Thread: It's been a week since the Supreme Court of California struck down California's money bail practices in the case of our client Kenneth Humphrey. A few important thoughts--please share if you care about bail: (1)
A basic point of the case is that it's illegal to put a person in a cage just because they can't pay. This is not a new principle. We should be very worried that thousands of judges, prosecutors, and jailers in CA have been doing this to millions of people for years. (2)
The capacity of legal bureaucrats to ignore basic laws and moral principles so that they can cage poor people is a huge threat to human well-being. They are capable of reproducing all the harms that this case seeks to remedy, but using new labels. (3)
For example, after the federal system essentially eliminated money bail, the rate of detention of poor people has increased by 300%, and racial disparities have increased. (4)
The Court chose not to decide a vital state Constitutional issue that would have prevented judges from caging people without money bail in less serious cases--thus potentially signaling a willingness to look the other way as judges illegally jail hundreds of thousands. (5)
The Court also suggested an expansion of for-profit electronic incarceration, intrusive drug tests, etc... A multi-billion dollar industry is lining up to replace money bail with e-carceration: what Michelle Alexander calls "the newest Jim Crow." (6) nytimes.com/2018/11/08/opi…
Places like California need urgent legislation that actually makes pretrial liberty and the presumption of innocence a reality by removing the discretion of for-profit companies, judges, prosecutors, and police from reproducing the same harms of the old system. (7)
One important immediate lesson: these bureaucracies of pain and waste will reproduce themselves unless we organize and build enough people power so that the elite bureaucrats who created the money bail system aren't the ones deciding what replaces it. (8)
In CA and beyond, let's get involved in community bail funds, courtwatch programs, mutual aid collectives like @jailbreakpgh, participatory defense like @svdebug, organizing like @JusticeLANow and supporting the people and families who are harmed by the unjust bail system. (end)

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More from @equalityAlec

3 Apr
Thread: The U.S. has 570,000 people who are homeless each night, but 17 million vacant homes. How does this connect to police budgets? (1)
A huge portion of what police do is arrest people who are homeless. In Portland, for example, the *majority* of police arrests are for human beings who are homeless, and a *vast majority* of those are for things police call "nonviolent." (2) yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-puni…
It is a choice by elite bureaucrats who control the police to arrest, cage, control, and brutalize people without houses instead of helping them get permanent safe shelter. Why? (3)
Read 7 tweets
2 Apr
THREAD: As more states legalize marijuana, it's important to note: there has not been a corresponding decline in local police budgets. Why? (1)
For years, police in the U.S. have chosen to make more arrests for marijuana than for all of what cops call "violent crime" combined. You might think that legalizing marijuana, then, would lead to reductions in resources for cops b/c one of their primary tasks is now gone. (2)
But one overriding feature of bureaucracies--especially a bureaucracy that serves elite interests of surveillance, profit, and control--is that they always try to get bigger. (3)
Read 5 tweets
1 Apr
This thread is a short story about how, behind the barrel of every police officer's gun, there is a lawyer somewhere making it all possible, rationalizing police violence, and calling it "justice." (1)
In Seattle, police place bicycles in poor neighborhoods as "bait," hoping to "catch" human beings who might try to use the bicycle. Police love "fishing" metaphors. (2)
One day in 2018, 41-year-old Jolene Paris was near a Goodwill store that was a gathering spot for houseless and near-houseless people. She saw a silver bicycle in the dirt near some shrubs. She wheeled it around the Goodwill parking lot, asking if it belonged to anyone. (3)
Read 7 tweets
31 Mar
THREAD: With people focused on Derek Chauvin, it is vital to say something: he was released before trial on $1 million bail in a murder case. For 500,000 poor people in cages right now, our bail system looks like this video:
Read 6 tweets
19 Mar
THREAD: Marvin D. Scott III has just been killed inside a Texas jail cell after being arrested for possession of marijuana. His story is important. (1)

wfaa.com/article/news/l…
After Sandra Bland's death, Texas increased funding for police, sheriffs, and jails. That money was used to hire more cops and jailers, give them raises and overtime, get military weapons and surveillance, and expand racial profiling. More human beings will die. (2)
Marvin Scott's family told reporters that he was working to address mental health issues. But Texas has woeful mental health infrastructure and pays police and jails to be its primary response to illness. (3)
Read 6 tweets
12 Mar
THREAD: like thousands of glossy reports before it, new report finds that LAPD "mishandled" BLM protests. if i went around illegally beating, shooting, kidnapping, and caging my political opponents, would the NYT say i "mishandled" it? (1) nytimes.com/2021/03/11/us/…
every few weeks, these journalists report on new reports finding systemic corruption and brutality in **every major US police force** and then they quote **very serious** police chiefs saying that "mistakes were made." then something dangerous happens... (2)
the reporters, unable to draw any connections and with no context/analysis about the history/function of US police, spend the article talking about lack of "preparation" and "training" and the need for more resources for cops. (3)
Read 10 tweets

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