Let me begin by thanking Marie Gottschalk, Amy Lerman, and Vesla Weaver for their generous comments and insightful critiques. Running through their remarks is a tenor of urgency and what Gottschalk calls a “bring it on” attitude that is necessary to dismantle the carceral state. This is no small thing when disciplinary standards equate empirical rigor with anormativity, or when “civility” codes discourage angry tones as if there is nothing to be angry about. On this front, I am also grateful to Jeffrey Isaac for organizing this “critical trialogue” on the racialized carceral state.

The core question my interlocutors raise is one I have struggled with over the course of writing The First Civil Right: In challenging the master narrative of conservative ascendance, does the book overstate the role that liberals played in building the carceral state? In particular, why “blame liberals” when there is a broad question that should be levied at many: “Why [do] American political elites, intellectuals, and reformers so frequently respond to violence and other social ills” through “punitive state building” rather than “expanded safety nets that would deal with vulnerability in all its forms”?

En route to addressing these questions, I should clarify that the book explores “how liberals built prison America” through two interrelated but distinct biographies. One is a biography of the national Democratic Party’s law-and-order agenda. The other is a biography of post–World War II racial liberalism, a particular ideology that understands “racism” as individual irrationality or psychological misfire. As it became the reigning ideology, racial liberalism set a particular logic for carceral state building: With police racial profiling and racially disparate sentencing interpreted as arbitrary errors of individual judgment, the solution was to replace the whims of administrative officials with rules, rights-based protocols, and standardized professionalization. This ideology holds a force all its own, imparting commonsense power to the fantasy of “solving” police killings of black women, men, and trans people with more training, more sensitivity to implicit bias, and more focus on sound police—community relations.

Here I emphasize racial liberalism to underscore that ideological entrenchment complicates notions of “blame,” with all that the word implies about methodological individualism, clear choices, and causality. When my interlocutors ask why so many opt for “punitive state building” rather than “expanded safety nets,” they invoke familiar binaries of policy choice. Why choose prisons over schools, retribution over rehabilitation, criminal justice over racial justice? But what is so remarkable about racial liberalism is precisely its proceduralist elision of these binaries; that is, racial justice actually requires strong, regimented criminal justice—no forced choice, no trade-off. For instance, when President Lyndon B. Johnson opened the floodgates of federal money for police in 1965 and again in 1968, he operated within a logic that saw “punitive state building” as integral to the “expanded safety net,” not opposed to it. To achieve a Great Society, the vulnerable deserved more and higher-quality schools, housing, and job training—and, yes, better equipped, better trained, and more racially diverse law enforcement. Federal subsidies were necessary because, in the words of Johnson’s attorney general, “People in the suburbs just won’t pay taxes for central city law enforcement any more than they’ll pay for central city education” (The First Civil Right, p. 233).

There is no denying that my work lays “much blame at the doorsteps of racial liberals” and, more centrally, at the shrine of racial liberalism. I adopted two research strategies to militate against “overstating” the case against liberal Democratic elites. First, to avoid piling on endless confirmatory evidence of liberal Democratic punitiveness, I selected “hard case” policy domains. In the policy domains of corporate and organized crimes, gun crimes, violence against women, and hate crimes, the impact of liberal law and order is well established. Shying away from these cases, I focused on federal funding for law enforcement, sentencing guidelines, mandatory minimums with particular emphasis on drug-related penalties, and the death penalty. Even in these hard cases, there is strong evidence that liberal Democrats propelled carceral development.

Second, given that policymakers work within historical constraints and without crystal balls, I followed long time horizons with an eye toward finding evidence of liberal dissatisfaction with policy consequences. If liberal elites were shocked and dismayed that some of their policies produced racialized punishment expansion, then they might have attempted to repeal or revise unexpectedly damaging crime policy. This does happen—rarely and slowly. For example, Charles Rangel and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus supported the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988, but the CBC campaigned to end the draconian drug penalties through the mid-1990s, and Rangel followed suit in the early 2000s. It took the rest of Congress until 2010.

There is little evidence for the so-called unintended consequences interpretation of liberal law and order. Holding faith that “they intended better” reflects a desire to square the circle between racial liberalism and racialized carceral expansion. Consider, for example, that Ted Kennedy—widely considered the standard-bearer of American liberalism—was a key architect of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, which effectively replaced judicial discretion with the rigid U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. By 1992, the evidence was in: Use of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines had doubled time served in federal prisons and exacerbated racial disparities. If Senator Kennedy found these consequences unacceptable or antithetical to his original vision, he did nothing to revise or repudiate the sentencing guidelines in his many remaining years in the Senate. Perhaps he harbored regret privately. But policies should not be evaluated by the imagined good intentions residing in policymakers’ hearts. Racialized state violence is not less brutal if delivered with professed good intentions.