by David Ford
(All “From The Frontlines Of COVID” articles are summaries based on Zoom calls between Airlift and group leaders. Full audio is available upon request from donors.)
Question: What kind of earth shaking political cause could bring together the Michigan ACLU, players from the Detroit Lions, and the grassroots organizers of Michigan Liberation?
Answer: A campaign to change county prosecutors.
County prosecutors?
Airlift supports grassroots organizations like Michigan Liberation (MI Lib), which has proven that the path to getting people out to vote is the path of local politics. MI Lib knows that the District Attorneys are the public officials that are most likely to have a devastating affect on the citizens of Michigan, and MI Lib has set out to change the people in those positions to ones who understand that a criminal justice system should protect and build communities, not destroy them. So they are leaning hard into the job of making the most direct and immediate change in the mass incarceration system: electing new prosecutors.
Step one: let voters know how the system works.
They recently joined forces with the Detroit Players Coalition, the Detroit branch of the ACLU, Detroit Justice Center, Moses (Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength), Detroit Justice Center, and FORCE (Faithfully Organizing Resources for Community Empowerment) to coordinate with the Advancement Project on July 22 to present a forum on the importance of prosecutors.
If you don’t know what they are talking about, here’s an ACLU video that lays it all out. Essentially, prosecutors have almost unlimited discretion to file charges and plea bargain. That means these individuals decide how poor, Black, Brown, Native American and every other citizen experiences the power of the criminal justice system. And up till now, success of prosecutors was measured by only one number: how many people they put in jail. But that has to change—that is changing. A new generation of prosecutors is running with a different attitude about how to protect communities.
The forum participants laid out the differences between the old prosecutorial style and the new.
The old style: MI Lib’s own Machelle Pearson, talked about being sent prison for life when still a minor (you can read Machelle’s extraordinary story here). Machelle now supports other juvenile offenders who are being treated exceptionally harshly by the Michigan criminal justice system. Her latest cause is fifteen-year-old Grace, being detained when her failure to do school work was considered a parole violation.
The new style: Philadelphia prosecutor published a “do not call list”—a way to call out bad cops. The list has the names of Philadelphia police who had such an egregious record of misconduct that they were considered to be too untrustworthy to be called as witnesses in court.
The old style: prosecuting people and sending them to jail for misdemeanors, often failure to pay fines or have insurance, i.e. driving while poor.
The new style: Chess Boudin, San Francisco DA, who ended the policy of charging money for bail, according to a San Francisco Chronicle article: “Disparities in cash bail requirements in San Francisco had resulted in African American defendants paying an average of $120 per year for pretrial release compared to $10 for white defendants.”
So what kind of candidate is MI Lib endorsing? One like Victoria M. Burton-Harris. Here’s what Ms. Burton-Harris is running on:
“We must change how we think about justice and safety in Wayne County. For too long, we’ve spent our resources locking people up for crimes when they posed no safety risk to our community. We’ve sentenced people to die in prison, and those people included our children. We’ve shown a zeal for prosecuting the war on drugs, which we know has not worked but has destroyed families, and we’ve avoided placing our limited resources on the crimes that have done real, serious harm to our community. We’ve refused to consider whether prison and jail is actually solving our problems. And we’ve stopped asking whether our system is built to protect all people who call this county home.”