Thread by @AlexandraErin

LRTs: So, there was a thing I found really disheartening, in the aftermath of Florida instituting a de facto poll tax for otherwise re-enfranchised people.

Back story here: Florida voters approved re-enfranchisement of people who had finished their sentences, the Republicans made sure it was implemented in a way that this included all court fees and fines being paid, which heavily blunted the impact.

And the thing that I noticed in comments was people being horrified and angry and up in arms at the idea of the right to vote being held hostage for money, and grappling with the racial demographics and racist targeting, and how this benefited the party that instituted it...

...right up until someone pointed out that the money they owed was part of their sentence, part of their punishment, and at that point like a good seventy or eighty percent of the outrage disappeared.

"Oh. Well, that's alright, then."

People who five seconds before had been talking about the racism in the criminal justice system are suddenly fine with the idea that fees levied by that system, against people who have lost everything to that system, could control whether those people have full rights in society.

Which brings me to my point:

We have to ditch, collectively and as a society, the idea that there is a group of people we can treat like criminals.

At all.

Up to and including criminals.

Because once we've decided there's a way we're going to treat criminals... then we're giving whoever is invested with the power to decide what is a crime and who did it the power to decide who gets treated that way.

Extrajudicial punishment. I say this phrase a lot. Under the Constitution, we cannot sentence a person to have their head rammed into the ceiling of a cop car. Cruel and unusual. Can't do it. We have no law that says you can do this to a person.

But we all know cops do it, if they feel like it. If they want to feel big or want someone else to feel small. If they feel they owe someone retribution. For a lot of reasons big and small, very, very small, they do it. Hair Furor "joked" about how they should do it more.

And while it would be 100% struck down in court if we tried to pass a "head-bashing law" (at least, so far)... if we try to talk about how it shouldn't happen, we get: "So don't break the law." and "We're talking about criminals."

Of course, at the point someone is being put in the back of a cop car, they are an *alleged* criminal, they haven't had their day in court, and under the law they're supposed to be innocent, right?

And everyone will agree that *some people* shouldn't be treated that way.

But mostly the people who are parsing out whose head it is okay to bash against a cop car or hit with a flashlight believe it will never be them, could never be them.

And maybe the people who are the worst about this are probably right, but there are gradations. Lots of progressive people are out there telling people they're dying on the wrong hill for being an absolutist about this stuff.

We really have to embrace the idea that there is no class of people who are outside the protection of law, the full protection.

It matters what happens to immigrants, and to sex workers, and to gang members, because they're human beings who matter.

But if you can't stretch yourself to care about other people, realize that when you give the authorities full license to criminalize immigrants, sex workers, and gang members... you give them broad latitude to do the same to you.

Can you prove your citizenship? Could you with papers on hand if you were stopped on the street? Could you... if being suspected of non-citizenship meant you had no due process and no legal protection and no one had to look at your papers or listen to you or even let you speak?

The number of 100000% legal and perfectly innocuous things that are now associated with sex work or sex trafficking means that there is a vector to surveil, detain, or arrest huge numbers of people subject purely to official whims.

And police have looooong employed laundry lists of "gang signs" to criminalize any racialized person they want to. How many colors can you wear that isn't some gang's color? How many people can you nod to in your neighborhood before one of them is an "affiliate"?

These nets were drawn ages ago and they're getting wider and stronger now. We should have cut them to ribbons long ago but fear and apathy were too strong. Fear of the Criminal Element™️, apathy at distant troubles involving others.

And this here is not optional.

If the government made it policy that Herman P. Smith of 2234 Cherry Tree Lane, Melville, Ohio had no right to due process or equal protection and we shrugged because we don't know Herman...

They could say we're Herman.

https://twitter.com/HerHandsMyHands/status/1154704798891069441

You couldn't prove you're not Herman P. Smith once they said you were because Herman P. Smith has no power to prove anything.

That's how a small a crack it takes to obliterate the concept of rights. A hole the size of one human being.

While we have cops they're going to put people in the backs of cars and while we have the system we do people will be incarcerated, but even while that persists we must reject the idea that the people in squad cars or camps or prisons are less than human, are unentitled to rights

Basically, reject the whole idea of a criminalized person. If someone is suspected of a crime they must be protected from harm. If someone is sentenced to a punishment, their punishment must not exceed their sentence.

And the sentence should not be treated as sacred, either.

We got into this mess because those of us with the most power to look out for others didn't.

I mean, those with the very most power actively created these conditions. But moving past them to the more passive participants.

We got into this mess because in a million ways we decided terrible things were okay under certain conditions, and we trusted the people who judged those conditions.

And now the face-eating leopards are coming home to roost. And eat our faces.

We are not getting out of this without a reckoning, we are not getting out of this without real hard work, and most importantly of all we are not getting out of this without each other.

All of us or none of us.

Any victory that leaves some behind is a surrender in disguise.