Framework

The judge is an ethical educator – the ballot should be signed for the debater that has
the best strategy for combating institutionalized oppression
Peterson 14 [David K, UC Irvine, 2014, “DEBATING RACE, RACE-ING DEBATE: AN EXTENDED
ETHNOGRAPHIC CASE STUDY OF BLACK INTELLECTUAL INSURGENCY IN U.S. INTERCOLLEGIATE DEBATE
DISSERTATION”, dissertation through ProQuest]
Extended case method ethnographers select cases on the basis of their societal significance rather than their generalizability and
transportability to other cases. This often means that deviant cases are the best cases (Burawoy 2002; Small 2009). Given that white supremacy
is normative and systemic rather than deviant and isolated, the practices that “sustain its circuituous, contentless logic” could be mapped in
virtually any local site or “case.” However, I argue that policy debate activity has a unique societal significance anad that it provides a fruitful
empirical terrain upon which to understand the construction and contestation of racial meanings and norms. The activity of intercollegiate
debate is representative in many respects but is also deviant and unique. The discourses that circulate in policy debate are drawn from every
corner of the academy as well as from the fields of politics and law and thus the activity reflects the normative structure of the larger
intellectual universe of which it is a part. Debate is unique, per the explanation above, in that it is structured in such a way to enable
an interrogation of and critical discussion of these norms and values that, for a variety of reasons, is possible in few other institutional
because the silence around whiteness
locations. This significance stems from four main characteristics of the debate activity. First,
has been breached and questions of white power and privilege are made the subject of public discourse, the debate activity
provides a unique opportunity to understand nuances in the way that “whiteness as a form of power is
defined, deployed, performed, policed and reinvented.” Secondly, this discourse on whiteness is not just engaged by those
“shooting from the hip,” or speculating on a subject about which they have 22 never been forced to contemplate. On the contrary, in the
debate activity, questions of racial power and privilege have become the subject of research and discussion, not in fleeting moments, but rather
over a sustained period of time. Gary Allan Fine (2001) described competitive policy debate as “a world of talk,” the participants of which are
trained specifically to be effective listeners and talkers with the confidence to take on a range of contentious issues. Also, Fine argues that
policy debaters tend to be relatively well informed about social issues and current events and far more liberal than the general society. As an
educational activity, policy debate is designed to foster the skills to effectively navigate civil society, evaluate argumentation and arrive at
solutions to social problems. These characteristics of debaters and the debate activity allow for identification of more nuanced and
sophisticated racial discourse that operates at higher levels of abstraction than is typical in other social realms. The debate activity thus
represents a limit-case that enables a closer approximation of the limits of civil society in grappling with and reconciling racial domination.
Third, questions of racial power and privilege cannot be evaded or ignored by the mostly white male participants of the
debate activity. In many ways, the white participants are placed on the defensive as demands are made of them to address and account for the
operation of white supremacy. Failure on the part of debate participants to muster an adequate and reasonable accounting, based in research
and a certain degree of thoughtfulness not required elsewhere, carries tangible consequences, namely the loss of competitive success.
Additionally, because black students in debate focus their criticisms on the normal and embedded, rather than deviant and spectacular,
operation of racial power in the banal conduct of daily institutional life, the questions were engaged at a higher level of abstraction that
required their peers to attempt to think about structures of power and privilege. Finally, students and teachers in the debate space 23 not only
have to think about, conduct research on, and speak about these contentious questions, they have to do so in dialogical interactions with their
black peers in which their accounts and articulations are criticized. Thus, contestation over the meaning of racial power and privilege can be
examined in situ, in the context of struggle over institutional resources, in specific and sustained interactions across the colorline.

Inherency/Impacts
First things first, socially egalitarianistic progress is not the result of a push for
equality, but internal contradictions between social ostracization and labor extraction
of black bodies, which require ever evolving methods of anti-black slavery
Wacquant 1, Loic.Deadly Symbiosis when ghetto and prison meet and mesh. http://www.sociology.cam.ac.uk/people/academic-
staff/professor-loic-wacquant/deadly-symbiosis-prison-ghetto .DA=3/2/17.-SVJK)
The first three of these institutions, chattelslavery until the Civil War, the Jim Crow regime of racial exclusion operative in the agrarian
South from Emancipation to the Civil Rights revolution, and the ghetto in the 20th century Northern industrial city, have, each in its own
manner, served two joined yet discordant purposes: to recruit, organize, and extract labor out of African Americans, on
the one hand; and to demarcate and ultimately seclude them so that they would [as] not [to]‘contaminate’ the
surrounding white society that viewed them as as irrevocably inferior and vile because devoid of ethnic honor. These
two goals of labor extraction and social ostracization of a stigmatized category are in tension with one another
inasmuch as to utilize the labor power of a group inevitably entails bringing it into regular intercourse with oneself and thereby
invites the blurring or transgression of the boundary separating ‘us’ from ‘them’. Conversely, to immure a
group in a separate physical and socio-symbolic space can make[s] it more difficult to draw out and deploy
its labor in the most efficient way. When the tension between these two purposes, exploitation and ostracization, mounts
to the point where it threatens to undermine either of them, its excess is drained, so to speak, and the institution
restabilized, by resort to physical violence: the customary use of the lash and ferocious suppression of slave insurrections on
the plantation, terroristic vigilantism and mob lynchings in the post-bellum South, and periodic bombings of Negro homes and pogroms against
ghetto residents (such as the six-day riot that shook up Chicago in 1919) ensured that blacks kept to their appointed place at each epoch.5 But
the built-in instabilities of unfree labor and the inherent anomaly of caste partition in a formally
democratic and highly individualistic society guaranteed that each ‘peculiar institution’ would in time be
undermined by the weight of its internal contradictions as well as by mounting black resistance and external
opposition,6 to be replaced by its successor regime. At each new stage, however, the apparatus of ethno-racial
domination would become[s] less total and less capable of encompassing all segments and all dimensions of the
social life of the pariah group. As African Americans differentiated along class lines and acceded to full formal
citizenship, the institutional complex charged with keeping them ‘separate and unequal’ grew more
differentiated and diffuse, allowing a burgeoning middle and upper class of professionals and salary earners to
partially compensate for the negative symbolic capital of blackness by their high-status cultural capital and proximity
to centers of political power, while lower-class blacks remained burdened by the triple stigma of ‘race’,
poverty, and putative immorality.7

In the bright future of the 21st century, the lines between prison and ghetto are
blurred
Wacquant 2, Loic.Deadly Symbiosis when ghetto and prison meet and mesh. http://www.sociology.cam.ac.uk/people/academic-
staff/professor-loic-wacquant/deadly-symbiosis-prison-ghetto .DA=3/2/17.-SVJK)

The two decades following the climax of the Civil Rights movement not only witnessed a sea change in the function, structure and texture of
the dark ghetto in the postindustrial metropolis. The racial and class backlash that reconfigured the city also ushered a
sweeping transformation in the purpose and social organization of the carceral institution. Summarily put, the ‘Big
House’ that embodied the correctional ideal of melioristic treatment and community reintegration of inmates21 gave way to a race-
divided and violence-ridden ‘warehouse’ geared solely to neutralizing social rejects by sequestering them
physically from society – in the way that a classical ghetto wards off the threat of defilement posed by the
presence of a dishonored group by encaging it within its walls, but in an ambience resonant with the
fragmentation, dread, and despair of the post Fordist hyperghetto. With the explosive growth of the incarcerated
population leading to rampant overcrowding, the rise in the proportion of inmates serving long sentences, the spread of
ethnically-based gangs, the flood of drug offenders and especially of young offenders deeply rooted in the informal economy
and oppositional culture of the street, the ‘inmate society’ depicted in the classic prison research of the postwar
decades foundered, as John Irwin (1990: vi) observes in his 1990 preface to The Felon: There is no longer a single, overarching convict culture or
social organization, as there tended to be twenty years ago when The Felon was written. Most prisoners restrict their association to a few other
prisoners and withdraw from prison public life. A minority associates with gangs, gamble, buy and sell contraband commodities, and engage in
prison homosexual behavior. If they do so, however, they must act ‘tough’ and be willing to live by the new code, that is, be ready to meet
threats of violence with violence.

This shit isn’t even being kept secret anymore, Ehrlichman, assistant to Nixon for
domestic affairs admitted in an interview:
Baum,Dan.April 2016.Legalize it all how to win the war on drugs. https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/1/ .DA=3/3/17.-SVJK)
At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he
impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace
and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon
White House after that,
had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t
make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana
and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could
arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening
news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Why did the government throw rehabilitation out the window? Because they wanted
to see their ability for social purging fly
Wacquant 3, Loic.Deadly Symbiosis when ghetto and prison meet and mesh. http://www.sociology.cam.ac.uk/people/academic-
staff/professor-loic-wacquant/deadly-symbiosis-prison-ghetto .DA=3/2/17.-SVJK)

The ‘Big House’ of the postwar decades was animated by a consequentialist theory of punishment that sought to resocialize inmates so as to
lower the probability of re-offense once they returned society, of which they were expected to become law-abiding if not productive members.
Following the official repudiation of the philosophy of rehabilitation in the 1970s (Allen, 1981), today’s prison has for sole
purpose to neutralize offenders – and individuals thought to be likely to violate the law, such as parolees – both materially, by
removing them physically into an institutional enclave, and symbolically, by drawing a hard and fast
line between criminals and law-abiding citizens. The ‘law-and-order’ paradigm that has achieved undivided
hegemony in crime and justice policy over the past two decades jettisons any notion of prevention and proportionality in favor
of direct appeals to popular resentment through measures that dramatize the fear and loathing of crime
viewed as the abhorrent conduct of defective individuals.27 ‘Such appeals to resentment’, writes Hirsch (1999: 676),
‘reflect[s] an ideology of purging “undesirables” from the body politic’ in which incarceration is essentially a
means for social and moral excommunication. That makes the mission of today’s prison identical to that of the
classical ghetto, whose raison d’être was precisely to quarantine a polluting group from the urban body. When the
prison is used as an implement for social and cultural purging, like the ghetto, it no longer points beyond itself; it turns into a self-
contained contraption which fulfils its function, and thus justifies itself, by its mere existence. And its
inhabitants learn to live in the here-and-now, bathed in the concentrate of violence and hopelessness brewing within the walls. In his
autobiographical description of the changing social structure and culture of a maximum-security facility in Pennsylvania over the past sixteen
years, inmate Victor Hassine (1999: 41) captures well the
devolution of the Big House, point[s]ing to eventual reentry into
society, into a Warehouse leading nowhere but to a wall of despair: Through this gradual process of deterioration,
Graterford the prison became Graterford the ghetto, a place where men forgot about courts of law or the difference
between right and wrong because they were too busy thinking about living, dying, or worse. Reform,
rehabilitation, and redemption do not exist in a ghetto. There is only survival of the fittest. Crime, punishment, and accountability are of little
significance when men are living in a lawless society where their actions are restrained only by the presence of concrete and steel walls. Where
a prison in any real or abstract sense might promote the greater good, once it becomes a ghetto [prison] it can do nothing
but promise violent upheaval.
Solvency
Plea bargains are the states tool to ensure mass incarceration continues all the while
lying to the public about the existence of the latest peculiar institution
Weil, Danny. November 2012.Widespread Use of Plea Bargains Plays Major Role in Mass Incarceration. http://www.truth-
out.org/news/item/12556-overwhelming-use-of-plea-bargains-plays-major-role-in-mass-incarceration .DA=12/21/17.-SVJK)

The American judicial system has become one in which constitutional rights and protections are sacrificed
through mendacity and deception to appeal to a cult of judicial efficiency and economy. The public has been lied
to; plea bargaining does not make society safe or tackle the problem of crime itself. This is simply another
necessary illusion that is funneled into the minds of the populace to rationalize the commodification
of people for profit. The problem with all of this, as the late thinker Hannah Arendt noted in her New York Review of Books article
"Lying in Politics," is that: "the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the
liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods."
In reality, the current criminal justice system has little to do with public safety, truth-telling or avoiding falsehoods. Many
of those
currently incarcerated and languishing in for-profit or government prisons include nonviolent drug offenders
and those accused of parole-violation technicalities, such as not having a job or missing a parole
officer appointment. In reality, Americans are locked up for crimes, such as writing bad checks or using drugs, that
would rarely, if ever, produce prison sentences in other countries. The United States incarcerates 2.3 million criminals.
The number of people on lockdown in America is more than that in any other nation. The modern criminal justice system primarily serves
the interests of the increasingly privatized and financialized prison-industrial complex, which includes, among others, "tough
on crime" politicians, seedy bail bondsmen, Wall Street-traded for-profit prison corporations, the drug-testing industry, police and corrections
officers, and parole and prison officers' unions.

Take out the plea bargains and the system collapses

Weil, Danny. November 2012.Widespread Use of Plea Bargains Plays Major Role in Mass Incarceration. http://www.truth-
out.org/news/item/12556-overwhelming-use-of-plea-bargains-plays-major-role-in-mass-incarceration .DA=12/21/17.-SVJK)

As long as plea bargains are used as a club to coerce defendants into abdicating their right of the constitutional guarantee to a fair trial, the
prison-industrial complex will continue to grow exponentially. Plea bargains are one big woodpile that serves to fuel the
ever-expanding prison-industrial complex, rendering transparent the American political resolve to incarcerate more and more
people even if it means bankrupting their municipalities, cutting education and devoting their budgets to subsidizing the for-profit prison
industry. If this resolve represents the mens rea (criminal intent) of the political will for mass incarceration, then plea
bargaining can be
said to represent(s) the actus reus, the physical act of carrying out the industrial carceral state. If plea
bargains were eliminated, or even severely monitored and reduced, the states and the federal
government would then be required to carry out their burden under the constitution of prov(e)ing the guilt of a
criminal defendant in accordance with the law. If this happened, there would be a whopping reduction in prosecutions,
not to mention incarcerations. Such a shift would be an important step in ending the current carceral
culture of mass confinement and cruelty. Michelle Alexander, a civil rights lawyer and bestselling author of the book, The New Jim Crow:
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, recently wrote in The New York Times that in her phone call with Susan Burton, a formerly
incarcerated woman who took a plea bargain for drug use, Burton asked: 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? Believe me, I know. I'm asking what we can do. Can we crash the
system just by exercising our rights? Burton has the right to ask this question. It took her 15 years after pleading to a drug charge to get her life
back together. The organization she recently started, A New Way of Life, offers a much-needed lifeline to women released from prison. But it
does much more than this: it is also helping to start a movement against plea bargaining and the restoration of the constitution as it applies to
citizens. All of Us or None is another such group that is organizing formerly incarcerated people and encouraging them to demand restoration
of their basic civil and human rights. But the question Burton asks remains: could
criminal defendants really crash the
system if they demanded their constitutional rights and refused to plea to crimes they did not
commit? From the point of view of American University law professor Angela J. Davis, the answer is yes. The system of mass
industrial incarceration is entirely dependent on the cooperation of those it seeks to control. If
everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised their constitutional rights, then there would not be
enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the flood tide of litigation. As Davis notes, not everyone
would have to join for the revolt to have an impact: "if the number of people exercising their trial rights suddenly doubled or tripled in some
jurisdictions, it would create chaos."

Peculiar institutions like plea bargains, lying to the public in order to hide the use of
people for profit, are not the result of racialized violence but the causal factors of it.
Wacquant 4, Loic.Deadly Symbiosis when ghetto and prison meet and mesh. http://www.sociology.cam.ac.uk/people/academic-
staff/professor-loic-wacquant/deadly-symbiosis-prison-ghetto .DA=3/2/17.-SVJK)

I indicated earlier that slavery, the Jim Crow system and the ghetto are ‘race making’ institutions, which is to say that
they do not simply process an ethnoracial division that would somehow exist outside of and independently
from them. Rather, each produces (or co-produces) this division (anew) out of inherited demarcations and
disparities of group power and inscribes it at every epoch in a distinctive constellation of material and
symbolic forms.35 And all have consistently racialized the arbitrary boundary setting African Americans apart from all others in the
United States by actively denying its cultural origin in history, ascribing it instead to the fictitious necessity of biology. The highly particular
conception of ‘race’ that America has invented, virtually unique in the world for its rigidity and consequentiality, is a direct
outcome of the momentous collision between slavery and democracy as modes of organization of social life
after bondage had been established as the major form of labor conscription and control in a underpopulated
colony home to a pre-capitalist system of production (Fields, 1982). The Jim Crow regime reworked the racialized
boundary between slave and free into a rigid caste separation between ‘whites’ and ‘Negros’ – comprising all persons of known African
ancestry, no matter how minimal – that infected every crevice of the postbellum social system in the South (Powdermaker, 1939). The
ghetto, in turn, imprinted this dichotomy onto the spatial makeup and institutional schemas of the industrial
metropolis. So much so that, in the wake of the ‘urban riots’ of the 1960s, which in truth were uprisings
against intersecting caste and class subordination, ‘urban’ and black became near-synonymous in policy
making as well as everyday parlance. And the ‘crisis’ of the city came to stand for the enduring contradiction between the individualistic and
competitive tenor of American life, on the one hand, and the continued seclusion of African Americans from it, on the other.36 As a new
century dawns, it is up to the fourth ‘peculiar institution’ born of the adjoining of the hyperghetto [and] with the carceral
system to remould the social meaning and significance of ‘race’ in accordance with the dictates of the
deregulated economy and the post-Keynesian state. Now, the penal apparatus has long served as an accessory to ethnoracial
domination by helping to stabilize a regime under attack or bridge the hiatus between successive regimes: thus the ‘Black Codes’ of
Reconstruction served to keep African-American labor in place following the demise of slavery while the criminalization of civil rights protests in
the South in the 1950s aimed to retard the agony of Jim Crow. But the
role of the carceral institution today is different in that, for
the first time in US history, it has been elevated to the rank of main machine for ‘race making’.