The largest one-time release of federal prisoners in U.S. history took place over Halloween weekend, and hardly anyone, it seems, got scared. Most of those released were men of color—African Americans and Latinos who were convicted of low-level drug crimes and benefitted from a decision by the U.S. Sentencing Commission to retroactively apply new sentencing guidelines to current prisoners. Forty-six of those prisoners, including the mother of Denver Broncos star receiver Demaryius Thomas, saw their sentences commuted by President Obama. They were freed along with more than 6,000 others.

This is the kind of move that, a couple decades ago, would have inspired long, throaty outrage from tough-on-crime advocates on both the right and left—especially on the eve of an election year. Instead, nary a peep was heard from the presidential candidates on either side of the aisle. Senator Ted Cruz spoke up about it, while also pointing out that he favors some sentencing reforms. Hillary Clinton’s racial-justice platform rollout began on the Friday before Halloween, and while she did not mention the mass release specifically, she spoke supportively of “banning the box” to stop asking about criminal histories on job applications and other measures to help former inmates adjust to life on the outside. “It leads to repeat offenses. It creates a culture of hopelessness,” she said. “People who have paid their debt to society need to be able to find jobs, not just closed doors and closed hearts.”



There was one notable exception in the press. Politico framed its story on the prisoner release around the potential for it to backfire politically. Above a photo depicting President Obama during his historic July prison visit in Oklahoma, the headline read: “Has Obama set loose a new Willie Horton?” The quintessential black bogeyman had been revived, just in time for 2016.

One year from this past Sunday, we’ll elect a new President of the United States. With this campaign featuring the most vigorous debate on racial justice in recent memory, it would hardly be a surprise along the way to find Republicans reverting to the Willie Horton strategy: invoking a black (or brown) criminal to sink a Democratic nominee the way it did Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988. George H.W. Bush’s campaign manager that year was Lee Atwater, who articulated the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy more clearly and bluntly than anyone: “you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff” to refer to race, he said in one interview, rather than the more direct “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” We didn’t get to read or hear that interview until the new millennium, and well after Atwater’s death in 1991. By the time we did, Atwater’s move to tie the convicted murderer Horton to Dukakis, the Massachusetts governor under whose watch Horton was furloughed for a weekend in the summer of 1986 and did not return, was already the stuff of dark political legend. The following spring in Maryland, Horton had raped a woman twice and assaulted her fiancé. (He is still sitting in prison today serving out a life sentence.) Atwater famously remarked, “By the time we're finished, they're going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis's running mate.”

The attack, cynical and undeniably race-baiting though it was, worked. Later ads such as Senator Jesse Helms’s “White Hands” were further proof that Republican candidates didn’t have to say “nigger” to use black people to their advantage. It’s the essence of the Southern Strategy: Since the GOP had no interest in black citizens' votes, they used us as a tool to scare white voters further to the right, casting us as the people who are coming to kill you, or rape you, or take your job. This stuff goes back to racial stereotypes that emerged during and after slavery in this country, only its perpetuators now use a slightly more subtle approach. Slightly.