This week marks the beginning of a new political era – and the end of another.
Not just in Washington, either. A new administration also brings turnover at the state level. U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance joins us today, on her final day as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. She announced her intent to retire last week, and spoke with us about her eight years serving as the head law enforcement official for Alabama's northern district.
Joyce Vance: When I first began working for Attorney General Eric Holder and asked him what he wanted me to do, he said, “I want you to make your community safer.” And I think that’s the job so many of us have taken on in this administration, to fulfill our traditional role in enforcement, but also to work on prevention and reducing recidivism among people who have served a prison sentence.
Alex AuBuchon: You mentioned reducing recidivism, and I know one thing your office has been known for is your work with state prisons, and specifically helping prisoners re-enter society. Can you talk a bit about that?
JV: Sure. Our re-entry work started because I was asked to do some work in Washington, looking at re-entry policy. And as a career prosecutor, in a much earlier day I might have viewed that as work that would have been better done by people who were trained in social work, and not really the job of prosecutors. But as I began to read the material, I really changed my view, pretty radically. Because if we successfully worked to remove the barriers to successful re-entry for people who have served time in prison, we could make the community safer – less crime. We could save on the costs in our criminal justice system. And we could also be doing the right thing for people, helping them reclaim their lives and become hard-working, taxpaying, law-abiding citizens.
One of the most important understandings that underlies the work that we do in re-entry is that people who commit crimes should be held accountable. They should go to prison and serve the sentence that a judge imposes on them. But when they return from prison, they should not come out with impediments that make it impossible for them to go back to being contributing, law-abiding citizens.
And we live in a system where that’s very difficult. Just such a simple act as getting a driver’s license and getting identification was cripplingly difficult in Alabama, until we began to work on that.
We’ve made a lot of progress; we have other work to do. Anything that we can do to help these people reclaim their lives benefits all of us, and it’s tremendously important work.
AA: That is amazing work – but I know the majority of your work as a U.S. Attorney goes back to putting people who deserve to be there behind bars. What are some of the highlights of your tenure as U.S. Attorney as far as prosecution is concerned?
JV: Some of the work that I’m extraordinarily proud of are our public corruption, white-collar fraud cases – sort of heads and tails of the same coin. So the Dunning case that was prosecuted last year that resulted in an 18-year sentence for someone who had leached between $16 and $18 million in funds earmarked for health care for the poorest people in our community, had leached those funds out of the system and into his own pocket.
That whole idea of ensuring that taxpayers’ dollars are not diverted, are spent for the purposes for which they’re meant has been a critical foundation of our work for the last eight years.
AA: And looking back at the last eight years, what’s your impression of what your office has managed to do overall? Is there anything you wish you had done differently?
JV: I feel really good about the work that we’ve done in our office – both the way that we’ve continued to grow as an office, been committed to making the best decisions we can make as prosecutors.
For me personally, you know, I’m far from perfect. I make mistakes. But something that I have come to really appreciate is that we’re human beings – we’re going to make mistakes. But I feel like the mistakes that I have made have come from a place of always trying to do the right thing, and trying to do it as appropriately as you can.
Sometimes our crystal ball isn’t good, and we might make strategic decisions in cases or other matters that, in hindsight, you say “I wish I’d been smarter – I wish I’d done a better job of writing or arguing.”
But at the end of the day, I would assess the performance of the office as outstanding, and they’ve been very patient with me as a leader, which I really appreciate.
AA: Ms. Vance, thank you so much for your time. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
JV: I have to say that, for me, being U.S. Attorney was not a stepping stone on the way to another job. I don’t have any political aspirations. It was really, for me, the capstone of a career serving an office that I love.
I was very grateful for Senator Sessions’ support. It was really because of him that I was confirmed so early. And he also gave me one of the best pieces of advice on how to be a U.S. Attorney. We spoke shortly after I was confirmed, and he told me that one of the most important things I would ever do would be to be there for my people. Prosecutors have hard jobs, and it is easy for people to be critical of prosecutors, and he told me that I would need to always support them. I was grateful for that advice. It was a touchstone for me every day.
U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance is in her final day representing the Northern District of Alabama. Robert Posey will take over as acting U.S. Attorney until President-elect Trump appoints a new prosecutor to that position. And Senator Jeff Sessions will likely take over next week as U.S. Attorney General.