By now, if you’ve been paying attention, you know that Jeff Sessions poses a dangerous and grave threat to the American justice system. But the good news is that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has a strategy for fighting him off and for mitigating the possible damage done under a Trump administration. In Philadelphia, the organization is utilizing a canvassing effort to turn out its members to vote in key races that could have a major impact on the issue of mass incarceration.
Tuesday’s election in Philadelphia, then, is Act 1: Scene 1 of the ACLU’s new localized plan, called the Smart Justice campaign, which was hatched back in October. [Udi Ofer], the campaign’s director, calls the strategy Ten-Ten-Ten: A three-year nationwide push for 10 new lawsuits, 10 new state laws, and victories in 10 key district attorney races—a local pincer attack against the nation’s incarceration rate. Ofer says his team hopes to cut that rate one day by 50 percent.
To many, it’s not at all obvious why the ACLU should target local races, rather than use its precious money to challenge Sessions head-on—a stark imperative when your organization’s raison d’etre is to sue the Justice Department. But the Sessions DOJ, Ofer explains, isn’t as powerful as it seems. “Ninety percent of incarcerated populations are in state prisons or in local jails,” Ofer says—the reason why Obama-era clemency policies barely made a dent in the number of incarcerated Americans. “It’s a state-based problem, and it’s a problem that needs to be resolved by the states.”
This strategy couldn’t come at a better time. Last week, Sessions moved forward with a move to toughen rules on prosecuting drug crimes even though Democrats and Republicans both agreed that mandatory minimums were an enormous waste of taxpayer money and resources and unnecessarily penalized nonviolent drug offenders. His renewed war on drugs is yet another way to increase the nation’s incarceration rate and add more black and brown bodies to jails by any means necessary. And in Philadelphia, evidence of the structural injustice that leads to mass incarceration is particularly stark.
According to data collected by the ACLU, 67 percent of defendants sitting in Philadelphia jails are awaiting trial; the majority of them stuck there because bail has been set too high. Issues like civil asset forfeiture offer even more startling figures: Of the $5 million that Philadelphia confiscated in civil asset forfeitures in 2015, the ACLU estimates that 32 percent came from arrests that did not result in any convictions. (The DA’s defenders contest some of these statistics.) Abstracted to the state level, the ACLU’s larger playing field, Pennsylvania had roughly 50,000 inmates in state prisons in 2015—the sixth-largest prison population in the country. And the problem may get better before it gets worse: Last month, the state Legislature passed a bill that would no doubt please Sessions, toughening mandatory minimum sentences often viewed as a driver of unnecessary incarceration.
Part of what makes the ACLU’s campaign unique is that the canvassers who are doing voter engagement and outreach are the formerly incarcerated themselves. Ex-offenders who can speak directly to voters about the importance of these issues and why it’s necessary for ACLU members to get out and vote for DAs who will work for fair sentencing laws and humane treatment of offenders. These are the very people who have so much to lose when elections go the wrong way and know of what they speak. They are who should be leading this part of the resistance. Since the election is Tuesday (and with a pretty set of diverse candidates), it will be interesting to see how this strategy plays out.