I think of Debbie Africa, who gave birth secretly in prison, how the other women prisoners used sounds to shield her birth process. They protected the two of them from guards so that she and the baby were able to share precious time together, undetected for days. I think of Assata Shakur too, impossibly conceiving and giving birth to her daughter while being a political prisoner, mostly in solitary confinement. And how she listened to her angry daughter, and the dreams of her grandmother when they told her she could be free. They could be together.

from Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

.

Today, as you read this [...], there are almost 2 million people locked away in one of the more than 5,000 prisons or jails that dot the American landscape. While they are behind bars, these incarcerated people can be found standing in line at their prison’s commissary waiting to buy some extra food or cleaning supplies that are often marked up to prices higher than what one would pay outside of those prison walls. [...] If they want to call a friend or family member, they need to pay for that as well. And almost everyone who works at a job while incarcerated, often for less than a dollar an hour, will find that the prison has taken a portion of their salary to pay for their cost of incarceration. [...] These policymakers and government officials also know that this captive population has no choice but to foot the bill [...] and that if they can’t be made to pay, their families can. In fact, a 2015 report led by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Forward Together, and Research Action Design found that in 63 percent of cases, family members on the outside were primarily responsible for court-related costs [...].

Rutgers sociology professor Brittany Friedman has written extensively on what is called “pay-to-stay” fees in American correctional institutions. In her 2020 article titled, “Unveiling the Necrocapitalist Dimensions of the Shadow Carceral State: On Pay-to-Stay to Recoup the Cost of Incarceration,” Friedman divides these fees into two categories: (1) room and board and (2) service-specific costs. Fees for room and board -- yes, literally for a thin mattress or even a plastic “boat” bed in a hallway, a toilet that may not flush, and scant, awful tasting food -- are typically charged at a “per diem rate for the length of incarceration.” It is not uncommon for these fees to reach $20 to $80 a day for the entire period of incarceration. The second category, what Friedman refers to as “service-specific costs,” includes fees for basic charges such as copays or other costs for seeing a doctor or nurse, programming fees, email and telephone calls, and commissary items. 

In 2014, the Brennan Center for Justice documented that at least 43 states authorize charging incarcerated people for the cost of their own imprisonment, and at least 35 states authorize charging them for some medical expenses. More recent research from the Prison Policy Institute found that 40 states and the federal prison system charge incarcerated people medical copays. 

It’s also critical to understand how little incarcerated people are paid for their labor in addition to the significant cut of their paltry hourly wages that corrections agencies take from their earnings. Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of incarcerated people work behind bars. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, those who work regular jobs in prisons such as maintaining the grounds, working in the kitchen, and painting the walls of the facilities earn on average between $0.14 and $0.63 an hour. [...] Arkansas and Texas don’t pay incarcerated workers at all, while Alabama only pays incarcerated workers employed by the state’s correctional industry. [...]

For example, if someone sends an incarcerated person in Florida $20 online, they will end up paying $24.95. [...]

Dallas County charges incarcerated people a $10 medical care fee for each medical request they submit. In Texas prisons, those behind bars pay $13.55 per medical visit, despite the fact that Texas doesn’t pay incarcerated workers anything. Texas is one of a handful of states that doesn’t pay incarcerated people for their labor. 

In Kentucky’s McCracken County Jail in Paducah, it costs $0.40 a minute for a video call; this translates into $8.00 for each 20-minute video call. [...] For those who need to use email, JPay charges $2.35 for five emails for people in the Texas prison system ($0.47 an email). [...]

People in Florida prisons pay $1.70 for a packet of four extra-strength Tylenol and $4.02 for four tampons. And with inflation, commissary items are priced higher than ever. For example, according to the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, incarcerated people in Kentucky experienced a 7.2 percent rise in already-high commissary prices in July 2022. Researchers noted that a 4.6-ounce tube of Crest toothpaste, which costs $1.38 at the local Walmart, is $3.77 at the prison commissary. [...]

In Gaston County, North Carolina, incarcerated individuals who participate in state work release may make more than the state’s $0.38 an hour maximum pay, but they pay the jail a daily rate based on their yearly income of at least $18 per day and up to $36 per day. In fact, Brennan Center research indicates that almost every state takes a portion of the salary that incarcerated workers earn to compensate the corrections agency [...].

These room and board fees are found throughout the nation’s jails and prisons. Michigan laws allow any county to seek reimbursement for expenses incurred in relation to a charge for which a person was sentenced to county jail time -- up to $60 a day. Winnebago County, Wisconsin, charges $26 a day to those staying in its county jail.

---

Text by: Lauren-Brooke Eisen. “America’s Dystopian Incarceration System of Pay to Stay Behind Bars.” Brennan Center for Justice. 19 April 2023. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

https://www.insurrecthistory.com/archives/2022/01/10/i-always-dressed-this-way-surfacing-nineteenth-century-trans-history-through-mary-jones

“We know the lurid details of [Mary Jones’s] legal troubles made her a minor recurring figure in local newspapers during her life. One rare glimpse of her own voice comes from court testimony recorded during People vs. Sewally when she was asked why she wore women’s clothing. Jones explained:

“I have have been in the practice of waiting upon Girls of ill fame…they induced me to dress in Women’s Clothes, saying I looked so much better in them and I have always attended parties among the people of my own Colour dressed in this way – and in New Orleans I always dressed this way.”

But beyond the brief, strategically crafted narratives given in court, little of her life, thoughts, feelings, and relationships is known.

Jones’ interactions with the carceral system–and her intermittent, sensationalizedappearances in newspapers throughout the 1830’s to 50’s–must be understood within her specific historical context. The United States' growing urban populations, particularly in northeastern cities such as New York, rendered trans communities increasingly visible, inviting increasing public and political concern with crossdressing. A wave of anti-masquerade laws intended to forestall deceptions across racial lines were passed across the United States during Jones’ lifetime, including New York’s 1845 penal code 240.35(4); they were also quickly marshaled to harass trans people. In 1836, Jones was arrested for stealing the wallet of Robert Haslem, a white man who solicited her sex work. A lithograph published following her conviction for grand larceny depicts Jones as a beautiful woman, elegantly dressed and calmly side-eyeing the viewer. The caption describes her as “The MAN-MONSTER.”… a label that at once denies Jones’ womanhood by suturing her to the category “man” while excluding her from that category through the epithet “monster.”

The name “man-monster” places Jones at the nexus of two continuing histories of attempted dehumanization. Misogynoir constructs Black women as improperly feminine and therefore improperly human. Transmisogynist bigotry dehumanizes trans women by denying manhood and womanhood, thus rendering us neuter–an inhuman “it.” The archival objects that inform us about Jones bear witness to forms of oppression that continue to the present– to an intricate, pernicious, and ongoing mingling of racism, misogyny, and transphobia. The public mockery and carceral violence inflicted on Jones should be understood as analogous to the violent backlash against trans women of color that has followed our current moment of trans visibility – a backlash resulting in 2021 being the deadliest year for trans people on record in the United States. Justice demands that we remember the cruelties Jones suffered as we work to build a world that would make them truly locked in a historical past.”

[“In my early advocacy for survivor justice as a teenager, many of the writings I was exposed to convinced me that locking up as many rapists as possible was the lone solution to our rape culture, the lone path to achieving justice. Of course, almost ironically, this was despite my own refusal to see a former friend who had assaulted me in a criminal light, and the fact that I’d never even dreamt of confronting him on a personal level let alone seeking any sort of legal recourse.

I know now that much of this stemmed from fear on some level—fear of disbelief, fear of blame, fear of punishment and judgment and scrutiny, even fear of sympathy; fear that all I would ever be was a victim. But it was more than that: It was also deep, personal acceptance that punishment was not going to move either of us forward. That’s not to say that those who commit harm, those who rape and assault, should not face accountability and consequences, especially to protect others from being victimized. But victims of harm, not adversarial systems designed to dole out winner-take-all punitive outcomes, know best what they need to move forward, what they need to heal. And many of us know that bargaining with and begging a patriarchal, white-supremacist institution like our criminal legal system to recognize our humanity would only subject us to additional trauma and prolonged suffering.

Much of our misunderstandings of sexual violence and its relation to the carceral capitalist police state emerges from fundamental misunderstanding about what most rapes and sexual and domestic violence cases entail, and who the perpetrators are. Most rapists are not bestially violent strangers waiting in alleys; far more often than not, they’re friends and family members, they’re “normal” guys who know their victims; they’re boyfriends, partners, co-workers. Many if not most of us have been friends with people who have committed acts of sexual harm without our knowledge, friends with other people who are friends with assailants. In many social circles, men brag to their male friends about acts that constitute rape and sexual assault and are often even praised and socially rewarded for it.

We’re surrounded by sexual violence, whether we witness it or not, and the carceral state does nothing to alleviate or address this reality.”]

kylie cheung, from survivor injustice: state-sanctioned abuse, domestic violence, and the fight for bodily autonomy, 2023

The carceral system involves spatial confinement - a geography of institutions and sites of caging, isolation, and punishment. But the protest of the hunger strike can penetrate the prison walls and take up space outside. If the revolt within the prison and the revolt outside are joined, then the challenges for the state escalate. The carceral system also involves time, as imposed by the prison sentence. A hunger strike, however, claims time in a different dynamic. The strike is a durational performance in which the prisoners, bit by bit, take back both their body and their time. The violence of the state is understood as discipline, coded as routine and necessary to maintain order in the prison. The striker refuses this routine. The state may control space, but it is vulnerable to temporality, vulnerable to the destabilization that is the striking prisoner's objection - to shake things up. The state is vulnerable, because it cannot anticipate and control every contingency. The striking prisoners disrupts the time sentence and time stamps that are in the prison's control. The state tries to stabilize the uprising, to manage the disorder, to calculate how to wall off unwelcome outcomes of the strike. The authorities may calculate that they can wait the protest out, that they can contain its impact. The stakes of seizing time, seizing the moment from the state, are vast. History can veer onto a different trajectory. Past resolves and political impasses can thaw, recasting the present. And what seemed impossible can become another, possible future.

Nayan Shan, Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes

to be fair i actually like the way that pterry positions police work - that there IS value in theory in a force that works to bring justice and uphold laws designed to protect people, and if police were good people who truly wanted justice then that would be fine, but also unflinchingly pointing out how easy it is for cops to be corrupt and/or arms of the government and how individual coppers' prejudices can affect their policing if not dealt with? like night watch especially with the original gang and with cable street and then with carcer easily becoming police - feels like pterry was saying 'ACAB, but they don't HAVE to be, but it takes root reform and a top-down permanent commitment to genuine people-focused policing to make them a force for good'

HI yeah sorry i waited to chew on this for a while i'm thinkin it over bc i am still always of two minds. pterry's take on policing is very reform-minded and explicitly trying to call out widespread corruption and violence in direct deconstruction of almost every other traditional form of the police procedural. and also having vimes and his police literally break from their intended role as a tool of the state to try to hold the state equally as accountable as people with less power is very narratively good! the idea that runs through the books of one man who is so committed to justice that he can reform the whole institution from the inside is compelling! and it is also very much an unrealistic fantasy and the kind of empty promise cities throw millions of dollars away for in sensitivity training and uber-militarization hoping that the problems with policing always sort themselves out with the right polish

as an abolitionist i don't agree that police work is an essential service and that police need to exist to provide justice, or that people would tear themselves apart without police and states and laws to hold them in check. but. that premise is something it would be very hard to make a procedural without. i think i like the watch best when they function the least like Police and are striving to provide more nuanced nonviolent community support, and de-escalate, and actually protect and serve people, and i like that sections like the start of night watch where every department in the city is involved in a genre-typical tense manhunt and shootout with A Psychopath Serial Killer (tm) are very, very rare

carcer isn't like most watch series criminals in being either a person driven to breaking the law by rough circumstances or a corrupt person in power, when we meet him he's just knee-jerk murdering young off-duty officers to keep from being caught for undescribed other random murders. carcer is just the sort of character who exists to be as terrible as possible with no particular motivation in order to make vimes' inner narration about how badly he wants to get a chance to kill this man without due process something that is sympathetic as much as it is harrowing. definitely the type of character most copaganda pieces use as an antagonist, and i like that the watch books don't resort to that the rest of the time. AND i also love that being just a guy who loves to do indiscriminate violence for the hell of it lands him a job as a cop in the past THAT is a great deconstruction. i also love the final conclusion being that even people who are this brand of cartoonishly evil and too dangerous to safely apprehend can't just be murdered in the street on the judgement of a good guy with a weapon. tho of course he is just hauled off and killed by the state anyway with more due process and paperwork involved. which is a little bit of an undercut of the idea but the ethics of capital punishment is sort of a different beast and not rly the focus ANYWAY

TLDR my hesitation is that a lot of the premise of police reform in the watch books is the kind of thing that demonstrably doesn't work irl re: promoting change from the inside but if you gotta have a book about good cops i do appreciate the ways pterry dug in and grappled with that

I think a lot of nonviolence preachers are entirely too comfortable plugging their ears to the violence of the status quo. There is this sense that a staunch commitment to nonviolence makes you more righteous than those you assume to have bloodlust, but often violence is not only justified it is essential.

No, you must never dehumanize your enemy, and yes your love for the people you are fighting for/with should come before your hatred of your enemy, but it is an absolute disconnect from reality to pretend that radical change is achieved through nonviolence in a vacuum.

Yes, the consequences of your choices must be considered carefully. Yes, it is essential to minimize collateral and make sure your efforts do not needlessly endanger people.

But it is never the peaceful, chaste, and piously nonviolent movements that break the chains. The nonviolent are who the oppressors find to be the lesser evil when the violent flex their power. No liberation effort has ever been achieved by sit-ins, marches, or chants. It has been achieved by the violent struggle for freedom.

Non-violence is not useless. It garners sympathy. It pulls people to a cause. It is a show of strength. Nonviolence is a compromise. It is saying “we are being peaceful now, parlay with us while this is still the case.”

Non-violence being the end of the road only works when the threat of violence is so great those in power do not risk it. Violence is not a last resort, it is a big stick looming over nonviolent action saying “deal with them now or you deal with me.”

Oppression is violence. Bigotry is violence. Discrimination is violence. Systemic barriers are violence. The carceral state is violence. Genocide is violence.

The State is always holding their own stick saying if you do not accept this is the way of things, we will use violence. And then they do not wait for you to disagree, they enact violence. The system IS violence.

Violent resistance to a system is not the beginning of violence, it is the returning of dialogue to an entity that only understands and parlays with violence.

Nonviolence is not the source of liberation, it is the compromise. You are not more righteous than the violent for being unwilling and condemning towards those who enable you to have a voice against the system.

In plain sight

Here’s something I want you to contemplate.

There’s a specific Federal prison for pedophiles of a particular minority religion. (I don’t want to say which religion, because that might imply members of that religion are pedophiles, and that is not the case.)

Now, if you looked it up, you’d not find the James Howard Institute for the Correction of Pedophiles of Particular Religion. It’s just that when the US has a pedophile of that religion they send them to this place, in order to reduce the risk that they’ll be beat to death in General Population somewhere else.

But there are two important things to consider in this.

First, the USA has the largest carceral population in the world - over two million - if the US Prison system were a state it would be the 35th by population and have at least four seats in the House. This means there’s a large enough population for such odd little niche groups to be meaningful.

Second, and more importantly, I only know about this because I happen to know of someone who was sent to that particular prison. Besides that, I had NO IDEA. And I’m going to go out on a limb and think that even if you’re an American, even if you vaguely care about these things and don’t think we should just be executing people but those bleeding heart liberals keep getting in the way... you still didn’t know about this.

Our prison system is huge. It encompasses everything from maximum security facilities which are literally laid out so the inmates can’t tell where they are in the complex, to work camps which have almost no security. It’s a system where a guard can strap down an inmate and pepper spray them in the face, and get a promotion Just Because. It sorts people by demographic and crime, but also routinely puts extremely petty criminals in with serial killers. It’s a system which has contracts guaranteeing a certain number of prisoners will be put in private, for-profit prisons. And no, I’m not distinguishing between state and federal, because state prisoners are frequently houses in federal prisons, and sometimes (albeit less often) the reverse. And for the most part, the American public only vaguely knows about this.

Where am i going with this? Look. The state of Florida is passing laws to essentially criminalize being trans, and other states are looking at doing the same. There are no guardrails left to keep a rightwing legislature from declaring it a crime, punishable with death or life incarceration, to write with your left hand, or follow a diet that’s not approved by the FDA, or wear clothing that’s “inappropriate” for your gender. We’re not “baby steps” away from having death camps for the targets du jour. The infrastructure exists today. The only thing they’re waiting on is the opportunity to pull the trigger.

And here’s the scary part: we may not notice when they do. It’s going to be quiet and slow. It’s going to be a shift in policy which happens without any announcement. It’s going to be how they now define being gay near children as pedophilia, and they opened a special prison for “handling” pedophiles. And wouldn’t you know, prosecutions for that have been going up. “Taking out the trash” they’ll call it. They’ll say that liberals and Democrats have always been soft on crime and are protecting pedophiles. And altogether too many people won’t question that narrative, all while the rightwing authoritarians murder large swathes of the population.

Bernice King's quoting her father Martin Luther King: “We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.” #MLKDay #MLK95 #MLK

Bernice King quoting her father Martin Luther King: “Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.” #MLKDay #MLK95 #MLK

Bernice King quoting her father Martin Luther King: “Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter — but beautiful — struggle for a new world.”

Bernice King quoting her father Martin Luther King: “True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.” #MLKDay #MLK95 #MLK

Bernice King quoting her father Martin Luther King: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” #MLKDay #MLK95 #MLK

Bernice King quoting her father Martin Luther King: “A Church that has lost its voice for justice is a Church that has lost its relevance in the world.” #MLKDay #MLK95 #MLK

Local anarchist gets anarchised.

The [shortened] message from Family and Friends of Jen Angel:

"As a long-time social movement activist and anarchist, Jen did not believe in state violence, carceral punishment, or incarceration as an effective or just solution to social violence and inequity. The outpouring of support and care for Jen, her family and friends, and the values she held dear is a resounding demonstration of the response to harm that Jen believed in: community members relying on one another, leading with love, centering the needs of the most vulnerable, and not resorting to vengeance and inflicting more harm."

[... back to the article copy]

According to a spokesperson with the Oakland Police Department, around 12:30 that afternoon, “an individual broke into” Angel’s car while she was in it and stole an item from her, then ran back “to a waiting vehicle.”

Angel jumped out of her car and gave chase, police said. “While the victim struggled for their belongings, they were knocked to the ground and sustained injuries.” According to a crime brief published by the San Jose Mercury News on Monday that did not name Angel as the victim, she was somehow snagged by the suspects’ car door, “and was dragged more than 50 feet before falling free in the middle of the street.”

I do kind of wonder why she gave chase to the thieves. Maybe she was just trying to "center the needs of the most vulnerable" and "lead with love."

[D]ebt and indebtedness [...] produc[e] forms of spatial enclosure [imprisonment] that do not rely on the spectacular [singular moments of blatant literal physical violence] but are, rather, achieved through temporal openings and foreclosures. To be clear, this frame does not obscure the many forms of carceral enclosure [...]: the prison, the checkpoint, the security wall. Historically, enclosure is understood as the privatization of land. But Wang extends the concept of enclosure to encompass time. Wang demonstrates that [...] mobility is policed through [...] an apparatus of punishment that solicits time as the form of spatial enclosure. [...]

[D]ebilitating infrastructures turn able bodies into a range of disabled bodies. [...] [C]heckpoints [...]; administrative bureaucratic apparatuses that stall and foreclose travel, mobility for work, [...] the capacity to move and change residences - baroque processes to apply for permits to travel [...], absence of public services such as postal delivery [...]; and finally [...] denial of resolution, suspension in the space of the indefinite [...]. In fact, slow death itself is literalized as the slowing down of life [...]. [Land] itself becomes simultaneously bigger - because it takes so long to get anywhere - and smaller, as transit becomes arduous [...] where it is so difficult to travel between areas without permits and identifications. Movement is suffocated. Distance is stretched and manipulated to create an entire population with mobility impairments. And yet space is shrunken, as people are held in place, rarely able to move far. [...]

---

Time itself is held hostage.

This is the slow aspect of slow death: slow death can entail a really slow life, too, a life that demands constant calibration of different speeds and the relation of speed to space. [...]

The suspended state of the indefinite, of waiting and waiting (it) out, wreaks multigenerational psychological and physical havoc. [...]

Time thus is the meter of power; it is one form that physical enclosure takes on. The cordoning of time through space contributes to an overall “lack of jurisdiction over the function of one’s own senses” (Schuller 2018: 74) endemic to the operation of colonial rule [...]. [T]his process entails several modes of temporal differentiation: withholding futurity, making impossible anything but a slowed (down) life, and immobilizing the body [...]. Julie Peteet (2008) calls the extraction of nonlabor time “stealing time” [...]. [T]he extraction of time attempts to produce a depleted and therefore compliant population so beholden to the logistics of the everyday that forms of connectivity, communing, and collective resistance are thwarted. The extraction of time functions as the transfer of “vital energy” [...], an extraction that recapitulates a long colonial history of mining bodies for their potentiality. [...]

Checkpoints ensure one is never sure of reaching work on time.

Fear of not getting to work then adds to the labor of getting to work; the checkpoints affectively expand labor time [...].

Bodies in line at checkpoints [...] [experience] the fractalizing of the emotive, cognitive, physiological capacities of bodies [...]. It’s not just that bodies are too tired to resist but that the experience of the “constant state of uncertainty” becomes the condition of being. [...]

---

All text above by: Jasbir K. Puar. "Spatial Debilities: Slow Life and Carceral Capitalism in Palestine". South Atlantic Quarterly 120 (2) pp. 393-414. April 2021. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for criticism, teaching, commentary purposes.]

Newest video essay is out!!!

It's called "Vinland Saga Season 2 is God Damn Peak"

Or alternatively it's called: The Carceral State of Vinland Saga Season 2.

The video idea came to me when I did my first Vinland Saga on how the manga tackles Violence and I wanted to make this right after, but I wait until season 2 came out and it was worth the wait.

The underlining idea is Carceral cultures that the Viking World imposes on its young. Through imposing such a culture those who "deviate" from the norms of violence are shunned from society or they are turned into slaves.

Thus simply being "weak" is criminalized but the Farmland arc does an interesting thing as it serves as method for Thorfinn to self-reflect but this is doing through the use of a Haunting.

However, Vinland goes further as it demonstrates a liberation from Carceral Cultures and from "viking realism" as Thorfinn imagines a place that is free from the fires of war, from enslavement and suffering.

So that's how this video came into being

I then had to stich anime clips and make a video essay

So if you're interested check out my video essay and throw me a comment :)

wait actually can I start being as no nuance and reductive as jason antis

"Actually I do think Bruce is right and Jason is wrong because killing is always bad"

Oh so you like prisons? You like working with cops? You like carceral state propaganda? I see :/

(Both of them are wrong because the Batman comics have operated off of punitive and then, only after punishment, rehabilitative justice ideals since day 1 but this is a very salty joke so.)

I've posted about this before but the rights of the accused in criminal cases in this country are in a fucking absurd state. So, here's how it works legally, as far as I can tell.

You're arrested, accused of a fairly serious crime. In a very wide variety of situations, you will be compelled to accept legal representation for your case, your assigned defender being paid by the state. Now, most of the people who claim that anyone getting a public defender is probably going to be found guilty are lawyers trying to sell you criminal defense services. On the other hand, they're almost certainly right. So far, so normal, right, with the caveat that the land of the free lets you self-represent if you're dumb enough to do it but we often don't.

If you lose your case, though, which I remind you anyone with a state-assigned defender is extremely likely to do, the state will attempt to recover the cost of the trial from you, including the cost of the services of your public defender (who is probably billing you for time really spent on the cases of their paying clients). You might be thinking "wait, what the hell?" or "isn't this a travesty?" or "won't this lead to everyone who doesn't go in extremely rich being broke or deep in debt by the time their trial ends?" but don't worry. If you're already broke you can request free representation. If you know about the form. If you have any property whatsoever though, including, say, the home of your family or something, well, you're fucked I suppose. Long story short, if you're poor, well, maybe you should just plead guilty, eh, keep the costs down.

The good news is your barely remunerated prison labor might put a small dent in your debt by the time you get out. That's nice. Enjoy trying to find a job to keep up with the debt when you have a criminal record, by the way.

This is really merely a particular way for the state to deal with the basic problem of carceral politics in a democratic society, other states have come up with other solutions. The problem is that we want to live in a society with a wide variety of guaranteed liberties, but guaranteeing these liberties in the context of criminal justice is extremely expensive. So when the costs cannot easily be pushed on the accused, the state has to come up with loopholes around those guaranteed liberties, in order to be able to afford to continue creating prisoners at the rate necessary to maintain social order.

here’s my issue with people thinking that the supreme court is a fundamentally good (or perhaps useful is a better word) institution that will correct itself in the long term and they cite plessy and brown vs. board as their example of this logic

plessy (separate but equal) was decided in 1896. brown was decided in 1954. that’s more than fifty fucking years of america saying racial segregation was constitutional and millions of people suffered for it. they endured mental, physical, economic, legal and emotional anguish. they died, and many people died before they would have in an otherwise just world.

that pain is not inconsequential. it is felt generations later. it is embedded into families and the landscape of cities and racist policies that have stayed on the books. in many ways, i would argue that the injustice of plessy has not been cured to this fucking day.

when a basic, necessary, incontrovertible right is denied, that denial echoes. when your autonomy is not legally recognized, it alienates you and siphons your power away. it makes you vulnerable to abuse and reduces the resources at your disposal to live your life how you see fit. it emboldens oppressors to seek other avenues with which they can oppress you.

if roe is overturned, many states are poised to trigger laws that will make all abortion illegal within those state lines. the longer the right to abortion is not codified into law, the more creative those same states will become to prevent their citizens from seeking abortions elsewhere. they will violate privacy and use the carceral state as a cudgel to get what they want.

people who had to live with the rulings in korematsu, under dred scott, under plessy didn’t fucking deserve to endure that. they did not deserve to wait for the law to acknowledge their rights, or to have their freedom stolen from them. the supreme court tepidly acknowledging that their previous decision was wrong possibly decades from now if ever is cold comfort to the people who must live with that decision, the decisions that stem from it, and the consequences today.