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Voiceover: You're listening to The Takeaway with Melissa Harris-Perry from WNYC and PRX in collaboration with WGBH Radio in Boston.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: Throughout March for women's history month, we've joined with The Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University to bring you the stories of women leading locally. We've spoken with mayors, state senators, and members of city council. Today we turn to our system of local criminal justice, where we find another group of locally elected officials, judges, sheriffs, and district attorneys.

Now, local district attorneys are key actors in the system, as they are the ones who decide whether and how to pursue criminal charges against those who are arrested. Just about half of elected DAs are women, but only 5% of elected district attorneys in the country are Black. As for women of color, that's a tiny fraction, but just up the road for me in Durham County, North Carolina, the Honorable Satana Deberry serves as district attorney.

Satana Deberry: I am from Hamlet, North Carolina. I went to Princeton and came back to North Carolina for law school at Duke and had gone to DC to practice law and ended up coming back home and becoming a criminal defense attorney. I spent a few years doing that and got really disenchanted with the way the process worked.

I felt that by the time my clients got to me they really had experienced failure of so many different systems. Whether it was educational, mental health, healthcare, housing, and the prosecutors to me were not the best people. They didn't want to hear about what my clients had been through, how they'd gotten to that place. I decided to shift my own career into working on those systems that kept people poor, kept communities underdeveloped with little economic opportunity.

It was through that work that I came back in contact with some folks in Durham who were doing local work around criminal justice reform. I had worked with them doing some affordable housing and community economic development work. They said they really wanted to have a DA who understood all of the collateral consequences of the criminal legal system and some folks in my community asked me to run.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. I want to back up just a bit. Let's start with what you learned as a criminal defense attorney that led you in part here. I heard you talking about the challenges that your clients were facing and the idea that the DAs you were coming up against in court were uninterested in those challenges. Does the law make room for that? Does the law even give us room to care about all of those realities of challenge growing up, of poverty, of disenfranchisement, or does it take this atomized view of you the individual client in this moment either did something bad or you didn't, you did something against the law or you didn't and we have to either punish you or not, depending on whether or not you didn't, no matter what your experiences were growing up?

Satana Deberry: There is a reason that prosecutors have 100% discretion in determining which cases move forward in court. That is not just because our system anticipates the prosecutor, making sure that all these constitutional protections are met, that the letter of the law is met, that there is evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, but also that there may be collateral consequences not just to that particular defendant, but also to our community as a whole. That the prosecutor should be making a decision based on all number of factors not just the letter of the law. If it were just the letter of the law, there would not be so much discretion written into the prosecutor's role.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I understand that for you, one of your sheroes is Barbara Jordan who, in many ways, brought all of who she was, so much of her Texas girl self, so much of her brilliance, but in other ways also couldn't bring all of herself. That Barbara Jordan was making history and representing us as Southern Black girls at a time when-- Even for a decade after her death, we would write about her as though she had not been in a long-term loving relationship with another woman. When you think towards Barbara Jordan and the parts of herself that she wasn't able to bring to work, how does that potentially speak to you in this moment?

Satana Deberry: Barbara Jordan was certainly a hero of mine. She was the first person that I saw in a national audience who looked like me. Who looked like my aunties and my grandmother and who spoke like the people that I grew up with in church. I felt her and I understand what it was like for her to have had to divorce the personal from the profession.

There are certainly many Black women of her generation who weren't queer and still had to separate who they were at home from who they were at work. I think of her as just blazing this path where I get to be my full self. She took one step, so I can take two steps. I don't know if there's anybody watching me who thought they couldn't do what I do before and now think they do, but I hope that there is.

I hope that they understand that they can bring who they are, their fully self to this work, and people will respect that. Some people will have criticism of it, but one of the things that I have learned is that when you are fully yourself, the criticism doesn't matter as much. You recognize that they're not talking about you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It is a tough time to be a reform-minded DA, because in cities across the country, including in Durham, we have seen an uptick in crime as the pandemic has worn on. Talk to me a little bit about how you as a district attorney respond to what has been labeled in these political ways as the reform has caused the crime uptick?

Satana Deberry: We have seen an uptick in violent crime, not all other sorts of crime. Actually crime overall has been down, but we have certainly seen an uptick of violent crime in literally every jurisdiction in America, whether they have had a reform-minded prosecutor or not. Prosecution is a very small piece of criminal legal reform and it is certainly not the only thing that goes into crime is very complicated matter and certainly violent crime, when you look at it, is informed by place and space and the poverty in the communities in which it is occurring. The lack of economic opportunity, the history of mass incarceration in those communities that keep those communities from thriving and participating in the American dream.

The way that I have responded to that is that we know that there are people in our community who are at risk of committing violent crime. We want to be focused on those people, but we don't want to let our fear overtake all the good that we know is happening in our community around violence interruption, around making sure people who are reentering from prison have jobs and housing.

We don't want to flatten it all out into just being afraid and doubling down on punitive measures. We want to think holistically about our community and how we can still hold people accountable when they commit violent crime and continue our reforms for low level crime and other things.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Our conversation is part of our month long series, Women Leading Locally. When I say to you "women leading locally", what does that mean to you?

Satana Deberry: I live in a community, I think, that now we have 24 elected women of color leading in our community. There are black women leading. Our mayor is Black, the chair of our county commissioners, our police chiefs, our county manager, our city manager, the list goes on and on and on.

We have Latino women leading. We have Asian women leading. We have people who have typically been forced out of the political center, and now we are the policymakers and decision-makers. For me, that brings me hope for the future that we are now having a wide range of different views. I am a firm believer in the wisdom of crowds, and we have people with so many different backgrounds, with so many different priorities and ways of looking at the world that I think we can only get better locally from that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Satana Deberry is the Durham County District Attorney. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Satana Deberry: Thank you.

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