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| Matt Flynn is a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination for Wisconsin governor |
"My object is to stop destroying lives. ... I will review and accept petitions for review from a pardon board of any non-violent offense."
— Matt Flynn on mass incarceration
Madison, Wisconsin — Reached Matt Flynn, candidate for Wisconsin governor, by phone in March on his way to a national student walk-out event in solidarity with victims and survivors of the Parkland massacre.
Our topic was a different type of violence: State-inflicted devastation by the criminal justice system and what Flynn proposes to do about it, if elected governor.
Matt Flynn sounds a lot like he lost a family member to a criminal justice system. He didn't.
But the attorney has obviously been personally affected by family after family watching in horror as municipal police and state prosecutors throw another Wisconsinite into prison.
"I want to empty the jails and prisons of as many non-violent offenders as possible," said Flynn, outlining the scope of a major campaign plank that just a few years ago might be considered radical.
Criminal justice reform is an idea whose time has come as America has endured decades of becoming "a leviathan unmatched in human history," (Loury, Boston Review).
Gov. Scott Walker's part in the prison industry and the assault against Wisconsin families is not as well-known in our state as it should be.
"Walker pushed dozens of proposals in the state house to lengthen criminal penalties, for everything from perjury to privacy invasion to intoxicated boating. In just the 1997–98 legislative session, Walker authored or co-sponsored twenty-seven different bills that either expanded the definition of crimes, increased mandatory minimums for offenders, or curbed the possibility of parole," notes Scott Keyes in The Nation.
Walker openly bragged about his bill, the infamous Truth-in-Sentencing law, which limited early parole, as having come from the corporate bill mill, the American Legislative Exchange Committee.
Most Wisconsin Democrats went along with mass incarceration out of fear or for careerism.
Not Matt Flynn.
As brutality and cruelty have accelerated the erection of the American prison system, Flynn offers a competing vision.
Below is an extended quote from Flynn on the topic:
I had a kid come up to me in Eau Claire a couple of months ago, and he said, 'my dad just got out of prison after 20 years and he can't find a job. What can do we do?'
I said, 'that's a terrible thing; what did he do to get 20 years?'
The predicate offense that sent him off was something that was not violent, no way it should warrant 20 years. How it God's name did they give 20 years for that?
It was he had three prior convictions for marijuana possession. Two possessions can be a felony. Some of these judges, they want to be hard-nosed cowboys. They look at it and say, 'well, three prior felonies and fourth felony that in itself merits a longer sentence' without giving any consideration to the reality. So, if a man gets 20 years in jail, he loses his family, loses his wife, loses contact with his kids, can't get work, destroys his life.
I resolved that we're not going to that. And I think that there is something of an economic incentive for parts of government to build prisons. We spend more money on prisons than on the UW-System. I think we have to stop that, and turn that around. What I said is, and I got angry, I will pardon anybody who is in for a non-violent marijuana possession. I will review and accept petitions for review from a pardon board of any non-violent offense.
And consider commutation of that offense, or pardon depending on the circumstances. I want to empty the jails and prisons of as many non-violent offenders as possible.
I will pardon a lot of people.
Flynn emphasizes he will as well work for "full legalization of marijuana" in Wisconsin.
Flynn speaks with erudition and an acuity missing from Wisconsin politics during the state's Lost Decade, 2011-2019.
Using stories from Wisconsin families and works from history such as Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol and the intellectual historian, Carl Schorske's, disquisitions on 1890s Vienna politics and culture presaging 20th century totalitarian, Flynn has staked out a position, if not unique among his opponents for the nomination of the Democratic Party for governor, certainly the most full-blooded and convincing this writer has heard in this mindless pit of a state.
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