We’re creating a dystopia, where the mania of the state isn’t secrecy or censorship but unfairness. It’s far more complicated than that, and in a way more horrible. To say that the rich go free while the poor go to jail turns out to be a gross oversimplification. Only we’ve arranged things so that the problem is basically invisible to most people, unless you go looking for it. You just need to see it, and it speaks for itself. This is a story that doesn’t need to be argued. But underneath that surface is a florid and malevolent bureaucracy that mostly (not absolutely, but mostly) keeps the rich and the poor separate through thousands of tiny, scarcely visible inequities. We still have real jury trials, honest judges, and free elections, all the superficial characteristics of a functional, free democracy. Can you imagine spending a night in jail for possessing a pink Hi-Liter marker? For rolling a tobacco cigarette? How about for going to the corner store to buy ketchup without bringing an ID? We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we’re building a bureaucracy to match those feelings.įor most of the poor people who are being sent away, whether it’s for a day or for ten years, their prison lives begin when they’re jailed for the most minor offenses imaginable. Unquestionably, however, something else is at work, something that cuts deeper into the American psyche. None of us are free if one of us is chained ness Walk up to – legal to think for self – talk to self – but now with mechanism in place… the exponentiation of a quiet revolution.īizarrely, for instance, we’ve become numb to the idea that rights aren’t absolute but are enjoyed on a kind of sliding scale But the instant people were permitted to think about all this and question the unwritten rules out loud, it was like the whole country woke up from a dream, and the system fell apart in a matter of months.That happened before my eyes in 19, and I never forgot it For a Russian in Soviet times, navigating every moment of citizenship involved countless silent calculations of this type. Poverty goes up Crime goes down Prison population doubles.Įveryone understood this hypocrisy implicitly, almost at a cellular level, far beneath thought. it’s happening everywhere…įind many links to democracy now interviews on Matt’s wikipedia page: Right now it’s just too easy to put poor people in jail where we don’t see the injusticeĢ4 min – if they’re too big to prosecute, they’re too big to exist it’s a feature of the systemĪre we at that moment. Not appropriate for prison (even though stole billions) – this point where i realized we’ve determined kinds of people that go to jail and kinds of people that don’t
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