Thread by @equalityAlec

THREAD: While investigating a jail, I met a Black teenager who was arrested with metal chains and put into a cage b/c he couldn’t pay a ticket a police officer gave him for “sagging his pants.” Let’s take a step back and look at what is “normal” in the “justice system.” (1)

This country puts human beings in cages for possessing plants on a list of plants the government says you can't have. Police choose to arrest more people for marijuana possession than all of what police call “violent” crime combined. (2)

This country puts human beings in cages because their families can’t make a cash payment. 400,000 people are in crowded jail cells during a pandemic because they are waiting for trial but they can’t pay enough cash. (3)

Because of the way this country puts human beings in cages, the punishment bureaucracy separates several million children from their parents each year. (4)

This country cages people for crossing a political boundary it created through colonial invasion. Many of those people come from places where the US led coups to overthrow democratically elected governments and trained fascist death squads at US police training camps. (5)

This country cages Black people at 6 times the rate of South Africa at the height of Apartheid. (6)

This country does not let people hug their jailed loved ones or even speak to their parents and children who are in cages unless they can pay for-profit companies to whom local sheriffs and state prisons give monopoly telecom contracts. We monetize human contact. (7)

Much of this violence is committed by an entity that calls itself the "Department of Justice" in a bureaucracy they market as the "justice system." (8)

For decades, in every city, county, and state, there has been a bipartisan consensus to perpetrate this race-based violence among both Democrats and Republicans. Most people have been taught not to even think about it as violence. (9)

Do these facts, and many many many more I could have highlighted, say anything deeper about the interests that really control our punishment bureaucracy? (10)

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 most what we do in the punishment bureaucracy. It should be dismantled. (11)

And yet, in 2021, powerful people are doubling down on the mass incarceration bureaucracy and many people celebrate its most vicious cheerleaders like @SallyQYates and @PreetBharara as some kind of resistance heroes. We must reckon with the violence they have perpetrated. (12)

I explain all of this in more depth here: yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-puni…