Quick thoughts on the Young Thug trial, plea, and sentence

Young Thug is home—a cause for celebration after his two-and-a-half-year odyssey behind bars—but he is not free. Regardless of the conditions of his release, which I’ll talk about below, it’s something of a miracle that Young Thug got to see his family and sleep in his own bed last night. The trial against him, which continues to proceed against his few remaining co-defendants who either have chosen or not been allowed to plead guilty, was a racist, coercive farce. Thanks to the diligent work of journalists both self-taught, like the newly-minted legal expert Thugger Daily, and institutionally-established, like the New York Times’ Joe Coscarelli, the rap-interested public has been able to follow this case in its stops, starts, twists, and turns. My hope in collecting some thoughts on the case is to make the case that we can, and should, use this case to illuminate the realities of the criminal punishment bureaucracy in the United States and specifically in the American South. The idea being: if they can do this to a multimillionaire rap star while being streamed live to millions, what do you think it looks like when nobody’s watching?

How did Young Thug go home last night?

Yesterday, Young Thug entered a combination of guilty and “no contest” pleas in an incredibly risky gambit, putting his liberty in the hands of a judge more than two years into his RICO trial. In so doing, he gave up more than just his right to a trial, his right to an appeal of that trial’s verdict, and a number of other protections at least theoretically guaranteed for all people being accused of a crime in the United States. He, and his lawyers, explicitly rejected the State of Georgia’s plea offer, which would have put him on probation for 15 years, had him testify that YSL was a street gang, and bound him to a number of undisclosed “special conditions.”

This—a negotiated plea offer—is what the vast majority of plea deals in the United States look like. When you are talking criminal court, you are mostly talking pleas: it’s estimated that 95% of state criminal cases, and 98% of federal criminal cases, end in a guilty plea. So, as a threshold matter, the fact that Young Thug’s case made it to trial—let alone that the trial stretched across two years (we’ll get there)—makes it a tremendous outlier in the criminal legal landscape. The criminal legal system is only able to operate itself because prosecutors and judges are able to coerce defendants into pleading guilty. In a seminal 2012 New York Times op-ed, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, sketched out the ways in which the criminal legal system would more or less crumble if even a small fraction of people charged with crimes took their cases to trial. Trials cost money: you need to get jurors, pay staff overtime (as Young Thug cheekily noted during his plea for leniency with the judge yesterday), and expend state resources to convict someone. This, of course, is because the American legal system at least theoretically (again, most every right a criminal defendant has is theoretical) imposes a high burden upon the state in order to take someone’s freedom: prosecutors must prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt in front of a jury before convicting someone at trial. The criminal punishment bureaucracy in the United States is caught in a paradox: our legal system places a high price on freedom in the abstract, but in practice serves to process predominantly Black men into captivity so that they may be economically exploited, politically disappeared, and managed and controlled by the state. You have probably heard of mass incarceration before.

Plea bargains facilitate mass incarceration, which perpetuates itself by getting its hands on as many (again, overwhelmingly Black) people as possible, as quickly as possible. How it works is: police make arrests, prosecutors have complete discretion to charge arrested people with whatever crime they would like, courts either hold people in jail or force them to pay a ransom for their freedom, and legislatures create gigantic sentencing ranges used to hold over charged individuals’ heads. So, take Young Thug. Thug was arrested in connection with a multi-count indictment that alleged that he was the head of a criminal street gang, meaning that any crime committed “in furtherance” of the gang’s interests could be attributed to him—a choice made by legislators to more easily prosecute people by holding them liable for the acts allegedly committed by people in their orbit. He was then held without bond, stripping him of his freedom before any criminal charge was proven against him. To fight to clear his name, he had to endure two and a half years of sitting in a cage; at a certain point, the price of captivity got too high, and he decided that he would rather plead guilty if it meant he could go home than wait an indeterminate amount of months to win his liberty back. The legal system Young Thug navigated is not the one we have on paper, which treats individual liberty as more or less sacred, but the one we have in practice: one where prosecutors, judges, and lawmakers conspire to create enough pressure on people to win easy convictions and avoid juries.

As I mentioned above, most plea deals are negotiated between prosecutors and defendants. In exchange for a guilty plea, prosecutors will often agree to drop some charges, stipulate to a sentence, and offer the certainty of a specific punishment. This is possible not only because people pleading guilty are often being held behind bars and forced to prove their innocence (which, again, is a complete inversion of our system’s “innocent until proven guilty” theoretical commitments), but because judges are equipped with a coercive power of their own. Because mass incarceration cannot exist in a system where peoples’ rights are actually being enforced and honored, lawmakers provide judges and prosecutors with the ability to threaten massive amounts of prison time at people convicted of crimes. Criminal statutes typically have ranges of authorized sentences that more often than not veer into the totally nonsensical; these ranges exist not because they make sense as proportionate punishment for a crime, but because the threat of a high sentence can force someone into pleading guilty in exchange for a sure sentence. In other words, most criminal sentencing ranges are not meant to reflect what society, as it were, would deem an appropriate response to a criminal violation, but rather to be used as coercive measures to ensure people plead their cases down rather than exercise their right to trial. They put people in a position to gamble for their freedom, and they skew the odds in favor of the house.

Again, Young Thug’s case is instructive. Yesterday, the prosecutors offered Young Thug a 15-year probation term in exchange for a plea of guilty and certain other special conditions; when Young Thug rejected their offer and decided to put his sentence in the hands of the court, the prosecutors asked for a 45 year sentence: 25 in prison, 20 on probation. In one moment, the prosecutors determined that Young Thug did not need to do a sentence behind bars; the next, they demanded he do at least 25 years. The only thing that changed was that Young Thug rejected their coercive requests. If it seems recklessly disingenuous, that’s because it is.

So, Young Thug is free?

No. In putting his sentence in the hands of the judge, Young Thug took a tremendous risk that ultimately paid off—he was sentenced to time served with 15 years of probation, the exact sentence he had negotiated with the state, without having to testify against putative members of YSL. But while Young Thug’s coming home warrants celebration, the conditions of his release do not. Yesterday, Young Thug was sentenced to 40 years of prison time. Because he was offered probation, those years are suspended: if he successfully completes his probation, he will not have to spend another day behind bars. Suspended sentences, though, are another way in which the perpetuators of mass incarceration control people. For the next seven-and-a-half years, Young Thug will have to check in regularly with a probation officer. For the full fifteen, he is, with limited exceptions, banned from his hometown Metro Atlanta. He will be drug tested, his social media will be monitored, he is not permitted to be around people with certain convictions. He is not permitted to “promote gang activity,” an alarming condition stemming from a case in which prosecutors used lyrics, emojis, and hand symbols to argue that Young Thug was running a street gang. Nearly every Young Thug song contains a reference to YSL, a slime ad-lib, or a bit of lyrical content that the state has weaponized against him. It is quite possible that he is not allowed to continue as a touring or recording artist—if he is, his lyrics and performances will be closely tracked by a Tipper Gore-ian panopticon. Turn on an NFL game this weekend and count how many times you see a player wipe his nose after a first down, tackle, or touchdown; if Young Thug does that once over the next 15 years, a judge can decide that he must spend 40 years in prison (in the spirit of complete accuracy, it appears he would actually serve 17.5 more years, with 20 years suspended as parole time).

In many ways, Young Thug’s probation is this restrictive because of who he is: Young Thug was prosecuted not because law enforcement thought he was a gang leader, but because he was a popular rapper. His prosecution was, and is, as much a racist crusade against rap music and its perceived effects as it was a prosecution of a “gang.” Young Thug was targeted because he is a famous and successful Black artist, and he will be held to a ludicrous, dubiously legal standard because of his fame, his success, and his race. But, again, general lessons abound. Often times, people coerced into plea deals are offered probation, an option that feels like freedom because it does not entail literal caging. But probation, too, is as coercive a tool of the mass incarceration apparatus as anything else. If you are on probation, the state can control your every move. It can decide who you are allowed to be around, it can extract never-ending money from you, and it can condition every term of your liberty. You are not a prisoner on probation, but your freedom is more or less held hostage.

Probation, too, lowers the barriers for the state to cage people. If, over the next 15 years, Young Thug is accused of violating his probation terms, he will be held behind bars. If the same law enforcement apparatus that targeted him in the first place decides to target him again, he will be held behind bars. When you are on probation, you are presumed guilty of any future infraction, and you are no longer entitled to a jury who will decide whether you must serve your suspended sentence. The judge, and the judge alone, now holds the keys to your freedom.

In a very real sense, the State of Georgia won its sham prosecution against Young Thug. They did not prove a case against him, and there is every reason to believe that Brian Steel could have mounted a defense in front of the jury that would have cleared his name. But despite the fact that this prosecution was unethical and laughably sloppy, the criminal statutes that Young Thug was charged with violating are broad enough that a jury could have found him guilty on some, if not all, of his counts. If found guilty, the judge could have sentenced him to 120 years in prison. And in order to even get to that point—the point at which his name might have been cleared—Young Thug would have had to spend months more in jail.

And so the criminal punishment system worked how it does every day: not as a series of safeguards put in place by a society that cares about liberty and imposes a high cost on its being taken away, but as a system of mass processing, coercion, and violence used to exert economic, political, and social control over Black people, poor people, and all others from whom American society chooses to extract debts. Young Thug got to go home, but for the next 15 years he is banned from home. And the state, for all its fumbling, got to tell a rapper what he can and cannot do.