THREAD: A few thoughts on basic things that many people don't know about the US legal system, which now cages Black people at six times the rate of South Africa at the height of Apartheid. (1)
In many jails across the country, the windows are fake. It's more important for local government officials to see a nice building than it is for the human beings inside to get sunlight. (2)
Most jails do not let people visit or hug their loved ones. Why? To force them to spend $$$ at exorbitant rates to companies to whom jails gave monopoly telecom contracts in exchange for a cut of the profit. They monetized human contact. (3)
In the past 40 years, this country separated tens of millions of parents from their children and put tens of millions of human beings in cages for possessing plants on a list of plants the government says you can't have (4)
There are more arrests each year for marijuana than for all of what police call "violent crimes" combined. (5)
There are 400,000 human beings in jail cells as you read this who are there solely because they are too poor to make the cash payment required for their release. (6)
The US separates parents from their children and puts human beings in cages for crossing an imaginary political boundary it created through colonial invasions. (7)
All of this violence is done disproportionately on the basis of race in a bureaucracy we call the "justice system," supported by both major political parties. Most people have been taught by the media not to even think about it as structural violence. (8)
Sometimes we over-complicate things. There are many difficult, vexing, exciting questions of policy, philosophy, and life to spend time on. But there is no reasonable argument for the vast bulk of what is done in the criminal punishment bureaucracy. It should be dismantled. (9)
If you're interested in learning more about how it all works and how to think about fixing it, I've written more in the book Usual Cruelty (all royalties donated to @essie4justice) and here: yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-puni…
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THREAD: A few more shocking things about Harvard University using students to test military counterinsurgency tactics on behalf of police brutalizing young people of color in Massachusetts. (1)
Note the language in the course solicitation: prof wants to take military lessons from Iraq/Afghanistan to "clean up" Black and Brown communities. This is the language of ethnic cleansing. (2)
This Harvard solicitation comes at a time when US cages Black people at 6 times the rate of South Africa at the height of Apartheid and on behalf of one of the most notorious police depts where DOJ found massive civil rights violations perpetrated. (3) bostonglobe.com/2020/07/25/met…
THREAD: @Harvard is offering a class where elite students can learn from ex-military about using "counterinsurgency methods" from Iraq and Afghanistan to "clean up" Black and Brown communities in Massachusetts. (1)
This is part of the hidden story about the complicity of elite universities in the horrors of US policing and immigration enforcement. (2)
Fancy professors, in conjunction with big corporations, have a cottage industry to transfer military tactics/surveillance/weapons made for colonial wars to more and more sophisticated forms of domestic enclosure. stoplapdspying.org/pt42-police-st… (3)
THREAD: A federal court just affirmed a *9 year* prison sentence for a blind man in Los Angeles for failing to inform authorities supervising him "within five working days" that he had become homeless. (1)
Very few documents you'll ever read better capture the everyday cruelty of the mass incarceration bureaucracy. (2) cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/memo…
One of the banalities of evil we see every day: courts have concocted many ways to prevent themselves from doing justice. In this case, the court refused to even reach the question of whether it is constitutional to cage this man for 9 years. (3)
THREAD: I've never spoken publicly about this: when presented with overwhelming evidence that judges had committed federal felonies, multiple Obama US Attorneys chose not to prosecute them because it would hurt the integrity of the legal system (1)
The crimes were among the most serious and violent crimes imaginable: judges using their offices to illegally cage Black people and separate them from their children to generate revenue from collecting debts. (2)
I'm not saying I would support prosecution--just that when US Attys wanted to meet with me and saw the *flagrant crimes* uncovered by our public lawsuits, they decided that they would instead devote their resources to prosecuting immigrants and poor people for drugs (3)
THREAD: This article is a prime example of the fraudulence of elite law school discourse and the dangers that elite people at elite institutions can pose to marginalized people when they whitewash history. (1)
The marketing of this article is trying to get you to think the evils of the DOJ are the b/c of Trump. We are told that we need a "cultural restoration." What does that mean? "Restore" what? Prior to Trump, DOJ was the largest force of racist human caging in world history. (2)
We are told that we must "insulate" DOJ from "political influence." What? Every fiber of DOJ history is about political influence. It was for political reasons that it targeted poor Black people for crack and ignored the crimes of bankers. Read history (3) yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-puni…