Bernie's Plan Rings in a New Era of Criminal Justice Politics

By Meagan Day, Jacobin

20 August 19

With his Justice and Safety for All plan, Bernie Sanders is applying his democratic socialist vision to one of the urgent questions of our time: ending the carceral state. He’s opted to follow the lead of criminal justice reformers — and their demands are starting to look like his, too.

ernie Sanders’s Justice and Safety for All plan is a big deal. With no fewer than 127 bullet points, it’s the most comprehensive criminal justice plan released by any Democratic presidential candidate. As a random example, Sanders’s plan doesn’t just affirm the right to counsel for people without the means to pay — it proposes seven reforms to guarantee that right in practice. That granularity is characteristic of the whole document.

The plan’s heft and substance should put to rest the rumor that Sanders talks pretty but is thin on details. Moreover, the plan has implications that extend far beyond his own campaign.

For years, civil rights and criminal justice reform activists and organizations have been looking beyond procedural reforms. Increasingly, they’ve been training their sights on substantive change outside the criminal justice sphere itself, seeking community investment solutions that can improve living standards, improve safety, and over time displace police and prisons. Meanwhile, Sanders has been searching for a way to apply his democratic socialist ideas to criminal justice issues. The Justice and Safety for All plan represents the confluence of these currents: a democratic socialist looking to apply his political vision to criminal justice meets a criminal justice reform movement hungry for radical social interventions.

“My feeling had always been that the idea of producing public safety through community investment instead of policing was completely compatible with a democratic socialist agenda,” says Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the author of The End of Policing. Vitale, who is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), was tapped to assist the Sanders campaign in drafting its criminal justice plan.

“I said to the Sanders folks, look, this is happening.” The core civil rights and criminal justice organizations with a national reach “are all moving in a direction that’s consistent with your political vision. There’s been a massive shift within the civil rights community and among activists away from procedural reforms and toward community reinvestment.”

At the time of the early Black Lives Matter protests in 2014, the most popular demands emanating from the movement were still procedural reforms to policing. We heard a lot about body cameras, a database of police shootings, and prosecution of police officers who kill unarmed civilians. But a few years into Black Lives Matter, many activists and organizations started to feel that these measures alone were insufficient. Reforming the police was crucial, but it wouldn’t be enough. And while there were necessary changes to make to prisons and the legal system, reforms there would not suffice either. Thus we saw a new political orientation take shape, with activists shifting their focus from reforming police and prisons to reforming society, so that the role of police and prisons could be minimized.

Groups like the Movement for Black Lives and the Black Youth Project 100 “have been the cutting edge” of this transformation, says Vitale. In 2014, 150 groups came together in the Movement for Black Lives coalition. When it released a platform in 2016, the evolution was apparent. The coalition’s demands went far beyond the call for body cameras and databases. Demands included universal health care, quality tuition-free public education and childcare, full employment, and housing for all. In many ways, the demands of the movement started to resemble those of Bernie Sanders.

That evolution made Sanders’s overall political approach a natural fit, but it took a while for the pieces to come together. One reason for the delay was that Sanders himself was struggling to articulate what his political vision had to offer in the way of criminal justice solutions. For example, Sanders began to talk more about private prisons. It seemed obvious: Sanders is the nation’s leading critic of the distortions of the profit motive within the public sector. The problem is that private prisons are just the tip of the iceberg. The same went for cash bail, an issue Sanders himself helped elevate to prominence. It’s true that cash bail in effect criminalizes poverty and must end, but it’s just one aspect of a deeply broken system.

Thus, for a few years, Sanders tried in earnest but struggled to connect the dots between his democratic socialist political vision and the juggernaut of mass incarceration and overpolicing. That started to change this year, when his second presidential campaign sought to make connections (though still nascent) with criminal justice and civil rights activists and organizations in the post–Black Lives Matter landscape.

Through that effort, it appears that the Sanders campaign has finally found the sweet spot. These groups and individuals are bringing to the table an analysis of policing and prisons as an unsuitable substitute for public investment in dispossessed communities, particularly communities of color. To scale down the role of police and prisons in society, we must build up social programs and improve living standards for the poor and marginalized. And when it comes to building up an alternative to the carceral apparatus, that’s Bernie’s strong suit.

The new synthesis can be found throughout the Justice and Safety for All plan. The plan includes plenty of concrete reforms to the legal system, prisons, and policing. But it also repeatedly emphasizes the need to divert funds and resources into building healthier communities, consistent with the Movement for Black Lives’ invest-divest strategy. “We need to shift our emphasis toward solving problems in ways that don’t rely on policing and incarceration as a first option by supporting alternative strategies to make individuals and communities safer and healthier,” says the plan.

“When Bernie is president, we will finally make the deep and structural investments to rebuild the communities that mass incarceration continues to decimate,” it reads. “We must move away from an overly-punitive approach to public safety and start focusing on how to safeguard our communities, prevent the conditions that lead to arrests, and rehabilitate people who have made mistakes.”

In practice, what that means is that a Sanders administration won’t just ban the prosecution of youth in adult courts and end solitary confinement for juveniles, though these are necessary reforms in their own right. It will also “invest in school nurses, counselors, teachers, teaching assistants, and small class sizes to address disciplinary issues” — provisions that are already laid out in Sanders’s Thurgood Marshall Plan for Education. Similarly, a Sanders administration will not only end the war on drugs, it will also legalize safe injection sites and invest public money in addiction treatment and overdose prevention services. There is already a role for substance abuse treatment carved out in Sanders’s Medicare for All plan. And a Sanders administration will not only reduce the number of inmates by arresting fewer people and releasing more from jail; it will also guarantee safe and affordable housing and job training on the outside, before and after incarceration. These demands are already present in Sanders’s 21st Century Bill of Economic Rights.

None of this is a stretch for Sanders. His presidential campaign has always been predicated on the idea that we must tax the rich and corporations, and redistribute society’s wealth to the working class and the poor in the form of robust universal social programs, which enshrine as rights things like health care, education, housing, a good job, a secure retirement, and a clean environment. What was missing was a bridge connecting the rest of his platform to criminal justice reform.

With the release of the Justice for All plan, it appears the connection has been made. The plan simultaneously reflects Sanders’s evolution on criminal justice specifics and the contemporary criminal justice reform movement’s evolution on systemic social issues. The result, says Vitale, is a statement unlike any other circulating in the electoral sphere. “The Sanders document says we need to quit using the police and prisons to solve problems” like poverty, mental illness, substance abuse, and even crime itself, and instead “actually fix the communities.” Let’s hope this idea goes mainstream.

Here's What I Learned From My Privileged, Western Failure to Go Plastic-Free for a Month

By Van Badham, Guardian UK

20 August 19

I tried to re-enact my nanna’s depression-mindset, zero-waste home, but no victory over plastic went unpunished

y “plastic-free” July began with an idea to retain every piece of plastic waste I consumed, and port it around over the month in a bag with me wherever I went.

Had I stuck to this plan – despite deliberate and even desperate efforts to excise plastic waste from my life – I’d now be limping around like Skinner, from Howard Barker’s The Castle. She’s a witch punished for a murder by having her victim’s corpse strapped to her back.

Even without the bag, my plastic use weighs heavily on my conscience. Anti-plastic advocates often cite a visual moment of realisation of the size of the plastic problem. There’s an infamously life-changing photograph of an albatross chick with its stomach split from swallowed bottle lids, another of a seahorse with a Q-tip curled into its tail. A year ago, I discovered 30 separate bits of plastic waste in what is supposed to be my organic vegetable garden, and I’ve been minimising my plastic waste ever since.

I bought the books – the excellent Waste Not by Erin Rhoads and Less Stuff by Lindsay Miles are encouraging, Australian and familiar. I’m a beeswax-wraps and bamboo-toothbrush user, I “make do and mend” my clothes, I store bulk-bought snacks in glass jars. But there are no illusions in our house that taking mere individual responsibility for what is a collective problem can ever solve it – one household makes negligible difference when 340 million global tons of plastic are produced in a single year. The enraging history of plastic also includes how its corporate makers avoided bans and regulation by aggressively mobilising anti-litter campaigns in the 1980s – a sleight-of-hand blaming of citizens for the garbage mountains that their own companies were pumping out.

But my partner accepted my logic that, as activists, an ongoing awareness of where and how we use plastic would attune us to thinking through what a policy response to the plastic crisis might be. The challenge set was not to change our tastes, just to ditch the plastic parts of them.

Our advantages are many. We live in a regional community that still has market gardens, local producers and specialty shops. We have the vegetable garden, our own fruit trees. I work from home, I’m good at craft, I can cook, I make my own sauces and jams. Reducing our plastic use meant rejecting the sole local supplier of store-bought bread, so I taught myself to bake my own. I replaced plastic-packaged cola with one that’s homemade. Already, instead of a premixed cleaning spray, I ferment lemon scraps in vinegar for a month and spray that around.

But these simple replacements have a petrochemical trail. Locally, vinegar comes only in plastic. The spray bottle is plastic. Maybe the container the bread yeast comes in contains plastic; packaging that seems innocuous – from teabags to tin cans – often does … and pretty soon I was too damn depressed to look closely.

Plastic is ubiquitous. All the seedlings for my garden are sold in plastic pots. At the local organic vegetable market, the harried grocer displays capsicums, cauliflower and potatoes naked, but sells them in fastened plastic bags. This is an improvement on the supermarket, where the “organic” vegetables are sold as bricks from a styrofoam and cling-film plastic wall. At the local butcher, I asked if they could wrap the sausages in butcher’s paper instead of plastic. “Nah, we don’t use it,” she responded, as if I’d come in asking for a new wheel for my penny farthing or for a crank to start up my car.

Dairy was a disastrous prospect. The supermarket sells seven brands of cream; they’re all made locally – and every single one comes in a plastic container. I ordered silicon containers to freeze leftovers in – they arrived padded with plastic bubbles. A tin pot of cream deodorant came wrapped in plastic security stickers. Imaginative schemes for waste minimisation were met with pre-emptive defeat; the attempt to cater a dinner party from a medieval (!) cookbook demanded ingredients that only came plasticised.

I tried to reenact what I remembered of my nanna’s depression-mindset, zero-waste home … but no victory over plastic ever seemed unpunished. Cardboard-boxed Velvet soap is cheap, cleans everything … and, apparently, contains palm oil. Opening my cupboard doors onto paper sacks of flours and sugar was heartening precisely to the point I discovered that some shitting mice had trashed the lot.

Of this last catastrophe, my partner’s mother made the gentle point that if the purchase – of, say, plastic storage containers - is for lifetime use, then it can’t be considered plastic “waste”. But as every plastic lid, bag and bottle reminds, every piece of it is with all of us for more than a lifetime.

Yes, there are people whose skills in planning combine with their access to resources and they manage waste down to a monthly thimbleful. But not only are the majority of us incapable of their thrift, their example can’t just magic the plastic away.

What I learned from my month of privileged, cashed-up western failure is that it’s going to take the regulation of plastic production, distribution and supply by global governments to make anywhere “plastic-free”. Single-use-plastic-bag bans are not enough. Recycling is not enough.

Governments must legislate to enforce the use of alternatives, starting yesterday. A dead albatross is hanging around our necks, it’s full of plastic waste … but we’re the ones who will choke on the stuff.