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Whatley is Misrepresenting Cooper’s Record on Prisoner Release
A perspective from Alex H. Jones
The Michael Whatley campaign has attacked Roy Cooper with a barrage of harsh, provocative ads criticizing the governor for complying with a court order forcing him to release 3,500 inmates from prison. It’s an effort to perform a damaging backflip on Cooper, cynically recasting a centrist Democrat as a soft-hearted apologist for criminals. The ads do seem to be gaining a bit of traction. The problem is that Cooper handled the prisoner releases not like a hapless leftist, but as the cautious, skeptical anti-crime moderate he has been throughout his career.
It would be churlish not to acknowledge the suffering of crime victims and their families. That is not my intent, nor has Cooper shown any callous indifference toward their woe. But to truly honor the suffering of victims and account for the harm that criminals do requires us to grapple with the truth. Misrepresenting the issue turns a genuine tragedy into a dishonest, malignant political ruse. And the Whatley campaign, by suggesting that Cooper flippantly released dangerous people, is exploiting victims’ grief to score points in a political campaign.
In reality, Roy Cooper fought the prisoner-release orders and took a harsher line toward prisoners than at least one red-state governor. In 2020, left-liberal litigators pressured Cooper to release thousands of prisoners, allegedly to ease overcrowded conditions during the COVID pandemic. Activists used cloying rhetoric to insist that prison conditions were intolerably squalid for incarcerated people, and implored Cooper to take executive action to commute thousands of prisoners’ sentences. Cooper stood firm. The governor refused to commute the sentences of thousands of prisoners rather than let them out of prison.
Cooper did, however, follow court orders forcing the release of prisoners in 2021. The Whatley campaign has aggressively harped on the 3,500 inmates the Cooper administration released from prison. But progressive legal activists had initially requested that the governor release 18,000 prisoners. Legal activists were dourly moralistic about Cooper’s recalcitrant stance. Said one activist: “The idea that, you know, Roy Cooper is somehow being attacked for doing too much here is the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard… what we saw was a constant sort of reluctance to provide meaningful release.” That indictment was much closer to capturing the truth of how Cooper handled the court order than the dark rigmarole in Whatley’s ads.
If Cooper disappointed progressive activists, he outdid at least one Republican governor in limiting the scale of prisoner-release. The Deep South’s criminal justice system was described by historian Robert Caro as “something special,” a study in harsh retribution. But some of the most conservative governors in the region released prisoners during the pandemic. Arkansas and Tennessee, for example, are extremely red states with active death penalties—and they, too, followed court orders to release prisoners. Red-trending Iowa released 4,700 inmates, roughly half of the state’s incarcerated population. By releasing 3,500 inmates, Cooper merely did what other governors were forced to do — obey the will of the judicial branch.
The notion Whatley is pushing—that Cooper is some left-wing critic of the carceral state, eager to release prisoners no matter the cost—is hogwash. The truth is that Cooper is like my political hero, Jim Hunt. He’s a Democrat with broadly progressive views who takes a stern line against criminals. Whatley is distorting the story of COVID, Cooper, and prisoner release. Cooper fought left-wing activists to keep 18,000 prisoners from being released in He was more cautious than Republican superstar Kim Reynolds, the governor of Iowa. The facts are quite different than Whatley and his ad-makers would like North Carolina to believe.
“Viewpoints” on Chapelboro is a recurring series of community-submitted opinion columns. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work or reporting of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com.
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