A former prosecutor’s book outlines recommendations to reduce excessive criminal punishment of Black people.
Debbie Hines CW’76 became a prosecutor in Baltimore to make a difference in the Black community—only to realize that prosecutors play a big role in criminalizing Black people.
Prosecutors at the state and local levels handle most criminal cases in the United States and have perpetuated a system that prioritizes plea bargaining, swift convictions, and excessive punishment of Black defendants, Hines claims. But prosecutors are also in the best position to reform the criminal justice system.
Earlier this year, Hines wrote Get Off My Neck: Black Lives, White Justice, and a Former Prosecutor’s Quest for Reform, which offers specific recommendations for criminal justice and racial justice reform, largely from within the system.
The title comes from Al Sharpton’s eulogy for George Floyd, a Black man whose murder by a white police officer sparked nationwide outrage and spurred Hines to write the book. But the recommendations she makes are based upon a lifetime of experiences.
For the first five years of her life, Hines lived in West Baltimore, not far from where weeks of protests and riots against police brutality would occur over the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, a Black man who died after sustaining a severe spinal cord injury while in police custody.
Hines, her parents Willie and Naomi, and older brother Emery moved to the Park Heights section of Baltimore, a neighborhood filled with working-class Black families, where Hines’s parents lived for the next 40 years. Hines’s childhood included “the talk” her parents gave her and her brother about how to behave around the police. “Black people pretty much know that if you’re stopped by the police, try not to have any kneejerk actions,” she says. “Try to let your hands be seen at all times. Try not to go to certain areas where there could be issues with the police in terms of driving.” She also learned some of the history of police brutality. “Black people have known for years that police kill Black people, but it just didn’t get reported and become as mainstream as it is now,” adds Hines.
Hines and her brother were the first in their family to graduate from college. At Penn, Hines studied US history which “started me on a lifelong journey and yearning to know more about how history affects society, with a particular emphasis on Black Americans,” she says. “My Penn studies helped me to think about change—that history does not need to be inevitable or repeat. Change is possible.” Hines credits her advisor, former history professor and author Nell Irvin Painter, with dissuading her from pursuing a PhD and becoming a professor. “She actually told me what that entailed,” says Hines. “I said to myself, I do not want to spend my life publishing every year during the summer forever.”
Hines instead earned a law degree from the George Washington University School of Law. A job as an assistant attorney general in the Maryland Attorney General’s Office followed, and a few years later she joined the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office as a prosecutor.
In Get Off My Neck, Hines recommends a wide range of criminal and racial justice reforms to reduce the targeting and criminalization of Black people. These include establishing state oversight for prosecutors’ offices, as well as “integrity units” to review convictions and throw out any obtained through misconduct or illegal actions. Hines also advocates for requiring prosecutors to get involved in the communities they serve, expanding restorative justice programs, and developing alliances to promote prosecutor reform and public safety.
Ending the prosecution of certain misdemeanors is on her list, too. As a Baltimore City prosecutor, Hines worked on two or three felony cases per week but spent the bulk of her time on misdemeanors; on a given day, she handled up to 35 cases. Many misdemeanors “are just nuisance cases that clog the court” and should not be prosecuted, says Hines. These include trespassing, loitering, disorderly conduct, disturbance of the peace, driving on a suspended or expired license, driving a vehicle with expired tags, possession of marijuana, and prostitution. Civil fines should be imposed for traffic misdemeanors that do not cause harm or affect public safety.
After five years as a Baltimore prosecutor, Hines transitioned to private practice. She launched the Law Offices of Deborah K. Hines in 1998, focusing on criminal defense, family law, personal injury, and administrative law. That gave her new insight into the biases of the criminal justice system. “I saw the real upfront and personal effects on people that lasted long after their day in court ended,” she notes. Most of her Black clients face racial disparities regarding cash bail, probation, juvenile justice, sentencing, and increased or enhanced charges that she writes about in Get Off My Neck.
For example, “I see firsthand how a cash bail system keeps innocent people in jail before trial date and forces them to take a guilty plea to get on with their lives, even if innocent,” she says. “Almost all the Black clients I’ve represented who are placed on probation receive supervised probation versus unsupervised probation that most white defendants receive.” Hines explains that supervised probation puts clients at risk of incarceration if they violate technical terms of their probation, such as missing an appointment, failing a drug test, failing to pay court fines or restitution, failing to complete anger management classes, and other technical violations that force them back to court. Clients who suffer from substance abuse and mental illness continue to get in trouble or receive more jail time because they violated a probation term due to their condition, she adds.
Hines appears frequently in the media to provide analysis of legal and political issues. She resided in Washington, DC, for 25 years, before returning to her hometown of Baltimore to live in a house she inherited from her brother.
Hines acknowledges in her book that changing “the footprint of the carceral prosecution system” will take “steady, relentless effort.” And for that, you need hope. Hines credits her mother for teaching her to always continue learning and never stop hoping. Her mother overcame many challenges, including being born with elephantiasis and leaving school in the ninth grade to work as a sharecropper with family in the Jim Crow-era South. “From everything I experienced in my life with my mother, I know that knowledge is key,” she says, “and that you always have to have hope.”
—Samantha Drake CGS’06
