Working, How the System Is
by Ya'iyr
posted Feb. 8, 2022
Overused, yet seldom understood terms are strangling the sense out of current discourses on amerika's punishment system. "Criminal justice" and "prison reform" are indefinable abstractions wafting over the airwaves, intermingling with "legal system", "defund" and "abolish". My seeming overuse of quotation marks is only necessary because the definitions of the above terms remain contested by the "thought leaders" so fond of them. This is no anomaly. History has shown that the words "crime", "justice" and "legal" have always been subjectively interpreted. Judges, prosecutors and cops redefine these concepts daily when choosing the length of a sentence, the severity of a charge and whether to give a warning, or shoot to kill. It's no wonder we can not come to consensus on what is “wrong” with "the system" or what to do about it. We don't even agree on what the words mean.
Most of us are taught at a young age that crime is when a person breaks a law by doing something wrong or "bad". And when the legal system punishes that person, we call that justice. But for those who have studied amerika's justice system, or experienced it first hand, it is hardly "just". The system is just a myth; the scales are not even; skin color and economics weigh heavily before Lady Justice. Monumental hypocrisies glare at those who peek beneath the blindfold. Note the case of Willie Simmons, a Black man convicted of stealing $9, who was sentenced to Life in prison.¹ Justice? Compare that to Christopher Belter, a wealthy white man who admitted to raping four teenage girls and was sentenced to probation.² Hmm.
Obvious injustices must be expected in a society that intentionally disconnects the concepts of crime and harm. For example, shoplifting is theft and a crime that lands people in jail. But coercing employees to work after hours without compensation under threat of termination is also theft, yet not a crime. Though wage theft is undoubtedly harmful, no one has ever gone to jail for it. Contradictions like these are inherent to the current system.
What follows is not an attempt to define contested terms which will soon be appropriated and redefined. My goal is simply to bring some clarity to those who desire to see the system for what it really is. Here I intend to outline the purposes and applications of structures and systems which weaponize policing and determine who is targeted by the law. I hope to interrogate a system which arrests, prosecutes, and sentences people unequally based on socioeconomic status, race and gender. This system which we struggle to define, was never designed to prevent harm and keep us safe. As author Kristian Williams noted based on the history of law enforcement:
"[T]he police exist to control troublesome populations, especially those that are likely to rebel. This task has little to do with crime, as most people think of it, and much to do with politics — especially the preservation of existing inequalities. To the degree that a social order works to the advantage of some and the disadvantage of others, its preservation will largely consist of protecting the interests of the first group from the demands of the second." ³
People of color, women and LGBTQ+ folks have historically fallen into the category of the second group. Their demands typically include calls for equality, self determination and relief from discrimination and persecution. These demands are against the interests of the group which controls the social order — a group consisting mainly of wealthy white males and their collaborators.
This conflict materializes in remixed forms on streets, in work places, in schools and innumerable other spaces where the system shows itself malleable for the benefit of some but not others. Each day police officers decide whether to look the other way, give warnings, take someone to jail or kill them. Statistics show that those choices are largely influenced by skin color, gender, affluence and geographic location of the person encountering the cops.
Prosecutors decide on the severity and the amount of charges, which determine how much prison time one faces. Studies show that Black and Brown people are consistently charged more harshly than their white counterparts. The weight of one's charges influence one's willingness to plead guilty. When you face decades or life in prison, you face immense pressure to take a deal — even if you did not commit a crime.
Private attorneys and public defenders decide how hard they will fight for your freedom and many are overworked with little resources compared to the state.
No one wants to go on trial, especially when one knows they will never see a jury of their "peers". Not only do people of color face majority white juries, but most judges are white, and they decide how fair the trial will be. History shows us that juries are less sympathetic, and judges give longer sentences, to people of color. Amerika's punishment system is a terrifying beast to those without the benefits of white privilege and influence.
Since, for centuries, the system has disproportionately targeted, imprisoned and killed people who belong to marginalized groups, those groups experience generational oppression that has compounded exponentially and continues to this day. This monstrous mechanism never attempts to address the causes of "crime". It never acknowledges the impetus for individual's decisions. When people in power implement policies that widen economic disparities, people who are the victims of those policies are forced to make difficult decisions in order to survive. There is no responsibility or accountability for the harm those policy makers cause. Many times those who have done the most harm are rewarded.⁴ And those who the ruling class exploits are criminalized. The people striving to keep you poor push to have you locked up for striving to get by. The removal of community members who find ways to survive informally (illegally) is a way for the ruling class to eliminate possible subversives - those who refuse to accept the status quo.
It ain't broke. Among the architects invested in the continued oppression of others, we often hear suggestions for what to do when the barbaric nature of their system is exposed. They talk of common sense fixes as if something is broken. But the system is working how it is designed. Only the delusional and naive believe differently and eagerly accept periodic token concessions or "reforms". Politicians emit notions of reform like wispy vapors to distort the political landscape. Democrats and Republicans beg for votes every election season while promising to push for change, then offer platitudes after they fail to make progress. However, concrete progress was never on the agenda; only reformism - the fog impeding our view of the horizon. We cannot navigate our way to a promised land when our minds are clouded by deceit.
The current problems of mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex (PIC) are nothing more than reforms of previous vicious systems of social control. Early amerikan penitentiaries did not cage a disproportionate number of POC like today's system. There was no reason to imprison Black folks since they were already bound in slave chains. If someone felt a slave needed to be punished, they were mutilated, raped, killed. Likewise there was no hyper-incarceration of Indigenous people like today since common practice was to massacre them.
Still, criminalization by the state was imposed heavily on racialized groups like Irish immigrants who were considered "undesirable" before they were granted the privileges of whiteness. It was after the civil war when the 13th Amendment was adopted that laws targeting Black people gave rise to convict leasing. Prisons became the reforms keeping people suppressed, in bondage and propping up the southern economy.
It is evident that human bondage in this country is always re-forming, perhaps never more drastically than from the 1980s through the 2000s when policing, and the size of the prison system, increased exponentially. The timing is no mystery. The 1950s through the 1970s saw the rise of the nation's largest mass movement with POC and women demanding liberation and the end of imperialist wars. The state answered with the conspicuous importation of drugs and guns into communities of color followed by SWAT teams and the prison-building boom. These reforms were strategically implemented to prevent radical change; to stop the momentum in the people's fight for freedom and equality.
Modern prisons are still cages for housing "undesirables" while propping up struggling economies. Similar to before the Civil War (when poor whites were given jobs as overseers and slave patrols in the south, and strikebreakers in northern cities), whites today in rural amerika are provided stable employment overseeing the captives. And due to discriminatory economic policies, overpolicing, and bias and corruption in the legal system, a disproportionate number of prisoners are people of color. Many of these modern day slaves were ushered on their journey to the cage as children in the school-to-prison pipeline.
Schools, which should be places of safety, support and learning, have taken on the hallmarks of jail. Uniformed officers, metal detectors, distrust and punitive logics crowd out any semblance of an institution created to foster healthy childhood development. This has been a problem for decades in communities of color. An action that gets the average white kid detention, potentially results in criminal charges for Black and Brown youth. Schools have become prepping zones, acclimating children to life being surveilled, monitored and controlled. They are being prepared for the modern adult slave system.
In their book Prison By Any Other Name, authors Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law note:
"[T]he number of police in schools rose drastically in the first decade of the twenty-first century, thus increasing school-based arrests and heightening the involvement of the criminal punishment system in students' lives at young ages.
"A regular police presence in schools also paves the ground for police violence beyond arrests. In-school police have tased students, shot them with stun guns, body-slammed them, pepper-sprayed them and choked them." ⁵
These incidents traumatize all who experience, and witness, them. But they also serve the state's interest in inciting fear and desensitizing us to the greater violence of the criminal injustice system as a whole. We have been conditioned to accept that this is just the way things are; that we cannot change it, so we should not try.
Our society's reliance on a punitive criminal legal system is harming us, not making us safer. In 2020, the spectacle of amerikan state violence against people of color elevated calls to defund police and abolish prisons. These slogans reached the national stage, though police have yet to be defunded and prison has not been abolished. Still, alleged rises in crime rates were blamed on the "defund" movement.⁶
Apologists for the system would have us believe that more police equals more safety. I ask them, how can crime be on the rise right now, when police departments have the most funding of any era in history? Why isn't Chicago, which boasts the nation's second largest police force, the second safest city? According to carceral and punitive logics, this country, which imprisons more people per capita than any other, should have the least amount of crime. Yet we know that this is not the case. Despite the cultural emphasis on law and order, Amerika's streets, schools, grocery stores etc. are not the safest in the world. Something is not adding up.
All of the above is frequently excused as minor glitches, or failures, in a good system. However a deeper analysis reveals a police state which has consolidated power in the hands of the few by subjugating the many. And they have convinced most of us that it's for our own good.
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1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Simmons_(inmate)
2: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/18/nyregion/christopher-belter-rape-sentence.html
3: Williams, Our Enemies In Blue, Police and Power in America (2015)
4: A salient example of a politician who has benefited from doing irreparable harm to marginalized groups is Joe Biden through his 1994 crime bill which includes the Violence Against Women Act. 5: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/violence-against-women-act/
5: Shenwar & Law, Prison By Any Other Name, p.183, (2020)
6: For the most part, crime statistics are not reliable as they are reported by law enforcement officials who have been proven to manipulate the numbers. Plus they rarely report the crimes they commit which include, but are not limited to, police brutality, sexual assault, planting or fabricating evidence, hiding or destroying exculpatory evidence, perjury et al.