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On the one hand, the left has spent the last decade articulating a powerful critique of policing and incarceration: that police are a blunt, violent, racist instrument of social control; that prisons are racially skewed warehouses of human misery; that our criminal justice system spreads violence and instability and pain without solving the underlying social problems it claims to address. On the other hand, many of the same people who hold these views routinely demand sharper knives when the subject turns to sex crimes, calling for longer sentences, more aggressive prosecution, fewer procedural protections, and judges who will “take it seriously” by locking people away for as long as possible. These positions are rarely put in the same room together, let alone forced to argue it out. But they are obviously contradictory, and both the effort for criminal justice reform and the fight to address sexual violence suffer because of that contradiction.
Progressives who otherwise insisted that mass incarceration is a moral catastrophe became willing participants in a recall campaign whose entire point was to terrify judges into harsher sentencing.
After Persky was forced out, judges in California received the message loud and clear: deviate downward from sentencing norms in sex cases and you may be next. That’s not a speculative claim; it’s borne out by empirical research showing that sentencing severity increased after the recall, and that this increase fell disproportionately on Black and Hispanic men. The system did exactly what systems always do when you apply public pressure for “toughness”: it punished marginal defendants hardest. The cruel irony is that all of this was perfectly predictable by the very theory of the world progressives have advanced!
It’s genuinely hard to reconcile feminist demands for accountability for sex crimes with an abolitionist or decarceral framework, especially in a culture rightly furious at how often sexual violence is ignored or trivialized. What’s striking is how little interest most liberals have in resolving the contradiction, or even naming it.
Instead of that work, we get a kind of moral zoning: skepticism about police and prisons is permitted in the abstract, until a sufficiently heinous crime appears, at which point the old punitive reflexes roar back to life, now sanctified by progressive language.
If progressives want to be more than a collection of moral impulses that point in opposite directions, they have to do better than this. They have to ask whether “believe women” means building better social responses or simply building bigger cages. They have to confront the reality that empowering the carceral state for causes we like does not stay neatly confined to those causes. And they have to grapple with the uncomfortable fact that some victories, loudly celebrated as moral progress, come with costs that fall on precisely the people progressives claim to stand for.
When everything was going down in the summer of 2020, when George Floyd’s vicious murder was provoking a lot of ordinary people to embrace police and prison abolition, I asked several times “What about Harvey Weinstein? Should he go free?” People accused me of being insensitive and obtuse in a delicate time. And I probably was. But, like… what about him? Isn’t there a very real tension here, a need to confront the fact that not everyone who you’d be freeing from the prisons you’d be closing is innocent, the victim of racial injustice? And how long can we go about holding these contradictory impulses without having some very uncomfortable conversations about what we really believe?