War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16

War on Drugs Negative CaseSummary................................................................................................................................................................3

Glossary..................................................................................................................................................................4

Case Debate

1NC Solvency Answers (1/2)..................................................................................................................................5

Extensions: Non-Drug Surveillance Remains (1/2).................................................................................................7

Racism Advantage Answers (1/5)...........................................................................................................................9

Extensions: Current Reforms Solve (1/3)..............................................................................................................14

Extensions: Marijuana Legalization Solves (1/2)..................................................................................................17

Answers to: Marijuana Legalization Isn’t Inevitable.............................................................................................19

Extensions: Utilitarianism (1/2)............................................................................................................................20

Topicality

1NC Topicality Shell..............................................................................................................................................22

Decriminalization Counterplan

1NC Decriminalization Counterplan.....................................................................................................................24

Solvency Extension – Policing (1/3)......................................................................................................................25

Solvency Extensions – Challenges Institutional Racism (1/2)...............................................................................28

Solvency Extension – Mandatory Minimum Sentencing......................................................................................30

Answers to: Links to the Net Benefit....................................................................................................................31

Answers to: Permutation do both........................................................................................................................32

Answers to: Policing Continues............................................................................................................................34

Answers to: Federal Action Key............................................................................................................................35

Answers to: Increases Use....................................................................................................................................36

Reform Kritcism

Drug Surveillance Reform Kritik 1NC 1/2..............................................................................................................37

Answer to: Mass Incarceration Now....................................................................................................................39

Answer to: Piece Meal Reforms needed 1/2........................................................................................................40

Answers to: the public supports surveillance – War on Drugs.............................................................................42

Answers to: No Alternative to the War on Drugs.................................................................................................43

Answers to: Ending the War on Drugs is a 1st step...............................................................................................44

Answers to: End the War on Drugs and do the Alternataive (Permutation)........................................................45

Answers to: Reform Impact is Worth It................................................................................................................46

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16

Solvency Extension – State Cooption (1/3)..........................................................................................................47

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16

Summary There are 3 main strategies to answer the war on drugs affirmative:

The first strategy is topicality, which argues that the phrase “domestic surveillance” in the resolution ought to be interpreted as only referring to government surveillance in the context of terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda. If we allow domestic surveillance to refer to anything the government does to monitor things, that can lead to affirmatives that end government surveillance of library systems and other small affirmatives that are unpredictable for the negative team to research.

The second strategy is the states decriminalization counterplan – it argues that the states should end criminal penalties for prohibited drugs at the state level. This keeps drugs like marijuana, cocaine, and heroin on the books as illegal and allows the federal government to continue to pursue cartels but prevents local law enforcement from arresting people because the use of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, etc. is no longer a crime. This solves the affirmative’s harms about policing communities of color and the net benefit is the organized crime disadvantage from the other file.

The third strategy is the drug surveillance reform criticism – this argues that locating the problem of mass incarceration and racism in the war on drugs is a misdiagnosis that can be particularly harmful. First, less than 25% of people incarcerated are there because of drug crimes and second, the war on drugs isn’t the source of racism, it is flawed public consciousness and racist ideology that is responsible for violence against communities of color.

Ending the war on drugs and relying on the law to correct these injustices creates a flawed belief that progress has been made but allows racism to be pushed underground and emerge in new, insidious forms. In other words, unless we change the fact that racism is still deeply embedded in society, racism will not end, no matter how much legal change or administrative tinkering occurs. The alternative advocates for a shift in public consciousness in an attempt to change peoples’ racist beliefs and then positive change can follow after that.

Some important case arguments are that the affirmative doesn’t end all instances of institutional racism or surveillance, therefore other surveillance tools will continue to police communities of color. Another important case argument is that many efforts to end the war on drugs are occurring in the status quo. Marijuana is being legalized and decriminalized on mass scale which is a large tool used to police communities of color.

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16Case Answers

Glossary Decriminalization- the abolition of criminal penalties in relation to certain acts, perhaps retroactively, though perhaps regulated permits or fines might still apply, as opposed to legalization

Topicality- debate argument that the contends the affirmative should lose because the case presented is not an example of the resolution

Utilitarianism- is a theory in normative ethics holding that the best moral action is the one that maximizes utility. Utility is defined in various ways, but is usually related to the well-being of sentient entities.

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16Case Answers

1NC Solvency Answers (1/2) (___) Police forces will continue to find ways to criminalize communities of color Burns, editor at the Times, 2014 (Rebecca, Associate Editor at In These Times, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Marijuana Legalization”, [SG])

One worry has been that the high price of legalized marijuana will encourage a black market and that arrests for illegal distribution could actually increase. Mariame Kaba: I’m very concerned about how this is going to play out on the ground. Young people who are selling drugs because they have no other job opportunities are definitively not going to be able to participate in the formal economy through the dispensaries. Is law enforcement going to go after those young people 20 times harder now? AW: Yes, I am concerned that distribution charges will increase. Whenever you make change, especially against law enforcement’s status quo, it often finds a way to circumvent that change and maintain its budget. But we haven’t seen anything that will lead us to believe that is taking place right now. And you have to realize that these new marijuana laws are part of a much broader reform movement: Colorado has also been revising its criminal justice laws. The first thing we did once Amendment 64 passed [in Colorado] was to lower criminal penalties for those [between the ages of] 18 and 20 possessing marijuana. So we are already working on preempting any type of net-widening. ITT: What impact will marijuana legalization have on the War on Drugs as a whole? David J. Leonard: Any changes in the War on Drugs will require continued organizing and agitation, because history has shown that one step forward has also resulted in two steps back [for] communities of color. New York decriminalized marijuana in 1977. That clearly did not lead to the end of the War on Drugs in New York, or lessen its effects on communities of color. Instead, the way the law was written provided the foundation for stop-and-frisk, because the law made it a misdemeanor for marijuana to be in public view, which basically fostered incentives to stop blacks and Latinos and tell them to empty their pockets. So I have a number of concerns about the impact of these reforms on the War on Drugs. To give just one other example: Does decriminalization apply to those who are on probation and being drug-tested? MK: Another concern is whether, as the prices of marijuana start climbing [because of legalization] and [poor] people turn to using other kinds of drugs, those drugs then get painted as the worst possible drugs on the planet. The people who are doing the “worst” drugs somehow always happen to be the most marginalized people within our culture. That’s why it’s so important that we focus on uprooting the whole architecture of the War on Drugs. If we’re not talking about the root issues of racism and classism, there are bound to be unintended consequences.

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16Case Answers

1NC Solvency Answers (2/2)

(___) Policing and racism are too entrenched Kundnani and Kumar 2015—Arun Kundnani teaches at New York University and Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of Media Studies and Middle East Studies at Rutgers University “Race, surveillance, and empire” in International Socialist Review http://isreview.org/issue/96/race-surveillance-and-empire

In what follows, we argue that the debate on national security surveillance that has emerged in the United States since the summer of 2013 is woefully inadequate, due to its failure to place questions of race and empire at the center of its analysis. It is racist ideas that form the basis for the ways national security surveillance is organized and deployed, racist fears that are whipped up to legitimize this surveillance to the American public, and the disproportionately targeted racialized groups that have been most effective in making sense of it and organizing opposition. This is as true today as it has been historically: race and state surveillance are intertwined in the history of US capitalism. Likewise, we argue that the history of national security surveillance in the United States is inseparable from the history of US colonialism and empire.

(___) Stopping the drug war does very little to spillover and cause larger movements against the prison industrial complex Ball, 2012 Jared, “WHY SOME LIKE THE NEW JIM CROW SO MUCH by Greg Thomas,” http://imixwhatilike.org/2012/04/26/whysomelikethenewjimcrowsomuch/, Vitz

It should be no surprise that the political action proposed in The New Jim Crow is pitched as a plea for “love,” Christian love, and of course “forgiveness.” In closing, “crazy” and “absurd” “activists” in the distance, this law professor comes to speak the language of “movement,” but only to ask for a “new civil rights movement” (223), in spite of the gross limitations of such liberal reformism and her unrelenting avoidance of every other kind of movement in recent history, nationally and internationally. This is the classic sado-masochistic attachment to white racist Americanism of the Negro or “African-American” elite, the Black “lumpen-bourgeoisie.” The absence of any critical class analysis in Alexander is a reflection of this uncritical paradigm of “civil-rights” reformism, a class-specific liberalism of U.S. settler nationalism in a scorch-and-burn age of U.S. imperialism worldwide.¶ Her last chapter is entitled “The Fire This Time.” The only James Baldwin in The New Jim Crow is the one attached to the old “civil rights movement.” It is never the one who said the term “civil rights movement” is “an American phrase which … upon examination means nothing at all”; or the one who wrote No Name in the Street (1972) and The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985); or the one who said in the midst of the Black Power Movement that he had formerly been “the Great Black Hope of the Great White Father.” As an ‘exile’ or ‘expatriate,’ he represented hard and long for George Lester Jackson and the Black Panther Party at large. Nonetheless, politically selective and cliché,

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16Case Answers

Extensions: Non-Drug Surveillance Remains (1/2) (___)

(___) The affirmative only removes a tool for police to pursue the war on drugs without removing the financial incentives. Police will continue to harmful policies against communities of color, just with less information.Lopez, writer at VOX, 2015

(German, “How does the US enforce the war on drugs??”, 7-15 http://www.vox.com/cards/war-on-drugs-marijuana-cocaine-heroin-meth/war-on-drugs-enforcement-america)

On the domestic front, the federal government supplies local and state police departments with funds, legal flexibility, and special equipment to crack down on illicit drugs. Local and state police then use this funding to go after drug-dealing organizations."[Federal] assistance helped us take out major drug organizations, and we took out a number of them in Baltimore," said Neill Franklin, a retired police major and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which opposes the war on drugs. "But to do that, we took out the low-hanging fruit to work up the chain to find who was at the top of the pyramid. It started with low-level drug dealers, working our way up to midlevel management, all the way up to the kingpins."Some of the funding, particularly from the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program, encourages local and state police to participate in anti-drug operations. If police don't use the money to go after illicit substances, they risk losing it — providing a financial incentive for cops to continue the war on drugs.

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16Case Answers

Extensions: Non-Drug Surveillance Remains (2/2)

(___) Marijuana legalization only eliminates one instance, policing and control of communities of color will continue.

Enojado ’13 (Opaque Critical Theorist, “Three Good Reasons Why People of Color Should Question the Drug Legalization Movement”, [SG])

There are three good reasons for people of color to question the drug legalization movement.

1.) Drug legalization does not change the nature of policing. As tom dispatch and many others acknowledge, there are problems with budgets and prisons. No one disputes this issue. A pathological obsession with mandating long sentences and death penalties in the U.S. has reached unmanageable proportions. Everything from the law of parties to legalized brutality such as castration shore up the public’s basest desires for justice at any cost. For people of color, however, the issue is not merely out-of-control drug policy, but a racist criminal justice system few are simply willing to say is racist and needs immediate redress. The drug legalization movement, for people of color, represents a classic quandary as far as long term political strategy: focusing on dealing with symptoms of a problem rather than taking on the problem (in this case, white racism and, more broadly, white supremacy and neocolonialism) directly. Most of these good, sincere efforts are not grounded in history, or

(___) Communities of color are also surveilled through social services Eubanks 2014—Virginia Eubanks teaches in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY, and is a fellow at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, January 15, “Want to Predict the Future of Surveillance? Ask Poor Communities.” https://prospect.org/article/want-predict-future-surveillance-ask-poor-communities

But I wasn’t surprised. A decade ago, I sat talking to a young mother on welfare about her experiences with technology. When our conversation turned to Electronic Benefit Transfer cards (EBT), Dorothy* said, “They’re great. Except [Social Services] uses them as a tracking device.” I must have looked shocked, because she explained that her caseworker routinely looked at her EBT purchase records. Poor women are the test subjects for surveillance technology, Dorothy told me ruefully, and you should pay attention to what happens to us. You’re next.

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16Case Answers

Racism Advantage Answers (1/5) (___) The status quo solves – the federal government is curbing the war on drugs and states are changing drug policies Desilver 2014—correspondent at the Pew Research Center, “Feds may be rethinking the drug war, but states have been leading the way” April 2, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/04/02/feds-may-be-rethinking-the-drug-war-but-states-have-been-leading-the-way/

Attorney General Eric Holder recently called for reduced sentences for low-level drug offenders in federal cases, with the aim of reducing the growth of the federal prisoner population. ( About half of the nearly 200,000 federal inmates have been convicted of a drug offense.) Earlier, he said low-level drug offenders wouldn’t automatically be charged with offenses that carried strict mandatory minimum sentences, and gave Washington and Colorado the go-ahead to implement marijuana-legalization initiatives. This month, the U.S. Sentencing Commission is expected to vote on a set of amendments to the sentencing guidelines used by federal judges. The interest in sentencing reform now spans Washington D.C.’s normal partisan and ideological battle lines. The Smarter Sentencing Act of 2014 , now pending before the Senate, would cut mandatory minimums for a host of federal drug crimes. Its sponsors include Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin, liberal Democrats Patrick Leahy and Sheldon Whitehouse, Maine independent Angus King, and libertarian Republicans Rand Paul and Mike Lee.The federal moves come after years of similar changes at the state level. Between 2009 and 2013, 40 states took some action to ease their drug laws, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of legislative data provided by the National Conference of State Legislatures and the Vera Institute of Justice. Twenty-seven states moved only in the direction of easing, while 13 other states eased some laws and toughened others — often as part of a broader rethink of their drug policies. State-level actions have included lowering penalties for possession and use of illegal drugs, shortening mandatory minimums or curbing their applicability, removing automatic sentence enhancements, and establishing or extending the jurisdiction of drug courts and other alternatives to the regular criminal justice system. Some have been minor tweaks, such as Idaho’s 2011 change that allowed people convicted of violent felonies to participate in drug courts under certain circumstances. Other states have taken very different approaches to drugs: New York, for instance, moved away from its harsh Rockefeller-era drug laws in 2009. Last year, Vermont decriminalized possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, while Oregon (where possession of less than an ounce has been a noncriminal violation since 1973) made possession of more than an ounce a misdemeanor rather than a felony. All told, 16 states have passed laws decriminalizing marijuana; Maryland, which reduced penalties for marijuana possession and use in 2012, is now considering decriminalization legislation . State-level policy changes may not get the attention of federal moves, but they can affect many more people. State prisons house more than six times as many prisoners as federal prisons — more than 1.35 million in 2012, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. And for 16.6% of all state prisoners, a drug crime is their most serious offense (down from 20% in 2006).

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16Case Answers

Racism Advantage Answers (2/5)

(___) Most people behind bars in the War on Drugs were distributing or using hard drugs. These crimes harm communities and offenders should be punished.Caulkins and Sevigny 2009 - Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz School of Public Policy AND Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh (July 31, Jonathan P. and Eric L., “How Many People Does the US Imprison for Drug Use, and Who Are They? ” http://ibhinc.org/pdfs/CaulkinsSevignyHowanydoestheUSimprison2005.pdf)

The vast majority (85%) of the 274,324 people in prison in the U.S. in 1997 for drug-law violations were clearly involved in drug distribution in one way or another. Many of the remaining 15% (41,047) had at least some suggestion of possible current or past involvement in distribution. The precise proportion of drug offenders in prison solely because they used drugs is thus hard to pin down, but appears to be somewhere in the range of 2%-15%, representing 5,380 to 41,047 individuals. Furthermore, only about one- third of the 41,047 individuals were in prison as new court commitments; most were already on parole or probation before the infraction that led to their current incarceration. Almost half had a current nondrug infraction that may have contributed to their incarceration. Even taking the upper bound figure of 15%, the number of people in prison for their drug use is far lower than would be implied by naively assuming that everyone convicted of drug possession was not involved in distribution. Incarceration for drug use/possession thus appears to be a very modest contributor (0.5%-3.6%) to the total sentenced U.S. prison population (1,137,210 in 1997). One reason is that the expected time served by these individuals is about half that for those who were clearly involved in drug distribution. It is also worth noting that 50-80% of arrestees test positive for some illicit drug and -15% of drug arrests are for possession (Maguire and Pastore, 1997), so presumably if the criminal justice system wanted to incarcerate many more drug users, that would be possible. Among those in prison for drug use, almost 90% were involved with cocaine, heroin, and/or (meth)amphetamines. Just 5-7% possessed only marijuana. Hence, the number of marijuana users in prison for their use is perhaps 800-2,300 individuals or on the order of 0.1-0.2% of all prison inmates. This figure is roughly consistent with ONDCP (2005) and is well below Thomas' (1999) estimate of 9,700 based on the same survey because Thomas assumes that all inmates convicted of possession were not involved in trafficking. An implication of the new figure is that marijuana decriminalization would have almost no impact on prison populations, although it might well have a bigger effect on other components of the criminal justice system.

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16Case Answers

Racism Advantage Answers (3/5)

(___) Marijuana legalization is happening now which decreases policing of minority communities Cooper 2015—Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at The Week, “The Beginning of the end of the war on drugs” March 30 http://theweek.com/articles/546750/beginning-end-war-drugs

Something similar might be happening with the War on Drugs. Though the change has been longer in coming, and like gay rights the battle is far from over, there are some recent developments that would be absolutely incomprehensible to a time traveler from 2004. And I'm not just talking about marijuana. No, this is news about hard drugs in conservative states. In Kentucky, the legislature passed a bipartisan bill advancing a harm-reduction approach towards heroin addiction, while in Indiana, Republican Gov. Mike Pence authorized a needle-exchange program in response to an outbreak of HIV. The experiments with full marijuana legalization in Colorado, Washington, D.C., and Washington state are vital and long-overdue measures. But marijuana poses relatively simple political and policy challenges, since as a drug it is relatively harmless and now widely known to be so. Harder drugs like heroin, meth, and cocaine, by contrast, are much more dangerous and addictive, and thus pose more difficult political and policy questions. On the other hand, hard drugs are also behind the very worst part of the War on Drugs — the gruesome violence it foments in Latin America, where gangs massacre each other and everyone else over the ability to sell drugs to Americans. Reforming drug policy has the potential to make the world a dramatically better place.

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16Case Answers

Racism Advantage Answers (4/5)

(___) Utilitarianism and consequences ought to come first – the only ethical option is to save the most lives Isaac 2 — Jeffrey C. Isaac, James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life at Indiana University-Bloomington, 2002 (“Ends, Means, and Politics,” Dissent, Volume 49, Issue 2, Spring, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via EBSCOhost, p. 35-36)

As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility . The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one’s intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends . Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice , moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. [end page 35] This is why, from the standpoint of politics—as opposed to religion—pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant . Just as the alignment with “good” may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of “good” that generates evil . This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one’s goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important , always , to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment . It alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance . And it undermines political effectiveness .

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16Case Answers

Racism Advantage Answers (5/5)

(___) The War on Drugs is woefully insufficient and ineffective at addressing mass incarceration – the aff does very little to address systemic racism Forman 2012 James Jr, Clinical Professor of Law, Yale Law School. Faculty Scholarship Series. Paper 3599. "RACIAL CRITIQUES OF MASS INCARCERATION: BEYOND THE NEW JIM CROW" April, http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/3599

To this point, I have focused principally on crimes of violence and the state’s response to such crimes. I part company with the New Jim Crow writers in this regard. They focus almost exclusively on the War on Drugs. This approach made sense for early ACLU advocates such as Glasser and Boyd, whose only objective was to curtail the drug war.88 It makes less sense for more recent proponents of the analogy, who attack the broader phenomenon of mass incarceration but restrict their attention to punishments for drug offenders.89 Other crimes—especially violent crimes—are rarely mentioned.90 The choice to focus on drug crimes is a natural—even necessary— byproduct of framing mass incarceration as a new form of Jim Crow.91 One of Jim Crow’s defining features was that it treated similarly situated blacks and whites differently. For writers seeking analogues in today’s criminal justice system, drug arrests and prosecutions provide natural targets, along with racial profiling in traffic stops. Blacks and whites use drugs at roughly the same rates, but African Americans are significantly more likely to be arrested and imprisoned for drug crimes.92 As with Jim Crow, the difference lies in government practice, not in the underlying behavior. The statistics on selling drugs are less clear-cut, but here too the racial disparities in arrest and incarceration rates exceed any disparities that might exist in the race of drug sellers.93 But violent crime is a different matter. While rates of drug offenses are roughly the same throughout the population, blacks are overrepresented among the population for violent offenses. For example, the African American arrest rate for murder is seven to eight times higher than the white arrest rate; the black arrest rate for robbery is ten times higher than the white arrest rate.94 Murder and robbery are the two offenses for which the arrest data are considered most reliable as an indicator of offending.95 In making this point, I do not mean to suggest that discrimination in the criminal justice system is no longer a concern. There is overwhelming evidence that discriminatory practices in drug law enforcement contribute to racial disparities in arrests and prosecutions, and even for violent offenses there remain unexplained disparities between arrest rates and incarceration rates.96 Instead, I make the point to highlight the problem with framing mass incarceration as a new form of Jim Crow. Because the analogy leads proponents to search for disparities in the criminal justice system that resemble those of the Old Jim Crow, they confine their attention to cases where blacks are like whites in all relevant respects, yet are treated worse by law. Such a search usefully exposes the abuses associated with racial profiling and the drug war. But it does not lead to a comprehensive understanding of mass incarceration. Does it matter that the Jim Crow analogy diverts our attention from violent crime and the state’s response to it, if it gives us tools needed to criticize the War on Drugs? I think it does, because contrary to the impression left by many of mass incarceration’s critics, the majority of America’s prisoners are not locked up for drug offenses.

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16Case Answers

Extensions: Current Reforms Solve (1/3) (___)

(___) Specifically, the DEA has changed its policy on profiling Barrett 2014—Devlin Barrett is from the Wall Street Journal, December 8, “Justice Department Issues New Guidelines Barring Racial Profiling by Federal Agents” http://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-department-to-issue-new-guidelines-barring-racial-profiling-by-federal-agents-1418036401

Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday laid out new guidelines against racial and other types of profiling, citing law-enforcement cases that have sparked protests even as the new federal policy wouldn’t affect local police. The federal government since 2003 has banned profiling on the basis of race or ethnicity, though it has made an exception for national-security investigations. The new policy also will bar profiling on the basis of religion, gender, national origin, sexual orientation or gender identity, according to officials.

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16Case Answers

Extensions: Current Reforms Solve (2/3) (___) Current movements exist in the status quo that lead to the reforms the affirmatives main author, Michelle Alexander, is advocating forKilgore, Professor at the University of Illinois, 2014

(James, “Mass Incarceration: Examining and Moving Beyond the New Jim Crow”, Crit Sociology March 18 2014, http://crs.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/03/18/0896920513509821)In The New Jim Crow, Alexander argues that mass incarceration cannot be reversed by piecemeal reforms or ‘isolated victories in legislatures or courtrooms’ (2010: 218). She presses for the creation of a social movement on the scale of the civil rights mobilization of the ’60s to take on this task. However, her book offers little detail about the process for building such a movement. Since that time, she has offered a few more clues on this issue which I will address below. However, by unpadcking some of the class, race and gender dimensions of mass incarceration noted above, a number of observations surface about such a movement. First of all, embryonic forms of this social movement already exist in the self-organization of formerly incarcerated people, in the massive mobilizations against harsh immigration laws, and in the wide array of non-profits, churches and community organizations involved in lobbying and advocacy work on issues such as sentencing laws, isolation cells, the War on Drugs, racial profil ing, halting the spred of private prisons, re-entry, opposing criminal background checks by employers, and other concerns. An effective social movement would need to bring these groupings together and add others which seem to have an interest in opposing mass incarceration but have thus far remained on the sidelines. Key to creating a viable movement would be the participation of the incarcerated, the formerly incarcerated and their families and communities. Some moves in this direction have already taken place with the formation of organizations in various parts of the country such as All of Us or None, The Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted Peoples’ Movement, the Fortune Society, A New Way of Life, the Formerly Convicted Citizens Project, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, Families Against Mandatory Minimums and Citizens with Conviction. Moreover, for the first time in a long while, major strike action has occurred in several prisons highlighted by the work stoppage in four Georgia prisons in 2010 (Hing, 2010) and the 2011 hunger strike in the Pelican Bay SHU and other California penitentiaries (Lovett, 2011). However, to expand the base for such a movement would necessitate making an ideological link between mass incarceration and the general shifts toward inequality and cutbacks in state social services. A concrete example of this approach is the Boston Workers’ Alliance, an organization of unemployed workers who operate under the slogan ‘Fighting for Job and CORI (Criminal Offender Record Information) Reform’. While combatting joblessness is their main objective, they clearly see the link between mass incarceration and unemployment. As a result, one of their main cam paigns was to pressure Massachusetts to pass a ‘Ban the Box’ law outlawing the use of questions on employment applications about an applicant’s criminal background. Massachusetts is one of only a handful of states with such legislation. The United Workers’ Organization, a national forma tion of excluded workers, follows a similar track, including the ‘formerly incarcerated’ as one of the seven sectors which they organize (Excluded Workers’ Congress, 2011). In the same vein,

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16Case Answers

Extensions: Current Reforms Solve (3/3)

(___) Current movements exist to reform the criminal justice system DAVIS & GONZÁLEZ 2014 Juan, Democracy Now, Angela Davis on Prison Abolition, the War on Drugs and Why Social Movements Shouldn’t Wait on Obama, 3-6, http://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/6/angela_davis_on_prison_abolition_the#

The struggle to overhaul the criminal justice system in the United States has reached a pivotal moment. From the Obama administration’s push to reform harsh and racially biased sentencing for drug offenses to the recent decision by New York state to reform its use of solitary confinement, there is a growing momentum toward rethinking the system. But new battles have also emerged, like the fight over Stand Your Ground laws in states like Florida, where a number of recent court cases have highlighted the issue of racial bias in the court system. Marissa Alexander, an African-American woman of color who fired what she says was a warning shot into a wall near her abusive husband, is facing up to 60 years in prison at her retrial. Michael Dunn, who shot and killed an African-American teenager in a dispute over loud music in the same state of Florida, is facing a minimum of 60 years for attempted murder, but the jury failed to convict him of the central charge in the case: the murder of Jordan Davis, a case that, for many, recalled the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about these issues, we spend the rest of the hour with the world-renowned author, activist, scholar, Angela Davis, professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. For over four decades, she has been one of the most influential activists and intellectuals in the United States. She’s speaking here in New York on Friday at the Beyond the Bars conference up at Columbia University. It’s great to have you here, Angela. ANGELA DAVIS: Thank you, Amy. Thank you. Thank you, Juan. AMY GOODMAN: Do you sense progress? ANGELA DAVIS: Well, yes. I think that this is a pivotal moment. There are openings. And I think it’s very important to point out that people have been struggling over these issues for years and for decades.

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16Case Answers

Extensions: Marijuana Legalization Solves (1/2) (___)

(___) Marijuana legalization occurring in the status quo diminishes police profiling and militarization Sibilla, 14 [04/02/14, Nick Sibilla is a writer for the Institute for Justice., “The Shame of “Equitable Sharing””, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/04/equitable_sharing_legalized_marijuana_and_civil_forfeiture_the_scheme_that.html]

Legalization now threatens that forfeiture revenue for the police departments that have relied on it. Legal cannabis and the subsequent drop in forfeiture have already caused one drug task force in Washington to cut its budget by 15 percent. That’s great news for due process and property rights. But marijuana is still illegal under federal law, so local legalization has created ambiguity in civil forfeiture proceedings. Even in states where recreational or medical marijuana is legal, property owned by innocent people is still at risk thanks to “equitable sharing.” This federal program lets local and state law enforcement do an end run around state law and profit from civil forfeiture, simply by collaborating with a federal agency. Equitable sharing is a two-way street: For the federal government to “adopt” a forfeiture case, cops can approach the feds and vice versa. The U.S. Department of Justice has applications online for agencies to apply for adoption and to transfer federally forfeited property.

Crucially, criminal charges do not have to accompany a civil forfeiture case. The proceeds from federal forfeitures are deposited into the DOJ’s Asset Forfeiture Fund. After the DOJ determines the size of the cut for the feds, equitable sharing allows the local police to take up to 80 percent of what the property is worth. In fiscal year 2012, the federal government paid out almost $700 million in equitable sharing proceeds to local and state law enforcement agencies. Equitable sharing tempts cops to become bounty hunters, even in states with legal marijuana. Tony Jalali is living proof of this travesty. Jalali almost lost his business over four grams of marijuana. After immigrating to the United States from Iran in 1978, Jalali became a successful small business owner

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Extensions: Marijuana Legalization Solves (2/2)

(___) Marijuana legalization has tangible effects for communities of color Franklin, 14 [Neil, Executive Director of Law, Enforcement Against Prohibition, "3 Reasons Marijuana Legalization in Colorado Is Good for People for Color", 1/23, www.huffingtonpost.com/neill-franklin/marijuana-legalization-race-racism-minorities_b_4651456.html]

Here are three concrete ways that Colorado's law is good for people of color. 1. The new law means there will be no more arrests for marijuana possession in Colorado. Under Colorado's new law, residents 21 or older can produce, possess, use and sell up to an ounce of marijuana at a time. This change will have a real and measurable impact on people of color in Colorado, where the racial disparities in marijuana possession arrests have been reprehensible. In the last ten years, Colorado police arrested blacks for marijuana possession at more than three times the rate they arrested whites, even though whites used marijuana at higher rates. As noted by the NAACP in its endorsement of the legalization law, it's particularly bad in Denver, where almost one-third of the people arrested for private adult possession marijuana are black, though they make up only 11% of the population. These arrests can have devastating and long-lasting consequences. An arrest record can affect the ability to get a job, housing, student loans and public benefits. As law professor Michelle Alexander describes, people (largely black and brown) who acquire a criminal record simply for being caught with marijuana are relegated to a permanent second-class status. When we make marijuana legal, we stop those arrests from happening.

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Answers to: Marijuana Legalization Isn’t Inevitable (___)

(___) Marijuana legalization is coming nowWyatt 2014—Kristen Wyatt is from the Associated Press, April 2, “Poll: Marijuana legalization inevitable”http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/02/poll-marijuana-legalization-inevitable/7210215/Marijuana legalization in the U.S. seems inevitable to three-fourths of Americans, whether they support it or not, according to a new poll out Wednesday. The Pew Research Center survey on the nation's shifting attitudes about drug policy also showed increased support for moving away from mandatory sentences for non-violent drug offenders. The telephone survey found that 75 percent of respondents — including majorities of both supporters and opponents of legal marijuana— think that the sale and use of pot eventually will be legal nationwide. It was the first time that question had been asked.

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Extensions: Utilitarianism (1/2) (___) Death is the only irreversible impact – quality of life is subjective and reversible but the judge should prioritize the existence of bodies first Tännsjö, rofessor of Practical Philosophy at Stockholm University, 2011

(Torbjörn, “Shalt Thou Sometimes Murder? On the Ethics of Killing,” online: http://people.su.se/~jolso/HS-texter/shaltthou.pdf)

I suppose it is correct to say that, if Schopenhauer is right, if life is never worth living, then according to utilitarianism we should all commit suicide and put an end to humanity. But this does not mean that, each of us should commit suicide. I commented on this in chapter two when I presented the idea that utilitarianism should be applied, not only to individual actions, but to collective actions as well.¶ It is a well-known fact that people rarely commit suicide. Some even claim that no one who is mentally sound commits suicide. Could that be taken as evidence for the claim that people live lives worth living? That would be rash. Many people are not utilitarians. They may avoid suicide because they believe that it is morally wrong to kill oneself. It is also a possibility that, even if people lead lives not worth living, they believe they do. And even if some may believe that their lives, up to now, have not been worth living, their future lives will be better. They may be mistaken about this. They may hold false expectations about the future.¶ From the point of view of evolutionary biology, it is natural to assume that people should rarely commit suicide. If we set old age to one side, it has poor survival value (of one’s genes) to kill oneself. So it should be expected that it is difficult for ordinary people to kill themselves. But then theories about cognitive dissonance, known from psychology, should warn us that we may come to believe that we live better lives than we do.¶ My strong belief is that most of us live lives worth living. However, I do believe that our lives are close to the point where they stop being worth living. But then it is at least not very far-fetched to think that they may be worth not living, after all. My assessment may be too optimistic.¶ Let us just for the sake of the argument assume that our lives are not worth living, and let us accept that, if this is so, we should all kill ourselves. As I noted above, this does not answer the question what we should do, each one of us. My conjecture is that we should not commit suicide. The explanation is simple. If I kill myself, many people will suffer. Here is a rough explanation of how this will happen: ¶ ... suicide “survivors” confront a complex array of feelings. Various forms of guilt are quite common, such as that arising from (a) the belief that one contributed to the suicidal person's anguish, or (b) the failure to recognize that anguish, or (c) the inability to prevent the suicidal act itself. Suicide also leads to rage, loneliness, and awareness of vulnerability in those left behind. Indeed, the sense that suicide is an essentially selfish act dominates many popular perceptions of suicide. ¶ The fact that all our lives lack meaning, if they do, does not mean that others will follow my example. They will go on with their lives and their false expectations — at least for a while devastated because of my suicide. But then I have an obligation, for their sake, to go on with my life. It is highly likely that, by committing suicide, I create more suffering (in their lives) than I avoid (in my life).

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Extensions: Utilitarianism (2/2)

(___) Maximizing all lives possible is the only way affirm the quality and dignity of life Cummiskey 1990 – Professor of Philosophy, Bates (David, Kantian Consequentialism, Ethics 100.3, p 601-2, p 606, jstor,)

We must not obscure the issue by characterizing this type of case as the sacrifice of individuals for some abstract "social entity." It is not a question of some persons having to bear the cost for some elusive "overall social good." Instead, the question is whether some persons must bear the inescapable cost for the sake of other persons. Nozick, for example, argues that "to use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has."30 Why, however, is this not equally true of all those that we do not save through our failure to act? By emphasizing solely the one who must bear the cost if we act, one fails to sufficiently respect and take account of the many other separate persons, each with only one life, who will bear the cost of our inaction. In such a situation, what would a conscientious Kantian agent, an agent motivated by the unconditional value of rational beings, choose? We have a duty to promote the conditions necessary for the existence of rational beings , but both choosing to act and choosing not to act will cost the life of a rational being. Since the basis of Kant's principle is "rational nature exists as an end-in-itself' (GMM, p. 429), the reasonable solution to such a dilemma involves promoting, insofar as one can, the conditions necessary for rational beings. If I sacrifice some for the sake of other rational beings, I do not use them arbitrarily and I do not deny the unconditional value of rational beings. Persons may have "dignity, an unconditional and incomparable value" that transcends any market value (GMM, p. 436), but, as rational beings, persons also have a fundamental equality which dictates that some must sometimes give way for the sake of others. The formula of the end-in-itself thus does not support the view that we may never force another to bear some cost in order to benefit others. If one focuses on the equal value of all rational beings, then equal consideration dictates that one sacrifice some to save many. [continues] According to Kant, the objective end of moral action is the existence of rational beings. Respect for rational beings requires that, in deciding what to do, one give appropriate practical consideration to the unconditional value of rational beings and to the conditional value of happiness. Since agent-centered constraints require a non-value-based rationale, the most natural interpretation of the demand that one give equal respect to all rational beings lead to a consequentialist normative theory. We have seen that there is no sound Kantian reason for abandoning this natural consequentialist interpretation. In particular, a consequentialist interpretation does not require sacrifices which a Kantian ought to consider unreasonable, and it does not involve doing evil so that good may come of it. It simply requires an uncompromising commitment to the equal value and equal claims of all rational beings and a recognition that, in the moral consideration of conduct, one's own subjective concerns do not have overriding importance.

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16Topicality

1NC Topicality Shell

1. Interpretation –domestic surveillance is only for human terrorism Department of Justice, 2006 (U.S. Department of Justice, “The NSA Program to Detect and Prevent Terrorist Attacks Myth v. Reality”, justice.gov/.../nsa_myth_v_reality.pdf, January 27th, 2006)

Myth: The NSA program is a domestic eavesdropping program used to spy on innocent Americans. Reality: The NSA program is narrowly focused, aimed only at international calls and targeted at al Qaeda and related groups . Safeguards are in place to protect the civil liberties of ordinary Americans. The program only applies to communications where one party is located outside of the United States. The NSA terrorist surveillance program described by the President is only focused on members of Al Qaeda and affiliated groups. Communications are only intercepted if there is a reasonable basis to believe that one party to the communication is a member of al Qaeda, affiliated with al Qaeda, or a member of an organization affiliated with al Qaeda. The program is designed to target a key tactic of al Qaeda: infiltrating foreign agents into the United States and controlling their movements through electronic communications, just as it did leading up to the September 11 attacks.

2. Violation – they don’t curtail surveillance related to terrorism, they eliminate War on Drugs surveillance efforts

3. Reasons to prefer our interpretation – a. Limits – there are hundreds of different wiretapping, meta-data programs, and surveillance technologies related to a number of diverse areas, only crafting the topic around terrorism creates predictable research areasb. Ground – core negative offense revolves around questions of human terrorism

D. Topicality is a voting issue for fairness and education – vote against them to set a precedent

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Extensions: Limits (___)

(___) Even the Patriot Act gives the government surveillance capabilities in a number of tangential fields like libraries – limiting domestic surveillance to only terrorism is the only predictable limit to the topic Small, Lieutenant in the United States Air Force Academy, 2008 (Matthew Small, United States Air Force Academy, “His Eyes are Watching You: Domestic Surveillance, Civil Liberties and Executive Power during Times of National Crisis”, cspc.nonprofitsoapbox.com/storage/documents/Fellows2008/Small, 2008)

The USA Patriot Act provided much of the latitude under which President Bush operated. Section 203 of the act allowed the government to intercept oral, wire and electronic communications related to terrorism. The act failed to detail what exactly “communications related to terrorism” are, giving the executive a large umbrella of protection. Section 212 amends section 2702 of Title 18-Crimes and Criminal Procedure allowing government entities to require communications companies to release customer information. This section superseded Title II of the ECPA. The Act also expanded the scope of the FBI’s domestic surveillance by allowing the Bureau to monitor library checkout lists and internet use. More importantly, the American public favored the act.1 Even today support still remains for the act.2 As such, the president did not act outside the public mandate but merely did what he saw fit to ensure national security.

1 A Gallup Poll taken in 2002 and 2003 asked the question, “Do you think the Bush administration has gone too far, has been about right, or has not gone far enough in restricting people's civil liberties in order to fight terrorism?” In 2002 60% responded “about right” and 55% responded the same in 2003.

2 A poll conducted by ABC News showed 59% of respondents in favor of extending the USA Patriot Act.

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16Decriminalization Counterplan

1NC Decriminalization Counterplan Text: The 50 states and all relevant territories should decriminalize marijuana, cocaine, and heroin and eliminate mandatory minimum sentencing

States decriminalizing hard drugs is the best strategy – it eliminates the worst harms of the war on drugs by preventing policing from law enforcement but still keeps illegal on the federal level so the government can prosecute cartels and prevent organized crime. Morris, professor of Law and Criminology, 2007 Norval, Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Criminology, Emeritus, The University of Chicago Law School, “DRUGS: TEENAGE VIOLENCE AND DRUG USE,” 31 Val. U.L. Rev. 547, Lexis

There is no quick and obvious path leading to a working regulatory system backed up by the criminal law aiming at minimizing the harm done by drugs. Prudence dictates that we should move ahead gradually , rectifying our likely mistakes, building on our hope for successes.¶ For these prudential reasons, it seems to me that the only hope of exorcising the demon of drugs and eliminating our present unprincipled policy is a course of minor changes towards rationality. To name a few: no mandatory minimum sentences; no protracted imprisonment for drug distribution ¶ [*548] ¶ of anyone other than those elusive "drug king-pins" we rarely apprehend; no imprisonment for possessing drugs unless the amount possessed clearly indicates a substantial business investment directed towards sales; drug treatment available for all addicts , including residential treatment (and such treatment should certainly be compulsory in many cases, and backed by the threat and sometimes reality of imprisonment); no incarceration for a dirty urine when under treatment (only if repeated tests reveal rejection of treatment should this follow); and so on and so on. The prudential path is not one of a mindless liberality; rather it is one of a growing movement to treat drugs and addiction with less moral fervor and more rationality.¶ Most of my work nowadays relates to prisons and jails. Currently there are 2.1 million, mostly fellow citizens, in our prisons, jails and institutions for juvenile offenders; the figures being prison over 1.1 million; jail over half a million; and institutions for juveniles also more than half a million. These are enormously large numbers, grossly higher both absolutely and in terms of a percentage of population than any other country with which we would like to compare ourselves, particularly when it be remembered that our crime statistics are quite ordinary when compared with those of Western European countries, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Only in homicides and crimes of serious personal violence do we lead the pack and lead it far ahead we do and those crimes produce, of course, only a small proportion of the incarcerated. Roughly a quarter of those in prison, in my view, should not be there they are there for low level crimes of consumption or distribution of drugs. I have in mind, therefore, about half a million unfairly and unwisely incarcerated individuals.

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Solvency Extension – Policing (1/3) (___)

(___) Decriminalization is a useful strategy to stop the imprisonment of people of colorMorris, professor of Law and Criminology, 2007 Norval, Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Criminology, Emeritus, The University of Chicago Law School, “DRUGS: TEENAGE VIOLENCE AND DRUG USE,” 31 Val. U.L. Rev. 547, Lexis

As George Bernard Shaw affirmed, it is one mark of a sensitive mind that it can be moved by statistics.¶ I recently worked as a Special Master for a federal court for three years in Stateville prison in Illinois, a maximum security institution mainly serving Chicago. Prisoners and guards agreed on the ready availability of drugs, and this reality was regularly demonstrated to me in a variety of ways. The same is true of all the larger state maximum security prisons. Our prisons are not "drug free"; it is likely, therefore, that prohibitory deterrent laws will not result in a drug free society at large. ¶ I recently wrote a satirical piece in the op-ed pages of the Chicago Tribune urging the retention of our drug laws in their present form since they provide the only remunerative training in entrepreneurship for minority youth in our destroyed inner city. I further developed the theme that those who failed in this business received further entrepreneurial training in the only truly free market in Illinois, that operating in Stateville in which anything other than a gun is at a cost available. I added that our drug laws provide welfare for the Drug Enforcement Agency and a wide variety of police enforcers, and I should have¶ [*549] ¶ noted that they also serve as a useful cloak for much of our foreign policy, given the link we have established between certification of drug collaboration with us and a country's receipt of foreign aid funds.¶ Each year nicotine kills some 300,000; alcohol kills at least 30,000; the other drugs kill fewer than 3000. And nicotine and alcohol far outdistance the other drugs in the social suffering they inflict on others who do not use them. My epiphany on this matter came a few years ago at a three- day conference I chaired in Bellagio, beside Lake Como, in Northern Italy. (The character of academics is strengthened by this type of suffering). It was a well-planned conference drawing together fourteen countries to consider their domestic drug policies. Papers had been circulated by scholars in each country on their country's policies. Then the conference was convened of participants at subcabinet level from each country. The United States was represented by the deputy to our Drug Czar, and by the head of the White House Office of Drug Policy. One conclusion of the conference, published in its report, stays steady in my mind. It is at a level of policy that the United States stands apart from all the other industrialized countries: they favor a principle of harm reduction ; they hope to minimize the injury that drugs do to the individual and to society; they do not, as we do, embrace a policy that hopes to make their county drug free; they do not rely on the criminal law as the first line of defense. And they certainly do not devote funds outside their borders seeking to influence policies and practices in other countries.¶ Putting these differences in practical terms reveals the key to what we should be doing.

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16Decriminalization Counterplan

Solvency Extension – Policing (2/3)

(___) Decriminalizing removes criminal penalties and prevents policing of people for low-level crimes but still allows the government to combat cartels Blumenson and Nielson, professors of law, 2009 (Eric – Professor of Law, Suffolk University; J.D. Harvard Law School, and Eva – Associate Clinical Professor of Law, Boston University; J.D., University of Virginia, “NO RATIONAL BASIS: THE PRAGMATIC CASE FOR MARIJUANA LAW REFORM”, 2009, 17 Va. J. Soc. Pol'y & L. 43, lexis)

What is needed most, of course, is a sea change in marijuana law, not least in order to end the destructiveness of present policy. There should be major government-funded efforts to devise the most promising alternative legal regime. Our aim in this article is to underscore the need for policy reform, not to argue for a particular policy. But we do want to offer a few provisional thoughts on three possibilities, any one of which would constitute a vast improvement on present policy . The first is the one that currently exists in parts of the United States: decriminalization of use and possession. Decriminalization does not end the ban on use or sale of marijuana, but does remove criminal penalties for individuals found possessing a small amount. Decriminalization was a successful reform strategy in the 1970s but its momentum ran out soon after. Several states decriminalized possession of small quantities of marijuana in the 1970s, after President Nixon's commission on marijuana recommended it as national policy. n118 These laws, for the most part, remain in effect and take several forms. n119 [*74] Other states have stopped short of decriminalization, but offered ways to avoid a criminal record, for example by deferring a first offender's prosecution for a period of time and then dismissing the charge if there has been no arrest in the interim. Decriminalization has four important factors in its favor: (1) it puts an end to the worst excesses of current marijuana policy (including arrest, imprisonment, and the deleterious effect on law enforcement practices we have discussed); (2) studies show that decriminalization does not increase the number of marijuana users ; n120 (3) it is arguably more consistent with international drug treaty obligations than legalization , n121 and (4) it may again have a possibility of success, at least [*75] more so than any alternatives. As noted, Rep. Barney Frank last year filed a decriminalization bill for the first time in Congress, saying that after decades of belief in its merits, he now thinks public opinion supports it as well. n122 Recent polls show more popular support for marijuana decriminalization than any time in the last three decades. n123 Decriminalization retains many of the drawbacks of present policy, however, while jettisoning the worst. It still leaves marijuana production and sale to a black market populated by criminals, and eliminates any [*76] government control over the drug or its market. And although removing criminal penalties would liberate marijuana users from the virtually total loss of liberty that may be imposed under current law, preventing use of the substance raises separate liberty concerns we address elsewhere. n124

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16Decriminalization Counterplan

Solvency Extension – Policing (3/3)

(___) The criminalization of hard drugs reduces the incarceration by nearly 400,00 Bunker and Bergert 2010, (Robert J. Bunker, Counter-OPFOR Corporation, Claremont, CA, and Matt Begert, National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center (NLECTC) – West, El Segundo, CA, Counter-demand approaches to narcotics trafficking, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 21:1, 12 March 2010, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09592310903561700) TP

Prison population increase arguments in support of left of center approaches highlight the fact that:¶ . Drug offenders, up 37%, represented the largest source of jail population growth between 1996 and 2002.¶ . More than two-thirds of the growth in inmates held in local jails for drug law violations was due to an increase in persons charged with drug trafficking. . In 2000, an estimated 57% of Federal inmates and 21% of State inmates were serving a sentence for a drug offense . . .¶ . [B]etween 1990 to 2000.... drug offenders accounted for 59% of the growth in Federal prisons.29¶ This is representative of US policies that have resulted in it having more individuals incarcerated than any other country in the world. According to US Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, ‘at year end 2007, the total incarcerated population reached 2,413,112 inmates’ for all US territories and possessions.30 Based on an analysis derived from this data, the underlying report, and their own statistics, Stopthedrugwar.org states that:¶ Drug offenders made up 19.5% of all people doing time in the states, or roughly 400,000 people. In the federal system, drug offenders account for well over half of the 200,000 prisoners (those numbers are not included in this report), bringing the total number of people sacrificed at the altar of the drug war to more than half a million.31

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Solvency Extensions – Challenges Institutional Racism (1/2) (___)

(___) Decriminalization stops incarceration and is a useful tool to challenge institutional racism and white supremacy Wallis PhD in Political Science, 2011 Victor, Ph.D. in Political Science, Columbia University, Liberal Arts Dept., Berkeley College of Music, Managing Editor, JOURNAL OF THE RESEARCH GROUP ON SOCIALISM AND DEMOCRACY, “Mass Incarceration, Democracy, and Inclusion,” 3-14, http://sdonline.org/43/mass-incarceration-democracy-and-inclusion/

A second, more short- to middle-range goal is the decriminalization of victimless offenses, such as prostitution among consenting adults, homelessness, and, especially, recreational drug use. There are nearly half a million people in prison or awaiting trial who are now or potentially about to be needlessly severed from the body politic solely for drug-related offenses (Mauer & Chesney-Lind 2002a: 6). There are various arguments for drug legalization (see e.g. Husak & de Marneffe 2005: 3-105), but it takes little analysis to understand that the enormous resources now used to police and incarcerate drug offenders could be more effectively and humanely directed into providing the social services that, first, enable individuals to fight drug addiction (where treatment is needed at all) and, second, meet their basic human needs for housing, employment, health care, education, and community, which would help eradicate the oppressive social conditions that engender drug abuse. The current “war on drugs” also serves a vital function in preserving white supremacy and class inequality (Chomsky 2003); drug legalization, as an alternative to current practices, would therefore prevent the use of this tool to further divide and depoliticize poor people and people of color.

Contemplating prison abolition at this time in the US, the international center of mass incarceration, is seemingly utopian given that “It is as if prison were an inevitable fact of life, like birth and death” (Davis, 2003a, 15). It is essential, however, to reflect on the fact that no system of punishment (least of all the grotesque deformity of mass incarceration) is natural, normal, or eternal; rather, it is historically and societally specific (see Mathiesen 2000: 335-8; Rusche & Kirchheimer 2005; Foucault 1997). At the close of the fundamental text on prison abolitionism, Instead of Prisons, this insight is invoked along with an invitation to reinvigorate the criminological imagination of which Braithwaite spoke earlier. The book concludes: Prison, we have been taught, is a necessary evil. This is wrong. Prison is an artificial, human invention, not a fact of life; a throwback to primitive times, and a blot upon the species. As such, it must be destroyed. What has been worthwhile in human history… has been the work of… those who believed in the absurd, dared the impossible. Remember… that less than two hundred years ago, slavery still was a fundamental institution, regarded as legitimate by church and state and accepted by the vast majority of people, including, perhaps, most slaves… Like slavery, [prison] was imposed on a class of people by those on top. Prisons will fall when their foundation is exposed and destroyed by a movement surging from the bottom up (Critical Resistance 2005: 188). For those who seek to build a society of democratic

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Solvency Extensions – Challenges Institutional Racism (2/2)

<<<<Wallis Continues>>>

inclusion and comprehensive structural equality, the emerging struggle against mass incarceration is crucial. Few social movements today lie at the intersection of as many forms of oppression or have the potential to expose and therefore potentially undermine the deep structural injustices based in the US but benefiting capitalist, white supremacist interests on a global scale

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Solvency Extension – Mandatory Minimum Sentencing (___)

(___) Eliminating mandatory minimum sentencing eliminates the worst effects of drug laws by not disproportionately punishing repeat offendersMorris, professor of Law and Criminology, 2007 Norval, Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Criminology, Emeritus, The University of Chicago Law School, “DRUGS: TEENAGE VIOLENCE AND DRUG USE,” 31 Val. U.L. Rev. 547, Lexis

For these prudential reasons, it seems to me that the only hope of exorcising the demon of drugs and eliminating our present unprincipled policy is a course of minor changes towards rationality. To name a few: no mandatory minimum sentences; no protracted imprisonment for drug distribution¶ [*548] ¶ of anyone other than those elusive "drug king-pins" we rarely apprehend; no imprisonment for possessing drugs unless the amount possessed clearly indicates a substantial business investment directed towards sales; drug treatment available for all addicts, including residential treatment (and such treatment should certainly be compulsory in many cases, and backed by the threat and sometimes reality of imprisonment); no incarceration for a dirty urine when under treatment (only if repeated tests reveal rejection of treatment should this follow); and so on and so on. The prudential path is not one of a mindless liberality; rather it is one of a growing movement to treat drugs and addiction with less moral fervor and more rationality.

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Answers to: Links to the Net Benefit (___)

(___) The counterplan doesn’t link to the net benefit – decriminalization removes small-scale policing by still allows the government to pursue large cartel operations. Vox, 2015 “What’s the case for decriminalizing drugs” http://www.vox.com/cards/war-on-drugs-marijuana-cocaine-heroin-meth/drug-war-decriminalization-marijuana-cocaine-heroin-meth

Some drug policy reform advocates and experts, however, are critical of decriminalization without the legalization of sales. Isaac Campos, a drug historian at the University of Cincinnati, argued that keeping the drug market in criminal hands lets them maintain a huge source of revenue. "The black market might even be fueled somewhat by the fact that people won't be arrested anymore, because maybe more people will use," Campos said. "We don't know if that's the case, but it's possible." The concern for decriminalization supporters is that letting businesses come in and sell drugs would lead to aggressive marketing and advertising, similar to how the alcohol industry behaves today. This could lead to more drug use, particularly among problem users who would likely make up most of the demand for drugs. The top 10 percent of alcohol drinkers, for example, account for more than half the alcohol consumed in any given year in the US. Decriminalization, then, is a bit of a compromise in reforming the war on drugs. It would reduce some of the incarceration caused by the drug war, but it would continue operations that seek to reduce drug trafficking and hopefully make a drug habit less affordable and accessible.criminalization-marijuana-cocaine-heroin

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16Decriminalization Counterplan

Answers to: Permutation do both (___)

(___) Decriminalization doesn’t displace the cartels because cartels because there is no other competitive supply – instead we should focus on hardline efforts to combat them Redmond, 10 Helen, journalist, “The political economy of Mexico's drug war,” http://isreview.org/issue/90/political-economy-mexicos-drug-war,

In 2009, over the objection of the US, Mexico decriminalized the possession of small amounts of drugs. It had no impact on the drug war. Decriminalization is illogical, making it legal to possess a certain quantity of a drug but not to produce, sell, or transport it. Decriminalization leaves untouched the violence of the drug cartels competing for la plaza, and the superprofits that illicit drugs generate that make it worth murdering people to control market share. Furthermore, decriminalization continues to stigmatize, criminalize, and incarcerate hundreds of thousands of workers in the drug trade—from poppy and marijuana farmers, to drug mules who swallow condoms full of heroin, to smugglers crossing borders. To end the death and destruction of the drug war, every facet of drug production has to be legalized .

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Answers to: Permutation do both – Extensions (___)

(___) Decriminalization allows a black market to be sustained Sullum, 2008 a senior editor at Reason magazine and a nationally syndicated columnist, is the author of "Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use.", “Prohibition didn't work then; it isn't working now,” http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2008/04/america-on-drugs,

"Decriminalization" does not address any of these problems. As it's generally understood in this country, decriminalization amounts to treating users leniently while continuing to arrest, prosecute and imprison producers and sellers. In the states that have "decriminalized" marijuana, for example, possession of small quantities for personal use is generally a citable offense punishable by a modest fine. That policy is certainly an improvement over arresting pot smokers and putting them in jail, but it leaves the black market , with all its attendant problems, in place. What we call decriminalization is not even as tolerant a policy as the U.S. had during alcohol prohibition, when mere possession and consumption of alcoholic beverages, as opposed to manufacture and distribution, were not subject to punishment at all.

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Answers to: Policing Continues (___)

(___) Cops don’t want to arrest low level criminals if they don’t have to – Chicago proves Dumke 2014 Mick, Chicago Reader, 4-7, http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/police-bust-blacks-pot-possession-after-decriminalization/Content?oid=13004240

"This is a giant vicious circle," says the veteran. "Do I want to be stopping everybody in these neighborhoods? Absolutely not. But the craziness almost dictates it." The officers say no tweaks to the ticketing ordinance will solve the problems. The neighborhoods need economic alternatives to the drug trade. And both officers count themselves among the growing number of people who believe the government should oversee the cannabis business. "Take it out of the hands of the criminals," says the veteran. He won't get an argument from Alderman Proco Joe Moreno (1st). "We all know the usage is pretty much even among different ethnicities," he says. "It doesn't seem that the intent of the ordinance is being acted out on the street." Like the officers, Moreno believes it's time to consider legalizing marijuana, which he maintains is less harmful than alcohol (a position recently advocated by President Obama as well). "I think there's broad public support for it," Moreno says. "The City Council gets a lot of criticism, but on a number of issues we can move faster than the state or the federal government. It would be tough to pass, but I'd be more than happy to lead that effort."

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Answers to: Federal Action Key (___)

(___) State action is more important than federal action because state governments prosecute almost 90% of drug crimes AND they cause changes in federal government policyO’Hear, Professor at Marquette University, 2004 Michael, Marquette University Law School, “Federalism and Drug Control,” Lexis, Vitz

At the same time, there is good reason to believe that, on the whole, state policies cluster more closely around federal norms than would be the case in the absence of federal inducements to conform . 332 If this proposition is true, then the policy diversity that does exist might best be characterized as a "constrained diversity." What is the evidence of constraint? First, consider historical trends in marijuana regulation. In the 1970s, when decriminalization was taken seriously as a policy option by federal officials (and even publicly endorsed by President Carter), eleven states did, in fact,

decriminalize. Since the 1980s, when legalism triumphed in Washington and federal policy turned decisively against marijuana, only one state has decriminalized and another has actually recriminalized . 333 These developments occurred despite the absence of any clear consensus that decriminalization was a failure in the states that adopted it

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Answers to: Increases Use (___)

(___) Increased use from decriminalization is empirically denied – Portugal decriminalized drugs and use is at a historic lowDuke, Yale professor of Law, 2009 professor of law at Yale (Steven, “Drugs: To Legalize or Not” Wall Street Journal, 4/25, http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB124061360462654683)

A most impressive experiment has been underway in Portugal since 2001, when that country decriminalized the possession and personal use of all psychotropic drugs. According to a study just published by the Cato Institute, "judged by virtually every metric," the Portuguese decriminalization "has been a resounding success ." Contrary to the prognostications of prohibitionists, the numbers of Portuguese drug users has not increased since decriminalization. Indeed, the percentage of the population who has ever used these drugs is lower in Portugal than virtually anywhere else in the European Union and is far below the percentage of users in the U.S.. One explanation for this startling fact is that decriminalization has both freed up funds for drug treatment and, by lifting the threat of criminal charges, encouraged drug abusers to seek that treatment.

(___) In fact, decriminalization actually decreases drug consumption by shifting criminalization to a more public health model. Greenwald, 10 Glenn, fomer columnist on civil liberties and US national security issues for the Guardian. An ex-constitutional lawyer, “Drug Decriminalization Policy Pays Off,” http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/drug-decriminalization-policy-pays, Vitz

It may sound counterintuitive that decriminalization can improve drug problems. But Portuguese drug officials, with a decade of experience with decriminalization, understand the reasons for that causal relationship. First, when a government threatens to turn drug users into criminals, a wall of fear divides officials and the citizenry and, thus, prevents effective treatment and education campaigns. Portugal’s top drug official has said the stigma created by criminalizing drug use and the resulting fear of government were the biggest barriers to effective education and treatment programs in the 1990s. Second, treating drug addiction as a health issue, not a criminal offense, means the right solutions can be found. Counseling is far more effective than prison in turning addicts into nonusers. Third, when a government no longer spends inordinate amounts of money on arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning drug users, that money can instead be used on highly effective treatment programs, as well as services, like methadone clinics, to limit drug-related harms. Whatever one’s views on liberalizing drug laws, our debate should be grounded in empirical evidenc e — not speculation and fear-mongering. As California voters make a momentous decision on drug policy, Portugal’s decade of decriminalization offers exactly the sort of rational examination that has been sorely lacking.

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Drug Surveillance Reform Kritik 1NC 1/2

A. Link - The Affirmative’s attempt to curtail drug surveillance will only make things worse for people of color. Ending the War on Drugs actually makes it harder for social movements to fight the prison industrial complex by naturalizing certain forms of incarceration.Forman, Professor of Law at Yale, 2012

(James Jr, Faculty Scholarship Series. Paper 3599. "RACIAL CRITIQUES OF MASS INCARCERATION: BEYOND THE NEW JIM CROW" April, http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/3599)

In making this point, I do not mean to suggest that discrimination in the criminal justice system is no longer a concern. There is overwhelming evidence that discriminatory practices in drug law enforcement contribute to racial disparities in arrests and prosecutions, and even for violent offenses there remain unexplained disparities between arrest rates and incarceration rates. Instead, I make the point to highlight the problem with framing mass incarceration as a new form of Jim Crow. Because the analogy leads proponents to search for disparities in the criminal justice system that resemble those of the Old Jim Crow, they confine their attention to cases where blacks are like whites in all relevant respects, yet are treated worse by law. Such a search usefully exposes the abuses associated with racial profiling and the drug war. But it does not lead to a comprehensive understanding of mass incarceration. Does it matter that the Jim Crow analogy diverts our attention from violent crime and the state’s response to it, if it gives us tools needed to criticize the War on Drugs? I think it does, because contrary to the impression left by many of mass incarceration’s critics, the majority of America’s prisoners are not locked up for drug offenses. Some facts worth considering: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2006 there were 1.3 million prisoners in state prisons, 760,000 in local jails, and 190,000 in federal prisons.97 Among the state prisoners, 50% were serving time for violent offenses, 21% for property offenses, 20% for drug offenses, and 8% for public order offenses.98 In jails, the split among the various categories was more equal, with roughly 25% of inmates being held for each of the four main crime categories (violent, drug, property, and public order).99 Federal prisons are the only type of facility in which drug offenders constitute a majority (52%) of prisoners, but federal prisons hold many fewer people overall. Considering all forms of penal institutions together, more prisoners are locked up for violent offenses than for any other type, and just under 25% (550,000) of our nation’s 2.3 million prisoners are drug offenders.101 This is still an extraordinary and appalling number. But even if every single one of these drug offenders were released tomorrow, the United States would still have the world’s largest prison system. Moreover, our prison system has grown so large in part because we have changed our sentencing policies for all offenders, not just drug offenders. We divert fewer offenders than we once did, send more of them to prison, and keep them in prison for much longer. An exclusive focus on the drug war misses this larger point about sentencing choices.

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Drug Surveillance Reform 1NC 2/2

B. Impact and Alternative – The War on Drugs is just a symptom of much larger problem. Without a fundamental shift in public consciousness, the caste system will emerge in some other form and reproduce their harms. Instead of investing our time and energy in administrative tinkering and legal reforms, we should focus on changing America’s culture of racism.Alexander, Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University, 2010

[Michelle, “New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” pp. 221-224]

King certainly appreciated the contributions of civil rights lawyers (he relied on them to get him out of jail), but he opposed the tendency of civil rights lawyers to identify a handful of individuals who could make great plaintiffs in a court of law, then file isolated cases. He believed what was necessary was to mobilize thousands to make their case in the court of public opinion. In his view, it was a flawed public consensus— not merely flawed policy— that was at the root of racial oppression. Today, no less than fifty years ago, a flawed public consensus lies at the core of the prevailing caste system. When people think about crime, especially drug crime, they do not think about suburban housewives violating laws regulating prescription drugs or white frat boys using ecstasy. Drug crime in this country is understood to be black and brown, and it is because drug crime is racially defined in the public consciousness that the electorate has not cared much what happens to drug criminals— at least not the way they would have cared if the criminals were understood to be white. It is this failure to care, really care across color lines, that lies at the core of this system of control and every racial caste system that has existed in the United States or anywhere else in the world. Those who believe that advocacy challenging mass incarceration can be successful without overturning the public consensus that gave rise to it are engaging in fanciful thinking, a form of denial. Isolated victories can be won— even a string of victories— but in the absence of a fundamental shift in public consciousness, the system as a whole will remain intact. To the extent that major changes are achieved without a complete shift, the system will rebound. The caste system will reemerge in a new form, just as convict leasing replaced slavery, or it will be reborn, just as mass incarceration replaced Jim Crow. Sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant make a similar point in their book Racial Formation in the United States. They attribute the cyclical nature of racial progress to the “unstable equilibrium” that characterizes the United States’ racial order. Under “normal” conditions, they argue, state institutions are able to normalize the organization and enforcement of the prevailing racial order, and the system functions relatively automatically. Challenges to the racial order during these periods are easily marginalized or suppressed, and the prevailing system of racial meanings, identity, and ideology seems “natural.” These conditions clearly prevailed during slavery and Jim Crow.

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Answer to: Mass Incarceration Now [___]

[___] Ending the War on Drugs actually makes it harder to confront the racism at the heart of the criminal justice system because the War on Drugs is THE ONLY EXISTING THREAT to white middle class. This will zap the reform movement’s momentum. Simon, Creator of The Wire, 2013

(David, Creator of HBO’s The Wire, The Audacity of Despair, “Lost in a symptom: The Nation on marijuana reform,” 11-1, http://davidsimon.com/lost-in-a-symptom-the-nation-on-marijuana-reform/)

If white folk — and middle-class and affluent white folk at that — aren’t directly threatened by a policy or program, the chance of getting them out in the street, or even actively engaging with the government in any campaign for reform is minimized. So, too, with the drug war.

Mandatory minimum sentences and the elimination of federal parole, three-time-loser laws and draconian sentencing matrices were all well and good when the presumed targets were the underclass, the feared drug gangs of inner city America. Only in the past decade — as prison populations have soared, methamphetamine has entrenched itself among whites in the American West, and the shrugging economy has sent more and more of the white working-class and underclass to the corner — have white folk been swept in greater numbers into the national dragnet, resulting in growing disenchantment with the drug war across the racial spectrum. Yet even still, for many white families, marijuana remains the singular and most obvious point of vulnerability to America’s obsession with drug prohibition. Eliminate the drug war’s most fundamental perceived threat to the white middle class and the air is going to rush out of the growing national opposition with the drug war so fast that our heads will spin.

Is that argument enough to eschew the very rational removal of marijuana enforcement from the drug war arsenal? Maybe not. It’s hard to leave those absurd laws intact when an opportunity exists to mitigate the damage done to those defendants — black and white — who are being prosecuted, however more modestly than with prohibitions against harder drugs.

But the least that people of goodwill can do is to stop pretending that forward movement on marijuana alone is anything less than an accommodation with an existing war of social control that is being waged disproportionately on the urban poor and is utilizing the prohibitions against harder drugs for the greater share of its incarcerative dynamic. Marijuana is not the core reason for our crowded prisons, and the reform of marijuana laws is, at best, triage for a failed and dystopic system that will be given another lease on life once the politically relevant portion of white America is given a pass. Removing weed from the overall equation will, in the end, consign increasingly-isolated poor people of color to the brutalities of the drug war for the foreseeable future. The game will still be the game for them, and a cruel and rigged game it will remain.

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Answer to: Piece Meal Reforms needed 1/2 [___]

[___] Crime policy reforms justified on the basis of fairness and justice have merely modernized racial inequality—we need to question the ideology of incarcerationMurakawa , Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, 2014[Naomri, , “First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.” ProQuest ebrary]

When Clinton New Democrats enacted legislation for community policing and death penalty expansion, their “rightward” punitive policies reposed on justifications from liberalisms past. The rights-laden liberal system secured the integrity of brutal, even lethal state violence, and the discourse of a community engagement enabled more order-maintenance policing. Perhaps some liberal lawmakers hoped to cement racial bias out of the machine. Perhaps others hoped to harden machinery to contain racial threat. In the strategic ambiguities of policymaking, it is difficult to distinguish policies for racial fairness from policies for racial discipline. I have argued that, in the logic of liberal law-and-order, this is a distinction without a difference. If legitimate punishment means that the state surveils, confines, and kills with the right techniques and protocols, then liberal law-and-order specified and refined quality administration with the outcome of legitimating the carceral state. In the end, new administrative fixes made violence appear less emotional and more rights-laden. In the end, the Big House may serve racial conservatism, but it was built on the rock of racial liberalism. Liberal law-and-order promised to deliver freedom from racial violence by way of the civil rights carceral state, with professionalized police and prison guards less likely to provoke Watts and Attica. Despite all their differences, Truman’s first essential right of 1947, Johnson’s police professionalization, Kennedy’s sentencing reform, and even Biden’s death penalty proposals landed on a shared metric: criminal justice was racially fair to the extent that it ushered each individual through an ordered, rights-laden machine. Routinized administration of race-neutral laws would mean that racially disparate outcomes would be seen, if seen at all, as individually particularized and thereby not racially motivated. Expunged from institutions and abstracted from the material world, race did its damage in psychic territory. This summons Gunnar Myrdal’s heavenly spirit of the American Creed, those virtuous commitments to liberty and democratic egalitarianism that float above the hardware of the U.S. racial state. As original sin, white prejudice left its mark in the form of black criminal propensities, making African Americans the embodiment of “a moral lag in the development of the nation.” 6 In this sense, liberal law-and-order was especially powerful in entrenching notions of black criminality. I say especially because liberal law-and-order maintained a politics of pity that, through references to African American family deficits and at-risk youth, softened the hard edges of conservatism and carceral neoliberalism.

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Answer to: Piece Meal Reforms needed 2/ 2 [___] Tinkering with the machinery of mass surveillance does not produce a conversation about what types of behavior deserve to be punished and who gets locked up. Murakawa , Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, 2014[Naomri, , “First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.” ProQuest ebrary]

Administrative tinkering does not confront the damning features of the American carceral state, its scale and its racial concentration, which, when taken together reinforce and raise African American vulnerability to premature death. By focusing on the intra-system problems of “discretion,” lawmakers displaced questions of justice onto the more manageable, measurable issues of system function. When framed as a problem of discretion— that is, individual decision making permissible by formal rules— then solutions to racial inequality double back to individual administrators and their institutional rules. In this sense, problematizing discretion forces questions of remediation onto sanitary administrative grounds. Should judges be elected or appointed? Should judges administer justice through sentencing guidelines? No guidelines and some mandatory minimums? No mandatory minimums and only mandatory maximums? Will judges or parole boards select the final release date? These questions matter, but they cannot replace clear commitments to racial justice. When they are posed independently of normative goals, process becomes the proxy, not the path, to justice. Without a normatively grounded understanding of racial violence, liberal reforms will do the administrative shuffle.

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Answers to: the public supports surveillance – War on Drugs (___)

(____) Civil society groups are shinning light on the prison industrial complex – their arguments are gaining traction with the public Nathan Goodman 3/10/14 (The Weekly Abolitionist: Media Against The Prison State, https://c4ss.org/content/25240,

State violence thrives in the dark. This is why the state secrets privilege is so abused, it’s why the Obama administration has viciously persecuted whistleblowers, and it’s why states benefit from a media climate where their legitimacy is assumed and radical ideas aren’t heard. So today I want to highlight some people both inside and outside prisons who are shining light on the prison state. In Alabama, prisoners are filming each other on smuggled cell phones to tell their stories and express grievances about human rights abuses in Alabama prisons. These videos are then posted on a YouTube channel affiliated with the Free Alabama Movement. As Bay Area Intifada explains, “the prisoners speak of deplorable conditions, slave labor, prisons being a continuation of slavery and many candid stories from their lives inside and outside the cement walls of Alabama’s prisons.” The very nature of the prisoners’ non-violent disobedience tells us something about Alabama prisons. The communication mechanism they use to engage in political speech, the cell phone, is prohibited by prison officials. Only by disobeying the prison’s institutional rules can the truth about prisons be revealed. Prisons are designed to suppress communication, dissent, and the accountability that might result from openness. The Free Alabama Movement deserves the support of all who care about freedom and justice, and I’ll continue posting on their story in the coming weeks. Outside of prison walls, I’ve been seeing prison abolitionist ideas in various media sources. Anarchist journalist Charles Davis published an excellent article at Vice that discusses prison abolition and interviews Isaac Ontiveros of Critical Resistance. The interview covers a lot of important questions about prison abolition, including what to do about violent criminals, what tactics to use right now, and the risks of reform. Critical Resistance is one of the most significant prison abolitionist groups in the world today, and it’s always excellent to see their work highlighted at a popular website like Vice. My friend Cory Massimo also recently published a guest post at The Stag Blog offering a libertarian case for prison abolition. He argues for a system based purely on restitution rather than punishment, and contends that prisons are the wrong response even to those who have violated the rights of others. I’m glad to see prison abolitionist ideas gaining traction in libertarian circles, and I hope they will continue to gain traction. Shining light on the prison state doesn’t just mean talking about prisons themselves. Prisons are closely related to a variety of other political issues.

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Answers to: No Alternative to the War on Drugs [___]

[___] There is growing momentum to rethink the racial bias at the heart of the criminal justice systemDAVIS & GONZÁLEZ, World renowned activist and scholar and Co-host of Democracy Now , 2014

(Juna & Angela, “Angela Davis on Prison Abolition, the War on Drugs and Why Social Movements Shouldn’t Wait on Obama, 3-6, http://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/6/angela_davis_on_prison_abolition_the#

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The struggle to overhaul the criminal justice system in the United States has reached a pivotal moment. From the Obama administration’s push to reform harsh and racially biased sentencing for drug offenses to the recent decision by New York state to reform its use of solitary confinement, there is a growing momentum toward rethinking the system. But new battles have also emerged, like the fight over Stand Your Ground laws in states like Florida, where a number of recent court cases have highlighted the issue of racial bias in the court system. Marissa Alexander, an African-American woman of color who fired what she says was a warning shot into a wall near her abusive husband, is facing up to 60 years in prison at her retrial. Michael Dunn, who shot and killed an African-American teenager in a dispute over loud music in the same state of Florida, is facing a minimum of 60 years for attempted murder, but the jury failed to convict him of the central charge in the case: the murder of Jordan Davis, a case that, for many, recalled the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about these issues, we spend the rest of the hour with the world-renowned author, activist, scholar, Angela Davis, professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. For over four decades, she has been one of the most influential activists and intellectuals in the United States. She’s speaking here in New York on Friday at the Beyond the Bars conference up at Columbia University. It’s great to have you here, Angela. ANGELA DAVIS: Thank you, Amy. Thank you. Thank you, Juan. AMY GOODMAN: Do you sense progress?

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, yes. I think that this is a pivotal moment. There are openings. And I think it’s very important to point out that people have been struggling over these issues for years and for decades.

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Answers to: Ending the War on Drugs is a 1 st step [___]

[___] Temporary solutions like the Affirmative make it more difficult to have a national conversation about the history of American racism.

Alexander, acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar, 2014

(Michelle, Drug War Chronicle, "The New Jim Crow" Author Michelle Alexander Talks Race and Drug War, Issue #825

If we're going to do this just to save some cash, we haven't woken up to the magnitude of the harm. If we are not willing to have a searching conversation about how we got to this place, how we are able to lock up millions of people, we will find ourselves either still having a slightly downsized mass incarceration system or some new system of racial control because we will have not learned the core lesson our racial history is trying to teach us. We have to learn to care for them, the Other, the ghetto dwellers we demonize. Temporary, fleeting political alliances with politicians who may have no real interest in communities of color is problematic. We need to stay focused on doing the right things for the right reasons, and not count as victories battles won when the real lessons have not been learned.

[___] Band-Aid solutions like the Affirmative tell communities of color to “move on” while white men get rich selling weed.

Alexander, acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar, 2014

(Michelle, Drug War Chronicle, "The New Jim Crow" Author Michelle Alexander Talks Race and Drug War, Issue #825

As we talk about legalization, we have to also be willing to talk about reparations for the war on drugs, as in how do we repair the harm caused. With regard to Iraq, Colin Powell said "If you break it, you own it," but we haven't learned that basic lesson from our own racial history. We set the slaves free with nothing, and after Reconstruction, a new caste system arose, Jim Crow. A movement arose and we stopped Jim Crow, but we got no reparations after the waging of a brutal war on poor communities of color that decimated families and fanned the violence it was supposed to address. Do we simply say "We're done now, let's move on" and white men can make money? This time, we have to get it right; we have to tell the whole truth, we have to repair the harm done. It's not enough to just stop. Enormous harm had been done; we have to repair those communities.

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Answers to: End the War on Drugs and do the Alternataive (Permutation) [___] Sequencing – We have to address America’s culture of racism, BEFORE we dismantle the War on Drugs or we will reproduce mass incarceration.

Nakagawa, Lifelong political activist, community organizer, organization builder, 2012

(Scot, , RaceFiles, Legalizing Marijuana May Be A Good Idea, But It Is Not A Racial Justice Strategy, 12-10, http://www.racefiles.com/2012/12/10/legalizing-marijuana-may-be-a-good-idea-but-it-is-not-a-racial-justice-strategy/)

Here’s why. The war on drugs is a war on people. It is not now nor has it ever been just about drug enforcement. The war on drugs was declared under the Nixon administration and drug enforcement expanded dramatically under the Reagan administration at a time when illegal drug use was dropping, and before crack made it’s way into the public consciousness. The war is and always has been specifically targeted at destabilizing Black communities, from its beginnings as a strategy to confound the Black Power movement and other radical movements. African American men have ever since been filling up our prisons, making the U.S. into the leading country on earth when it comes to incarcerating our own. When crack hit the media, the war on drugs became part of the U.S. political culture, but the war didn’t start in order to address the crack problem in the U.S. If it did, it would have targeted the largest group of crack consumers who are white. Of course, nothing like that happened as is evidenced by the grossly disproportionate rates of arrest and incarceration of African American men in particular. It is true that African-Americans and Latinos are arrested for marijuana possession at rates wildly out of proportion to their percentages in society, much less the rates of African American and Latino marijuana usage. But the fact that Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately punished while federal data shows that whites are more likely to use marijuana is just more evidence that the war on drugs isn’t about cracking down on drugs as much as it is about cracking down on certain people. And the Black and Latino (and in some states Native American) racial profile of drug prisoners isn’t just about where law enforcement is active, as some have suggested, asserting that racial animus is less a factor than pressure to make arrest and prosecution quotas. It’s also about plain, old fashioned racism. A 2002 University of Washington study of Seattle law enforcement practices showed that it is anti-Black stereotypes, not location, public safety priorities or citizen complaints that drives disproportionate targeting of Blacks in the war on drugs. And there, at this site, they targeted far more Blacks than whites even though whites were just as visibly dealing drugs. So before we celebrate the end of the war on drugs, let’s consider why it started. Given that reason, we can hope that decriminalizing marijuana will cut down on drug arrests, but making it a priority strategy toward ending mass incarceration of Blacks and Latinos is a mistake. Ending mass incarceration will require us to address the racism that allowed our prisons to become warehouses for men of color in the first place.

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Answers to: Reform Impact is Worth It Good intentions aren’t enough – reforms can actually make things worse. While it is important to respect the perspective of people on the ground, it is just as important to make sure we get things rightGoodman, Center for a Stateless Society, 2014

(Nathan, Center for a Stateless Society, STIGMERGY: THE C4SS BLOG, The Weekly Abolitionist: Abolish Criminalization, Abolish the State, http://c4ss.org/content/25934)

These are important concerns. It is vital to remember that the prison system as we know it emerged out of reform. For example, solitary confinement, a brutal method of control and psychological torture, was initially developed by Quakers and intended as a humanitarian reform. The criminalization of blacks in this country emerged from a loophole in the 13th Amendment, which said that slavery and involuntary servitude were unlawful “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” The reformist abolition of slavery was piecemeal, allowing the reestablishment of slavery through the penal system.

To avoid these pitfalls, Deborah Small recommends a broader emphasis than simply ending mass incarceration. Instead, she proposes a framework that emphasizes ending mass criminalization. She explains the distinction as follows: Mass incarceration is one outcome of the culture of criminalization. Criminalization includes the expansion of law enforcement and the surveillance state to a broad range of activities and settings: zero tolerance policies in schools that steer children into the criminal justice system; welfare policies that punish poor mothers and force them to work outside of the home; employment practices that require workers to compromise their basic civil liberties as a prerequisite for a job; immigration policies that stigmatize and humiliate people while making it difficult for them to access essential services like health care and housing. These and similar practices too numerous to list fall under the rubric of criminalization.

When people talk about mass incarceration they’re usually referring to the more than 2 million Americans behind bars in local jails or state and federal prisons. That number, as high as it is, obscures the fact that on any given day an additional 4 million people are under some form of correctional supervision — generally, probation or parole. According to the Wall Street Journal, studies reveal American men have a 52 percent likelihood of arrest over their lifetime — that’s basically a 50/50 chance. Either American men have an extraordinarily high rate of criminality or we’ve cast the police net way too wide and caught way too many in it.

I’m inclined to agree with this. While prisons are particularly repugnant institutions, people will not be free if they are released from prisons but then subjected to mass surveillance, police harassment, invasive searches, prison-like schools, incarceration within “halfway houses,” stultifying state-secured structural poverty, or other forms of systemic coercion and control. This why my abolitionism is holistic. Rather than merely looking at the institutions of prisons, I look at the entire state apparatus and social order.

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Solvency Extension – State Cooption (1/3) Their strategy repeats past failures – liberal institutions will prevent solvency Murakawa , Associate Professor Center for African American Studies at Princeton University, 2014[Naomri, , “First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.” ProQuest ebrary]The history of liberal law-and-order matters because the same proposals for better administration, proffered with the same good intentions, are likely to reproduce the same monstrous outcomes in the twenty-first century. The problems of a normatively untethered liberal law-and-order regime are clear in the arc of liberal positions on judicial discretion. Mid-century liberals viewed discretion as dangerous individualized justice, tailored to each defendant from each judge’s moral cloth in all its idiosyncratic textures. Judicial discretion lurked in law’s “twilight zone,” dispensing what Judge Marvin Frankel called “law without order.” Liberal fear of discretion endured through the mid-1980s, when one could easily characterize the “mainstream liberal thought” as unambiguously opposed to discretionary administrative interpretation and implementation. 15 With the rise of sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums through the 1980s and 1990s, however, liberals called for more judicial discretion by praising that which they previously reprimanded— justice customized to each individual defendant. 16

As a project to control the irrationalities of racial bias and administrative discretion, liberal law-and-order ignored empirical lessons and displaced normative questions. Reformers invoked the promises and perils of “discretion” while ignoring the central findings of research. The American Bar Foundation’s 1957 survey and the myriad studies it inspired analyzed discretion within the “total criminal justice system.” As a system, carceral machinery is not easily corrected by small administrative adjustments: tighten discretion in one place, and the criminal justice system “accommodates,” to use the original language of the ABF studies, so that discretion simply becomes more important for a different decision maker. Accommodation is evident of sentencing guidelines and mandatory minimums, which diminished judicial discretion but effectively increased prosecutorial discretion. When situated with a total system approach, the “amount” of discretion has neither increased nor decreased, concludes Samuel Walker; it has simply moved from one agency to another. 17

Administrative tinkering does not confront the damning features of the American carceral state, its scale and its racial concentration, which, when taken together reinforce and raise African American vulnerability to premature death. By focusing on the intra-system problems of “discretion,” lawmakers displaced questions of justice onto the more manageable, measurable issues of system function. When framed as a problem of discretion— that is, individual decision making permissible by formal rules— then solutions to racial inequality double back to individual administrators and their institutional rules. In this sense, problematizing discretion forces questions of remediation onto sanitary administrative grounds. Should judges be elected or appointed? Should judges administer justice through sentencing guidelines? No

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Solvency Extension – State Cooption (2/3)

{Murakawa Continues}

guidelines and some mandatory minimums? No mandatory minimums and only mandatory maximums? Will judges or parole boards select the final release date? These questions matter, but they cannot replace clear commitments to racial justice. When they are posed independently of normative goals, process becomes the proxy, not the path, to justice. Without a normatively grounded understanding of racial violence, liberal reforms will do the administrative shuffle. This book traced a stark half-century turn from confronting white racial violence administered and enabled by carceral apparatuses, to controlling black criminality through a procedurally fortified, race-neutral system. Race liberals institutionalized the “right to safety” while skirting its animating call against state-sanctioned white violence. Fixation on administrative minutiae distracted from the normative core of punishment in a system of persistent racial hierarchy. Unlike administrative tinkering, reforms for decriminalization and decarceration would push debates to their normative core: what warrants punishment, in what form, and why? 18 In place of liberal searches for the ideal procedural path to life incarceration, metrics of racial justice should focus on what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” 19 Seeing racism as “group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death” gives proper context to acts of violence between individuals. If we situate private violence in relation to group-differentiated reality, we begin to see the tight weave of state and private racial violence. An example often mobilized to repressive ends is the fact that most crimes occur within rather than between racial groups, such that African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans confront high incarceration rates and high victimization rates. This is the complex story of the U.S. racial state, where normal institutional and ideological processes perpetuate the multigenerational transmission of accumulated advantage and accumulated disadvantage. 20 Accumulated advantage imparts a presumption of innocence; inherited wealth enables home ownership in class-segregated areas (i.e., “a safe neighborhood”) and medical insurance for diagnosis of conditions and coverage of various prescriptions such as Ritalin (i.e., more effective forms of meth). In contrast, accumulated disadvantage imparts a presumption of guilt.

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War on Drugs Negative NAUDL 2015-16Reform Kritik

Solvency Extension – State Cooption (3/3) The codification of race within the law secured the subjugation of blacks which makes emancipation impossible from within the stateHartman 1997—Saidiya Hartman is a renowned author and a professor at Columbia University specializing in African American literature and history, “Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America” p. 194-195

The codification of race in the law secured the subjugation of blacks, regulated social interaction, and prescribed the terms of interracial conduct and association, despite protestations to the contrary. As the consequence of this codification of race, blackness became the primary badge of slavery because of the burdens, disabilities, and assumptions of servitude abidingly associated with this racial scripting of the body, and inversely, whiteness became “the most valuable sort of property” and the “master-key that unlock[ed] the golden door of opportunity.” To be sure, the Louisiana statue did impose the badges of slavery; it interfered with the personal liberty and full enjoyment of the entitlements of freedom and regulated the civil rights common to all citizens on the basis of race, and it thereby placed blacks in a condition of legal inferiority (563). The badges-of-slavery argument advanced by the attorneys for Plessy and in the dissenting opinion of Judge John Marshall Harlan deconstructed the purported neutrality of racial distinctions and, above all, held that racial classifications produced “caste-distinctions” or a superior and inferior race among citizens. Indeed, the Louisiana statue placed blacks in a condition of inferiority. However, it accomplished this not merely by the designation of a physical location, a seat in a particular railroad car. In directing individuals to separate cars, the conductor, in effect, assigned racial identity, a peril that did not go unmentioned by the Court and which was at the heart of Plessy’s challenge. On what basis and with what authority could a conductor assign race? Was not such assignment and assortment based on race a perpetuation of the essential features of slavery? Moreover, what did I mean to assign race when race exceeded the realm of the visually verifiable? Tourgee’s brief emphasized the instability of race and that the codification of race was purely in service of white dominance. In considering why Homer Plessy should not be allowed to enjoy the reputation of whiteness, Tourgee asked: “By what rule then shall any tribunal be guided in determining racial character? It may be said that all those should be classed as colored in whom appears a visible admixture of colored blood. By what law? With what justice? Why not count everyone as white in whom is visible any trace of white blood? There is but one reason to wit, the domination of the white race.” Blood functioned as the metaphysical title to racial property. Yet as there was no actual way to measure blood, the tangled lines of genealogy and association—more accurately, the prohibition of association—thus determined racial identity. If inheritance determined identity (and what could be more appropriate than inheritance in naming the law’s production of racial subjects given the transmutation of blood into property>), then it opened the golden door of opportunity for those able to enjoy the reputation of whiteness and disenfranchised those unable to legally claim title to whiteness.

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