1AC – Solvency

The War on Drugs has been revitalized under Trump – Sessions has repealed
Obama era reforms
Lopez 10/24 [(German, Writer for Vox with a focus with a focus on drugs, guns, criminal justice, race, and LGBTQ issues)
“ Under Trump and Sessions, federal prosecutors are ramping up the war on drugs ,” Vox News,
10/24/2017] DD
US Attorney General Jeff Sessions has traveled around the country this year invoking fears of violent
crime — and particularly the criminal group MS-13 — to justify a new “tough on crime” crackdown under the
Trump administration. On the ground, however, Sessions’s anti-crime efforts look more like the old
war on drugs than a new push against violent crime. Earl Rinehart reported for the Columbus Dispatch that US Attorney for the Southern

District of Ohio Benjamin Glassman “is costing taxpayers more money” by prosecuting more people, even minor players in drug
trafficking, “and he’s OK with that.” Rinehart went on (emphasis mine): The increase in the prosecution of violent crimes and drug cases such as
these, especially amid the opioid crisis, had the U.S District Court for Southern Ohio looking for extra jail space to keep a record 483 defendants whose
cases were pending as of Oct. 7. “That’s a lot for us,” said Chief U.S. District Judge Edmund A. Sargus Jr. Of the total defendants, 223 were up on drug
charges, 43 for violent crimes and 38 for child pornography. Based on these figures, nearly half of the new cases are for drug charges, and less than 10
percent are for violent crime. Despite Sessions’s rhetoric about violent crime, it sure looks like drugs are still his office’s main focus. On Twitter,
Glassman pushed back on the Dispatch’s report. He wrote, “I disagree that we are now charging minor players who, in years past, would not have been
charged at all. To the contrary, as the article also notes, we're pushing our investigations and prosecutions farther and wider than ever before. If
anything, as our scope and reach continue to grow, defendants who looked like leaders in years past now seem more like minor players. But we are
absolutely not looking to prosecute low-level folks. Just the opposite.” In a statement, Glassman also questioned the Dispatch’s methodology and
sources. He said that, by his count, “roughly a third of our case load involves violent crime and another third involves drugs or organized crime related
to drugs, like money laundering.” Still, the federal government is unique in that about half the people it locks up are in for drug offenses. At the state
level, where nearly nine in 10 prisoners in the US are held, most are in prison for violent offenses. Sessions
seems determined to
continue that federal trend. One of his first moves in the Justice Department was to instruct
federal prosecutors to bring punitive charges that can trigger harsh mandatory minimum
prison sentences against even low-level drug offenders, rescinding an Obama administration
memo that told federal officials to pull back on these kinds of prosecutions. Criticizing the Obama
administration’s decision, Sessions previously said, “What was the result? It was exactly what you would think: sentences went down and crime went
up. Sentences for federal drug crimes dropped by 18 percent from 2009 to 2016. Violent crime — which had been decreasing for two decades —

suddenly went up again.” The research is against Sessions’s claims There is no reason, based on the research, to think the two

trends Sessions cited are linked. Studies have repeatedly found that harsher punishments — which mandatory
minimums force on judges by requiring that they sentence offenders to a minimum amount of time in prison — and
the higher
incarceration rates they lead to don’t have a big impact on crime. A 2015 review of the
research by the Brennan Center for Justice estimated that more incarceration explained zero
to 7 percent of the crime drop since the 1990s, while other researchers estimate it drove 10 to 25 percent of the crime drop
since the ’90s — not a big impact either way. A 2014 analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts also found that

states that reduced their imprisonment rates also saw some of the biggest drops in crime,
suggesting that there isn’t a hard link between incarceration and crime. As Harvard criminologist Thomas
Abt previously told me, “Jeff Sessions is a crime dinosaur , peddling ‘tough on crime’ policies that went
extinct years ago. He tries to link violent crime to the ‘smart on crime’ policies of the past administration, but there’s simply no
evidence to support his argument.” (Abt broke down his criticisms further in a series of tweets.) In fact, Sessions’s prosecution
strategy likely won’t make an impact even in combating the spread and use of drugs. One of the best studies on this is a 2014 review of the research by
Peter Reuter at the University of Maryland and Harold Pollack at the University of Chicago. They found that while simply prohibiting drugs to some
extent does raise their prices, there’s no good evidence that tougher punishments or harsher supply-elimination efforts do a better job of driving down
access to drugs and substance misuse than lighter penalties. So increasing the severity of the punishment doesn’t do much, if anything, to slow the flow
of drugs. “We did the experiment. In
1980, we had about 15,000 people behind bars for drug dealing. And
now we have about 450,000 people behind bars for drug dealing,” Mark Kleiman, a drug policy expert at the Marron Institute at New
York University, previously told me. “And the prices of all major drugs are down dramatically. So if the question is do
longer sentences lead to a higher drug price and therefore less drug consumption, the answer
is no.”

Plea bargaining is the leading contributor to mass incarceration – it

manufactures a forfeiture of rights that subordinates people of color to the
state
Heiner 16 [(Brady, Affiliated Faculty of African American Studies, California State University, Fullerton) “The procedural
entrapment of mass incarceration: prosecution, race, and the unfinished project of American abolition,” Philosophy and Social
Criticism, 2016] DRD
First, the procedural entrapment thesis is that the American plea bargain system (as an apparatus of population
management wherein the USA maintains 5 per cent of the global population but 25 per cent of the world’s imprisoned population,
and as an insti- tution that coerces the forfeiture of due process rights to accelerate criminal conviction and confinement of those
charged), is
massively and predominantly, though not acciden- tally or exclusively, a technology
of racial domination. As a system of procedural entrap- ment, the plea bargain regime is a
necessary condition of and a leading contributor to mass incarceration , which is
fundamentally immoral and racially unjust. ¶ Without the widespread ‘forfeiture’ of rights that
the plea bargain regime manufac- tures, the American criminal justice system simply could not
process – i.e. arrest, detain, prosecute, imprison, and supervise – the vast numbers of people
(predomi- nantly of color) that it currently does. The Supreme Court recognized this in 1971:
‘If every criminal charge were subjected to a full-scale trial, the States and the Federal
Government would need to multiply by many times the number of judges and court
facilities.’78 (And this was just 5 months after President Richard Nixon declared the war on drugs,
which inaugurated the era of mass incarceration that has since led to the upsurge of the
imprisoned population by over 500 per cent. If criminal justice proce- dural capacity would
have had to multiply many times over to accommodate every criminal defendant’s
constitutional right to trial in 1971, the equivalent capacity requirements today would be
paralysing to state and federal budgets.) The Court then concluded that plea bargaining is ‘an essential component
of the administration of jus- tice’.79 ‘The truth is’, writes Timothy Lynch, director of the criminal justice project at the
libertarian Cato Institute, ‘government officials have deliberately engineered the system to assure
that the jury trial system established by the Constitution is seldom used. And plea bargaining
is the primary technique used by the government to bypass the institutional safeguards in
trials.’80 ¶ Second, the sedimentation thesis is directed toward the irresponsible prosecutorial
prerogative that undergirds the system of procedural entrapment. As an institutional agency
in the entrapment, confinement and social death of millions of Black, Latino/Latina and Native
American people, the power of the prosecutorial function is a functional analogue, a
postbellum sedimentation, of the irresponsible power of the administrators of plantation law
(i.e. the southern slaveholding class).
Both function massively and predominantly to enforce and
reinscribe the terms of the racial contract of their day. The discretionary power of Frederick Douglass’ overseer
was not subject to judicial investigation and was shielded from the censure of the public; and the Black subjects who may have
sought refuge from the overseer’s arbitrary executions were extended no legal standing and thus had no recourse to equal
protection of the law.81 Though the Reconstruction Amendments to the US Constitution ostensibly
abolished such racial exclusions from the American social contract, present-day prosecutorial
discretion , which sometimes makes life-and-death decisions, is analogously unac- countable
and unreviewable, is almost always exercised behind closed doors, is answerable only to
other prosecutors, and functions analogously to subordinate, entrap and confine people of
color.82 ¶

Plea bargaining is a trap – stacked charges, underground deals, information

deficits, and intimidation tactics
Heiner 16 [(Brady, Affiliated Faculty of African American Studies, California State University, Fullerton) “The procedural
entrapment of mass incarceration: prosecution, race, and the unfinished project of American abolition,” Philosophy and Social
Criticism, 2016] DRD
One of the reasons for this is the widely overlooked or unknown fact, recently voiced by Supreme Court
Justice Anthony Kennedy, that ‘criminal justice today is for the most part a system of pleas, not a
system of trials’ .33 Plea bargaining is a process that entails an (often quick) conversation in a
prosecutor’s office or a courthouse hallway between attorneys familiar with only the basics of
a criminal case – with no witnesses present, no full investigation, testimony, or impartial fact-
finding – resulting in a proposed res- olution that is then ‘sold’ to both the defendant and the
judge.34 Justice Kennedy asserts that the plea bargaining process – which he (quite tellingly) describes, following legal scholars, as
a form of ‘horse trading’ – ‘is not some adjunct to the criminal justice sys- tem; it is the criminal justice system’.35 As things currently
stand, more than 95 per cent of criminal convictions are the product of closed-door plea
bargains that result in defen- dants ‘forfeiting’ their Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment
rights to due process,36 ¶ including, in the majority of cases, ‘waiving’ the right to appellate and post-
conviction review.37 This means that currently more than 95 per cent of those convicted never see
the fair trial by judge or jury that the constitution guarantees them – a state of affairs that led a federal
judge recently to call trial by jury ‘an inconvenient artifact’.38 The cases of more than 95 per cent of the 7.5
million people under US penal control have not been held to the high evidentiary standard
required to validate a criminal conviction in court. The pre-trial evidentiary threshold for leveling charges is
much less exacting, merely requiring a prosecutor to persuade a grand jury that there is probable cause to indict. It is not just out of
cynicism that most lawyers repeat the famous expression of former New York Court of Appeal Judge Sol Wachtler that prosecutors
can get a grand jury to indict a ‘ham sandwich’.39 US attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010; grand juries declined to
return an indictment in 11 of those cases.40 ¶ Prosecutors admit to routinely engaging in strategic charge-stacking and overchar-
ging in the plea bargaining process. Since
the onset of the era of mass incarceration in the 1970s, federal
and state legislatures have fragmented and multiplied criminal statutes so as to produce an
abundance of overlapping crimes. This proliferation of criminal codes has constructed a
context in which a single unlawful incident typically violates a half-dozen or more
prohibitions.41 Coupled with the parallel adoption during this same period of mandatory
minimum sentencing schemes at state and federal levels, the power to adjudicate guilt and
impose sentences has shifted from the courtroom to the backroom, from judges and juries to
plea bargaining prosecutors and police officers.42 Through the practice of strategic charge-stacking
and overcharging, prosecutors exercise lax double jeopardy doctrine by charging criminal
defendants with an arsenal of overlapping crimes for which they technically have probable
cause, but which they seriously doubt they could ever prove in court (i.e. beyond a reasonable doubt).
The strategy of this practice is to leverage what legal scholars call the ‘trial penalty’ to compel people to ‘convict themselves’ by
pleading guilty to the lesser charge or set of charges that prosecutors then offer as a more ‘lenient’ alternative to the excessive,
tenuous and redundant stack of charges originally leveled.43 Occasionally, defendants even enter ‘open pleas’ to all the charges
against them, with no sentencing promises. ¶ Lest one wonder whether this coercive strategy were an accidental by-product of the
mandatory sentencing regime, consider the following statement of the US Sentencing Commission, an agency in the judicial branch
of government, among whose principal purposes is ‘to advise and assist Congress and the executive branch in the development of
effective and efficient crime policy’. The commission identifies ‘inducement to plea bargain’ as one of the rationales for mandatory
minimum sentencing legislation. In its 1991 Special Report to Congress, it stated that ‘the value of a mandatory
minimum sen- tence lies not in its imposition, but in its value as a bargaining chip to be given
away in return for the resource-saving plea from the defendant to a more leniently sanctioned
charge’.44 Justice Kennedy affirmed this design in a recent Supreme Court ruling, claim- ing that ‘[defendants] who do
take their case to trial and lose receive longer sentences than even Congress or the prosecutor
might think appropriate, because the longer sen- tences exist on the books largely for
bargaining purposes’.45 ¶ A ‘bargain’ typically signifies a mutually advantageous agreement, an agreement between two
parties in which a settlement is reached regarding what each party will give ¶ and take, perform and receive in the transaction.46
What is given and what taken in these plea bargains? According to the conventional, facially neutral account of the plea bar- gain
contract, prosecutors give leniency to the accused. Specifically, prosecutors agree to drop a select number of the charges that the
criminal code permits – charges, which is to say, for which probable cause has been established. In exchange for this ‘gift’, the
accused must in turn forfeit his or her Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment rights of protection against self-incrimination, to trial
by jury, to confront and cross-examine adverse witnesses, to present evidence, to compel the attendance of witnesses, and to
require prosecutors to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt. By inducing defendants to forfeit these rights, district attorneys (and
public defenders) save the resources that would otherwise be required to grant the accused the trial by jury that the constitution
guarantees her or him. As legal scholars Scott and Stuntz put it, employing the vocabu- lary of cost-benefit calculus that is the stock-
in-trade of the prison industrial complex: ‘Plea
bargaining provides a means by which prosecutors can
obtain a larger net return from criminal convictions, holding resources constant.’47 ¶ In their
rationalizations of plea bargaining, legal scholars and practitioners at the highest levels of
government falsely conceptualize it within an idealized framework of transaction between
equals. The Supreme Court maintains that the plea bargain flows from ‘the mutuality of
advantage’ to defendants and prosecutors.48 Indeed, the Court infers (with neither evidence nor argumentation)
that it is this alleged ‘mutuality of advantage’ that explains the fact that the vast majority of the criminal convictions in this country
rest on pleas of guilty or nolo contendere [no contest] resulting from plea bar- gaining.49 But
the plea bargain regime
appears like a market of mutually advantageous contracts, entered into freely by both parties,
only when it is viewed abstractly – divorced from the structural coupling formed between
mandatory minimum sentencing schemes and the pervasive prosecutorial practices of racially
selective charging, charge-stacking and overcharging; disconnected from the context and
genealogy of mass incarceration as a system of racial governance .50 ¶ In actuality, the plea
bargain regime is concretely constituted by structural asymme- tries and relations of
domination that are masked by the liberal contractual framework. The ‘self-incrimination’
that results from plea bargains is frequently the product of duress and unconscionable
information deficits wherein defendants (who are often indigent) are deprived of the
opportunity to deliberatively evaluate the ‘exchange’ of risks and penalties into which they
enter. For instance, one formerly incarcerated person with whom I spoke at Project Rebound in San Francisco was given 10
minutes in court to decide in isolation whether to accept a plea carrying a 25-year sentence or face a potential life sentence. Such
duress is not exceptional. Also, few criminal defen- dants (or people in general) realize that felony
conviction, beyond possible prison time, entails a host of ‘collateral consequences’ or civil
penalties that persist even after one has been released from prison. Judges and lawyers are
not required to inform criminal defendants of some of the most important rights and
entitlements that defendants are forfeiting when they plead guilty to a felony (and that they incur
whether or not they spend a day in prison). These civil penalties (technically called ‘civil disabilities’, since courts have
generally declined to interpret that such sanctions, for constitutional purposes, are actually ‘punishment’) include
deportation, and denial of the rights to ¶ vote, serve on a jury, or be employed in certain
occupations, as well as lifetime inelig- ibility for food stamps, cash assistance programs, public
housing and student loans.51 Legislative and judicial representatives readily admit that mandatory minimum sen- tencing
schemes are excessive and thus in violation of the retributive principle of propor- tional punishment – not by accident, but by
design.52 And they readily admit that such utilitarian design is consequentially to ‘induce’ defendants to forfeit their constitutional
In the executive branch, prosecutors routinely and openly apply leverage and overlap
rights.
these excessive sentencing schemes to compel defendants to ‘self-incriminate’ ¶ by ‘pleading
out’ of the jury trial system to which they are constitutionally entitled. And yet, the Supreme Court
masks the coercion that undergirds this system. In the 1978 precedent-setting case that gave ultimate legal sanction to prosecutorial
compul- sion in plea bargaining, the Court acknowledged that punishing a person accused of a crime for exercising his or her right to
trial by jury ‘is a due process violation of the most basic sort, and for an agent of the State to pursue a course of action whose
objective is to penalize a person’s reliance on his legal rights is patently unconstitutional. But’, the Court continues, ‘in the ‘‘give-
and-take’’ of plea bargaining, there is no such element of punish- ment or retaliation so long as the accused is free to accept or
reject the prosecution’s offer.’53 This was in the context of a decision ruling it constitutionally legitimate for a pro- secutor to
threaten someone with life imprisonment (!) for a minor crime (i.e. forging an ¶ $88.30 check) in an effort to strong-arm him into
forfeiting his right to a jury trial.54 How many reasonable people, when faced with the ‘double bind’ alternative between a potential
life sentence and a guaranteed 5-year sentence, would feel meaningfully free to ‘accept or reject the prosecution’s offer’ and risk
exercising her or his constitutional right to due process?55 Cognizant of
systemic racial disparities, like the
steeply higher rate of criminal conviction and disproportionate severity of criminal sentences
meted out to sub- jects of color,56 reasonable people of color are especially unlikely to feel
the freedom of choice that would distinguish a relation of equal exchange from a relation of
domination. Seen in the light of these unconscionable information deficits and distributional
inequities, the coercive and pervasive prosecutorial practice of charge-stacking and over-
charging, and the sharply asymmetrical negotiating positions of the state and the accused;
furthermore, considering the massive under-representation of people of color among criminal prosecutors (e.g. on average, 86 per
cent of judges and prosecutors in federal districts are white),57 and theenormous over-representation of people
of color among those incarcerated (i.e. roughly 70 per cent, and nearly 50 per cent Black):58 we ought to hear
this multitude of pleas not as a chorus of guilty confessions singing in synch with the
expediently fine-tuned orchestra of American criminal justice (playing the melody of the Law and Order
theme song); and we surely ought not to view it as an expression of prosecutorial ‘leniency’ or procedural justice. Rather, we

ought to concep- tualize this throng of pleas, massively and predominantly, as the procedural
entrapment of the impoverished and racially oppressed. ¶

Mass incarceration is a form of modern genocide – it’s responsible for rampant

intercity violence, crushing poverty, and massive loss of freedom
Thompson 14 [(Heather Ann, Associate professor of African American studies and history at Temple University) “Inner-City
Violence in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” The Atlantic, 10/30/2014] DD
Just as hyper-segregation
doesn’t explain the violence that so many have to endure today in
America’s inner city communities while still raising children, attending church, and trying to make ends meet,
neither does highly-concentrated poverty. Because of their exclusion from virtually every
program and policy that helped eventually to build an American middle class, non-whites have
always had far less wealth than whites. From the ability to maintain land ownership after the Civil War, to the virtual
guarantee of welfare benefits such as Social Security and FHA loans during the New Deal, to preferential access to employment and
housing in the postwar period, white communities have always had considerably more economic advantage than communities of
color. And
yet, no matter how poor they were, America’s most impoverished communities have never
been plagued by the level of violence they are today. But if neither racial segregation nor the racial poverty
gap can account for the degree to which poor communities of color are traumatized today, then what does? What is altogether new
is the extent to which these communities are devastated by the working of our nation’s criminal justice system in general and by
mass incarceration in particular. Today's rates of incarceration in America's poorest, blackest, and
brownest neighborhoods are historically unprecedented. By 2001, one in six black men had
been incarcerated and, by the close of 2013, black and Latino inmates comprised almost 60 percent
of the nation’s federal and state prison population. The numbers of incarcerated black women are also
stark. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, young black women ages 18 to 19 were almost five
times more likely to be imprisoned than white women of the same age in 2010. When President
Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act in 1965—legislation which, in
turn, made possible the most aggressive war on crime this nation ever waged—he was
reacting not to remarkable crime rates but to the civil rights upheaval that had erupted
nationwide just the year before. This activism, he and other politicians believed, represented not
participatory democracy in action, but instead a criminal element that would only grow more
dangerous if not checked. Notably, the national policy embrace of targeted and more aggressive policing as well as highly
punitive laws and sentences—the so-called “War on Crime” that led eventually to such catastrophic

rates of imprisonment— predated the remarkable levels of violence that now impact poor
communities of color so disproportionately. The U.S. incarceration rate more than quadrupled
between 1965 and 1995. In fact, the U.S. homicide rate in 1965 was significantly lower than it
had been in several previous moments in American history: 5.5 per 100,000 U.S. residents as compared, for
example, with 9.7 per 100,000 in 1933. Importantly, though, whereas the violent crime rate was 200.2 per 100,000 U.S. residents in
1965, it more than tripled to a horrifying 684.6 per 100,000 by 1995. Though mass incarceration did not originate in extraordinarily
high rates of violence, mass incarceration created the conditions in which violence would surely
fester. The quadrupling of the incarceration rate in America since 1970 has had devastating
collateral consequences. Already economically-fragile communities sank into depths of
poverty unknown for generations , simply because anyone with a criminal record is forever
“marked” as dangerous and thus rendered all but permanently unemployable. Also, with

blacks incarcerated at six times and Latinos at three times the rate of whites by 2010, millions of
children living in communities of color have effectively been orphaned. Worse yet, these kids
often experience high rates of post-traumatic shock from having witnessed the often-brutal
arrests of their parents and having been suddenly ripped from them. De-industrialization and suburbanization
surely did their part to erode our nation’s black and brown neighborhoods, but staggering
rates of incarceration is what literally emptied them out. As this Pew Center of the States graphic on Detroit
shows, the overwhelmingly-black east side of the Motor City has been ravaged by the effects of targeted policing and mass
incarceration in recent years with one in twenty-two adults there under some form of correctional control. In some neighborhoods,
the rate is as high as one in 16. Pew Center for the States Such
concentrated levels of imprisonment have torn
at the social fabric of inner city neighborhoods in ways that even people who live there find hard to comprehend,
let alone outsiders. As the research of criminologist Todd Clear makes clear, extraordinary levels of incarceration
create the conditions for extraordinary levels of violence. But even mass incarceration does not, in itself,
explain the particularly brutal nature of the violence that erupts today in, for example, the south side of Chicago. To explain that, we
must look again carefully and critically at our nation’s criminal justice system. The level of gun violence in today's inner cities is the
direct product of our criminal-justice policies—specifically, the decision to wage a brutal War on Drugs. When federal and state
politicians such as New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller opted to criminalize addiction by passing unprecedentedly punitive
possession laws rather than to treat it as a public health crisis, unwittingly or not, a high level of violence in poor communities of
color was not only assured but was guaranteed to be particularly ugly. This new drug war created a brand-new market for illegal
drugs—an underground marketplace that would be inherently dangerous and would necessarily be regulated by both guns and
violence. Without the War on Drugs, today's levels of inner-city gun violence would not exist.
Indeed, without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would
not exist. The last time we saw so much violence from the use of firearms was, notably, during Prohibition. “[As] underground profit
margins surged, gang rivalries emerged, and criminal activity mounted [during Prohibition],” writes historian Abigail Perkiss, “the
homicide rate across the nation rose 78 percent…[and] in Chicago alone, there were more than 400 gang-related murders a year.”
As important as it is to rethink the origins of the violence that poor inner city residents still endure, we must also be careful even
when using the term “violence,” particularly when seeking to explain “what seems to be wrong” with America’s most disadvantaged
communities. A level of state violence is also employed daily in these communities that rarely gets mentioned and yet it is as brutal,
and perhaps even more devastating, than the violence that is so often experienced as a result of the informal economy in now-illegal
drugs. This is a violence that comes in the form of police harassment, surveillance, profiling, and even killings—the ugly realities of
how law enforcement wages America’s War on Drugs. Today, young black men today are 21 times more likely than their white peers
to be killed by the police and, according to a recent ProPublica report, black children have fared just as badly. Since 1980, a full 67
percent of the 151 teenagers and 66 percent of the 41 kids under 14 who have been killed by police were African American.
Between 2010 and 2012 alone, police officers shot and killed fifteen teens running away from them; all but one of them black. This is
the violence that undergirded the 4.4 million stop-and-frisks in New York City between 2004 and 2014. This is the violence that led
to the deaths of black men and boys such as Kimani Gray, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, and Michael Brown. This is the
violence that led to the deaths of black women and girls such as Rekia Boyd, Yvette Smith, and 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones. And
this is the violence that has touched off months of protests in Ferguson, Missouri just as it also touched off nearly a decade of urban
rebellions after 1964. A close look at the violence that today haunts America’s most impoverished and most segregated cities, in
fact, fundamentally challenges conventional assumptions about perpetrators and victims. America’s black and brown people not
only don’t have a monopoly on violence, but, in fact, a great deal of the violence being waged in their communities is perpetrated by
those who are at least officially charged with protecting, not harming, them. As residents of Ferguson well know, for example, in the
same month that Michael Brown was shot to death by a police officer, four other unarmed black men were also killed by members
of law enforcement. Indeed, the
true origins of today’s high rates of violence in America’s most highly
segregated, most deeply impoverished, and blackest and brownest neighborhoods—whoever
perpetrates it—are located well outside of these same communities. Simply put, America’s poorest

people of color had no seat the policy table where mass incarceration was made. But though
they did not create the policies that led to so much community and state violence in inner
cities today, they nevertheless now suffer from them in unimaginable ways.

Thus the plan,

Resolved: The United States federal government should abolish plea-bargaining
in the criminal justice system.
The plan solves prosecutorial coercion and causes judicial overload which short-
circuits the inward flow of prisoners
Heiner 16 [(Brady, Affiliated Faculty of African American Studies, California State University, Fullerton) “The procedural
entrapment of mass incarceration: prosecution, race, and the unfinished project of American abolition,” Philosophy and Social
Criticism, 2016] DRD
Burton is painfully aware that the norm of pleading guilty enhances prosecutors’ capacity to process an ever-increasing number of
cases, widening the net of mass incar- ceration. She also knows that the
system of mass incarceration relies upon
the wide- spread ‘forfeiture’ of rights that the plea bargain regime manufactures. With this in mind,
Burton posed the following question to Alexander: ‘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?’ ¶ Initially stunned, Alexander ‘launched, predictably, into a lecture about
what prose- cutors would do to people if they actually tried to stand up for their rights’, reminding Burton of the risks involved in
facing down the arsenal of excessive and overlapping sen- tencing schemes that prosecutors were equipped with. She may also have
reminded Bur- ton of the severity of the so-called ‘trial penalty’ that, according to recent data analysis, makes the sentence following
a jury trial conviction on average 3.5 years more severe than the sentence imposed after a guilty plea.125 ¶ Painfully and personally
aware of such risks, Burton replied, ‘Believe me, I know. I’m asking what we can do. Can
we crash the system just by
exercising our rights?’ To which Alexander responded: ¶ The answer is yes. The system of mass
incarceration depends almost entirely on the coop- eration of those it seeks to control. If
everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised [their] 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
peo- ple 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 sys-
tem 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. ¶ Burton, who shares Alexander’s
assessment of the risk and potentiality of mass plea refusal, claimed: ¶ 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 argu- ment 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. ¶
It would be difficult to overstate the strategic advantages and potentially transformative
political repercussions of the mass conscientious plea refusal that Burton incisively pro- poses.
In the tradition of the civil rights movement practice of non-violent direct action – which, in Martin Luther King, Jr,’s famous
formulation, sought to ‘create a crisis’ in the racist structures of society by establishing a ‘creative, constructive tension’ that forces
society to confront and correct racial injustices that it has constantly refused to address – the
mass assertion of
constitutional due process rights would rapidly and efficiently overwhelm the prosecutorial
regime, throw the system of mass incarceration into crisis, and force the government to take
immediate and substantive action to remedy its racial injustice.126

Judicial overload causes broad criminal justice reforms that solve mass
incarceration
Heiner 16 [(Brady, Affiliated Faculty of African American Studies, California State University, Fullerton) “The procedural
entrapment of mass incarceration: prosecution, race, and the unfinished project of American abolition,” Philosophy and Social
Criticism, 2016] DRD
Executive desistence in the face of the systemic crisis generated by the mass asser- tion of due process rights would likely prove
unsustainable, however, as it would pre- sumably raise widespread doubts about the rationality, legitimacy and procedural justice of
maintaining an arsenal of criminal statutes that routinely go unenforced. Selective enforcement is, of course, the stock-in-trade of
the prosecutorial and policing professions, which, while financially flush in the era of mass incarceration, are execu- tors of a
distended body of criminal law that, as Harvard Law Professor William Stuntz claims, ‘covers far more conduct than any jurisdiction
could possibly punish’.130 How-
ever, programmatic desistence of the magnitude that would be
required to restrict crim- inal justice processing to the levels that could be maintained while
still accommodating the constitutional trial rights demanded by a mass movement of
conscientious plea objectors would arguably erode the perceived legitimacy of the criminal
law (at least with respect to the lower-spectrum of the penal code). Such potentialities would
likely force the question of state and federal legislative reform in the direction of de-
criminalization, or even legalization (e.g. in the case of certain classes of drugs).131 Recent
state direct-democracy initiatives suggest that there may be fairly substantive popular
support for attenuating criminal codes through selective statutory mitigation,
decriminalization and legalization. For example, Colorado (2012), Washington State (2012), Oregon (2014), Alaska
(2014) and Washington, DC (2014) have all passed measures to legalize, regulate and tax the production and sale of marijuana for
rec- reational use. Californians also overwhelmingly passed the Three Strikes Reform Act of 2012 (Proposition 36), which shortens
sentences of those subjected to life prison terms for ‘non-serious’, ‘non-violent’ offenses, and Proposition 47 (2014), which de-
felonizes all drug use, downgrades a multiplicity of non-violent economic and drug offenses from felonies to misdemeanors, and
reinvests the estimated $150 million in annual state savings toward school truancy and drop-out prevention, victim services, mental
health and drug abuse treatment, and other programs designed to expand alter- natives to incarceration.
Such measures
demonstrate popular support for advancing a public safety strategy beyond incarceration to
include treatment and prevention. ¶ Mass plea refusal could intensify such efforts by striking a
major blow to the prison industrial complex, which, as Angela Y. Davis points out, ‘devours the social
wealth needed to address the very problems [related to employment, education, housing,
addiction, mental disorder, etc.] that have led to spiraling numbers of prisoners’.132 Not even
accounting for the multibillion dollar corporate industry that weaves in and out of the public
and private prison systems,133 US criminal justice expenditures grew by over 600 per cent
between 1980 and 2006, from $35 billion to $215 billion. Criminal justice system employment
(including police, and corrections, judicial and legal, at federal, state and local levels) doubled
during that same period, rising from 1.2 million to 2.5 million people.134 Widespread
sentencing mitigation at all or most levels of existing criminal codes and de-criminalization in
the lower-spectrum of existing penal codes would disemploy and disencumber a significant
portion of these people and resources for more socially generative employment and
investment. As an exercise in imaginative possibility, consider the following scenario. If we cut public financing of
mass incarceration by, for example, returning criminal justice spending to the inflation-adjusted
levels spent in 1980 – prior to the escalations of the wars on drugs and illegal immigration, which
have since fueled the 500 per cent increase in the incarcerated population – over $125 billion
of public wealth would be freed up each year for investment in socially reparative and
generative enterprises like education, childcare, mental and physical health care and drug
treatment, public housing, job training, food assistance, parks and recreation, etc. Such
enterprises could easily absorb and constructively employ the millions of people that
America’s carceral system currently employs and confines. As Davis maintains, ‘The creation of new
institutions that lay claim to the space now occupied by the prison [industrial complex] can
eventually start to crowd out the prison so that it would inhabit increasingly smaller areas of
our social and psychic landscape’.135

No reinvestment in mass incarceration – shrinking state and federal budgets

Heiner 16 [(Brady, Affiliated Faculty of African American Studies, California State University, Fullerton) “The procedural
entrapment of mass incarceration: prosecution, race, and the unfinished project of American abolition,” Philosophy and Social
Criticism, 2016] DRD
Of course, rather
than a complex of executive desistence, legislative mitigation and de-criminalization, and public
reinvestment that tilts toward a less carceral and puni- tive society, it is also possible that government could
respond to the crisis generated by mass conscientious plea refusal by pursuing a still more
punitive agenda to enlarge and shore up the procedural pipelines of mass incarceration. State
legislatures could pro- cure emergency funding to expand the procedural capacity of their respective criminal justice systems.
Federal legislators could seek to bolster such expansion efforts by enacting an emergency financial bail-out of the criminal justice
system akin to the 2008 bail-out of the US financial system, ramping up national criminal justice spend- ing exponentially over and
above the already historically unprecedented heights. ¶ However, this course of action seems politically
unlikely. State and municipal bud- gets have not only been shrinking due to regressive tax
reforms and the economic crises produced by American finance capitalism and corporate
outsourcing, the portions of those budgets devoted to corrections and law enforcement have
already exponentially swelled, due largely to current (and in some cases unconstitutional)
overcrowding in many state prison systems. The electorate’s appetite for bankrolling the
prison industrial complex is waning amid steeply declining and non-existent state financing
of other social priorities like education, childcare, recreation and infrastructure. Criminal
proce- dural expansion would also be logistically fraught, straining political support , as it
would entail appointing an army of judges, many of whom are elected, which would in turn
require special elections, etc., as well as enlisting a multitude of eligible citizens for jury duty
service, and hiring the necessary personnel to coordinate them. ¶ In effect, on the side of utility,
increasing swaths of the populace have begun to iden- tify that public investment in mass
incarceration is depleting valuable social resources while producing disproportionately little
social benefit in the short term and over the long term exacerbating the very social
problems related to intergenerational poverty (e.g. unemployment, substance addiction, educational disparity
and mental disorder) that
lead to increased incarceration. On the side of justice, increasing numbers
of people are beginning to recognize that the US carceral state is falling short of the threshold
of social justice requisite to render state punishment morally legitimate.136 ‘If a society is to have the
moral right to punish, its laws must be just’, writes Igor Primoratz in his book Justifying Legal Punishment. ¶ But that is not all;
society must be doing something [constructive] about those social con- ditions that breed crime . . . If it does little or nothing about
those social problems that generate law-breaking, and then goes on to punish the law-breakers, it will be rightly seen as both callous
and hypocritical, and thus as lacking the moral standing requisite for punishing offenders in good faith.137 ¶ In
addition to
(and in virtue of) producing
a structural crisis in the procedural system of state punishment, the
widespread assertion of constitutional due process rights among those protesting procedural
entrapment would openly expose the moral illegitimacy of the institutional agencies of mass
incarceration, which require the compelled forfeiture of constitutional rights of nearly all their
targets in order for the system to function.
 1AC – Framing
The standard is maximizing expected well being.
Phenomenal introspection proves that pleasure is intrinsically good.
Sinhababu 08 [Neil, Assistant Professor at Department of Philosophy in National University of
Singapore. PhD, University of Texas at Austin, 2008. “The Epistemic Argument for Hedonism.”
http://philpapers.org/profile/259] LADI
Now I'll outline hedonism's answer to Joyce and Street's evolutionary debunking arguments, as
promised in section 1.1. Phenomenal introspection is a process of belief-formation that
evolved to be generally reliable, like visual perception. Knowing what one is experiencing
seems to be important for perception, so creatures who couldn't know what their experiences
were like would die without reproducing, having failed to form useful beliefs about their
surroundings. So creatures who could reliably form true beliefs about their phenomenal states
would be more likely to survive and reproduce. Hedonism withstands evolutionary debunking
arguments via what Street calls a “byproduct hypothesis.” Since belief in pleasure's goodness
is a byproduct of phenomenal introspection, which is selected for reliability, it's reliably
caused even if other moral beliefs aren't.31 If all other moral beliefs are undermined by their
origins in processes not selected for reliability, an evolutionary debunking argument could do
the same work for hedonists that the argument from disagreement has done in this paper.32

Our ability to understand the introspective experiences of others commits us to

utilitarianism.
Sinhababu 08 [Neil, Assistant Professor at Department of Philosophy in National University of
Singapore. PhD, University of Texas at Austin, 2008. “The Epistemic Argument for Hedonism.”
http://philpapers.org/profile/259] LADI”
One can form a variety of beliefs using phenomenal introspection. For example, one can
believe that one is having sound experiences of particular noises and visual experiences of
different shades of color. When looking at a lemon and considering the phenomenal states
that are yellow experiences, one can form some beliefs about their intrinsic features – for
example, that they're bright experiences. And when considering experiences of pleasure, one
can make some judgments about their intrinsic features – for example, that they're good
experiences. Just as one can look inward at one's experience of lemon yellow and recognize its
brightness, one can look inward at one's experience of pleasure and recognize its goodness.
24 When I consider a situation of increasing pleasure, I can form the belief that things are
better than they were before, just as I form the belief that there's more brightness in my
visual field as lemon yellow replaces black. And when I suddenly experience pain, I can form
the belief that things are worse in my experience than they were before. Having pleasure
consists in one's experience having a positive hedonic tone. Without descending into
metaphor, it's hard to give a further account of what pleasure is like than to say that when one
has it, one feels good. As Aaron Smuts writes in defending the view of pleasure as hedonic tone,
“to 'feel good' is about as close to an experiential primitive as we get.” 25 Fred Feldman sees
pleasure as fundamentally an attitude rather than a hedonic tone.26 But as long as hedonic
tones are real components of experience, phenomenal introspection will reveal pleasure's
goodness. Opponents of the hedonic tone account of pleasure usually concede that hedonic
tones exist, as Feldman seems to in discussing “sensory pleasures,” which he thinks his view
helps us understand. Even on his view of pleasure, phenomenal introspection can produce the
belief that some hedonic tones are good while others are bad.

Even under utilitarian calculus, this is the greatest impact in debate. The sheer
number effected demands redress.
Edelman 13 – MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN activist for the rights of children. She has been an
advocate for disadvantaged Americans for her entire professional life. She is president and
founder of the Children's Defense Fund. (“Dismantle the Cradle to Prison Pipeline—Our Future
Depends on It” https://allinnation.org/ms-content/uploads/sites/2/2013/10/Chapter9.pdf)¶
Today a toxic cocktail of violence, poverty, racial disparities in child-serving systems, poor
education, and racially unjust zero-tolerance policies are fueling a Cradle to Prison Pipeline®
crisis that is funneling millions of poor children and adults into dead-end, powerless, and
hopeless lives.¶ A black boy born in 2001 has a one-in-three chance of going to prison in his
lifetime, and a Latino boy has a one-in-six chance of the same fate. $e United States has the
highest incarceration rate in the world: 7.1 million adults are under some form of correctional
supervision including prison, jail, probation, or parole. Black males have an imprisonment rate
that is nearly seven times higher than white males, and Hispanic males have a rate more than
twice that of their white counterparts. This epidemic of mass incarceration has created one of
the most dangerous crises for the black community since slavery and it affects everyone in our
nation.¶ Federal spending on prisons totaled $6.6 billion in 2012 and annual state spending on
corrections tops $51 billion. This federal and state spending spree to warehouse prisoners has
perverted our nation’s priorities. States spend on average two and half times more per
prisoner than they spend per public school student, this at a time when a majority of children
of all racial and income backgrounds cannot read or compute at grade level in fourth- or eighth-
grade and huge numbers of youth drop out of schools. The privatization of juvenile and adult
prisons is yet another added danger. The world’s largest for-profit, private prison corporation,
the Corrections Corporation of America, recently offered to run the prison systems in 48 states
for 20 years if the states would guarantee a 90 percent occupancy rate.¶ The greatest threat to
America’s democracy and economic security comes from no enemy, but rather from our
failure to dismantle this Cradle to Prison Pipeline and to invest in and prepare all our children
for the future. Tomorrow is today. Children of color, who already are a majority of babies
being born in the United States and who will be a majority of our child population within this
decade, face bleak futures without high-quality early childhood programs and high-quality,
equitable public schools that would prepare them for college and our workforce.¶ Closing the
income and racial achievement gaps between poor and non-poor children and between white
and nonwhite children is an urgent national priority . Today, every 1.5 seconds during the
school year, a public school student is suspended; every 8 seconds during the school year, a
public high school student drops out; every 19 seconds a child is arrested; and every 3 hours and
15 minutes, a child or teen is killed by a gun.¶
The state can be repurposed
Ferguson 11, James, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford, “The Uses of Neoliberalism”,
Antipode, Vol. 41, No. S1, pp 166–184
If we are seeking, as this special issue of Antipode aspires to do, to link our critical analyses to the world of grounded political struggle—not only to
interpret the world in various ways, but also to change it—then there is much to be said for focusing, as I have
here, on mundane, real- world debates around policy and politics, even if doing so inevitably puts

us on the compromised and reformist terrain of the possible, rather than the seductive high
ground of revolutionary ideals and utopian desires. But I would also insist that there is more at stake in the
examples I have discussed here than simply a slightly better way to ameliorate the miseries of the chronically

poor, or a technically superior method for relieving the suffering of famine victims.¶ My point in discussing the South African
BIG campaign, for instance, is not really to argue for its implementation. There is much in the campaign that is appealing, to be sure. But one can just as easily identify a series of
worries that would bring the whole proposal into doubt. Does not, for instance, the decoupling of the question of assistance from the issue of labor, and the associated
valorization of the “informal”, help provide a kind of alibi for the failures of the South African regime to pursue policies that would do more to create jobs? Would not the
creation of a basic income benefit tied to national citizenship simply exacerbate the vicious xenophobia that already divides the South African poor,¶ in a context where many of
the poorest are not citizens, and would thus not be eligible for the BIG? Perhaps even more fundamentally, is the idea of basic income really capable of commanding the mass
support that alone could make it a central pillar of a new approach to distribution? The record to date gives powerful reasons to doubt it. So far, the technocrats’ dreams of
relieving poverty through efficient cash transfers have attracted little support from actual poor people, who seem to find that vision a bit pale and washed out, compared with
the vivid (if vague) populist promises of jobs and personalistic social inclusion long offered by the ANC patronage machine, and lately personified by Jacob Zuma (Ferguson
forthcoming).¶ My real interest in the policy proposals discussed here, in fact, has little to do with the narrow policy questions to which they seek to provide answers. For what
governmental
is most significant, for my purposes, is not whether or not these are good policies, but the way that they illustrate a process through which specific

devices and modes of reasoning that we have become used to associating with a very particular (and conservative) political agenda (“neoliberalism”) may be in
the process of being peeled away from that agenda, and put to very different uses. Any progressive who takes seriously the
challenge I pointed to at the start of this essay, the challenge of developing new progressive arts of government, ought to find this turn of events of considerable interest.¶ As
Steven Collier (2005) has recently pointed out, it is important to question the assumption that there is, or must be, a neat or automatic fit between a hegemonic “neoliberal”
political-economic project (however that might be characterized), on the one hand, and specific “neoliberal” techniques, on the other. Close attention to particular techniques
(such as the use of quantitative calculation, free choice, and price driven by supply and demand) in particular settings (in Collier’s case, fiscal and budgetary reform in post-Soviet
Russia) shows that the relationship between the technical and the political-economic “is much more polymorphous and unstable than is assumed in much critical geographical
work”, and that neoliberal technical mechanisms are in fact “deployed in relation to diverse political projects and social norms” (2005:2).¶ As I suggested in referencing the role
social technologies need not have any
of statistics and techniques for pooling risk in the creation of social democratic welfare states,

essential or eternal loyalty to the political formations within which they were first developed.
Insurance rationality at the end of the nineteenth century had no essential vocation to provide security and solidarity to the working class; it was turned to that purpose (in
Specific ways of solving or posing
some substantial measure) because it was available, in the right place at the right time, to be appropriated for that use.

governmental problems, specific institutional and intellectual mechanisms, can be combined

in an almost infinite variety of ways, to accomplish different social ends . With social, as with any other
sort of technology, it is not the machines or the mechanisms that decide what they will be
used to do. Foucault (2008:94) concluded his discussion of socialist government- ality by insisting that the answers to the Left’s governmental problems require not yet
another search through our sacred texts, but a process of conceptual and institutional innovation. “[I]f there is a really socialist governmentality, then it is not hidden within
socialism and its texts. It cannot be deduced from them. It must be invented”. But invention in the domain of governmental technique is rarely something worked up out of
whole cloth. More often, it involves a kind of bricolage (Le ́vi- Strauss 1966), a piecing together of something new out of scavenged parts originally intended for some other
purpose. As we pursue such a process of improvisatory invention, we might begin by making an inventory of the parts available for such tinkering, keeping all the while an open
If we can go beyond seeing in
mind about how different mechanisms might be put to work, and what kinds of purposes they might serve.

“neoliberalism” an evil essence or an automatic unity, and instead learn to see a field of specific governmental techniques, we may be
surprised to find that some of them can be repurposed, and put to work in the service of political projects very different

from those usually associated with that word. If so, we may find that the cabinet of governmental arts available to us is a bit less bare
than first appeared, and that some rather useful little mechanisms may be nearer to hand than we thought.

Pure criticism solves nothing

Singer 84 - Joseph William Singer, Associate Professor of Law at Boston University, 1984 [“The Player and the Cards: Nihilism
and Legal Theory,” Yale Law Journal (94 Yale L.J. 1), November, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Lexis-Nexis] LADI//KK
Criticism cannot magically generate answers. Internal criti- cism-criticism that uses a
paradigm's criteria against the paradigm it- self-merely shows that a certain theory does not
do what it purports to do. For example, demonstrating that a theory that claims to be determi-
nate is in fact indeterminate is purely negative; this sort of demonstration does not then tell
us how the theory can be made determinate or whether we should be interested in
determinate theories at all. On the other hand, external criticism-criticism that challenges the
fundamental assumptions of a mode of discourse (Rorty's "abnormal" dis- course)-also cannot
generate answers. Any alternative premises that might be the basis of a new paradigm have
already been assumed before the critique began. Thus, the external critique of the old
paradigm does not give us anything new except a striking contrast with the new para- digm
we have already invented.

Using the state as a heuristic is a powerful learning tool for liberation.

Zanotti 14 (Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Her research and teaching include critical political theory as well as international organizations, UN peacekeeping, democratization and the role of

NGOs in post-conflict governance.“Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World” – Alternatives: Global, Local, Political – vol 38(4):p. 288-304, obtained via school library being awesome.)
While there are important variations in the way international relations scholars use governmentality theory, for the purpose of my argument I identify two broad trajectories. 2

One body of scholarship uses governmentality as a heuristic tool to explore modalities of local and
international government and to assess their effects in the contexts where they are deployed; the other

adopts this notion as a descriptive tool to theorize the globally oppressive features of international liberalism. Scholars
who use governmentality as a heuristic tool tend to conduct inquiries based upon analyses of practices of

government and resistance. These scholars rely on ethnographic inquiries, emphasizes the multifarious ways government works in practice (to include
its oppressive trajectories) and the ways uneven interactions of governmental strategies and resistance are contingently enacted. As examples, Didier Bigo, building upon Pierre
Bourdieu, has encouraged a research methodology that privileges a relational approach and focuses on practice; 3 William Walters has advocated considering governmentality
as a research program rather than as a ‘‘depiction of discrete systems of power;’’ 4 and Michael Merlingen has criticized the downplaying of resistance and the use of
‘‘governmentality’’ as interchangeable with liberalism. 5 Many other scholars have engaged in contextualized analyses of governmental tactics and resistance. Oded Lowenheim
has shown how ‘‘responsibilization’’ has become an instrument for governing individual travelers through ‘‘travel warnings’’ as well as for ‘‘developing states’’ through
performance indicators; 6 Wendy Larner and William Walters have questioned accounts of globalization as an ontological dimension of the present and advocated less
substantialized accounts that focus on studying the discourses, processes and practices through which globalization is made as a space and a political economy; 7 Ronnie D.
Lipschutz and James K. Rowe have looked at how localized practices of resistance may engage and transform power relations; 8 and in my own work, I have studied the
deployment of disciplinary and governmental tools for reforming governments in peacekeeping operations and how these practices were hijacked and resisted and by their
targets. 9 Scholars who use governmentality as a descriptive tool focus instead on one particular trajectory of global liberalism, that is on the convergence of knowledge and
scrutiny of life processes (or biopolitics) and violence and theorize global liberalism as an extremely effective formation, a coherent and powerful Leviathan, where biopolitical
tools and violence come together to serve dominant classes or states’ political agendas. As I will show, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Sergei Prozorov

tend to embrace this position. 10 The distinction between governmentality as a heuristic and governmentality as a
descriptive tool is central for debating political agency. I argue that, notwithstanding their critique of liberalism, scholars who use
governmentality as a descriptive tool rely on the same ontological assumptions as the liberal
order they criticize and do move away from Foucault’s focus on historical practices in order to privilege abstract theorizations. By using governmentality as a
description of ‘‘liberalism’’ or ‘‘capitalism’’ instead of as a methodology of inquiry on power’s contingent modalities and technologies, these scholars tend to reify a

substantialist ontology that ultimately reinforces a liberal conceptualization of subjects and power
as standing in a relation of externality and stifles the possibility of reimagining political agency on different grounds .
‘‘Descriptive governmentality’’ constructs a critique of the liberal international order based upon an ontological framework that presupposes that power and subjects are

entities possessing qualities that preexist relations.Power is imagined as a ‘‘mighty totality,’’ and subjects as monads endowed with
potentia. As a result, the problematique of political agency is portrayed as a quest for the ‘‘liberation’’ of a subject ontologically gifted
with a freedom that power inevitably oppresses. In this way, the conceptualization of political agency remains confined within the liberal struggle of ‘‘freedom’’ and
‘‘oppression.’’ Even researchers who adopt a Foucauldian vocabulary end up falling into what Bigo has identified as ‘‘traps’’ of political science and international relations
theorizing, specifically essentialization and ahistoricism. 11 I argue here that in order to reimagine political agency an ontological and epistemological turn is necessary, one that
relies upon a relational ontology. Relational ontological positions question adopting abstract stable entities, such as ‘‘structures,’’ ‘‘power,’’ or ‘‘subjects,’’ as explanations for
what happens. Instead, they explore how these pillar concepts of the Western political thought came to being, what kind of practices they facilitate, consolidate and result from,
what ambiguities and aporias they contain, and how they are transformed. 12 Relational ontologies nurture ‘‘modest’’ conceptualizations of political agency and also question

overwhelming stability of ‘‘mighty totalities,’’ such as for instance the international liberal order or the state. In this framework, political action
the

has more to do with playing with the cards that are dealt to us to produce practical effects in
specific contexts than with building idealized ‘‘new totalities’’ where perfect conditions might
exist. The political ethics that results from non-substantialist ontological positions is one that privileges ‘‘modest’’ engagements and weights political choices with regard to
the consequences and distributive effects they may produce in the context where they are made rather than based upon their universal normative