Ben Wofford is a contributing editor at Politico Magazine.

PHILADELPHIA—A convicted murderer is trudging up Rodman Street and the poor guy’s feet are really starting to get sore. “I really didn’t want to be out here doing this today, again,” says Mike Twiggs, shaking his head ruefully as he props up a single bleach-white sneaker on a cast iron stoop, squinting into an iPad. He’s been at this for five straight weeks. “My old legs aren’t used to this,” he chuckles. The 59-year-old gingerly steps up to the door and raps his knuckles on the gleaming white finish, his bony fists and forearms speckled with small linear scars. No one home. Twiggs rummages through a backpack, flicking out some campaign literature that showcases this week’s hot political battle: The Philadelphia’s district attorney’s race. “I guess that’s what happens when you go canvassing on Mother’s Day,” he says, stuffing the brochure into a door wedge and then moving on.

In February, Twiggs emerged from prison—where he served 41 years for murder—and got his first job doing this: Canvassing for an American Civil Liberties Union turnout drive, an effort to tilt the district attorney’s race in Philadelphia. Twiggs, who is black, is sporting baggy sweatpants, aviator sunglasses and an ACLU T-shirt as he navigates the stately carriage homes of the tony Washington Square West neighborhood. Such a collision of worlds rarely occurs in a civic life increasingly segregated by zip code. But thanks to the ACLU, an ex-convict may soon be standing at your doorstep, too.


That’s because in Philadelphia, canvassers like Twiggs are beta-testing the ACLU’s new national strategy—made possible by a highly competitive district attorney’s race. The seven-way Democratic primary, held on Tuesday, will determine one of the most powerful prosecutors on the east coast. And the ACLU’s campaign to swing it represents the first time the national office has invested in a local election. For years, the ACLU has relied on litigation and legal briefs to further its rights-based agenda. But this spring, bolstered by a new spirit of activism and exploding membership numbers (thanks largely to President Donald Trump), an organization accustomed to litigating before the benches of judges, not the doorsteps of voters, is changing gears—venturing into district attorney races across the country to turn out its members and turn up the heat on candidates to take a stand on ACLU priorities like mass incarceration. Its primary weapons in this effort are former convicts like Twiggs, who are leading the canvassing effort that will target the 11,000 ACLU members in this city who are registered to vote and drive public resistance to overzealous prosecution practices.

In this way, the organization hopes to instill a generation of progressive district attorneys around the country, changing the way crime is prosecuted and reducing the incarceration rate—while also pulling the legal rug out from underneath the ACLU’s federal nemeses, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Trump administration.

The political landscape has changed dramatically since several top ACLU officials conceived of the strategy last year. Back then, mass incarceration was seen as a point of growing bipartisan consensus, at least at the federal level. But Trump’s election swept much of that away. These days, would-be reformers have grown steadily demoralized, as with last week’s announcement that Sessions would push for aggressive charges and greater mandatory minimum sentences for low-level, nonviolent drug offenders. Now, the ACLU’s hyperlocal strategy seems not only savvy, but prescient—the movement’s best shot at reducing the nation’s burdensome and expensive prison population—the largest per capita in the world—and combating the profound racial disparities that continue to plague the U.S. criminal justice system.

“If we’re ever going to genuinely transform our nation’s criminal justice system, then we have to overhaul prosecutorial practices,” says Udi Ofer, who is spearheading the ACLU’s new strategy. “If there’s one person in the system that can end mass incarceration tomorrow if they wanted to, it’s prosecutors.”



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Tuesday’s election in Philadelphia, then, is Act 1: Scene 1 of the ACLU’s new localized plan, called the Smart Justice campaign, which was hatched back in October. Ofer, the campaign’s director, calls the strategy Ten-Ten-Ten: A three-year nationwide push for 10 new lawsuits, 10 new state laws, and victories in 10 key district attorney races—a local pincer attack against the nation’s incarceration rate. Ofer says his team hopes to cut that rate one day by 50 percent.

To many, it’s not at all obvious why the ACLU should target local races, rather than use its precious money to challenge Sessions head-on—a stark imperative when your organization’s raison d’etre is to sue the Justice Department. But the Sessions DOJ, Ofer explains, isn’t as powerful as it seems. “Ninety percent of incarcerated populations are in state prisons or in local jails,” Ofer says—the reason why Obama-era clemency policies barely made a dent in the number of incarcerated Americans. “It’s a state-based problem, and it’s a problem that needs to be resolved by the states.”

Of the 2.3 million people in prison, says Ofer, 600,000 are sitting in local jails. “In many ways, to end mass incarceration, you have to overhaul the practices of 3,000 different local jurisdictions,” he says—far outside the purview of Attorney General Sessions. “That’s one of the reasons this problem is so enormous and so complex to solve.” But, Ofer said, it also means an opportunity.

The Smart Justice Campaign was made possible by a $50 million grant from George Soros, in 2014. But the campaign has just $185,000 to work with in Philadelphia, which covers canvassing, literature and social media. It’s a threadbare budget, but one that could can go a long way: The ACLU has 11,000 card-carrying members in Philadelphia who are also registered to vote, which the ACLU increasingly sees as an untapped political resource. Based on past elections, political consultants expect turnout to be 115,000 at maximum—around 15 percent—and few seem to think any candidate will reap more than 34,000 votes. Suddenly, 11,000 doesn’t seem like small potatoes.

Smart Justice Campaign Deputy Director Bill Cobb, who designed much of the Philadelphia campaign, described the Philadelphia beta test as a kind of Resistance Moneyball—how to get high-yield results on low equity. “It’s the DA who has to decide what to charge a person with,” says Cobb. He described another shrewd benefit to replacing the DA: Typically, district attorneys have enormous leverage as lobbyists in the state legislature for advancing or hemming punitive crime laws. “District attorneys,” says Cobb, “have tremendous impact at both the front end and the back end.”

In Philadelphia, the seven candidates appeared to have gotten the memo. Nearly all have committed to undoing the city's reputation for aggressive prosecutorial practice. The race is wide open, a rare event in city politics, after the announced departure of DA Seth Williams, who is leaving office under a corruption investigation. The candidates have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in television time—unusual for a drowsy, off-year election—colorful ads peppered with satisfied assurances to fight Trump. The race was at first perceived as a two-way contest between former Assistant DA Michael Untermeyer and former federal prosecutor Joe Kahn. Then a surprise donation from George Soros—a staggering $1.45 million—has suddenly catapulted Larry Krasner, a defense attorney with no prosecutorial background, into the running.

The ACLU has not endorsed a candidate (its tax status prohibits it) and instead will only rally its members to the polls—though it’s widely thought that Krasner, by far the most vocal civil libertarian, is its favorite. At this point, the ACLU’s Cobb told me, almost any candidate will do. “It’s become so popular that every candidate feels the need to represent themselves as a criminal justice reformist,” he told me. “That’s an amazing sign. I don’t believe we could move this field any more far left.”

He might be right. Recently, Untermeyer, a former Republican, announced he was in favor of abolishing cash bail; Krasner has said would abolish the death penalty; and the remaining candidates have each made similar pledges. It’s unclear how much the dialogue is owed to the ACLU, which has pushed for public stances from candidates on issues like civil asset forfeiture—the seizure of money and property related to an arrest—and juvenile life-sentencing. Recently, Pennsylvania had as many as 500 prisoners sentenced to life as juveniles; last year, the Supreme Court ruled the practice unconstitutional. But the DA’s office has been slow to resentence these prisoners—by now grown men, known as “child lifers.” How quickly these cases are adjudicated depends largely on how much the next DA cares about their cases; Krasner, the favorite of the progressive left, has vowed to evaluate each case meticulously.

For Cobb, these issues are personal. In 1993, Cobb was charged with robbery, kidnapping and criminal conspiracy, and he was given a cash bail of $350,000. He sat in jail awaiting trial for 10 months, before winning a petition that the wait violated his right to a speedy trial. But for the 40-odd canvassing unit in Philadelphia, it’s all personal: Every member of the team is a former convict, one whose personal story offers a compelling narrative for the like-minded ACLU members they are meant to rally. The idea was Cobb’s. “We could send, you know, a college student to knock on doors,” he said. “But the goal and objective of this is to educate people about the DA, and their capacity to drive mass incarceration. Who better to inform the public than individuals who have the lived experience of being charged and being sentenced?”

The ACLU’s canvassing team in Philadelphia has two “child-lifers”—and one of them is Twiggs. In the 1970s, as a 16-year- old, Twiggs, who was involved in gang activity in Philadelphia, killed a rival gang member. As a juvenile, he was sentenced to life, and served much of his 41 years at the Graterford Penitentiary. He doesn’t like to talk much about it. “I’m definitely not angry,” Twiggs tells me as we maneuver on the subway. He struggles with the technology to enter the subway gates, which are new, uncertain where to put his coin. Forty-one years is a long time. “None of us saw [the Supreme Court ruling] coming. … I’m just glad to be out, that I didn’t die in prison,” he says. In February, Twiggs was freed; he could have done almost anything. But he wasted almost no time joining the campaign, the outcome of which could affect the fate of people in his very predicament. Philadelphians who have heard Twiggs’ story, and that of the other child-lifer, Vincent Boyd, have reportedly burst into tears on their doorsteps.

Twiggs begins his morning at campaign headquarters: A sprawling, futuristic office space in downtown Philadelphia, with a full-scale, impossibly beautiful view of City Hall directly below—and the district attorney’s office at the end of the block. Here, packed into a glass conference room sit 16 canvassers dressed in blue ACLU T-shirts, huddled over iPads, while organizer Nick Pressley preps them for the day’s agenda. “Remember, today is our third pass,” Pressley tells the group. Later, he briefs the canvassers for a grueling day of walking on Tuesday’s Election Day. But the canvassers already look exhausted—“They’ve knocked on tens of thousands of doors,” Pressley tells me—but he points out that the retention rate of the canvassers is one of the best he’s ever seen. “Most of these guys are doing it because they’re passionate about it,” Pressley explains. “Some have sat in prison for months, even though many were innocent—and lost their job or lost their home in the process.”

A few canvassers share personal stories similar to Cobb’s. One, Donald Coles, tells me that a technical probation violation, 16 years after his sentence ended, spelled jail for three months, costing him his job; his grandmother had to watch his infant daughter. One young man, a 23-year-old, was arrested for selling drugs—a charge that could jeopardize his college degree, where he is studying, poetically, criminal justice. Prestina Serrano, a stately woman dressed in all blue and dazzling jewelry, is here to canvass as an advocate for her son-in-law, who served time in prison for selling marijuana, and her ex-husband—who has been waiting in jail since July 2015, to be tried for breaking and entering, a crime he says he didn’t commit. When I ask how much she’s spent to get through the legal system, Serrano expels a rueful sigh. “Oh gosh. This year alone, maybe $30,000 between the two of them,” she says. “If you’re arrested, you’re really mistreated.” Serrano, who is from the surrounding suburbs, adds, “If you’re a black person in Montgomery County, Bucks County—forget it.”

The cases in the room are instructive: If you see the issue of mass incarceration as a serious one, then Philadelphia’s prosecutorial record is likely to offend you. According to data collected by the ACLU, 67 percent of defendants sitting in Philadelphia jails are awaiting trial; the majority of them stuck there because bail has been set too high. Issues like civil asset forfeiture offer even more startling figures: Of the $5 million that Philadelphia confiscated in civil asset forfeitures in 2015, the ACLU estimates that 32 percent came from arrests that did not result in any convictions. (The DA’s defenders contest some of these statistics.) Abstracted to the state level, the ACLU’s larger playing field, Pennsylvania had roughly 50,000 inmates in state prisons in 2015—the sixth-largest prison population in the country. And the problem may get worse before it gets better: Last month, the state Legislature passed a bill that would no doubt please Sessions, toughening mandatory minimum sentences often viewed as a driver of unnecessary incarceration.

“This is an issue in most major cities. But Philadelphia just presents it far more dramatically,” says David Rudovsky, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies mass incarceration. When I tell him of Twiggs’ case, Rudovsky gives a sigh of recognition. “Philadelphia alone, still, has over 300 juvenile lifers that now have to be resentenced, more than any other state,” he says. Rudovsky is working with the Institute for Justice on its lawsuit over the use of civil asset forfeitures. “The DA is the major player,” Rudovsky continues. “No, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the DA probably is the most significant player in terms of incarceration rates—probably more than the police, probably more than arrest rates, even.”



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A wide-open district attorney race in Philadelphia, or any major city, doesn’t come around often. “Since 1989, there’s been two openings for the DA,” says Larry Ceisler, a longtime political consultant and operative in Philadelphia. The race has given reformers the sense that the stakes are high, and the opportunity to advance their agenda close at hand. “Because of Trump, really, the DA’s race became a race to the left. And then it became a race about death penalty, mass incarceration, police,” says Ceisler. He thinks turnout will be low, typical for an off-year election. For that reason, he says, “it could be close.”

Ceisler was intrigued to get my call; as a member of the ACLU, he had seen something curious last week, when one evening, a man in a blue T-shirt came to his doorstep in South Philadelphia. But the man wordlessly handed Ceisler a brochure, then simply walked away. “All he did was hand it to me,” Ceisler says. “I felt sorry. I couldn’t understand what he was doing. I didn’t realize what this was all about.” Ceisler, a veteran campaign strategist, offers some tips for the ACLU’s upcoming cities in the campaign: Blast the message out sooner—perhaps a news conference with the mayor—only then to follow up with the canvassers, who should emphasize their personal story at all times. Ceisler also worries about the literature, which doesn’t advocate for a particular candidate, but rather instructs members to vote for whichever candidate best supports civil liberties, and links to a second, educational website. He thinks neither makes it clear whom ACLU members should vote for: Krasner. “I think it was a fantastic and noble idea,” Ceisler says. “But I would not say it was executed as well as it could have been.”

The ACLU will have plenty of opportunity to go back to the drawing board—and organizers acknowledge that they are going to dissect the Philadelphia campaign, warts and all. Leaders haven’t decided on the next nine target cities. But Rudovsky thinks the ACLU already has much to celebrate. “What’s remarkable about this race is that virtually all the candidates have taken fairly progressive positions on a whole range of criminal justice matters,” he says. Rudovsky pointed to recent victories of reformist DA’s in Houston, Kim Ogg, and Chicago, Kim Foxx, as breakthroughs—and if Krasner prevails in Philadelphia, the ACLU’s quietly favored candidate would make a hat trick for reformers.

In Houston and Chicago, ACLU’s Ofer spots a trend. “When’s the last time you knew the name of a prosecutor in Harris County Texas? You know about her because her election sent a signal, one that went well beyond Texas,” Ofer says. “There is a reform movement afoot, that prosecutors can be seen as part of the solution to end mass incarceration.”

A campaign sign for DA candidate Larry Krasner. Krasner has been bolstered by a $1.45 million campaign donation from George Soros. | Ben Wofford

No one understands the national stakes better than Twiggs, who became a savvy political junkie inside prison, following the administration of Barack Obama—and the election of Trump. “Obama wasn’t able to achieve everything he wanted to. The Republican Party blocked a lot of his efforts,” Twiggs tells me as we walk. He pauses to look at a Krasner sign, perched in the window of a Federal-style townhouse we pass by. “Obama obviously did enough to help us—juvenile lifers. He did enough to help federal prisoners, with crack cocaine versus powder cocaine and all of that. But now the Republican Party, Jeff Sessions”—he guffaws—“they’re trying to take it back. Trying to erase what the Obama administration did. They’re trying to roll back those gains.”

Twiggs tells me he is looking forward to the end of the campaign. “I’m just trying to get my life back on track,” he says—he’s working on finding a paralegal job, polishing up his résumé and finding a wife. (He’s met someone recently, but, he says grinning, they’re “just talking.”) Though Twiggs tells me that the work has been exhausting, he also says that he has come to depend on it. “I guess it’s a little personal—any chance, you know, to participate in the DA’s race. I guess it feels like I’m making a difference, perhaps.” He pauses to consider this, then quietly says, “Feel like you might be making a difference.” Pressley, the field organizer, tells me later, “A lot of my canvassers are black and brown folks. They don’t think white people care. They don’t think that people care. But then when they get a chance to talk on the doorstep, and that person cares and genuinely empathizes with their situation, it helps them. It gives them further strength to continue along this path of rehabilitation.”

Toward the end of his four-hour shift, Twiggs runs into a voter on the sidewalk—a burly, bearded Caucasian in a T-shirt and Flyers cap, who introduces himself as Steve and is walking a black poodle, named Betsy. “Huh,” Steve grunts, somewhat warily, when he first hears Twiggs’ story. He seems more apprehensive than flustered; there’s a convicted murderer walking on his block. Twiggs asks, “Did you know about the juvenile sentencing issue?” Steve pauses. “I do now,” he says. Twiggs seems to tip his cap, and he hunches forward to hand Steve a brochure. Suddenly, Steve lunges forward, dog leash in fist.

Steve has thrust out his hand. It takes Twiggs a moment to register it but, haltingly, he clasps it in a handshake. For a moment, the two are silent.

“Good luck,” Steve says.