VOICES FROM INSIDE THE SYSTEM

‘My Goal Is to Dismantle the System I Once Defended’

Lola Rainey is a former Arizona county prosecutor who left her work to become an abolitionist

Voices From Inside the System is a new GEN series where we interview people who have had firsthand experience in industries with especially fraught histories of systemic racism and inequity. We asked our subjects to think deeply about the role they played and the work they did. We asked them why they stayed or why they left, how they might be complicit, or if they thought they — or anyone — could fundamentally change the system.

Lola Rainey is a former Pima County prosecutor in her 60s from Tucson, Arizona. She now works as an abolitionist with a focus on bail reform. According to the ACLU, Arizona has the highest Latino incarceration rate in the country. Since 2000, the prison population in the state has increased by 60%; it is twelve times larger than it was in 1978. Rainey spoke with journalist Justine van der Leun about her experience.

Before I became a prosecutor, I wanted to write. I started working as a copy girl at a local paper in Arizona. I was entering my junior year in college; it was the summer of 1977. There were few female journalists — and no Black female journalists — but I felt it was a stepping-stone to a job as a reporter. After six weeks, an editor invited me to lunch and told me that it was my last day. “If you were in a New York or Chicago newsroom, you’d fit in. But you don’t fit in here,” he said. I understood this white man was saying there was no future for me in media.

I stuffed it down. Over the next two years, I got married, had a baby, finished my undergraduate degree in journalism, made the Dean’s List, did all the right things to prove myself. But I watched as doors opened for my white peers while I looked for work as a salesperson at a department store. A friend, also a Black woman, suggested I apply to the law school where she was studying. I was accepted, one of a handful of Black students, and came out with a law degree.

The immediate goal was to find a job. My father worked at the post office and my mom worked at a bank and cleaned houses. I didn’t have the connections to get a position at a private firm. The first job I got was working for the government as a city prosecutor in Tucson. Then in 1987, I became an assistant district attorney, the first Black female prosecutor in Pima County. I was good at litigating. I liked the courtroom theatrics and the idea that I was a guardian of justice. And I liked to win.

That is the culture of prosecution: Win, win, win. You’re rewarded for being tough and getting convictions, not for being just. It’s politicized. Very few people are going to elect a district attorney who campaigns by saying: “I’m not going to put away too many people.”

I saw we were prosecuting people of color disproportionately, but I kept looking at each case individually. When the facts indicated that a crime had been committed, I wanted the perpetrator held accountable. I sent people to prison and didn’t question the amount of time they got, or how they were charged.

Basically, I was willing to put on blinders in order to continue to do the work I cared about. It wasn’t about the money — you don’t make much as a government lawyer — it was about the purpose and meaning of the job. I believed I was advocating for crime victims in lower-income, working-class minority and Black communities. Also, I was trying to build a career. I was part of a team. If you’re a part of perpetuating a system that is broken and racist, you yourself become twisted and damaged by it, too, perhaps without even noticing.

In 1990, I went into private practice as a defense attorney. I still believed in the law, but my views were evolving. We all knew about the racist judge, what he said casually at his backyard barbeque. I paid the bills with divorce law and criminal defense, but I started taking civil rights cases, too. I began to work with people who constantly felt the boot of the state on their necks.

There’s no such thing as a progressive prosecutor. It’s like saying you have a kind overseer because he doesn’t whip you as much. Really? That’s progress?

After five years, an eye condition I’d had from childhood deteriorated and I took a break while awaiting a corneal transplant. During that time, I began to study international law, with a focus on indigenous rights. I received an LLM degree. In 1999, I was hired as an acting attorney general for the Colorado River Indian Tribes. I started wrestling with questions: Why are indigenous tribes always fighting federal authorities? Why are prosecutors overcharging Black people, setting high bails for people of color, giving other people a pass? No matter how many times I got one individual a break, I saw so many others get shafted.

I tried to push for reforms. Change this, then that. It was patchwork. It never stuck. The system adjusted and went back to what it was. Now, when I see the conversation on progressive prosecutors, I laugh. There’s no such thing as a progressive prosecutor. It’s like saying you have a kind overseer because he doesn’t whip you as much. Really? That’s progress?

I had to admit that laws serve people with power, people with money, corporations. I understood that you had to be radical to have hope of achieving some kind of justice for all. And justice for all is not possible in a system that has supported and maintained the power of certain people to the detriment of all others. Black and Brown people and indigenous people are immeasurably harmed by it. But so are white people. Whiteness blinds them because they do benefit over people of color — but they’re also getting screwed.

In 2003, at the end of my term working for the tribes, I left law completely. I had undergone one corneal transplant but needed the second one. I lost some of my vision. I entered the world of disability activists. I saw in my National Federation of the Blind comrades a courage and bravery I had never before witnessed. They just set fire to things. They fought, and then fought harder. Inspired and grieving, I traveled the world, taught, and reframed my ideas of what justice is. I became, once and for all, an abolitionist.

When Black Lives Matter and the new Civil Rights movement was kicking off in 2014, it resonated with me. I supported the Tucson BLM group as an elder supporter and stepped up and spoke out when the youngsters needed me to. In 2017, I began to work with Black Mamas Bail Out to raise money for poor incarcerated moms to get out of jail. People are regularly detained, pre-trial, for extensive terms simply because they can’t afford bail. They lose their jobs. Their families suffer. That same year, my adult daughters and I started Tucson Second Chance Community Bail Fund to help people in my city get free, go home, fight their cases, and achieve better outcomes.

Recently, I was invited to speak about my bail fund to a law school. I declined. I would have had to tell the students to burn their law books. I would have had to tell them that law is a dead system, and a dead system deadens you. I don’t believe in those old laws or anything resembling the status quo. I believe we must create something new and imagine something different. My goal is to dismantle the system I once defended. That’s the only way to improve lives. It’s the only way to create a future that is worth looking forward to, worth living in, worth fighting for.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.