice Ginsburg Backs Abolition Of The Electoral College - Daily Caller [Last Updated On: February 7th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 7th, 2017]
- If alliance wins, making CMPof 2 manifestoes will be a task - Hindustan Times [Last Updated On: February 9th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 9th, 2017]
- Effective abolition of child labour (DECLARATION) [Last Updated On: February 9th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 9th, 2017]
- Judicial review is government at work - The Independent Florida Alligator [Last Updated On: February 10th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 10th, 2017]
- Did Darwin's theory of evolution encourage abolition of slavery ... - Washington Post [Last Updated On: February 10th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 10th, 2017]
- Italy sets up fast-track asylum courts for migrants - The Local Italy [Last Updated On: February 11th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 11th, 2017]
- Take Five: Susan B. Anthony - The Sun Chronicle [Last Updated On: February 12th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 12th, 2017]
- Pope Francis on death penalty - Philippine Star [Last Updated On: February 12th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 12th, 2017]
- Protests as Iowa considers its own 'Scott Walker bill' - Washington Examiner [Last Updated On: February 14th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 14th, 2017]
- Executives Reflect on Evolving GUSA - Georgetown University The Hoya [Last Updated On: February 14th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 14th, 2017]
- Report: Improved school access in Tanzania still leaves work to be done - Africa Times [Last Updated On: February 15th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 15th, 2017]
- Might mandatory retirement come back with 70 as the new 65? - The Globe and Mail [Last Updated On: February 15th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 15th, 2017]
- Monument to Thomas Fowell Buxton on Bincleaves Green in Weymouth - Dorset Echo [Last Updated On: February 15th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 15th, 2017]
- Tate announce QUEER BRITISH ART 1861-1967 - FAD magazine [Last Updated On: February 15th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 15th, 2017]
- County To Apply for Grant for I.V. Community Center | The Daily Nexus - Daily Nexus [Last Updated On: February 17th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 17th, 2017]
- The myth of the alpha leader is destroying our relationshipsat work and at home - Quartz [Last Updated On: February 17th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 17th, 2017]
- Equalities Secretary to seek UK assurances over benefits after ... - AOL Money UK [Last Updated On: February 18th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 18th, 2017]
- Disobedience: What Can We Risk? - Mad In America [Last Updated On: February 19th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 19th, 2017]
- Govt mulls abolition of parallel degree programs in public varsities - Capital FM Kenya (press release) (blog) [Last Updated On: February 19th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 19th, 2017]
- The redeeming chaos of a bull in the government china shop - Charleston Post Courier [Last Updated On: February 20th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 20th, 2017]
- Westminster warned against benefits 'claw back' once 'bedroom tax' abolished in Scotland - Scottish Housing News [Last Updated On: February 20th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 20th, 2017]
- Opinion: Let's take discourse about HB2 beyond just money - The Daily Tar Heel [Last Updated On: February 22nd, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 22nd, 2017]
- Fighting voter ID laws in the courts isn't enough. We need boots on the ground - Los Angeles Times [Last Updated On: February 22nd, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 22nd, 2017]
- Oped: Fight ID laws one voter at a time - York Dispatch [Last Updated On: February 23rd, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 23rd, 2017]
- Age Action calls on TDs to back Bill abolishing mandatory retirement ... - BreakingNews.ie [Last Updated On: February 23rd, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 23rd, 2017]
- New York dockers' union calls for abolition of crime-busting Waterfront Commission - The Loadstar [Last Updated On: February 23rd, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 23rd, 2017]
- Molly J. McGrath: Fight ID laws one voter at a time - Madison.com [Last Updated On: February 24th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 24th, 2017]
- Frederick Douglass Park: We're Fixing Our Typo! - Nashville Scene [Last Updated On: February 24th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 24th, 2017]
- Jim Goetsch: Abolition of abortions means changing the way we think - The Union of Grass Valley [Last Updated On: February 24th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 24th, 2017]
- Abolishing provincial championships only way to cure fixture ... - Irish Independent [Last Updated On: February 25th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 25th, 2017]
- Labor won't fight any Fair Work Commission decision to cut Sunday penalty rates: Bill Shorten - Western Advocate [Last Updated On: February 26th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 26th, 2017]
- Committee expected to recommend 100m water charges refunds to those who have paid up - Irish Independent [Last Updated On: February 28th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 28th, 2017]
- Sinn Fein attacks schools minister over plan to merge two transfer tests - Belfast Telegraph [Last Updated On: February 28th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 28th, 2017]
- 'As a lecturer in the 1980s, I kept my sexual orientation to myself' - Times Higher Education (THE) [Last Updated On: February 28th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 28th, 2017]
- Coveney says he will not legislate for water charges abolition as it would be illegal - thejournal.ie [Last Updated On: February 28th, 2017] [Originally Added On: February 28th, 2017]
- Taoiseach refuses to back down on water - Newstalk 106-108 fm [Last Updated On: March 2nd, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 2nd, 2017]
- Heart of Smartness - Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription) (blog) [Last Updated On: March 4th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 4th, 2017]
- 10 must see events in Hull 2017 season three Freedom this summer - Hull Daily Mail [Last Updated On: March 4th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 4th, 2017]
- We are sick of being told what to do, says Freddie Forsyth - Express.co.uk [Last Updated On: March 4th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 4th, 2017]
- Corruption: Abolish security votes, peg minimum wage at N50,000 Ekweremadu - Vanguard [Last Updated On: March 4th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 4th, 2017]
- Saudi employers given one month to return passports - Gulf Business - Gulf Business News [Last Updated On: March 5th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 5th, 2017]
- Religious bodies misguided - Trinidad & Tobago Express [Last Updated On: March 6th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 6th, 2017]
- Ousted Rec Director Loses Case Against City - Athletic Business (blog) [Last Updated On: March 6th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 6th, 2017]
- Any deal must provide route to full pay restoration, says ASTI - Irish Times [Last Updated On: March 6th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 6th, 2017]
- Analysis of Pauline Hanson's flat 2 per cent tax shows it would help overseas imports - The West Australian [Last Updated On: March 7th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 7th, 2017]
- Taxes for self-employed likely to rise in Hammond's budget - The Guardian [Last Updated On: March 7th, 2017] [Originally Added On: March 7th, 2017]