Usual Cruelty

It's really tough for me to get through books about US's criminally un-just system. Luckily this book is short. It lacks any filler. I like to highlight passages as I read but it would have resulted in highlighting every page. This is just jam packed with valuable insight in how our criminal justice system works and how it fails to achieve its directly intended goal.

The author offers heartbreaking stories of the systematic cruelty that runs rampant. It is not objectively possible for the United States of America to call itself the “leader of the free world” while detaining 25% of the world's prisoners, and doing so in the most needlessly cruel and horrible conditions on earth. We are not a “free” nation. This is propaganda to keep us complacent. We are an authoritarian regime that endlessly throws poor people and people of color into a bottomless pit.

Our system does not exist to “reform.” It exists to make people suffer. There is no rational basis to how the system operates other than “it's how we've always done it” or “criminals should pay”. When you take a step back and look at it rationally, the brutality is truly horrifying.

The author writes from the point of view as a lawyer and to an audience of lawyers in order to convince enough of them to try and fight for systematic changes. Lawyers have a unique role as those with power and enough agency to make systematic change, as long as they recognize their power and are willing to actually fight for the people rather than maintain their status as a cog in the “punishment bureaucracy” as he puts it.

A civilized society would not base their system of laws around how to most effectively brutalize and punish its citizenry. Every law that is broken, every crime committed is not an individual failure, it is a societal failure. Resolving these failures require societal solutions to things like: poverty, addiction, homelessness, white supremacy, poverty, poverty, and also poverty. But we don't live in a civilized society. We live in a society that has to be “tough on crime”. So we toss black bodies into the open maw of this hellworld we call a “justice system”.

I could go on forever about this. It really upsets me how broken this system is. I would recommend this book to anyone who thinks we live in a “nation of laws” or anyone associated with criminal justice, or any lawyer, or just anyone at all.

The book ends with this call to action:

“Legal academics, judges, and lawyers of conscience must take up this two-pronged challenge: we must bring intellectual rigor to legal discourse and doctrine that shape the punishment system, and we must use the energy that animates our bodies to ensure that the legal system looks in practice as it appears in our scrolls and on our marble monuments.”

Here are some other good quotes I found, they're all very long because they're so incredibly good:

“A lot of people are talking about ‘criminal justice reform.' Much of that talk is dangerous. The conventional wisdom is that there is an emerging consensus that the criminal legal system is ‘broken.' But the system is ‘broken' only to the extent that one believes its purpose is to promote the well-being of all members of our society. If the function of the modern punishment system is to preserve racial and economic hierarchy through brutality and control, then its bureaucracy is performing well.”

“[I]n 2015, more people were handcuffed and caged for marijuana offenses than for all ‘violent' crimes combined. In many jurisdictions, the single most common criminal prosecution is for driving with a suspended license, and about forty percent of suspended American drivers' licenses were taken away not for any reason related to driving, but because a person was too poor to pay court debts.”
We supposedly abolished indentured servitude and debtors prison. But not really. We just better bureaucratized it.
Also this shows why the state would oppose more public transportation: it would result in them having less control over its citizenry. If you have to drive, then the state has an exceptionally effective weight to hold over your head in the event you step out of line. And they have an exceptionally effective tool to criminalize poverty.

“A major achievement of the punishment bureaucracy is that it has retained mainstream respect even though its “law enforcement” choices crush unprecedented numbers of people with no evidence of any unique social benefit while simultaneously allowing enormous amounts of lawlessness that cause massive harm. Why are these choices still viewed as legitimate?
First, the groups who wield power in our society benefit from the punishment bureaucracy. It privileges their private property, their racial supremacy, their jobs, their voting rights, and their segregated neighborhoods.
Second, the growth of the punishment bureaucracy itself changes our culture and economy. As the bureaucracy expands, it employs larger and larger numbers of police officers, prosecutors, probation officers, defense attorneys, prison guards, contractors, and equipment manufacturers. People working in the system become dependent on its perpetuation for their livelihoods and even their identities. The path of least resistance is to grow more. Jobs are created, local political power is consolidated, and “law enforcement” activities are normalized and then rendered economically essential—such as roadblocks, prison guards, home raids, drug interdiction teams, neighborhood patrols, armed police in schools, SWAT teams, stop-and-frisk practices, social media monitoring, video surveillance, probation drug testing, and ‘intelligence' divisions.”

“[T]he punishment bureaucrats who created the contemporary ‘criminal justice system' are broadly comfortable with the way that our society looks. They market a crime problem in need of ‘law enforcement' in order to keep our society looking the way that it does. They do not want to solve the ‘crime' problem if that means a society that looks much different—say, more equal and with less private profit. Hence they both construct and respond to ‘crime' with strategies that increase inequality and control, but do little to stop the same problems they purport to care about—and that often make those problems worse, thereby justifying a circular call for more (selective) punishment. And that is why courts do not enforce the rules of law that are intended to make our society more equal when those rules conflict with the goals of the punishment bureaucracy.
The ‘law enforcement' religion is hostile to the view that a society that is more equal would have less crime, not because that idea is untrue, but because the very goal of the criminal legal system is to preserve certain elements of an unequal social order even if that inequality creates ‘crime.'”

“[F]ew ideas have caused more harm in our criminal system than the belief that America is governed by a neutral ‘rule of law.' The content of our criminal laws [...] and how those laws are carried out [...] are choices that reflect power. The common understanding of the ‘rule of law' and the widely accepted use of the term ‘law enforcement' to describe the process by which those in power accomplish unprecedented human caging are both delusions critical to justifying the punishment bureaucracy. ”

“No matter what one's views on drugs, there is one thing that all agree on: these laws were never based on empirical evidence about the best way to create a society with less use of harmful substances.”

“No government in any jurisdiction in the United States has proven that human caging is a way to reduce drug use at all, let alone the least intrusive way. Instead, a mountain of evidence suggests that the punishment approach to drugs has actually increased drug use and the harms associated with it, including by diverting funds from evidence-based alternatives.”

Decriminalization is objectively a more rational way to handle drug use. Anyone who says otherwise is merely sadistic.

The punishment disparity for crack vs powdered cocaine possession was once 100:1. This is one example of laws with a very clearly racist intent behind them. “For decades, even the cautious U.S. Sentencing Commission wanted to remove this disparity because there is no legal or scientific basis for it. And when Congress did reduce the disparity after a unanimous Senate vote in 2010—and millions of years in prison later—no one offered a justification for why it had existed. But for reasons that were never articulated, the government did not remove the disparity; it chose to lower the disparity from 100:1 to 18:1. And for more than eight years after that ‘Fair Sentencing Act' passed, the government chose not to make even these limited ‘fair' changes retroactive to help the thousands of human beings already in prison because of a law that everyone agreed had no basis.”
Yeah we sure do live in a “country of laws”: The country of AmeriKKKa.

There's lots more but this is getting too long. Every line is worth quoting. The book is fantastic but also very depressing.