Thread by @NiggaTheory

Chauvin’s status as a cop magnifies the gravity of his harm, so it’s certainly an aggravating factor. But intentionally inflicting twice as much suffering on him for that reason in the name of retribution reinforces a punitive moral framework that hurts more blacks than it helps.

https://twitter.com/crownvictoria22/status/1408573852846891012

If Chauvin had been sentenced to the presumptive 12.5 years, he would have had to serve at least 8.25 years (assuming good behavior), and most if not all of that time will be spent in “isolation for his own safety,” i.e., solitary, which @amnesty rightly recognizes as torture.

I have actively opposed the torture of prisoners that is the practice of solitary confinement—an 8X8 steel cage for at least 23 hours a day—for years, not only because it’s barbaric but also because it’s a form of barbarism the state disproportionately visits upon Black folk.

So even if Chauvin’s status as a police officer aggravates his wrongdoing, I don’t support doubling the torture of any wrongdoer, even the most monsterized, because I know black folk will bear the brunt of any approach to blame & punishment rooted in the logic of monsterization.

When I think of any human being crammed in an 8X8 cage for 8.25 years (99 months), I think of unfathomable suffering, crushing to contemplate. My dad traced his constant nightmares to the 4 weeks he spent in solitary. I can’t imagine his suffering multiplied 99 times for one man.

I understand that the retributive urge to inflict intentional suffering on wrongdoers, to prolong & intensify their agony, runs strong and deep. But 99 months of torture should be sufficient to slake our heartiest punitive urges; do we need 198 months of torture to get us there?

Even if we weren’t talking about the unique hell that’s solitary, prisons outside of solitary are still hellholes, places of extreme misery. What conception of justice equates accountability with the infliction of greater misery? One rooted in retribution, retaliation, & revenge.

Yet many decarceration activists have been fighting hard in these streets for years to move our blame and punishment attitudes & practices in the direction of a rehabilitation & redemption framework. It’s the only way to make deep & lasting cuts in racialized mass incarceration.

But the radically new moral framework prison abolitionists and anti-carceral activists champion must be applied consistently to maintain its legitimacy and moral credibility. The price of principle is consistency—even when it’s tough, uncomfortable, or extremely distasteful.

I can’t consistently say we must curb the retributive urge & embrace a more rehabilitative approach open to the possibility of redemption for the sake of racial justice (because Blacks inevitably inflame it the most) and yet let’s double Chauvin’s punishment, for most any reason.