🤔 I often post about how many innocent Black folk (millions) spend up to 2 years in jail, just because they can't afford bail. About how the less likely you are to be a criminal or in a gang, the more likely you are to experience prison violence. About how I am not hard. I'm soft as a kitten's belly! And yet 15 minutes in a cell with me, and I could have you confessing to crimes you didn't commit, just to get out of jail and away from me.
But Chauvin gets stabbed, and now y'all wanna talk? BFR.
I just got done helping another 100% innocent Black friend in NYC avoid being charged with a felony. That charge could have had him in Rikers for up to 2 years pre-trial. He could have lost his job, house, credit score, savings, his relationship, etc. A lot of people get stabbed in Rikers.
How I helped: Advice. Lawyer. Covered retainer.
But y'all want to talk about Chauvin? That's what makes you finally want to talk about cruel and unusual punishment, and violence in the prison system?
If you want to talk about violence in the prison system, what we can do to reduce it, and how it is morally reprehensible for prosecutors to use that violence as a way to get Black people to confess to crimes that everyone knows that they did not commit? Then I'm with you. 👍🏿
But if you want to talk specifically about how we can keep Derek Chauvin safe? How we can keep the inhumane, brutal prison system for innocent Black folk, but protect him from it? Miss me with that. Talk to somebody else.
Kalief Browder was 100% innocent. He was a good student and had never been arrested. He was accused of stealing a backpack, even though no backpack was found on him or anywhere near him when he was arrested. There was literally zero evidence. But they sent him to Rikers for 3 years, hoping he would confess to something that everyone knew he didn't do. He never confessed. And it broke him.
The violence in the prison system is necessary to get Black people to confess to crimes that they did not commit.
Without extreme prison violence, and without the injustice of cash bail, poor Black people would have a better chance of not being wrongfully convicted. Tens of millions of lives would be positively impacted. The United States would become a less racist place!
That's the problem that we should be addressing. Not "How do we keep the evil system, but help Chauvin not get stabbed?"
@mekkaokereke Police will target people (particularly unhoused black men) a crime happens around them & they pick them up. W/out evidence or statements they will charge them! My son has been arrested 2x w aggravated assault- in both cases he was absolutely innocent. There was $10,000 bond. It was by sheer luck there was evidence in both cases that ended in his release before he was officially charged. One of these times he may not be so lucky because police in his area have him on their radar.
@mekkaokereke There needs to be a word that captures the essence of “background fascism” — that’s the fascism that sits just barely enough out of sight that the complacent Whites (who the system depends on for support) can pretend it doesn’t exist.
@CivilityFan But Democrats do it too. In fact, Biden is directly to blame for the '94 Crime Bill that made this situation worse. Before you suggest that that was a long time ago and perhaps he's changed, I would remind you that his answer to recent calls for reform was to increase police funding.
@noisenerd@mjf_pro@mekkaokereke In the time that bill was formulated, there was buy in from minority communities. It wasn’t anticipated that it would be used by following administrations as a substitute Jim Crow, it was to fight crime in those communities. Don’t judge the past by today’s 2020 hindsight to see where somebody heart. Calls for defunding the police were such a PR failure, without responding in this way you would have given the election to tfg. It’s all politics, but context matters
@CivilityFan Calls for defunding were a PR failure because people like Biden refused to actually engage with what people were saying. Nobody was suggesting that you simply get rid of police and do nothing to address the issues, and rather than explaining that he chose to take the easy way out and go with what was politically popular. There is no excuse for pretending that we don't know this doesn't work when so many lives are at stake.
@noisenerd@mjf_pro@mekkaokereke I think you are mistaken in this view. Defunding the police and putting those resources into improving the communities is a great idea but the slogan absolutely killed it, no politician is going to be able to defend it, no constituency except maybe very progressive intellectuals is going to grasp its message. It is defeat to any politician that endorses it because voters are not nuanced and smart, they react on a gut level and vote out of fear more than hope. That’s my opinion, ymmv
If what you said was true, then politicians would have rejected the term and enacted the good ideas. But, they didn't do that. Because it's not about the slogan. It's about the ideas.
As I've mentioned before, people in the 60s didn't like the term "nonviolent protest" when MLK said that either.
It's not the term. It's the concept.
The concept isn't popular with racists, and centrists listen to racists more than they listen to Black people.
Everywhere the concepts have been tried, they've been successful at reducing crime. And yet, centrists roll back these policies, to put in place violent, anti-Black programs that we already know don't work.
Because those anti-Black programs please racists on the right. Which keeps centrists in office. Which is what centrist politicians care about more than improving the lives of their constituents, Black or white. 🤷🏿♂️
Thanks for your explanations.
But you wrote a while ago that you're pro-capitalism, so that makes you at best left of center ?
Note that your program as you defined it in your answer is indeed center-left...
You're not spineless at all and I understand that you conflates "centrism" and "spinelessness" as alas many centrists are spineless, but your political program is actually centrist.
On one issue, which is the source of most of my debates with friends. Basically "Can you have capitalism without racism, sexism, oppression?"
Me: I think we can. Today the incentives are all wrong. We can fix it! We've never really tried.
Friends: 🤦🏿♀️ Bro. You're trying right now! And it's not working. Look around you! Don't be so naive. Y'all tried to take the racism out of capitalism, and all you made is Black capitalists.
🙂One level deeper is, "Can the systemic leverage points of capitalism be adjusted through policy to incentivize the right behavior?" I think they can.
🙂🙃Counter argument is, "No, they absolutely cannot. Because the folk that profit from the existing system, use that cash and influence to make sure that those systemic leverage points don't get moved at all."
🙂🙃🙂Counter-counter: So then reduce the influence of cash on democracy!
🙂🙃🙂🙃 Dude... how?! Why would they ever let that happen?
Yeah, that's my point. On a global scale, I'm just left of center. But that's not what "centrist" means in the US. The US is an extremely right-skewed country. US voters are left of their politicians.🙃
My position, which would be just left of center in a normal country, is the political far-left in the US. Even though its policy positions are supported by about 60% of the population.
A US "centrist" is the center of US politicians. Romney. Biden. McCain. Clinton. Sinema. Manchin.
Also not true. The people that didn't like the phrase, didn't like the concept either. There's no big pool of people who are like if you would have called it [other phrase] instead I would have supported it.
In short, the failure wasn't "PR." The failure was we are addicted to systemic racism. So much so that we can't believe a better world is possible.
Threatening suspects with "what could happen to them" in jail, and putting first-timers in cells with known violent offenders or intimidating snitches, are forms of stochastic terrorism.
@mekkaokereke
I always read your posts trying to learn and figure out how to bring change.
It seems like a large fund that will cover bail for poor people can really make a difference.
Do you think that something like that can be set up both locally and nationally?
But better than bail funds, is eliminating cash bail. Whether or not you are kept in jail pre-trial or not, shouldn't be based on how much money you have. It should be based on how much risk you present to the community (which is still open to bias, but much less).
So we should support progressive DAs over carceral ones.
@mekkaokereke Ever wonder if the defense lawyers stopped getting their clients to plea deal and did their job how different the ethnic breakdown of prison population would be?
@mekkaokereke I don’t know if it’s like this everywhere, but in public housing in New Hampshire part of your lease says that if you are arrested for any reason, even if you are found not guilty or charges are dropped, simply being arrested violates your lease and is ground grounds for eviction.
A teacher back in 2016 was arrested for something, I think she was protesting maybe, anyway she lost her job and she was evicted. Later it came out that the police had falsified evidence to justify the arrest in the first place so it was dropped. She was able to get her job back but of course Housing was long gone.
@mekkaokereke 2 years is also the new google inactive account deletion window
" What happens when your Google Account is inactive
When your Google Account has not been used within a 2-year period, your Google Account, that is then deemed inactive, and all of its content and data may be deleted."
@mekkaokereke I forget who it was, but I saw a recent toot that said something along the lines of "there's no reason to acknowledge when an awful person has a good take, when you could instead acknowledge the endless number of heroic people with the same take."
Same thing here. No conversation about prison brutality needs to bring up Chauvin at all, and it says a lot about anyone who decides to do so.
@mekkaokereke This is like when Epstein committed suicide. There were two parts of that I found interesting/depressing:
The apparent enormous amount of ignorance around how common prison suicides, and violence and poor mental health and poor conditions in general in prison are
The insistence that it had to be a conspiracy, because rich white men aren't the kind of people who are supposed to die in prison
Add comment