Fifteen Questions: Andrew Manuel Crespo ’05 on Plea Bargaining, Playing Football in High School, and a Fateful Coop Dance Party
Andrew Manuel Crespo ’05 is a professor of criminal law and procedure at Harvard Law school, the executive faculty director of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, and a founding editor of Inquest, a forum for advancing decarceral ideas. He has clerked for Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan and served as a public defender in Washington, D.C.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
FM: I thought we might begin with Inquest. It’s a decarceral forum that you helped to create, and now you serve as one of the coeditors of. So I’m really interested, what prompted you to establish it?
AMC: The Institute to End Mass Incarceration, which is a center here that I [co-run], is the publisher of Inquest — Inquest was one of our first projects — and we published it because we realized that we needed it. There are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people across the country who are doing work every day in some way to try to end mass incarceration in the United States. And one of the striking things about it is how disaggregated or siloed that community of people can be.
We realized that there isn’t one place for all those people to come together and learn from each other, share ideas with each other, inspire each other.
Now they’re reading each other here and it’s sparking all sorts of new ideas.
FM: If you had to recommend one piece, one thing that’s in Inquest, what would it be?
AMC: One thing that I’m really proud of that Inquest has started doing even more recently is we’ve been publishing collected series. Three, four, or five essays run together as a theme. Some of these we’ve done as collaborations, so we did one on carceral labor with LPE Blog. And we did one that’s ongoing now with Truthout, on abolition in practice.
FM: In the conversation that you had at the symposium with some of the formerly incarcerated men who were included as part of The Visiting Room Project.
I’m really interested in what you guys talked about, and how it felt to be a part of that?
AMC: For big chunks of the country, prison is remote. That’s part of what prison does.
We literally take people from their communities, and send them sometimes hundreds of miles away, as a way to almost try to render invisible what it is that mass incarceration is doing.
The Visiting Room Project is the largest collection ever, of first-person video narratives for men serving life without parole.
It’s like you’re sitting across the table from them, just hearing them tell you a bit about their lives. And you quickly see what is apparent to anyone who knows people who are in prison — is that these are just people. They are people and they have their lives. They have stories. They have all the complexities that all of us have.
What was surprising when they started this project was none of them expected to be released. And then because of elections, because of organizing, and because of the hard work of communities trying to change public policies — Louisiana had folks running their clemency system, including their governor, who were willing to give some of these men a second chance and release them — about 25, 26 of them had been released. And a number of them spent the whole day here at Harvard.
We ended it with this evening symposium where we just got to talk about their lives and the way that this project can reach out to people and start changing hearts by making apparent to people what it is that mass incarceration does on a human level.
FM: Do you have any memories in particular of things that they said that, for you, are particularly salient?
AMC: I’m struck by the extent to which, really to a person, they conveyed a sense of hopefulness for folks who are doing the hard work of trying to end a system as massive and as entrenched as mass incarceration.
These men experienced this. They’d been sentenced to die in Angola. And yet, the message they wanted to bring to Harvard students, to a place of just tremendous privilege, was one of hope.
FM: You went to Harvard College, then you went to Harvard Law School. And now here you are as a professor at the law school. So I’m wondering, what keeps you coming back?
AMC: At every stage of my life at Harvard, I have found friends who had a shared sense of values and commitments in the world that has been both formative and reinforcing.
I feel really lucky to have had the space to have, now, multi-decade Harvard relationships that continue to be so important to me. And to be making new ones every semester.
FM: Given that you’ve spent so much time at Harvard, I’m very interested in how you conceptualize Harvard’s role within various systems in America.
Have you seen your peers become these leaders of tomorrow, and in what ways?
AMC: The Harvard degree does not confer on you a guarantee that you will use the privilege and power that you get by virtue of being here to make the world better. That’s a choice. It’s always a choice.
I’m constantly inspired by what I see some of my students doing, what I see some of my peers doing, my fellow alums doing. And then sometimes I see other alums of this school, and I’m horrified by what they’re doing and that’s just the messy reality of the world we live in.
FM: In a similarly pedagogical vein, I wanted to talk about your forthcoming book, “Criminal Law and the American Penal System.”
AMC: I’m writing this book with a good friend and tremendous collaborator at the University of Chicago named John Rappaport.
We have big hopes for this book — the hope is to pretty meaningfully reorient the criminal law class that’s a required class for every law student.
If you look at the major books that are used to teach this class out there across the country, they’re written by tremendous law professors and real leaders in the field. But the first editions of each of those books, which are still their basic DNA, were written back in the late 60s and early 70s. The American prison population starts going vertical in 1973 and just doesn’t stop growing until 2009. That’s the period, the stretch of decades, during which we became the country that incarcerates more of its own people than any country in the history of the world.
I think that a required class about criminal law should be teaching people about the role that law and lawyers played in creating mass incarceration and the role that law and lawyers could play in helping to end it.
Plea bargaining is a major part of the story of mass incarceration. It’s how you can get to a system that can produce so many convictions essentially on the cheap.
FM: I wanted to talk about your recent article that you wrote, called “No Justice, No Pleas.”
You outline the potential of plea bargaining unions and the possibility of collective striking against plea deals. In your opinion, does this represent one of the more feasible ways of working within the confines of law to enact radical change with regards to mass incarceration?
AMC: A woman named Susan Burton, who is a formerly incarcerated organizer in California, she shared this idea in the pages of the New York Times with Michelle Alexander, where she just asked what would happen — I was just talking about plea bargaining — if everybody who was facing criminal charges and being asked to plead guilty, if they banded together and refused to do it?
The answer, I think, is that the system would immediately grind to a halt. There’s no way for any penal system in the country, any sort of local county courthouse, any kind of jail, to be able to handle, frankly, even just 5 or 7 percent of the people facing charges, refusing to plead guilty.
When you are asked, “How do you plead?” and you say, “Not guilty,” that’s actually a tremendously powerful thing to do. In part because it demands from the state that the state do what it promises it’s going to do to everybody, which is what it says in the Constitution: give you a trial, in front of a jury, by your peers, in public, with a lawyer to defend your rights. That’s not easy for the state to do.
FM: I wonder, how do you integrate those ideas into your teaching of law students here, which are, as we know, kind of within those spaces and the ivory tower?
AMC: The most essential way is through The Institute to End Mass Incarceration, which we started here two years ago, which is built on exactly this whole theory that I just laid out.
It has advocacy work that it does, where we partner directly with anti-carceral, organizer-led campaigns in order to walk the walk I was just describing, to be lawyers that are part of the organizing team for those efforts.
FM: My next question has to do with your intentions going into law school. Did you know that you wanted to go into carceral advocacy?
AMC: I didn’t have lawyers in my family. My parents were each the first ones and the only ones in their generation of siblings to graduate college. My grandparents didn’t go to college, my mom’s mom stopped schooling in third grade.
I didn’t know a lot about what you could do as a lawyer, coming into law school.
I was lucky my first year as a student here to be taught by someone who is a real giant at this school who passed away recently. His name is Charles Ogletree.
In addition to being a legend here, before that, he was a legend in D.C., as a lawyer at the office where I would eventually work as a public defender, the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia.
I remember sitting in his office that looked a lot like this one, and asking him for career advice, and him just telling me: “You’re a public defender. You should try going to work at the office I worked at.” And I did, and it was tremendously formative for me.
FM: I wanted to ask you a little bit more about your personal life, and your history. Fair warning: I did a lot of research and found some deep cuts.
AMC: Uh oh, alright.
FM: So I learned from this 2000 article on your high school academic prowess, that you were the student council president, the starting right guard on the football team, and the valedictorian. So I would love to know — this is a very impressive array of feats — which of these activities did you find the most fulfilling?
AMC: This picture that I have –
That’s me in the huddle, in my high school football team.
My mom is always a little annoyed when I say that playing football in high school was one of the most important things I did. I loved being student council president, it was like my first real chance experimenting with civic leadership, and I took it really seriously.
As the student council president and valedictorian points go — I had some real nerd juice going. I was also in musical theater.
But something about the team nature of playing football was really valuable to me, and the interdependence of it.
FM: In college, I learned that you performed with the Veritones. So what was your favorite song that you performed?
AMC: At least back then, one of our standards was a song by Marc Cohn called “Walking in Memphis,” which I now sing to my daughter at bedtime.
FM: I learned that you met your wife on the dance floor of the Dudley Coop. This is kind of the ideal meet cute. Please tell me more.
AMC: To segue from the Veritones, one of the Veritones who was my dearest friend, was my wife’s roommate in Quincy house. And she emailed me saying, “Hey, I’m gonna go to this party at the Coop.”
It’s like, hey, a chance for a great dance party. Like there weren’t a ton of those as an undergrad here.
I met my wife dancing on the dance floor there. And we just immediately hit it off, we connected. There was that special kind of spark or connection. And we danced till they shut the party down.
And then I asked the mutual friend a few days later, “Hey, I really had a great time meeting your roommate. You should hook us up. I’d like to see if she wants to go out.” And the friend said: “Absolutely not.”
“You have to understand, Abby is a grown woman. And you will mess this up if you try and date her right now. You need to slow your roll, grow up, come back in the fall, beginning of junior year, and we’ll talk again.” And I did. You know, in academics, I think you would call it like a revise and resubmit.
But I didn’t forget and I came back in the fall.
I asked her out, and now 20 years later, we are still very much in love, happily married, have two kiddos, and all still right here at Harvard.
FM: You have two kids, what are your favorite things to do with them?
AMC: Consistent with how Abby and I met, I really like having dance parties with them. My daughter, who is super into dancing, and my three-year-old son is now getting into it too.
FM: I have just one more question: you’ve seemed to work tirelessly for 20 years now on these issues that are profoundly slow-moving and, I can imagine, easily discouraging. I’m wondering, what are the practices that you engage in to sustain yourself?
AMC: One is really surrounding yourself with partners and colleagues in the work who bring you inspiration, grounding, and who you just enjoy being in the struggle with. That feeling of solidarity is so meaningful, and important.
And then I like reading histories about people in movements who have done improbable, seemingly impossible things.
So grounding yourself in the understanding both that these deeply implausible things are possible and not inevitable, that it takes a lot of work, but that it’s not futile, or at least it’s not destined to be futile. It is for me, inspiring, if you’re in the fight with the right people.
Corrections: December 10, 2023
A previous version of this article incorrectly listed Andrew Manuel Crespo ’05 as an executive faculty director of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration. In fact, he is the institute’s sole executive faculty director.
A previous version of this article misspelled the name of Marc Cohn.
Clarification: December 10, 2023
This article has been updated to clarify that Andrew Manuel Crespo ’05 co-runs The Institute to End Mass Incarceration with Premal Dharia.
— Associate Magazine Editor Sam E. Weil can be reached at sam.weil@thecrimson.com.