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Initially, Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins was pelted by a blizzard of criticism when he had the courage to radically alter the interpretation and execution of laws in his county.The first-ever African American district attorney in Dallas County, Watkins investigated the number of falsely incarcerated inmates and used DNA technology and other methods to exonerate them.
Secondly, he appropriated vast resources to finding the actual guilty persons for those crimes. Both actions caused great disquiet in the establishment. And if that were not enough, he resisted the outdated and unethical practices of previous Dallas district attorneys.
Past Dallas district attorneys would pocket convictions like nickels and dimes regardless of the defendants’ guilt or innocence. They would then use the convictions to bolster credentials for future political ambitions. But now two or three years into his term, Watkins says the very people who distrusted the law, particularly blacks, now believe in the system and his methods.
Watkins’ actions have garnered national attention and success. This, Watkins says, should give district attorneys around the nation the courage to implement his philosophy. “Actually, it won’t take courage. They will see it does make sense to get away from this whole mentality of ‘getting tough on crime’ because that’s silly. It’s stupid. [They say] ‘Hey, I’m going to be tough for the sake of being tough,” says the Prairie View A&M University political science graduate.
“If you look at that whole outlook of being tough, that has made us complicit. All [district attorneys] across the country who say they are touch on crime have made crime rates worse because what they done is say ‘I can care less. And if you’re innocent or guilty, all I’m concerned is with conviction. Then when I do get conviction, I am not concerned with any kind of rehabilitation.'”
The ramifications have been cataclysmic, Watkins testifies. America has, by far, the highest incarceration rate of any industrialized nation, creating the monstrosity known as the prison-industrial complex. It is a system that is in revolt against itself.
“The problem is that we send a lot of innocent people to prison. But those folks that we do sent to prison that are guilty we don’t give them anything so that when they get out and live on my street and down the street from the school that my kids go to are still criminals,” Watkins says. “They still have the same problem that they had before we convict them. So those that say they are tough on crime are only complicit in making their county, their city and their state less safe.”
Swimming against the legal currents of the times has exposed the egregious inadequacies within the system, Watkins says and now he receives great support to reverse the damnable trend in Dallas County.
“They are starting to see that when we send a 17 year old to prison for five years and he didn’t have a high school diploma, has a drug problem and didn’t have any skills,” says the Texas Weslyan Law School grad. “And he gets out and he’s 22, 23 years old, he’s still uneducated, he still has a drug problem and doesn’t have marketable skills.”
This is why Watkins is an ardent proponent of actual rehabilitation in prison and post-incarceration support for former inmates in order to acclimate prisoners back into society and therefore reduce crime –terry shropshire
