By the end of his incredible career, Barry Bonds was a three-true-outcomes player. To those of us in the baseball world, that means he rarely hit a ball in play that was touched by a fielder. Most often, he achieved one of the so-called three true outcomes: a walk, a strikeout, or a home run. 2,558 times Barry Bonds stepped into the batters box and intimidated the pitcher into issuing a free pass. That makes him the all-time walks leader, a few hundred in front of fellow walker Rickey Henderson.
Maybe he’s met his match. Bernie Sanders is setting a land speed record for free passes this political season. It’s one of the oddest realities of the existing movement within Democratic politics—that supporters of Sanders so desperately crave a perfect movement that they’ve deified an imperfect leader.
You could have never told me before the beginning of this primary campaign that Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, would be scoring political points in bunches by throwing punches over the 1994 crime bill. Do you want to know how America ends up incarcerating more of its citizens per capita than Iran and China? It’s not because good criminal justice policy has had a fighting Bernie Sanders in its corner. It’s because practically the entire political world has capitulated to the realities of a tough on crime movement, which sells wheel barrows worth of security to skittish white voters on the periphery of cities where they sometimes work or take their kids to the ballgame.
You look back at the discussions around the crime bill and see that Hillary Clinton said stupid, destructive, and racist things in pandering for political support. She preceded John Dilulio, the Princeton criminologist, in using the term “superpredator” to describe a certain sect of young people who were committing heinous crimes. All equivocations and contextualizations aside from an ex-president who really needs to shut the fuck up, Clinton’s words played on the 1870s notions that white people had something to fear from a breed of black male likely to unleash special destruction on communities. Hear her words in action and you get a sense that she’s recalling the effect of the early 1900s concerns about “negro fiends,” high on drugs, terrorizing communities. The pacification of white fear has always been a political winner. Her moment in 1994 is a continuation of that.
And her words weren’t benign. They weren’t without impact. Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative describes the cascading hideousness that followed the early-90s superpredator scare tactics:
These predictions set off a panic, fueled by highly publicized heinous crimes committed by juvenile offenders, which led nearly every state to pass legislation between 1992 and 1999 that dramatically increased the treatment of juveniles as adults for purposes of sentencing and punishment.
Ask your local public defender, if your state is still funding his office, and you’ll hear a chronic loneliness in his concerns. If you spend an hour or a minute in those offices, you’ll sense an us against the world mentality that has erupted not because there’s been a small caucus of progressive legislators working on behalf of the accused and maligned, but specifically because the sphere of political influence of public advocates is effectively nil. When President Obama gave that heartfelt introduction of Merrick Garland in the Rose Garden, he waxed poetic about Garland’s days prosecuting crimes. He brushed off the fourth amendment as a mere technicality in the sort of insidious rhetoric that continues to plague the criminal justice system today.
In short, he did what everyone does when it comes to criminal justice. Or at the very least, what everyone’s done. We live in an age where representing criminal defendants is a political liability. Countless office seekers have had to grovel and explain away their defense of the accused. The federal courts are filled with former prosecutors with only a small few former defenders to be found.
And then there’s Sanders, the Vermont senator who has weaponized the 1994 crime bill. The crime bill that he hated so much that he voted for it. In a rational and reasonable world, this would be enough. In another cycle, Sanders might have unleashed this line of attack only to receive derisive questions about his own support for the bill.
But Senator Sanders, his supporters might have asked incredulously, didn’t you vote for this, too? He’d have been accused of the sort of pandering Clinton is accused of when she goes on black radio and talks about hot sauce. In a more rational world, supporters of Senator Sanders might wonder whether they were being put over by another white hero of the Civil Rights Movement who couldn’t stand his ground when the going got tough a few decades later. But this isn’t a rational world. And this isn’t a normal primary.
When he stood up to give comment on the bill, he said, among other things:
Mr. Speaker, it is my firm belief that clearly, there are some people in our society who are horribly violent, who are deeply sick and sociopathic, and clearly these people must be put behind bars in order to protect society from them.
I read trial transcripts often. As I’ve prepared appeals, I’ve never seen a prosecutor get up and accuse a defendant of being a superpredator. Surely, to do so would merit an objection and maybe a mistrial. It’s the sort of direct de-humanization that we’ve moved past, at least nominally, even in Texas. But I have heard prosecutors say on closing that defendants are “deeply sick and sociopathic.” I’ve heard them insinuate, as Sanders did, that some people are violent to their core. And I’ve read transcripts in which juries have accepted this pseudo-science as fact, believing that their vote to convict, and more often, their vote for harsh punishment, is their moral duty in protecting society from a deranged animal likely to offend again. And when you read it, you have a hard time finding the distinction between the term “superpredator” and the perpetuation of bad science that assumes a deep sickness in people who quite often commit crime for entirely explainable situational reasons.
It’s worth noting that in his speech on the bill, Sanders touched on some truths. He outlined the environmental nature of crime and its underlying causes. Yet he still equivocated, wobbling close enough to the center that he could convince his white constituents that he, too, was concerned about the evil monsters out there.
This isn’t to say that Sanders is evil, nor was his support for that bill. It’s just to say that it was political. A bit like Clinton’s support for the same bill. An indication of the political reality that’s gotten us to where we are today. The effort for criminal justice reform has rarely had a friend in an influential position in national government. And that should have been apparent. You don’t create one of the worst, most brutal, most regressive criminal justice regimes in the world unless you have broad support for backward policy from both wings of the political sphere. That good-hearted people who saw all the angles—people like Clinton and Sanders—voted for the crime bill and perpetuated language about the deeply sick nature of “some criminals” would, in another primary, be an indication of how we got to where we are. If those people—the ones we can usually count on to give a shit about human beings—were in the bag for white fear, then Zeus only knows what the rest of the government must have been thinking on the issue.
This seems like a point that would have been caught by the scholars who’ve been so hard on our politicians for their collaboration in creating this mess. Michelle Alexander wrote an entire book about tracing the current criminal justice system back many decades, and even she’s given Sanders a pass in favor of a thorough beating of Clinton on the issue. Our willingness to pin the problem on a corrupt political system has devolved into a desire to pin it on one individual, perhaps because this is easy, or perhaps as a consequence of the Sanders political framing. If he’s done one thing well, it’s to pin the tail of all corruption right on the Clinton donkey. Somehow it’s allowed him to avoid paying the piper on his own complicity. The caretakers of a movement—the movement to raise awareness of the deeply institutional nature of racial injustice in this country—have decided that playing politics is more important than maintaining their seething accuracy in laying the blame at the feet of pretty much everyone. And that’s a shame. Because to assign guilt to even the good ones swept up in a tide of political expediency was to understand the root of the problem. Playing political boogeyman is something less constructive.
It seems, too, like a point that might have been appreciated by supporters of Sanders. The Sanders campaign and its constituent-led message has been the political embodiment of the “both sides do it” angst. On the issue of corporate money in politics, there’s a stark realization that we only got here because both sides were complicit in dark money schemes. Supporters of Sanders freely admit the corruption of almost the entire political world on the issue of banking regulation. You might have thought that these supporters were well-trained to spot another space where our problems have erupted precisely because of the lack of real pushback from anyone working within the Washington government. But to do so would have been to admit something astonishing—that Sanders isn’t pure—and something terrifying—that maybe no one’s shined bright enough to defeat our sweeping tide of darkness.
I wrote once about Ben Tillman, the murderous lyncher whose name is on the most famous building at my alma mater. I wrote that the scariest thing about Ben Tillman is not that he was an outlier, but that he was emblematic of the times. Surely he was nothing noble, but his was a reflection of the disturbing sentiment of the antebellum movement, and we’ve built him into an albatross because it’s more painful to think that his views might have been mainstream. But they were. He was just the loudest voice of an otherwise unconscionable majority, which thought enough of him to place him the federal congress and on the board of a major university.
And maybe that’s what’s happening here. It’s painful to grapple with the reality that our criminal justice system is a continuation of even the pre-Emancipation ideals that established America. It’s painful to think that the sweeping tide of white supremacy, white fear, and white resentment might be so strong that it could sweep to the shore two people like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Surely she knew better. She went into those schools in the South in the wake of Brown. She saw with her own eyes how de facto segregation and white flight left a generation of black kids to languish without the resources to pull themselves out of the planned oppression that was always going to be the reality for the vast majority. Surely she must have drawn the connection between these social conditions—red-lining, public divestment, and outright racism—and the rampant crime in America’s abandoned cities. But she chose the easy way out, to pander, as so many have, to the politics of fear in America.
But so should he have seen the same. We’ve all seen the photos of Sanders marching for justice in the Civil Rights era. And in his own speech, he acknowledged the link between failed economic policy and prevailing crime. But he voted, too, for the crime bill, and he advocated on the House floor with pseudo-science that’s still used by prosecutors today to scare juries into putting men away for 40, 50, or 60 years for crimes of opportunity. In a sane world, he’d bear some responsibility for that. It wouldn’t be a political arrow to be launched at Clinton. It would be a lamentable moment truly emblematic of America’s disastrous political history on crime and race. Where two of the most progressive Democrats in recent memory can reach back into their dusty closets to find a bill of sale, pushing black folks and the poor right down the river in favor of votes.
But for one reason or another—perhaps the unshakable need for an angel to sit atop the shoulder adjacent to some devil—Sanders has received a pass, and more, the political cover to attack his opponent for an equivalent failure. He’s done so under the usually watchful eye of the caretakers who’ve abandoned the underlying truth of the movement—that the “New Jim Crow” wouldn’t be if there had been a cabal of Sanderses fighting as hard for criminal justice revolution as they fought for economic revolution.