Blake Invitational 1 Kamiak nb aff

The Role of the Ballot is to evaluate the simulated consequences of the aff policy. Prefer:

The state is inevitable—debating policies is the only way to create social change in debate

Coverstone 5: Alan Coverstone (masters in communication from Wake Forest, longtime debate coach) “Acting on Activism: Realizing the Vision of Debate with Pro-social Impact” Paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Conference November 17th 2005 11/18/15. RW

An important concern emerges when Mitchell describes reflexive fiat as a contest strategy capable of “eschewing the power to directly control external actors” (1998b, p. 20). Describing debates about what our government should do as attempts to control outside actors is debilitating and disempowering. Control of the US government is exactly what an active, participatory citizenry is supposed to be all about. After all, if democracy means anything, it means that citizens not only have the right, they also bear the obligation to discuss and debate what the government should be doing. Absent that discussion and debate, much of the motivation for personal political activism is also lost. Those who have co-opted Mitchell’s argument for individual advocacy often quickly respond that nothing we do in a debate round can actually change government policy, and unfortunately, an entire generation of debaters has now swallowed this assertion as an article of faith. The best most will muster is, “Of course not, but you don’t either!” The assertion that nothing we do in debate has any impact on government policy is one that carries the potential to undermine Mitchell’s entire project. If there is nothing we can do in a debate round to change government policy, then we are left with precious little in the way of pro-social options for addressing problems we face. At best, we can pursue some Pilot-like hand washing that can purify us as individuals through quixotic activism but offer little to society as a whole. It is very important to note that Mitchell (1998b) tries carefully to limit and bound his notion of reflexive fiat by maintaining that because it “views fiat as a concrete course of action, it is bounded by the limits of pragmatism” (p. 20). Pursued properly, the debates that Mitchell would like to see are those in which the relative efficacy of concrete political strategies for pro-social change is debated. In a few noteworthy examples, this approach has been employed successfully, and I must say that I have thoroughly enjoyed judging and coaching those debates. The students in my program have learned to stretch their understanding of their role in the political process because of the experience. Therefore, those who say I am opposed to Mitchell’s goals here should take care at such a blanket assertion. However, contest debate teaches students to combine personal experience with the language of political power. Powerful personal narratives unconnected to political power are regularly co-opted by those who do learn the language of power. One need look no further than the annual state of the Union Address where personal story after personal story is used to support the political agenda of those in power. The so-called role-playing that public policy contest debates encourage promotes active learning of the vocabulary and levers of power in America. Imagining the ability to use our own arguments to influence government action is one of the great virtues of academic debate. Gerald Graff (2003) analyzed the decline of argumentation in academic discourse and found a source of student antipathy to public argument in an interesting place. I’m up against…their aversion to the role of public spokesperson that formal writing presupposes. It’s as if such students can’t imagine any rewards for being a public actor or even imagining themselves in such a role. This lack of interest in the public sphere may in turn reflect a loss of confidence in the possibility that the arguments we make in public will have an effect on the world. Today’s students’ lack of faith in the power of persuasion reflects the waning of the ideal of civic participation that led educators for centuries to place rhetorical and argumentative training at the center of the school and college curriculum. (Graff, 2003, p. 57) The power to imagine public advocacy that actually makes a difference is one of the great virtues of the traditional notion of fiat that critics deride as mere simulation. Simulation of success in the public realm is far more empowering to students than completely abandoning all notions of personal power in the face of governmental hegemony by teaching students that “nothing they can do in a contest debate can ever make any difference in public policy.” Contest debating is well suited to rewarding public activism if it stops accepting as an article of faith that personal agency is somehow undermined by the so-called role playing in debate. Debate is role-playing whether we imagine government action or imagine individual action. Imagining myself starting a socialist revolution in America is no less of a fantasy than imagining myself making a difference on Capitol Hill. Furthermore, both fantasies influenced my personal and political development virtually ensuring a life of active, pro-social, political participation. Neither fantasy reduced the likelihood that I would spend my life trying to make the difference I imagined. One fantasy actually does make a greater difference: the one that speaks the language of political power. The other fantasy disables action by making one a laughingstock to those who wield the language of power. Fantasy motivates and role-playing trains through visualization. Until we can imagine it, we cannot really do it. Role-playing without question teaches students to be comfortable with the language of power, and that language paves the way for genuine and effective political activism. Debates over the relative efficacy of political strategies for pro-social change must confront governmental power at some point. There is a fallacy in arguing that movements represent a better political strategy than voting and person-to-person advocacy. Sure, a full-scale movement would be better than the limited voice I have as a participating citizen going from door to door in a campaign, but so would full-scale government action. Unfortunately, the gap between my individual decision to pursue movement politics and the emergence of a full-scale movement is at least as great as the gap between my vote and democratic change. They both represent utopian fiat. Invocation of Mitchell to support utopian movement fiat is simply not supported by his work, and too often, such invocation discourages the concrete actions he argues for in favor of the personal rejectionism that under girds the political cynicism that is a fundamental cause of voter and participatory abstention in America today.

2. Legal debates are key to short-term survival of oppressed populations. Whether the law is good or bad, legal education is crucial to empowerment.

Arkles et al 10: (Gabriel Arkles, Pooja Gehi and Elana Redfield, The Role of Lawyers in Trans Liberation: Building a Transformative Movement for Social Change, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, 8 Seattle J. Soc. Just. 579, Spring / Summer, 2010, LN)

While agenda-setting by lawyers can lead to the replication of patterns of elitism and the reinforcement of systems of oppression, we do believe that legal work is a necessary

and critical way to support movements for social justice. We must recognize the limitations of the legal system and learn to use that to the advantage of the oppressed. If lawyers are going to support work that dismantles oppressive structures, we must radically rethink the roles we can play in building and supporting these movements and acknowledge that our own individual interests or even livelihood may conflict with doing radical and transformative work. n162 A. Community Organizing for Social Justice When we use the term community organizing or organizing, we refer to the activities of organizations engaging in base-building and leadership development of communities directly impacted by one or more social *612 problems and conducting direct action issue campaigns intended to make positive change related to the problem(s). In this article, we discuss community organizing in the context of progressive social change, but community-organizing strategies can also be used for conservative ends. Community organizing is a powerful means to make social change. A basic premise of organizing is that inappropriate imbalances of power in society are a central component of social injustice. In order to have social justice, power relationships must shift. In Organizing for Social Change: Midwest Academy Manual for Activists (hereinafter, "the Manual"), n163 the authors list three principles of community organizing: n164 (1) winning real, immediate, concrete improvements in people's lives; (2) giving people a sense of their own power; and (3) altering the relations of power. n165 Before any of these principles can be achieved it is necessary to have leadership by the people impacted by social problems. n166 As Rinku Sen points out: Even allies working in solidarity with affected groups cannot rival the clarity and power of the people who have the most to gain and the least to lose . . . organizations composed of people whose lives will change when a new policy is instituted tend to set goals that are harder to reach, to compromise less, and to stick out a fight longer. n167 She also notes that, "If we are to make policy proposals that are grounded in reality and would make a difference either in peoples' lives or in the debate, then we have to be in touch with the people who are at the center of such policies. n168 We believe community organizing has the potential to make fundamental social change that law reform strategies or "movements" led by lawyers cannot achieve on their own. However, community organizing is not always just and effective. Community-organizing groups are not immune to any number of problems that can impact other organizations, including internal oppressive dynamics. In fact, some strains of white, male-dominated *613 community organizing have been widely criticized as perpetuating racism and sexism. n169 Nonetheless, models of community organizing, particularly as revised by women of color and other leaders from marginalized groups, have much greater potential to address fundamental imbalances of power than law reform strategies. They also have a remarkable record of successes. Tools from community organizers can help show where other strategies can fit into a framework for social change. The authors of the Manual, for example, describe various strategies for addressing social issues and illustrate how each of them may, at least to some extent, be effective. n170 They then plot out various forms of making social change on a continuum in terms of their positioning with regard to existing social power relationships. n171 They place direct services at the end of the spectrum that is most accepting of existing power relationships and community organizing at the end of the spectrum that most challenges existing power relationships. n172 Advocacy organizations are listed in the middle, closer to community organizing than direct services. n173 The Four Pillars of Social Justice Infrastructure model, a tool of the Miami Workers Center, is somewhat more nuanced than the Manual. n174 According to this model, four "pillars" are the key to transformative social justice. n175 They are (1) the pillar of service, which addresses community needs and stabilizes community members' lives; (2) the pillar of policy, which changes policies and institutions and achieves concrete gains with benchmarks for progress; (3) the pillar of consciousness, which alters public opinion and shifts political parameters through media advocacy and popular education; and (4) the pillar of power, which achieves autonomous community power through base-building and leadership development. n176 According to the Miami Workers Center, all of these pillars are essential in making social change, but the pillar of power is most crucial in the struggle to win true liberation for all oppressed communities. n177 *614 In their estimation, our movements suffer when the pillar of power is forgotten and/or not supported by the other pillars, or when the pillars are seen as separate and independent, rather than as interconnected, indispensable aspects of the whole infrastructure that is necessary to build a just society. n178 Organizations with whom we work are generally dedicated solely to providing services, changing policies, or providing public education. Unfortunately, each of these endeavors exists separate from one another and perhaps most notably, separate from community organizing. In SRLP's vision of change, this separation is part of maintaining structural capitalism that seeks to maintain imbalances of power in our society. Without incorporating the pillar of power, service provision, policy change, and public education can never move towards real social justice. n179 B. Lawyering for Empowerment In the past few decades, a number of alternative theories have emerged that help lawyers find a place in social movements that do not replicate oppression. n180 Some of the most well-known iterations of this theme are "empowerment lawyering," "rebellious lawyering," and "community lawyering." n181 These perspectives share skepticism of the efficacy of impact litigation and traditional direct services for improving the conditions faced by poor clients and communities of color, because they do not and cannot effectively address the roots of these forms of oppression. n182 Rather, these alternative visions of lawyering center on the empowerment of community members and organizations, the elimination of the potential for dependency on lawyers and the legal system, and the collaboration between lawyers and directly impacted communities in priority setting. n183 Of the many models of alternative lawyering with the goal of social justice, we will focus on the idea of "lawyering for empowerment," generally. The goal of empowerment lawyering is to enable a group of people to gain control of the forces that affect their lives. n184 Therefore, the goal of empowerment lawyering for low-income transgender people of *615 color is to support these communities in confronting the economic and social policies that limit their life chances. Rather than merely representing poor people in court and increasing access to services, the role of the community or empowerment lawyer involves: organizing, community education, media outreach, petition drives, public demonstrations, lobbying, and shaming campaigns . . . Individuals and members of community-based organizations actively work alongside organizers and lawyers in the day-to-day strategic planning of their case or campaign. Proposed solutions--litigation or non-litigation based--are informed by the clients' knowledge and experience of the issue. n185 A classic example of the complex role of empowerment within the legal agenda setting is the question of whether to take cases that have low chances of success. The traditional approach would suggest not taking the case, or settling for limited outcomes that may not meet the client's expectations. However, when our goals shift to empowerment, our strategies change as well. If we understand that the legal system is incapable of providing a truly favorable outcome for low-income transgender clients and transgender clients of color, then winning and losing cases takes on different meanings. For example, a transgender client may choose to bring a lawsuit against prison staff who sexually assaulted her, despite limited chance of success because of the "blue wall of silence," her perceived limited credibility as a prisoner, barriers to recovery from the Prison Litigation Reform Act, and restrictions on supervisory liability in § 1983 cases. Even realizing the litigation outcome will probably be unfavorable to her, she may still develop leadership skills by rallying a broader community of people impacted by similar issues. Additionally, she may use the knowledge and energy gained through the lawsuit to change policy. If our goal is to familiarize our client with the law, to provide an opportunity for the client *616 and/or community organizers to educate the public about the issues, to help our client assess the limitations of the legal system on their own, or to play a role in a larger organizing strategy, then taking cases with little chance of achieving a legal remedy can be a useful strategy. Lawyering for empowerment means not relying solely on legal expertise for decisionmaking. It means recognizing the limitations of the legal system, and using our knowledge and expertise to help disenfranchised communities take leadership. If community organizing is the path to social justice and "organizing is about people taking a role in determining their own future and improving the quality of life not only for themselves but for everyone," then "the primary goal of empowerment lawyering is building up the community." n186 C. Sharing Information and Building Leadership A key to meaningful participation in social justice movements is access to information. Lawyers are in an especially good position to help transfer knowledge, skills, and information to disenfranchised communities--the legal system is maintained by and predicated on arcane knowledge that lacks relevance in most contexts but takes on supreme significance in courts, politics, and regulatory agencies. It is a system intentionally obscure to the uninitiated; therefore the lawyer has the opportunity to expose the workings of the system to those who seek to destroy it, dismantle it, reconfigure it, and re-envision it. As Quigley points out, the ignorance of the client enriches the lawyer's power position, and thus the transfer of the power from the lawyer to the client necessitates a sharing of information. n187 Rather than simply performing the tasks that laws require, a lawyer has the option to teach and to collaborate with clients so that they can bring power and voice back to their communities and perhaps fight against the system, become politicized, and take leadership. "This demands that the lawyer undo the secret wrappings of the legal system and share the essence of legal advocacy--doing so lessens the mystical power of the lawyer, and, in practice, enriches the advocate in the sharing and developing of rightful power." n188 Lawyers have many opportunities to share knowledge and skills as a form of leadership development. This sharing can be accomplished, for example, through highly collaborative legal representation, through community clinics, through skill-shares, or through policy or campaign meetings where the lawyer explains what they know about the existing structures and fills in gaps and questions raised by activists about the workings of legal systems. D. Helping to Meet Survival Needs SRLP sees our work as building legal services and policy change that directly supports the pillar of power. n189 Maintaining an awareness of the limitations and pitfalls of traditional legal services, we strive to provide services in a larger context and with an approach that can help support libratory work. n190 For this reason we provide direct legal services but also work toward leadership development in our communities and a deep level of support for our community-organizing allies. Our approach in this regard is to make sure our community members access and obtain all of the benefits to which they are entitled under the law, and to protect our community members as much as possible from the criminalization, discrimination, and harassment they face when attempting to live their lives. While we do not believe that the root causes keeping our clients in poverty and poor health can be addressed in this way, we also believe that our clients experience the most severe impact from state policies and practices and need and that they deserve support to survive them. n191 Until our communities are truly empowered and our systems are fundamentally changed to increase life chances and health for transgender people who are low-income and people of color, our communities are going to continue to have to navigate government agencies and organizations to survive.

3. Oppression is created by social systems so only a focus on material conditions can solve

Johnson 1: Allan Johnson, 2001. (PhD in sociology, he joined the sociology department at Wesleyan University) http://www.cabrillo.edu/~lroberts/AlanJohnsonWhatCanWeDO001.pdf. RW

Privilege is a feature of social systems, not individuals. People have or don't have privilege depending on the system they're in and the social categories other people put them in. To say, then, that I have race privilege says less about me personally than it does about how the society we all live in and how it is organized to assign privilege on the basis of a socially defined set of racial categories that change historically and often overlap. The challenge facing me as an individual has more to do with how I participate in society as a recipient of race privilege and how those choices oppose or support the system itself. In dealing with the problem of privilege, we have to get used to being surrounded by paradox. Very often those who have privilege don't know it, for example, which is a key aspect of privilege. Also paradoxical is the fact that privilege doesn't necessarily lead to a "good life," which can prompt people in privileged groups to deny resentfully that they even have it. But privilege doesn't equate with being happy. It involves having what others don't have and the struggle to hang on to it at their expense, neither of which is a recipe for joy,personal fulfillment, or spiritual contentment.... To be an effective part of the solution, we have to realize that privilege and oppression are not a thing of the past. It's happening right now. It isn't just a collection of wounds inflicted long ago that now need to be healed. The wounding goes on as I write these words and as you read them, and unless people work to change the system that promotes it, personal healing by itself cannot be the answer. Healing wounds is no more a solution to the oppression that causes the wounding than military hospitals are a solution to war. Healing is a necessary process, but it isn't enough.... Since privilege is rooted primarily in systems—such as families, schools, and workplaces—change isn't simply a matter of changing people. People, of course, will have to change in order for systems to change, but the most important point is that changing people isn't enough. The solution also has to include entire systems, such as capitalism, whose paths of least resistance that shape how we feel, think, and behave as individuals, how we see ourselves and one another.

4. Fairness. Anything else moots 6 minutes of 1ac offense – forces a 1ar restart. They get a 13-7 minute advantage which means we have worse discussion, even if the subject of discussion is slightly better. Unfairness denies effective dialogue on kritikal issues which turns your impacts

Galloway 7 Ryan Galloway, Samford Comm prof, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28, 2007

Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice their position. Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing. The affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements. While affirmative teams have recently resisted affirming the topic, in fact, the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point of departure. Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative. The negative crafts approaches to the topic consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the arguments that the topic allows for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced argumentative table. When one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers. However, it also undermines the respect due to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a fundamental component. A desire to be fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect, a demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months upon months of preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced. Affirmative cases that suspend basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular negative strategies. Unprepared, one side comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are unable to “understand what ‘went on…’” and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114).

Advocacy

Plea bargaining ought to be abolished in the united states criminal justice system. I’m willing to specify things like actor, method of implementation, etc., during CX to avoid frivolous T debates and preserve substantive education.

Solvency Advocate—Ralph Adam Fine, summer 1987. “Plea Bargaining: An Unecessary Evil”. Marquette Law Review, Volume 7, Issue 4.

Advantage 1 = War on Drugs

Plea bargaining has become a tool of the modern police state to ramp up the war on drugs through disparate conviction of minorities

Sims 7: Clayton Sims, 2007. “The Historical and Racial Implications of Plea Bargaining”. https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/97522/17-908-spring-2007/contents/assignments/plea_bargaining.pdf. RW

Although race's role was small, if even detectable, in the birth of the modern plea bargaining process, it has played a large role in the disparate conviction of black defendants due to violations of drug laws. This effect is compounded by the enormous influx of defendants into the justice system created by the aggressive prosecutiorial nature of American drug policy. Defendants convicted of violations of drug laws are overwhelmingly African American". While this disparity is not the main subject of our attention, it does further the impact of the streamlined plea bargaining involved in drug convictions. African Americans are arrested and convicted for drug violations more regularly due to the more public nature of drugs dealt in urban, predominantly black, neighborhoods. The regularity of processing makes the plea bargaining system a standard element of the jsudicial system for these defendants. Celesta Albonetti's research regarding the characteristics of defendants of drug offenses also reveals that not only are African Americans more likely to be convicted of drug convictions, once in the legal system, they are statistically more likely to enter a guilty plea than white defendants.. They are also receive a statistically lower reduction in their sentence once a guilty plea is entered than do white defendants.. This overwhelmingly implies that in the modern legal system, Black defendants are subject to a three-fold disadvantage regarding plea bargains. They are more likely to be arrested and convicted of drug offenses, more likely to receive and accept a plea bargain, and more likely to receive less benefit from doing so than white defendants. Despite a legal origin seemingly void of racial intent, plea bargaining has become a tool in the war on drugs that aggressively discriminates against African Americans.

This enforces white supremacy—to get past trials, prosecutors indict on maximum charges, which inflames racial bias, denies right to due process and stratifies society

Roberts 8, Dorothy E. CONSTRUCTING A CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM FREE OF RACIAL BIAS: AN ABOLITIONIST FRAMEWORK. 39:261. scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1575andcontext=faculty_scholarship. 2/4/2008. NP 11/21/15.

Moreover, institutional arrangements that reward the fanatical pursuit of convictions encourage prosecutorial “overreaching.”47 By routinely indicting defendants on the maximum charges possible, prosecutors place overwhelming pressure on defendants to give up their right to trial.48 There is virtual uniformity of plea bargaining in drug cases.49 In New York, for example, more than ninety percent of drug cases are decided by guilty pleas, rather than jury trials.50 Mandatory minimum sentencing laws pressure defendants to cooperate with prosecutors as the only way to escape draconian prison terms.51 This “assembly-line justice” created by mandatory sentencing and prosecutorial power funnel black defendants into prison without the individualized judgment of culpability normally contemplated by notions of just desert.52 Thus, the mass imprisonment of African Americans should be viewed as a state measure to supervise citizens en masse on the basis of race rather than a race-neutral effort to control crime or mete out offenders’ just deserts.

Prefer my studies—they’re extremely comprehensive and specific

Fontier et al 17: Jenn Rolnick Borchetta and Alice Fontier, writers for The Marshall Project, a nonprofit journalist organization focused on criminal justice. “When Race Tips the Scales in Plea Bargaining”. October 23rd, 2017. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/10/23/when-race-tips-the-scales-in-plea-bargaining. RW

TWO OFFICERS ESCORTED a young black man into the courtroom, bringing him in handcuffs from a holding cell in the back called “the pen.” They placed him beside his public defender and stepped away. So far, things were routine. The prosecutor had offered the man a plea deal of probation and he indicated that he would accept. In a scene that plays out dozens of times a day in the Bronx criminal court, the judge ran through a constitutionally required script. This article was published in collaboration with Slate. She explained what it means to accept a prosecutor’s plea offer: that he was giving up his right to a trial; he was admitting guilt; he could not change his mind. The judge asked, as she must: “Is anyone forcing you to accept this plea today?” At this point, most people quietly say "no." But the man responded “yes,” he was being forced to accept the plea. Refusing to accept meant facing the strong arm of prosecution and potentially going to prison for years. He protested that he had no real choice.Three court officers surrounded him. The judge repeated the question: “Is anyone forcing you to accept this plea today?” This time, flanked by officers, he said no. A few minutes later, he walked out a free man, but he now had a criminal conviction and the oversight and constraints that come with probation. Countless people like this young man face tremendous pressure to accept a prosecutor’s plea offer. And most criminal punishment results—not from a trial by a jury of your peers—but in convictions imposed through plea deals. Against this backdrop, a new study showing racial bias in the plea bargaining process demands attention and action. A new study from Carlos Berdejo of Loyola Law School demonstrates for the first time that there are significant racial disparities in the plea deals that white and black people receive on misdemeanor charges—with black people facing more severe punishment. Berdejo analyzed 30,807 misdemeanor cases in Wisconsin over a seven-year period and found that white people facing misdemeanor charges were more than 74 percent more likely than black people to have all charges carrying potential prison time dropped, dismissed, or reduced. And white people with no criminal history were more than 25 percent more likely to have charges reduced than black people who also had no criminal history. This suggests, as Berdejo concludes in his report, that prosecutors use race to judge whether a person is likely to recidivate when deciding what plea to offer. Prior studies have found racial disparities in the plea bargaining process. The Berdejo study differs, however, in that it analyzes a detailed statewide data set of the entire life of criminal cases, from charging to sentencing, making it more reliable and expansive. The majority of arrests nationally are for misdemeanor charges. At The Bronx Defenders, where we provide public defense services to low-income people in the Bronx, we had over 18,000 new misdemeanor cases in 2016 alone. That was more than three quarters of our cases, and about half of all cases that we closed last year resulted in plea deals. If there are racial disparities in pleas in misdemeanor cases that lead to worse punishment of black people, it means a significant proportion of our criminal justice system is meting out punishment in a racially-biased manner. Prosecutors wield enormous power and total discretion in deciding whether and how to charge people, whether to request pre-trial detention or money bail, and what plea to offer. One factor guiding this decision is whether the attorney believes the person will be held on bail. Frequently, people charged with misdemeanors accept pleas just to go home. A young black man from the South Bronx, one of the poorest congressional districts in the country, may have almost no chance of paying bail, so the only option is a criminal record and probation. Contrast that to a wealthier white man, who knows that if the judge sets bail he can pay his way out. This man has no pressure to accept a plea, and his lawyer can investigate his case and negotiate a better plea. Immediate interventions could stem racial disparities in pleas. New York must eliminate money bail for misdemeanors to end the threat of pretrial incarceration that disparately extracts guilty pleas. Prosecutors should state the reasons for plea offers on the record to create transparency and be required to collect and share data about their offers to expose any disparities. It is only through established facts and data that we can educate prosecutors and judges, as well as work to combat implicit and overt bias.

Perpetuation of the war on drugs means violence is self-sustaining—it creates funding and recruit for radical groups.

Glenny 16: Misha Glenny. To win the war on terror, forget the war on drugs. 2016. https://www.ft.com/content/808c348e-a4db-11e5-a91e-162b86790c58

The terms may no longer be politically correct but western governments continue to wage both a war on terror and a war on drugs. They now need to recognise what is staring them in the face: that the prosecution of the latter makes it impossible to win the former. From Afghanistan to the Maghreb, from Mexico to London, terrorists and violent gangs depend upon the revenues they garner from the illegal drugs trade. The billions spent by America and its allies on war in Afghanistan since 2001 have not destroyed the Taliban. On the contrary, funds from heroin sales have made the group stronger than ever. The prohibition of narcotics makes ever less sense. The primary purpose of the policy has been a near total failure since it was first introduced in the 1920s. No government with the exception of North Korea has the capacity to police the drug trade. In the UK, law enforcement agencies intercept between 10 and 20 per cent of illicit drugs before they reach market. In order to seriously disrupt the profits of the drug trade, they would need to seize closer to 60 per cent. Ask young people how easy it is to buy drugs and most will answer that it is not as hard as buying alcohol. The movement of cocaine and marijuana through west Africa and the Maghreb has provided various organisations linked to al-Qaeda and Isis with a cash boost. Western governments cannot stop drugs reaching their cities, and their passage benefits some of the worst people in the world. But the problems do not end there. Homegrown terrorists in Britain and France are often radicalised in prison, after first being jailed for drugs offences or other petty crime. The recruiting sergeants of radical Islam realised long ago that prisons offered rich pickings. If we were to stop sending young men to jail for petty drugs offences, this source of extremism would be cut off. Changing the drug laws is not merely about discarding a policy that has never worked — one which in fact works against our society. It would also have positive financial effects. We already have evidence for this from US states that have legalised marijuana. In the last fiscal year, for example, Colorado collected $70m in sales taxes from marijuana from a population of just under 5.5m. If marijuana were legalised in the UK, the extra tax take could amount to £1bn or so a year. That windfall is just the beginning. The prohibition of drugs in the UK imposes huge social and economic costs. Drug offences account for 15 per cent of the prison population, but more than half of inmates admit that their crime was related to a drug habit. Reform of the drug laws could remove 40,000 of Britain’s 87,000 inmates from jail. Policing and court expenses aside, the cost of keeping one prisoner in jail for a year is £40,000. So that saves another £1.5bn. The spoils become spectacular if the police are liberated from having to chase down drug users, the great majority of whom are casual users aged 16-24. That money could instead be channelled into combating terrorism, among other things. Security budgets have rarely looked as tight as they do today. The Metropolitan Police is battling to maintain its numbers above 30,000 officers, the minimum required for a city as big as London. The National Crime Agency, Britain’s version of the FBI, is in disarray and unsure of its role. And the intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, are feeling the squeeze as they have to spend time and money seeking out operatives with a different profile from the Oxbridge candidates of the past (members of Britain’s minority communities, for example). In almost every other sector, George Osborne, the chancellor, has demonstrated a sharp eye for a bargain. Reforming the drug laws would offer a big financial prize. If the examples of Switzerland and Portugal are anything to go by, decriminalisation will also lead to a reduction in drug consumption. Canada’s new government is set to legalise marijuana for recreational use and Britain should do the same. The crises we face today are so serious that it is not only bad politics to resist drug law reform — it is downright immoral.

Extinction

Rhodes 9: Richard (a visiting scholar at Harvard and MIT, and currently he is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Rhodes is the author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), which won the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award) “Reducing the nuclear threat: The argument for public safety” December 14th 2009 JW

The response was very different among nuclear and national security experts when Indiana Republican Sen. Richard Lugar surveyed PDF them in 2005. This group of 85 experts judged that the possibility of a WMD attack against a city or other target somewhere in the world is real and increasing over time. The median estimate of the risk of a nuclear attack somewhere in the world by 2010 was 10 percent. The risk of an attack by 2015 doubled to 20 percent median. There was strong, though not universal, agreement that a nuclear attack is more likely to be carried out by a terrorist organization than by a government. The group was split 45 to 55 percent on whether terrorists were more likely to obtain an intact working nuclear weapon or manufacture one after obtaining weapon-grade nuclear material. "The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is not just a security problem," Lugar wrote in the report's introduction. "It is the economic dilemma and the moral challenge of the current age. On September 11, 2001, the world witnessed the destructive potential of international terrorism. But the September 11 attacks do not come close to approximating the destruction that would be unleashed by a nuclear weapon. Weapons of mass destruction have made it possible for a small nation, or even a sub-national group, to kill as many innocent people in a day as national armies killed in months of fighting during World War II. "The bottom line is this," Lugar concluded: "For the foreseeable future, the United States and other nations will face an existential threat from the intersection of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction." It's paradoxical that a diminished threat of a superpower nuclear exchange should somehow have resulted in a world where the danger of at least a single nuclear explosion in a major city has increased (and that city is as likely, or likelier, to be Moscow as it is to be Washington or New York). We tend to think that a terrorist nuclear attack would lead us to drive for the elimination of nuclear weapons. I think the opposite case is at least equally likely: A terrorist nuclear attack would almost certainly be followed by a retaliatory nuclear strike on whatever country we believed to be sheltering the perpetrators. That response would surely initiate a new round of nuclear armament and rearmament in the name of deterrence, however illogical. Think of how much 9/11 frightened us; think of how desperate our leaders were to prevent any further such attacks; think of the fact that we invaded and occupied a country, Iraq, that had nothing to do with those attacks in the name of sending a message.

The drug war causes mass incarceration and creates the predominant mode of racist social control—there is no more damaging act against communities of color currently than the war on drugs.

Alexander 6: Alexander, Director of the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School 2006 Michelle, Federalism, Race, and Criminal Justice, Chapter pp. 219-228

Most Americans today can look back and see slavery and Jim Crow laws for what they were-extraordinary and immoral forms of social control used to oppress black and brown people. However, few believe that a similar form of social control exists today. What I have come to recognize is that, contrary to popular belief, a new form of social control does exist, as disastrous and morally indefensible as Jim Crow-the mass incarceration of people of color. There is an important story to be told that helps explain the role of the criminal justice system in resurrecting, in a new guise, the same policies of racial segregation, political disenfranchisement, and social stigmatization that have long oppressed and controlled all people of color, particularly African Americans. The story begins with federalism and its evolving methods of maintaining white supremacy. A recent twist has been added; one that the civil rights community has failed to explain to those who do not read reports issued by the Bureau of Justice Statistics or Supreme Court decisions. In 1980, 330,000 people were incarcerated in federal and state prisons7 - the vast majority of whom were people of color. 8 Since then, the number has more than quadrupled to over 1.3 million.9 When prison and jail populations are combined, the number jumps to over two million. 10 Although African American men comprise less than seven percent of the population, they comprise half of the prison and jail population.11 Today, one out of three African American men is either in prison, on probation, or on parole.l2 Latinos are not far behind. They are the fastest growing racial group being imprisoned, comprising 10.9 percent of all state and federal inmates in 1985, and nineteen percent in 2003.13 We know how this happened. In 1980, the Reagan administration ushered in the War on Drugs, another major backlash against civil rights. Although we typically think of the Reagan era backlash as attacking affirmative action and civil rights laws, the War on Drugs is perhaps the most sweeping and damaging manifestation of deliberate indifference-or downright hostility-to communities of color.

Abolition is key—the bargaining process has too many structural problems to ever be efficient

Howe 82: Scott W. Howe, June 8th, 1982. “The Value of Plea Bargaining”. Oklahoma Law Review. http://adams.law.ou.edu/olr/articles/vol58/howe584.pdf. RW

Scholars who are critical of plea bargaining, however, have also begun to use this shadow-of-trial efficiency theory to support arguments for abolition or reform of the practice. The debate focuses on impediments that distort plea bargaining in ways that skew results away from accurately discounted trial outcomes. These impediments include structural problems surrounding the plea bargaining process, such as information deficits, agency costs, poor lawyering, pre-trial incarceration rules, and rigid sentencing mandates, along with the many psychological disabilities of defendants, such as “overconfidence, self-serving biases, denial mechanisms . . . and risk preferences.”17 Some who have used the theory of discounted trial outcomes to argue for the legitimacy of plea bargaining have conceded that certain structural problems render many bargains inefficient, and they have tried to suggest some modest solutions. However, critics of plea bargaining have urged that the impediments are sufficiently numerous and egregious to require at least extraordinary reforms, if not the abolition of plea bargaining.

Advantage 2 = Decarceration

The criminal justice system is a manifestation of the racist prison industrial complex—ending plea bargaining is a key first step towards resistance

Weil 12: Danny Weil, November 7th, 2012. Danny Weil is a writer for Project Censored and Daily Censored. He received the Project Censored "Most Censored" News Stories of 2009-10 award for his article: "Neoliberalism, Charter Schools and the Chicago Model / Obama and Duncan's Education Policy: Like Bush's, Only Worse," published by Counterpunch, August 24, 2009. Dr. Weil has published more than seven books on education in the past 20 years. You can also read much more about the for-profit, predatory colleges in his writings found at Counterpunch.com, Dailycensored.com, dissidentvoice.com and Project Censored.com where he has covered the issue of the privatization of education for years. He can be reached at [e-mail] new book, an encyclopedia on charter schools, entitled: "Charter School Movement: History, Politics, Policies, Economics and Effectiveness," 641 pages, was published in August of 2009 by Grey House Publishing, New York, and provides a scathing look at the privatization of education through charter schools. “Widespread Use of Plea Bargaining Plays Major Role in Mass Incarceration”. Truthout. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/12556-overwhelming-use-of-plea-bargains-plays-major-role-in-mass-incarceration. RW

American Justice: The Cult of Efficiency and Deception The American judicial system has become one in which constitutional rights and protections are sacrificed through mendacity and deception to appeal to a cult of judicial efficiency and economy. The public has been lied to; plea bargaining does not make society safe or tackle the problem of crime itself. This is simply another necessary illusion that is funneled into the minds of the populace to rationalize the commodification of people for profit. The problem with all of this, as the late thinker Hannah Arendt noted in her New York Review of Books article "Lying in Politics," is that: "the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods." In reality, the current criminal justice system has little to do with public safety, truth-telling or avoiding falsehoods. Many of those currently incarcerated and languishing in for-profit or government prisons include nonviolent drug offenders and those accused of parole-violation technicalities, such as not having a job or missing a parole officer appointment. In reality, Americans are locked up for crimes, such as writing bad checks or using drugs, that would rarely, if ever, produce prison sentences in other countries. The United States incarcerates 2.3 million criminals. The number of people on lockdown in America is more than that in any other nation. The modern criminal justice system primarily serves the interests of the increasingly privatized and financialized prison-industrial complex, which includes, among others, "tough on crime" politicians, seedy bail bondsmen, Wall Street-traded for-profit prison corporations, the drug-testing industry, police and corrections officers, and parole and prison officers' unions. It is well known, or should be, that California's "three strikes and you're out" provision was promoted by corrections officers because caging humans is not only good for business, it is the fiduciary responsibility of the for-profit prison-industrial complex corporations. It is no surprise, either, that the primary defenders of the criminalization of marijuana are police and corrections officers' unions because this is the bread and butter of their professions. Prison Spending Fuels Cuts in Higher Education It is unfortunate that the money spent to imprison millions of Americans is, much like the military-industrial complex, draining resources from more pressing social and economic needs, such as education. A stunning and detailed report with illustrative and compelling graphs from the California Common Sense web site has recorded just how skyrocketing expenditures on incarceration in California have been associated with the decline in spending on higher education. The report is not only thoroughly documented and visual, but also compares and contrasts a myriad of issues that now plague higher education and documents how they correlate to prison expenditures. In 2012, corrections spending and student debt nationwide reached $1 trillion each. Recently, The Huffington Post noted that: "Pennsylvania is home to the country's most expensive public university. In-state tuition at Penn State University runs higher than $15,000, but the state has been cutting spending on higher education since 2007. The result is Pennsylvania now spends twice as much on corrections as it does on higher education." One can look around the nation to see the burgeoning costs of incarceration and the corollary with cuts in higher education. In Massachusetts, a state known for its old-moneyed prestigious private universities, state legislators took an axe to cut appropriations to higher education between 2008 and 2012, hacking off a whopping 37 percent, according to the Boston Globe. This meant that the state spent dollar for dollar on higher education and mass incarceration in 2007. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) released a report in April of 2011 entitled "Misplaced Priorities." In it, the NAACP examines America's escalating levels of prison spending and its impact on state budgets and our nation's children. The report concludes that in all 50 states, the need is to downsize prison populations and shift the savings to education budgets. What Would Happen if Defendants Crashed the Court System by Refusing to "Plea Out"? As long as plea bargains are used as a club to coerce defendants into abdicating their right of the constitutional guarantee to a fair trial, the prison-industrial complex will continue to grow exponentially. Plea bargains are one big woodpile that serves to fuel the ever-expanding prison-industrial complex, rendering transparent the American political resolve to incarcerate more and more people even if it means bankrupting their municipalities, cutting education and devoting their budgets to subsidizing the for-profit prison industry. If this resolve represents the mens rea (criminal intent) of the political will for mass incarceration, then plea bargaining can be said to represent the actus reus, the physical act of carrying out the industrial carceral state. If plea bargains were eliminated, or even severely monitored and reduced, the states and the federal government would then be required to carry out their burden under the constitution of proving the guilt of a criminal defendant in accordance with the law. If this happened, there would be a whopping reduction in prosecutions, not to mention incarcerations. Such a shift would be an important step in ending the current carceral culture of mass confinement and cruelty. Michelle Alexander, a civil rights lawyer and bestselling author of the book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, recently wrote in The New York Times that in her phone call with Susan Burton, a formerly incarcerated woman who took a plea bargain for drug use, Burton asked: What would happen if we organized thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people charged with crimes to refuse to play the game, to refuse to plea out? What if they all insisted on their Sixth Amendment right to trial? Couldn't we bring the whole system to a halt just like that? Believe me, I know. I'm asking what we can do. Can we crash the system just by exercising our rights? Burton has the right to ask this question. It took her 15 years after pleading to a drug charge to get her life back together. The organization she recently started, A New Way of Life, offers a much-needed lifeline to women released from prison. But it does much more than this: it is also helping to start a movement against plea bargaining and the restoration of the constitution as it applies to citizens. All of Us or None is another such group that is organizing formerly incarcerated people and encouraging them to demand restoration of their basic civil and human rights. But the question Burton asks remains: could criminal defendants really crash the system if they demanded their constitutional rights and refused to plea to crimes they did not commit? From the point of view of American University law professor Angela J. Davis, the answer is yes. The system of mass industrial incarceration is entirely dependent on the cooperation of those it seeks to control. If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised their constitutional rights, then there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the flood tide of litigation. As Davis notes, not everyone would have to join for the revolt to have an impact: "if the number of people exercising their trial rights suddenly doubled or tripled in some jurisdictions, it would create chaos." The entire carceral system is riddled with corruption and broken beyond comprehension. Davis and Burton might be right: crashing the judicial system by refusing to get roughhoused into phony plea bargain deals could be the most responsible route to cleaning up the courts and restoring constitutional rights. It is daunting, and it takes guts, but with more than 90 percent incarcerated for plea bargains, it is courage we need. One thing we do know: there are many people falsely accused of crimes doing time in for-profit American gulags, and many more waiting to replace them. This situation might be good for the for-profit prison system and a few major stockholders but it spells Dante's Inferno for those forced to take the plea, as Alford, Banks, Burton and far too many others know.

Flooding the CJS with trials through the plan would spur public conversation about reform and eventually lead to decriminalization

Alexander 12: Michelle Alexander, March 10th, 2012. The New York Times. “Go to Trial: Crash The System”. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/opinion/sunday/go-to-trial-crash-the-justice-system.html. RW

The truth is that government officials have deliberately engineered the system to assure that the jury trial system established by the Constitution is seldom used,” said Timothy Lynch, director of the criminal justice project at the libertarian Cato Institute. In other words: the system is rigged. In the race to incarcerate, politicians champion stiff sentences for nearly all crimes, including harsh mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes laws; the result is a dramatic power shift, from judges to prosecutors. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Opinion Today Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, The Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world. Sign Up You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. The Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial. Thirteen years later, in Harmelin v. Michigan, the court ruled that life imprisonment for a first-time drug offense did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. No wonder, then, that most people waive their rights. Take the case of Erma Faye Stewart, a single African-American mother of two who was arrested at age 30 in a drug sweep in Hearne, Tex., in 2000. In jail, with no one to care for her two young children, she began to panic. Though she maintained her innocence, her court-appointed lawyer told her to plead guilty, since the prosecutor offered probation. Ms. Stewart spent a month in jail, and then relented to a plea. She was sentenced to 10 years’ probation and ordered to pay a $1,000 fine. Then her real punishment began: upon her release, Ms. Stewart was saddled with a felony record; she was destitute, barred from food stamps and evicted from public housing. Once they were homeless, Ms. Stewart’s children were taken away and placed in foster care. In the end, she lost everything even though she took the deal. On the phone, Susan said she knew exactly what was involved in asking people who have been charged with crimes to reject plea bargains, and press for trial. “Believe me, I know. I’m asking what we can do. Can we crash the system just by exercising our rights?” The answer is yes. The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control. If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation. Not everyone would have to join for the revolt to have an impact; as the legal scholar Angela J. Davis noted, “if the number of people exercising their trial rights suddenly doubled or tripled in some jurisdictions, it would create chaos.” Such chaos would force mass incarceration to the top of the agenda for politicians and policy makers, leaving them only two viable options: sharply scale back the number of criminal cases filed (for drug possession, for example) or amend the Constitution (or eviscerate it by judicial “emergency” fiat). Either action would create a crisis and the system would crash — it could no longer function as it had before. Mass protest would force a public conversation that, to date, we have been content to avoid. In telling Susan that she was right, I found myself uneasy. “As a mother myself, I don’t think there’s anything I wouldn’t plead guilty to if a prosecutor told me that accepting a plea was the only way to get home to my children,” I said. “I truly can’t imagine risking life imprisonment, so how can I urge others to take that risk — even if it would send shock waves through a fundamentally immoral and unjust system?” Susan, silent for a while, replied: “I’m not saying we should do it. I’m saying we ought to know that it’s an option. People should understand that simply exercising their rights would shake the foundations of our justice system which works only so long as we accept its terms. As you know, another brutal system of racial and social control once prevailed in this country, and it never would have ended if some people weren’t willing to risk their lives. It would be nice if reasoned argument would do, but as we’ve seen that’s just not the case. So maybe, just maybe, if we truly want to end this system, some of us will have to risk our lives.”