Speakers Kemba Smith Pradia and Paul Butler deliver powerful remarks at ADI Convening

CARLISLE, Pa.—This year, the Antiracist Development Institute (ADI) at Penn State Dickinson Law’s Third Annual Convening featured two exceptional keynote speakers who drew upon their respective personal experiences to offer nuanced critiques of the criminal legal system in the United States.

Kemba Smith Pradia became a criminal justice reform advocate following her 6.5-year incarceration amid the federal government’s so-called “war on drugs” in the 1990s. Her well-received speech during the Convening’s October 9 banquet emphasized the need to tell the stories of Black women inequitably impacted by mass incarceration, driven in part by an increase in drug-related arrests for women.

Paul Butler, the Albert Brick Professor in Law at Georgetown University Law Center, spent years as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice. He drew on what he learned during that time about criminal procedure and equal protection of the laws to discuss racial disparities in the criminal legal system and the need for systemic change.

Their complementary addresses served as powerful reminders of the importance of the ADI’s work to dismantle structures that scaffold systemic racial inequality and intersectional injustice.

‘I still ache for all the women I left behind in prison’

Following an introduction by Shanell Powell ’27, Smith Pradia shared her background with convening attendees. During college, she began dating a man who sold drugs. He became mentally and physically abusive to Smith Pradia and was later murdered while being targeted in a federal probe. The young woman, a first-time nonviolent offender who witnessed some of her boyfriend’s criminal actions, was sentenced to 24.5 years in prison in accordance with mandatory minimum guidelines. She was seven months pregnant at the time.

Smith Pradia’s family and friends tirelessly fought the injustice of her sentence. She eventually received a commutation from President Bill Clinton in 2000, thanks in part to the efforts of then-NAACP Legal Defense Fund President and Director-Counsel Elaine Jones and then-Associate Director-Counsel Theodore Shaw. President Joe Biden pardoned Smith Pradia in 2024, expunging her criminal record.

She understands the impact that sharing stories like hers can make. Smith Pradia urged those at the Convening to center the perspectives and experiences of formerly incarcerated individuals in their advocacy, as these people are “closest to the problem and closest to the solution.”

She recalled how her parents spread her story wide and far, something she remains incredibly grateful for. “We know that a lot of families who have a loved one incarcerated are embarrassed and ashamed and don't want to share with anyone, but my dad always said that you never know who you are sitting next to,” said Smith Pradia.

She highlighted the success stories of formerly incarcerated individuals, particularly women, to counter “fear-mongering” narratives about those who have served time.

“Walking out those prison doors and having legal lions on my team advocating for my release, it was only natural for me to want to come out and do the same thing advocating for others,” said Smith Pradia. She remembered speaking to her mom through tears following her release from prison. “She kept asking me, ‘What is wrong, aren’t you happy that you are home?’ And I told my mom, ‘I am happy that I am home, but at the same time, I still ache for all the women I left behind in prison who had the same story and deserve the same second chance that I received,’” said Smith Pradia.

That feeling has fueled her work over the past 25 years, including her service on the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission and Virginia Parole Board, as well as her testimony before Congress and the United Nations on criminal justice issues. Earlier during the Convening, the ADI screened a movie that Smith Pradia executive produced, Kemba, that told her life story. It is currently streaming on BET+.

‘We need to study the equal protection of laws’

Butler delivered his Convening keynote on October 10 during a session of Penn State Dickinson Law’s “Race and the Equal Protection of the Laws” class, a required course for all first-year students at the Law School. Speaking in Carlisle’s Apfelbaum Family Courtroom and Auditorium with a livestream to University Park, Butler introduced himself as a former prosecutor who “used that power to put Black men, Black women, Hispanic people, and poor people in prison. Like a lot of prosecutors, that was pretty much all I did.”

He noted that perhaps he should have questioned the work he was doing. Since leaving that job, he has raised those questions in his scholarship, including authoring the book Chokehold: Policing Black Men, which The New York Times dubbed the best book on criminal justice reform since The New Jim Crow.

Butler discussed the role of race in the development of constitutional criminal procedure. He outlined how white supremacist narratives fed the false perception that Black men were “dangerous.”

Butler noted that in many cases with Black litigants, race was not cited in Supreme Court of the United States justices’ opinions. “I have been talking a lot about race, but if you read those opinions, the Court does not. The Court is doing racial justice work, but it is not talking about race,” said Butler, pointing to the Court’s 1935 decision in Norris v. Alabama and its 1936 decision in Brown v. Mississippi.

After exploring the founding of the NAACP, noting the contributions of civil rights attorney and later Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and the implications of the Supreme Court’s 1968 decision in Terry v. Ohio, Butler revealed that there are more Black people in the criminal legal system today than there were enslaved people in 1850.

“When people think of race and crime or race and the policing problem today, they think about it quite differently than people thought of the problem at the time of the founding of the NAACP,” said Butler. “They think about Black people and especially Black men. Everybody understands that there's a problem. But people have different theories about what the problem is.”

Some say the issue is with Black men and masculinity, he noted. Others claim it’s an issue of policing or underpolicing or one of law reform. Butler played a series of media clips related to those viewpoints and wove in samples from relevant hip-hop and R&B songs to illustrate his points. He invited audience members to draw their own conclusions before sharing his view.

“When I think about my work as a prosecutor and my research as a scholar and my faith as a man, I am also persuaded by the theory articulated by the movement for Black lives. I think that our criminal legal system is not about keeping families and communities safe. It is about keeping Black people in their place,” Butler said.

He concluded by quoting Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and former president Barack Obama, both of whom used the phrase "there but for the grace of God go I" when talking about the incarceration of Black men. “The determination of who goes to criminal court should not be so fortuitous. It should not depend so much on race and class. As long as it does, we need to pay attention,” said Butler. “We need to study the equal protection of laws.”