Social movements are surging in ways unseen in a generation, with issues of racial justice and workers’ rights at the fore. Within a span of years, Black Lives Matter has become “the largest movement in U.S. history.” At the same time, the labor movement has seen a rise not just in union filings and successful strikes but in public support as well. Historically, these two movements have not been the same. But their souls are knit. The harms they fight stem from interwoven roots, giving them what community organizers would call overlapping “stories of us and of now,” the narratives of injustice and of hope that spur collective action.

But might these movements also overlap at the more particular level of strategy and tactics? That narrower question has preoccupied me for more than fifteen years, stretching back to my first encounters with American-style plea bargaining. When I was a public defender, I advised scores of individuals — almost all of them Black men — as they considered plea deals placed before them by the state. Each time that I conveyed a plea offer, I watched their eyes fall as they wrestled with the cruelty of it all. The oppressive weight of prison, masquerading behind the façade of a supposedly welfare-maximizing choice. A “bargain.”

It was obvious from the start that what was happening here was anything but. Nor did it take long for me to question my role in it all. The words of Albert Alschuler, which I’d first encountered as a law student, echoed regularly in my ears: “A guilty plea entered at gun point is no less involuntary because an attorney is present to explain how the gun works.” As a lawyer, I could calculate and compare the sentencing ranges associated with any given plea deal. I could offer careful advice about the pros and cons of the different options. But the people confronting these choices needed more than information and advice. They needed power. The power to fight back.