Something alarming is happening. I've been tracking this around the country, and I have never seen a judge in modern U.S. history responsible for more people in jail. Judge Ramona Franklin just hit 500 people in jail at the same time solely because they can't pay cash.
Also striking is Judge Kelli Johnson. She has the 6th highest number of people in jail because they lack cash, but records suggest that Johnson has a reduced docket because she is the admin judge. Alarming that her numbers are so high. This was her case:
None of these people are convicted. Given the comprehensive research on how jail kills people, these judges' recent decisions are now likely responsible for thousands of years of human life lost. @TexasCJE @OrganizeTexas
The situation has reached such a crisis that Harris County is planning to transfer 500 human beings to a for-profit jail in Louisiana at huge expense, hundreds of miles away from their loved ones. Unspeakable.
A rule of thumb: whenever you see unspeakable injustice in the criminal punishment bureaucracy, you should know that someone is profiting from it.

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More from @equalityAlec

13 Jan
THREAD: It's a lot of work to catalog the new copaganda unleashed each day by the New York Times. However, today's piece glorifying authoritarian violence in San Francisco is scary. Some of it is subtle, but it's worth unpacking a few key points. nytimes.com/2022/01/13/opi…
First, NYT lets a corporate/police backed politician criticize all of her opponents who want less poverty/more housing/more healthcare/more investment in community and less investment in for-profit surveillance and state violence as "white." She says: “They are not Black people."
This trope of glorifying elites engaging in state violence and using their racial identity to insulate them from criticism is propaganda. It's especially jarring when many of the core intellectual and strategic leaders of the movement against cop/prisons are Black women.
Read 12 tweets
12 Jan
What if local news media reported on safety code violations by landlords in the same way they report on low-level crimes that police send them in press releases? What if they reported on local pollution and wage theft violations that local governments document each day?
It's vital to see that editors choose which stories to cover, and they are typically the stories that police and corporations want covered. It shapes our assessments of what is urgent, and focuses us on things that cause minuscule relative harm. A thread:
This single fire killed almost double the number of people as all murders in NYC combined in a typical week. As this great journalism by @akela_lacy demonstrates, no local news had found it important enough to report on the fire code violations.
Read 4 tweets
11 Jan
THREAD: This story is about a 68-year-old unhoused military veteran who just spent 382 days in jail because he lacked cash. His story is important. How he was treated by prosecutors, judges, and his own defense lawyer is chilling.
The man was arrested on Christmas Day 2020. He was accused of stealing a bottle of wine from a CVS and threatening to hit someone with the bottle of wine. He wasn't even brought to court for his own bail hearing, where the judge required him to pay $30,000.
A few days later, a judge reduced the cash bail amount to $5,000. Because only the U.S. and the Philippines have for-profit commercial bail industries, this meant that he could have paid $500 or less to a private company to be free. He couldn't pay.
Read 10 tweets
5 Jan
THREAD. One year ago today, I argued the case of Kenneth Humphrey in the California Supreme Court. The case struck down the cash bail system as we know it in California. But the case is more important for what the court did NOT do, and more people should know about THAT.
Kenneth Humphrey was accused of robbing a few dollars and a bottle of cologne from another man at the senior living facility they both lived in. As he awaited his day in court, he was initially kept in a cage because he couldn’t pay $600,000. He decided to appeal.
Then something amazing happened: the Court of Appeal issued a unanimous opinion striking down California’s ubiquitous money bail practices. Kenneth got a new bail hearing, and he was released and did great. A beautiful photo essay by @svdebug
Read 22 tweets
4 Jan
THREAD. What’s happening at the New York Times is disturbing. Many people pointed out the headline about a mysterious bullet that killed a 14-year-old girl, but some interesting things emerge when you look closely at the article itself. nytimes.com/2021/12/30/us/…
The background: An LAPD cop killed two people with an assault rifle in a Burlington Coat Factory, including a 14-year-old girl who was trying on a dress, part of a wave of recent police murders in Los Angeles.
Here are the sources NYT chose to educate readers, in order:

-Spokesperson for cop union
-Lawyer for cop (humanizing, defending him)
-Person mentored by the cop
-New person mentored by the cop
-AG
-Professor (former cop)
-Lawyer for family
-Lawyer for cop (again, twice more)
Read 22 tweets
4 Jan
Look at the choice to use the word “overarching” here. It’s important to understand how it is sophisticated propaganda.
At a time of global ecological catastrophe, rising overt fascism, and rampant death and suffering from lack of healthcare, housing, and inequality, elites foment panic re: small categories of “crime” that cause exponentially less harm but provide excuses for repression.
Interests that own news outlets benefit from people focusing urgently on the narrow category of police-reported “crime” and not on wage theft, pollution, evictions, foreclosures, tax evasion, etc. or myriad deeper issues of corruption/inequality.
Read 5 tweets

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