Thread by @JoshuaBHoe

There were two recent protests by incarcerated people that we should be paying attention to

1. The people at St Louis City Justice Center protesting COVID protocols

2. The Moose Lake Hunger Strike around the "forever punishment" of Civil Commitment reason.com/2021/02/10/civ…

In case you are less familiar with the second, these are people who served their sentence and are being held - in many cases forever, beyond their actual sentence based on questionable scientific claims of dangerousness

Yes, I get that folks in this situation are unpopular.....

But, we are holding people for DECADES who already served their sentences based on the legal fiction that it is treatment and not punishment

Think about the implications of the government having this power

In fact, there is one man, who has literally been held in a PRISON for over THIRTY YEARS under this "law" without EVER being found guilt of a crime

Repeat, under the fiction it is treatment, someone has been held for over THIRTY YEARS IN A PRISON without EVER being found guilty

And if you agree your government has the power to indefinitely detain anyone that they want - as long as they are unpopular - we are setting a pretty terrifying precedent.....and I struggle to figure out how this is different than what Mao did in reeducation camps

The "rule of law" is a term that gets thrown around a lot but it does not mean "follow the law" it means there are limits to the power of government and those powers are defined by our law/Constitution

This practice is an affront to the rule of law and to the idea of liberty

That a country that puts on large shows that we live in a free country, we should remember that not everyone lives in a "free country" governed by a "rule of law"

Or at the very least, some citizens are held under "lawless law" and are not afforded their basic right to liberty

You can call incarceration "treatment" but it is still incarceration.

Heck you can call a beating a form of education, but that doesn't make it not an assault

"Future crime" is not crime, and this is Minority Report in real life (and just about as scientific)