Paul Butler's Let's Get Free and Criminal Justice Dysfunction

Introduction: A History of Prejudice in American Justice

The American criminal justice system has had a long history of prejudice. From the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision that institutionalized the false concept of "separate but equal," to the Jim Crow laws that followed, to the methods of "control" enacted by police in urban communities, criminal justice in the United States has seen a great deal of crime but very little justice. Part of the reason for the inherent dysfunction in the way minorities have always been treated in America is that the country was founded on prejudiced WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) principles: the principle of "manifest destiny" was based on the supposedly "divine right" that WASPs had to "control" the New World and eradicate the "lesser" races, such as Native Americans and African Americans. These prejudiced principles were absorbed into the criminal justice system through lawmakers — as seen in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision — and through the courts, as Paul Butler demonstrates.

The dysfunctional justice system and the problem of mass incarceration in the U.S. are central concerns in Paul Butler's book Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice. Butler begins with the perspective of a prosecuting attorney observing street life. Cops and prostitutes know one another, with police for the most part turning a blind eye to "the world's oldest profession" (Butler, p. 3). Yet when citizens of the DC area see "cops and the girls yukking it up…a showy crackdown happens for a few days" in order to save face for the police department. The arrested prostitute is brought before a judge because "lawmakers don't want people to have jury trials for certain offenses" (p. 1). Everyone in the courtroom views the prostitute as a "whore" (p. 4) who has the "temerity" to challenge the system by going to trial. Butler is conveying a sense of the meanness he himself will later encounter when he goes to trial. The sympathetic reader will already be asking: what is the courtroom for, if not exactly this? Does not everyone have the right to a trial? Here is one example of how the justice system is dysfunctional: as Butler puts it, even in the courtroom, certain defendants have "no defense" (p. 3).

After Butler himself is prosecuted for an offense he did not commit, he recognizes the inherent "meanness" embedded in the system (p. 28). The criminal justice system, with its mass incarcerations — a quarter of the world's inmates are held in U.S. facilities — is engaged in "controlling" urban populations, not protecting them. This paper examines the key propositions Butler makes throughout the book and shows how they relate to the criminal justice system, concluding with a personal reflection on what his account reveals.

Police Abuse of Power

Butler makes the proposition that police officers often abuse their power: "They can falsely say that they have evidence when they don't, or that witnesses identified you, or that your friends have implicated you" (p. 28). This is certainly true in his own case: the officer who testifies at his trial lies openly, and when cross-examined by Butler's attorney, the officer's credibility collapses. But police misconduct extends further: "The police can arrest you for a minor traffic offense like not wearing a seat belt or driving with expired tags" (p. 28). Arrest for such a minor infraction reflects a complete absence of balance or proportion in the criminal justice system.

The heavy hand of the law is always presumed to be right, and the practical wisdom for many citizens is to avoid it entirely. Yet this is not possible for everyone. In the lyrics of "Hip Hop Police," Chamillionaire observes: "If you aren't guilty of anything, then why did you run? Cause you the police and plus I saw you cocking your gun, and the chamber wasn't empty, it was obviously one." People — especially minorities — avoid police because police can behave less like public servants and more like agents of intimidation. Rather than serving and protecting, police in some communities use their authority to control and take advantage of residents. They employ fear tactics to discourage people from challenging them or standing up for themselves.

It is a system that clearly favors the powerful. As Butler discovers in his own legal career, the system is populated by individuals quite willing to abuse the authority granted to them. This abuse damages every community it touches: it makes residents afraid of the law, portrays officers as adversaries rather than allies, and fills streets with chronic tension. There is no mutual respect. The law suspects everyone who fits its "profile" of what a criminal looks like, and citizens distrust the law because they recognize that "control" — rather than justice — drives many police decisions. No citizen wants to feel that he must be "controlled" as though incapable of governing himself.

Mass Incarceration and the Destruction of Communities

Butler's argument that mass incarceration harms communities and families is similarly compelling. His reasoning is straightforward: "Too much incarceration creates too many unemployable young men" (p. 33), and "Mass incarceration changes the way that people think about crime and punishment" (p. 33). The problem visible in today's criminal justice system is that communities — and the very sense of community — are being destroyed by police crackdowns and mass imprisonment. Rather than allowing citizens to govern themselves, the law steps in and attempts to control everything. Families lose fathers and sons. Communities lose leaders.

The only force holding people together becomes the law itself, which, as Butler experiences firsthand when he is arrested, contains no compassion. What then are minorities — who make up the majority of the prison population — to do? In the lyrics of "Dear Mama," 2Pac reflects: "When things went wrong we'd blame mama. I reminisce on the stress I caused, it was hell / Huggin on my mama from a jail cell." Those who are incarcerated lash out at the very people meant to protect them — their families — only to realize that it is not their families but the bars of the cell that have driven them apart.

The law is without compassion in this regard. Its singular purpose appears to be the control of urban populations through mass incarceration. It removes young men from the streets and into prison cells, preventing them from ever establishing roots or a sense of place and community. The jail becomes their community; prison life becomes their primary source of culture. The system of mass incarceration does not help offenders to reform — it only generates more crime. As the urban population is treated increasingly like a problem to be removed, that population drifts further and further from the values the law claims to promote, and becomes more likely to develop its own sense of morality, its own code of right and wrong, and its own conception of justice. By insisting on control through mass incarceration, the criminal justice system demonstrates a thorough lack of empathy.

Conclusion: Reforming the Criminal Justice System

In reading Paul Butler's book, I found that he makes compelling points about how the criminal justice system operates in the United States. It is filled with a spirit of meanness that regards offenders as something less than human. Butler himself possessed something of this spirit when he was on the prosecuting side of the law. When he unexpectedly found himself on the other side, he underwent a conversion. He now saw clearly how dysfunctional the justice system was. It did not care for truth. It did not care that it had abandoned the "serve and protect" ethic that had once guided both law enforcement and society. It served only to control.

Through mass incarceration, racial profiling, and lawmakers' deference to ruling capitalist elites, urban communities are being systematically dismantled. They have no meaningful recourse to justice. They are in conflict with a law that aims to oppress rather than protect them. They cannot live according to their own lights in this supposedly free society. This reality is borne out by the testimony of hip-hop artists who have lived the street life firsthand. They witness how the criminal justice system treats members of their communities with suspicion and contempt. Even Paul Butler — a lawyer — is treated with scorn by the law when he is suspected of overstepping the ceiling that elites have placed over people of his skin color.

If anything is to change in this culture of mistrust, it must begin with the way we perceive one another. The "mean" mentality and the insistence on control must be abandoned. Respect, care, and a restoration of the idea of serving a community — rather than policing it — are all essential to any genuine reform of the criminal justice system.

Butler, P. (2010). Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice. UK: ReadHowYouWant Publishers.