Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: Police

Police Abolition Principles

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On July 13, 2023

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This piece is by Jonathan Korman and Reprinted With His Permission

 

With Twitter imploding, it is long past time to name something about my long thread there featuring a recurring refrain:

Fire every cop.

Raze every police station. Salt the earth where they stood.

Start over. No guns. No one who was a cop before.

We cannot reform institutions which do this. We can only replace them.

The legitimacy of liberal democracy is at stake.

The thread captures hundreds of examples of horrors perpetrated by police in the US. I refined my refrain over time.

Fire every cop.

People protest that there are good cops who should not be punished.

But I am not talking about punishment. I am talking about remedies. However many “good cops” there may be, sifting them out would be difficult … and I have cause to doubt it is worth doing …

Raze every police station. Salt the earth where they stood.

Policing in the US demonstrates profound institutional failure, baked into all of its systems. We must reject every part of that inheritance, both pragmatically and symbolically.

Start over.

What should we try to achieve? What institutions and practices suit our purposes?

I imagine that we need some rough equivalents to things we have in existing policing; I think something like homicide detectives are a good idea, for example. But for most of what we ask from policing — addressing “crime” — we need social welfare delivered by entirely different means. Police abolition asks what society we would need in order to make it possible to do without police.

We must avoid legacy assumptions. We must think and work from a clean slate.

No guns.

Guns in the hands of police create a host of harms. Their mere presence deforms our systems and processes for the worse. We must simply eliminate them from whatever new institutions we devise.

No one who was a cop before.

I take institutional knowledge seriously. I hesitate to sacrifice it, but dread even more carrying it over from a monstrous system. Even the best people are bent by their adaptations to the old system.

Moses could not enter the Promised Land.

We cannot reform institutions which do this. We can only replace them.

My original Twitter thread shared countless examples of horrifying policing. I shared them not to indict the examples but to indict the systems which produced them. We need a clean break.

The legitimacy of liberal democracy is at stake.

Hobbes calls for a state monopoly on use of force. The liberal democratic ethos — that is, not “liberal” as in not-conservative or not-leftist, but as in Locke and Mill and Jefferson and Berlin — legitimizes the state’s power with democratic accountability and a driving purpose of securing universal rights. If agents of the state directly contradict those libdem principles, as they do in the US, it indicts not just policing but the state itself and the state’s animating principles.

I desperately want to rescue the libdem ethos because I have no better alternative. Radicalism about police abolition is necessary to preserve the institutions and ideas we have which are worth saving.

Is The Police’s Right Wing Bias A Problem For Them?

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On July 7, 2023

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This piece is a comment, by Purple Library Guy, elevated from the comments with their permission.

You know, it occurs to me that the cops, both in France and North America, are headed for a problem similar to Israel’s. That is, they’ve gradually shifted from being bipartisan supporters of the establishment in general to partisan supporters of the hard right, and other parts of the establishment are gradually noticing.

So like, time was Israel had massive and unbreakable bipartisan support in the US from both Republicans and Democrats alike. And Israel was generally fairly nonpartisan in how it interacted with the US. As Israel’s own politics shifted right, the Labour party died and so on, while in the US there was a rise of the religious far right with their massive enthusiasm for Israel, Israel’s politics have increasingly shifted to outright support of the Republicans, and this is one of the sources of Democratic politicians’ support for Israel fracturing. Not that there is now zero support for Israel among Democratic politicians, but it’s weaker; some continue with status quo strong Israel support, some have weaker and more critical support, and some get away with being basically anti-Israel in a way that would have killed their political careers once upon a time. And this is an ongoing process which has not seen its end point, and which seems likely to end up causing Israel significant political trouble.

A similar thing is happening with the cops; as significant sections of the establishment and middle class feel the cops do not have their backs but are instead standing with the politics of the far right not just in terms of racism but in various other ways such as opposition to “wokeness”, sections of the centre-left and even centrist establishment are ceasing to take the police for granted and starting to see them as a problem. The police are narrowing the societal base they depend on. It could come back to bite them.

Sure, nobody’s going to “defund the police” in the sense of totally get rid of them. But there seem to be quite a few options floating around for handling most things that currently involve police in other ways; once you start doing those pilot projects and then expanding them and then you do a study saying cops are only called out a quarter as much as before because so much is handled by social workers and mental health experts, the political cover for cutting them way back gets a lot more solid, and if everyone knows they’re a bunch of alt-right bastards who cannot be trusted by the centrist establishment (let alone progressives of any stripe), there’s gonna be motive to do it.

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Are Police In San Francisco Too Lazy To Work, Too Scared, Or Just Incompetent

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On May 5, 2023

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Stumbled across this interesting rabbit hole on twitter.

Brian Kirschner did the math in constant 2019 numbers:

And, on traffic citations:

So, this interesting. There’s been a general collapse in clearance rates across the country, but when you look at them in detail you tend to see that police have basically stopped trying to clear crimes against blacks, and concentrate on crimes against whites.

But SFPD looks like more than that, it looks like refusal to work.

It’s an interesting situation. Part of it, I’m quite sure, is the way that police are trained to be scared. David Grossman (I’ve read his book “On Combat”) is famous for insisting that training must create instinctive killers who react without conscious thought. Police training is full of exercises which make cops scared of the public.

Indeed…

…officers are afraid of being injured or killed because their jobs are dangerous, but data show that being a police officer is relatively safe. Law enforcement doesn’t crack the top-15 list of most dangerous jobs in America, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

…“A lot of research shows that what people think is dangerous and what they believe poses the greatest risk of harm is determined by your membership in various social groups,” Arsiniega says. This is a phenomenon called “social amplification.” Police may believe they are at a great risk of civilian assault, even when empirical data say otherwise…

…

Mixing systemic racism and socially amplified fear of assault becomes deadly because police are armed, and they have “legal justification to kill people and be legally excused if they’re protecting their lives or lives of a third party,” Arsiniega says.

However, in more than 90 percent of cases in which an officer kills a civilian – about 1,000 each year in America – officers claim to be protecting themselves, not a third party.

Neither do the majority of injuries to on-duty officers come from civilians.

For her dissertation at the University of California at Berkeley, Arsiniega studied police officer injury data from all causes in Savannah, Georgia, between 2010 and 2018. Only 11 percent of all officer injuries were the result of civilian assaults.

She also studied assaults on Atlanta Police Department officers from 2015 to 2018 using reports written by officers themselves. Despite having a violent crime rate roughly 2.5-times the national average, not a single officer was shot or stabbed in the years of her sample. The most serious injuries caused by civilians were broken bones in the hand and cuts and scrapes on officers’ hands and knees while arresting suspects.

Cops are basically immune to prosecution for violent crimes against civilians. There are exceptions, but they’re exceptions. They aren’t actually doing a particularly dangerous job: being a logger or a fisherman is way more dangerous, but they think they are, and they have an ethos of “us versus them.”

But their training emphasizes that is “better to be judged by twelve, than carried by six”. They are more concerned about their safety than the safety of others, they don’t “protect and serve” civilians, they protect and serve themselves.

This feeling of being a beleaguered group, under great danger, probably contributes to refusal to work. They show up, but they don’t take anything they perceive as risks.

There is also a sense that they aren’t appreciated, a “we risk our lives and you look down on us and don’t treat us like heroes” and that also, I’m sure contributes to a sense that they don’t owe it to the public to do their jobs. After all, money isn’t worth their lives.

But basically, being a cop is close to being a sinecure at this point. They are mostly immune to prosecution, they are paid very well for municipal workers, and police budgets in most cities keep rising and are often the largest part of the city budget. It’s a union job in the worst sense of the word: a job where there is no real accountability to actually do the job, and it is cushioned by the high respect that most white Americans have in the police.

Sixty-nine percent of Americans trust local police and law enforcement to promote justice and equal treatment for people of all races (up from 56%), and 52% feel the same about police unions (up from 40%).

Since clearance rates have been declining for decades and since the response to that has been to increase budgets, there really is no reason for police to do their jobs. In fact, not doing their jobs is probably the strategy that works best: it’s easier, they get to say crime is out of control and claim that more money is needed.

If not doing your job leads to more money not less, why do your job, especially when you’ve been trained to think it’s a dangerous job, when being a policeman isn’t even as dangerous as being a farmer, logger, or fisherman.

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How to Keep Enforcers Like Police, the Military, and Spies Under Control

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On February 16, 2022

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There are broadly three groups of enforcers: police, secret police (spies), and the military. All three have a tendency to attract people who are reactionary, and who enjoy having authority and causing fear. The great attraction of being an enforcer, for many people, is that you get to make other people do things, and hurt them, and they can’t fight back.

Police, in particular, are always making choices as to what laws they enforce and how, and how strictly they enforce them. There’s a lot of discretion in the job. It’s long been noted that some people are treated far more harshly, for the same infraction, than others. Indeed, what can get you beaten up and arrested by cops if you’re part of a group they don’t like, or you irritate a particular cop, can also be ignored if they like you, or you’re part of a group they like.

This was a common complaint during the BLM protests, where right-wing protesters would be protected by cops and not arrested for actions for which they would have come down hard on the BLM protesters. In Canada, during the “trucker” protests, it’s been noted over and over again that indigenous and left-wing protesters would never have been treated so leniently by the police for so long — and indeed, it was only when protesters blocked trade between the US and Canada that any serious action was taken.

The most critical part of that action was financial. Chrystia Freeland announced that accounts would be frozen and that truckers’ insurance (without which you cannot operate a rig in Canada) would be terminated. That’s interesting, because these are administrative actions that don’t require the cops to actually do much, beyond report who’s there. There’s no going in with the horses and riot gear and tear gas and beating people up like they do to the indigenous and G7 protesters.

At least when dealing with local cops, and especially in Ottawa and Windsor, it seems like the police basically refused to do their jobs or even, in Ottawa, follow direct orders from the police chief (who has since resigned and who also seemed, initially, very friendly to the protesters).

As I’ve noted before, there are normally three requirements for revolution: an elite faction in support of the revolution, a popular faction in support (at a higher percent than the “truckers” have, about 25 percent to 30 percent), and the refusal of enforcers to protect the current regime.

So, enforcer willingness to act against any threat is important.

But it’s also worth noting that enforcers aren’t a monolith. Police aren’t secret police, who aren’t cops, and even within, say, police, there can be splits. In the US during school integration, local cops usually wouldn’t protect school integration, so the federal police (FBI) were sent in and they did. The FBI traditionally had bad relations with local cops and were happy to stick their thumb in.

This leads to one of the main rules of running enforcers. You want them to hate each other. You want the feds to hate the state/provincial local police. You want the military to despise the spies and look down on the police, state and local. You want the local police to hate the state/feds for horning in on them, and loathe the secret police for keeping track of them and you want them to think the military are out of touch.

You also don’t want them cross-training. They do different things, and what is appropriate for police is not appropriate for secret police or military, and vice versa. As a rule, you should not allow someone who has worked in one branch to apply to have jobs in the others — no vets into the police or secret police and vice versa. You don’t want them thinking of themselves as one group — and in any case, militarized police are always a mistake and militaries that do police and occupation work always become incompetent, weak, and fight worse. This is what turned the Israeli army from one of the best in the world into crackers who get their asses handed to them by Hezbollah and are scared of even fighting it.

This is also why, in the military, there shouldn’t be one “military,” but multiple services. Anything you gain from combining them into one service is more than counterbalanced by the danger. (And, it’s clear, in many ways, they perform better when they feel competitive, in any case.)

The next problem is one of the oldest in history: Demobilizing armed men. This is one of the hardest things to do. Because it’s clear that the Ottawa police, for example, are no longer under civilian control, the majority of them need to be let go and replaced with people who will obey orders.

Doing this is hard. They would probably strike and become even more unwilling enforce laws, and it’s quite likely they would threaten elected officials. Once you’ve given a group a semi-monopoly on force, breaking that monopoly is difficult. This is why you need a divided enforcer class. While you’re disarming and firing, say, the spies, you need to be able to use the federal or provincial police, or in a worst case scenario, the military (who should only be used for policing in emergencies — they’re bad at it, and it’s bad for them, as previously discussed).

Finally, while you will always need some police, we need a lot less. Various cities have experimented with unarmed crisis response teams: If someone’s having a mental breakdown, sending non-police almost always leads to better outcomes, and if force does turn out to be required, someone trained in the sort of violence in which orderlies sometimes need to engage (restrainment) is far better than a police.

Take away all the miscellaneous activities from armed police, and you’ll have a lot less trouble. Make the traffic enforcers a completely different organization, the mental health guys different, expand the paramedics, etc. The less men with guns and a propensity for violence, the better.

Also, while you may never hear me say this in the case of anything else, I don’t think armed men should also have unions. Police unions always seem to be the worst of the worst. There’s a reason the military doesn’t allow unions and it applies to police, too.

There is also a selection issue, and we need to find a way to not select for reactionaries and bullies in the enforcer class. In the military, this was traditionally done by a draft (which I hate but tentatively endorse). In the police and the secret police, we have to find out a way to do it as well.

In Canada and the US both, the police are out of control. They are gangs, the most dangerous gang wherever they operate, and they despise and look down on civilians, including the politicians who are their nominal superiors. They need to be replaced en-masse, and the new police forces need to be much smaller. Police militarization needs to end, and rivalry between different police forces, the military, and the secret police (spies) needs to be encouraged, while the actual number of police needs to be cut at least in half to a third by giving many of their roles to other groups who are unarmed — or at the very least, don’t have guns, tazers, and so on.

This would be true no matter what type of government you ran. The enforcers are always dangerous, and they always have to be kept divided, and they are always ripe for abusing their power due to impartiality.

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Policing the Police

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On June 1, 2020

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GUEST POST by Webstir

In this time of police brutality, who can we depend upon to police the police? Who can we depend upon to police the prosecutors? The judges? Our lawmakers? You. That’s who. It’s your job. More than that, it’s your duty to your fellow man. And it’s not really even very difficult. All it takes is a little creative thinking.

Know this: If you’re protesting, you’re being surveilled. But to protest effectively, you must come to the protest organized. To do so requires that you surveil. To surveil effectively you must preserve your anonymity. If you don’t, anticipate a retaliatory response that will attempt to destroy your life. Or, even take it.

A smart first step is to hire a lawyer. The lawyer is your public face. They are ethically bound to preserve your anonymity so long as you aren’t using their services to commit a crime. But lawyers aren’t cheap. The way around this is to gather as many people you trust as you can and pool your resources. Send one of your pool to hire the lawyer and have them issue a Freedom of Information Act request to your local law enforcement agencies. Have them seek names, ranks, and badge numbers of every officer in the agency’s employ. Hell, if you’re enterprising, you can have the lawyer seek disciplinary records as well.

And remember, that same lawyer will also help save your bacon should you find yourself locked up – which you very well may.

Next, enrich the information you’ve gathered. Start plugging the names into public information web sites like Intellius, TruthFinder, Spokeo, or BeenVerified. These sites are a wealth of information. They will likely tell you email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, criminal histories, debts, relatives, and close associates. Other resources are county property record web sites and the Secretary of State web sites. If these require personal identification to access, use your lawyer. Take the data you found and then track down their social media profiles. Download the pictures of them from the social media sites in their civilian capacities and record any posts that appear useful.

Now it’s time to put the information you’ve gathered to use. Assemble a packet of each and every officer with a plain clothes face picture. Use your pooled resources to print hundreds of these packets and distribute them among your pool and among protestors. Make an electronic copy and distribute it to your associates online. Remember, you’re being surveilled. There are black hat cops among you and you’re going to want to be able to identify them. If someone is advocating violence and you don’t know him or her, check the list.

At the protest, use your information. Buy a bullhorn. When the cops get close, start calling them out by name. Tell them what you know about them. Tell them you know where they live. Tell them you know who their family members are. Tell them you know how much they’re in debt. Tell them about their latest post on Facebook.

The police rely on fear to control you. Being just a badge number instead of a human allows them to do that. Destroy their illusion of anonymity. Make them scared. Think about it. What would you do if a crowd of angry protestors were telling you they know everything about you down to your latest social media post? Me? I’d begin worrying about my family. I might also begin to think about a career change. Think too, about the likely response of the law enforcement agencies once they know all their information is out there. A likely response is to assign some of their resources to protect their dwellings and families. These are resources that aren’t hitting you upside the head with a baton or spraying mace in your eyes. That’s a win.

Also, take pictures of badge numbers when you find yourself in the thick of it. Once home, track them down on your database and distribute widely on social media. Tell the story of what you saw the officer do and post pictures and video of them if you have it. Tag them in the post. Let them know you’re watching their every move.

Finally, this tactic doesn’t have to be restricted to the police forces alone. Prosecutors and elected officials are often every bit as complicit as the cops themselves. Remember who is giving them the green light. Use the same tactics on them. Know your enemy. And remember, “[t]hose who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Stay peaceful, but be prepared to fight power with power. Knowledge, is power. Exercising it is your duty. Go forth, and sow fear among your oppressors.

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The Enforcer Class

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On June 10, 2015

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If you are a left-winger who wants to, in effect, overthrow a racist oligarchical system, the police are not your friends. Nor, need I point out, are corrections officers. Nor is most of the court system.

These people belong to the enforcer class. Police and corrections officers are paid not just in money but in license to brutalize. In most cases, they can get away with beating people up and even killing them. To stop a police officer from skating on murder requires riots, as a rule, and even that doesn’t usually work. The FBI has cleared themselves of every killing an FBI officer has performed for decades.

This is not incidental, this is not an accident; this is how our lords and rulers want the enforcement system to run.

Police are selected and trained and socialized to either become thugs or to cover up thuggery. Imbeciles will say things like “not all cops,” but it is virtually unheard of for the “good cops” to inform on the bad cops–they keep their mouths shut. This is wise on their part, of course, because the vast majority of police would turn on them in seconds if they were to betray the blue wall of silence.

America, per capita, imprisons more people than any other country in the world. Many of these people are non-violent drug offenders who used a drug which is less harmful than alcohol or cigarettes. Solitary confinement is widespread, prison rape and battery are widespread, and there is plenty of evidence of prison guard collusion in said rape and battery.

If you are an African American male, you are far more likely to have spent time in prison than in university.

And police lie routinely about those they arrest. How many people are in prison who didn’t commit the crime of which they are accused? How many would have been convicted if police hadn’t concealed exculpatory evidence? The answers to these questions are unknown for obvious reasons, but I would stake a great deal that it is a non-trivial number.

All of this assumes the accused even had a trial–most people in prison have never had one: They plead out. That’s absolutely not an indication of guilt, it is an indication that they couldn’t afford to fight the system. Justice is very expensive, and prosecuting attorneys advise defendants against going to trial. If people lose (which, again, doesn’t  necessarily indicate guilt), they’ll get book thrown at them.

The American “justice” system cannot operate without plea bargains. The state arrests too many people for that. Hardly anybody gets justice, people get railroaded to prison without a trial, based on the word of police who are willing to lie, and once they are felons, their lives are permanently destroyed.

The people who run this system are not your friends. They do not like you. They enjoy the authority they have, and if you “disrespect a cop,” even if you’re firmly within your rights, if they think they can get away with it, they will fuck you up, enjoy it, and firmly believe that you deserve it. Then they’ll lie about it.

Not your friends. Not your allies. The hard fist of the oligarchy, the boot stamping on your face over and over again.

If you do not understand this you are living in a fantasy land and delusional in the face of real, hard power.

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In Light of Eric Garner

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On December 5, 2014

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Understand this, if you understand nothing else:

the system is working as intended.

It is true that a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a sandwich, and it is tempting to blame the prosecutor, Donovan.  Certainly he made a decision, but he made the decision that the system wants: police are almost never prosecuted for assault or murder and on those rare occasions that they are, they almost always get off.

Donovan did what the legal system wanted him to do.

As for the police in question, well, they did what the legal system wants them to do, as well:

“Get away [garbled] … for what? Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. I’m tired of it. It stops today. Why would you…? Everyone standing here will tell you I didn’t do nothing. I did not sell nothing. Because every time you see me, you want to harass me. You want to stop me (garbled) Selling cigarettes. I’m minding my business, officer, I’m minding my business. Please just leave me alone. I told you the last time, please just leave me alone. please please, don’t touch me. Do not touch me.”

” I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe,” he said, as officers restrained him.

What you will hear defenders of the police say is “he was non-compliant.”

Non-compliant.

If a police officer tells you to do anything, you do it immediately.  If you do not, anything that happens to you, up to and including death, is your problem.

The legal system exists, today, to ensure compliance.

Graph of incarceration in the US over time

From Wikipedia

American oligarchical society rests on people not effectively resisting.  All gains now go to the top 10%, with the rest of society losing ground.  Incarceration rates blossom in 1980, which is also the year that the oligarchical program is voted in and becomes official.  (Trickle down economics can be understood no other way.)

Any part of the population which is inclined to resist, must be taught that it cannot resist.  Get out millions to demonstrate against the Iraq war: it will not work. Protest against police killings of African Americans, it will not work.

Nothing you do will work.

You will comply, and you will learn that resistance is futile.

strikes over 1000The more outside the mainstream you are, the more you will learn it.  African Americans, Latinos, poor whites (in that order.)  Those who are fundamentally authoritarian, but somewhat opposed to the system (like the Bundy ranch) are treated more carefully (though the militia movement has its martyrs).  But the fundamental lesson of life is to do what your lords and masters tell you to, and to not protest any law or order, no matter how nonsensical, trivial, or unjust it is.

Three strikes laws and the end of judicial discretion are about this.  During the 80s the legal system was taken away from the judges and given to the prosecutors and the police. Almost all sentences are plea-bargained: the person with almost all the power in the system is the prosecutor.  He or she is judge and jury for the vast majority of cases, and even when a case does go in front of a judge, the judge’s discretion is extremely limited.  Your third crime stealing a bike?  Too bad, we’re throwing the key away.

Compliance when given specific orders and learned hopelessness about protest or organizing are the aims.  Ordinary citizens must understand that they cannot change the system if elites do not agree with the changes they want made.  If they try, they will be arrested and receive a criminal sentence, meaning they can never again have a good job.

In this system the wolves or goats identify themselves.  An injustice is committed, people protest and the most aggressive protestors (which doesn’t always mean violence) are arrested.  Certainly the organizers are.  Those people are, as a result, usually destroyed economically even if they aren’t locked up for years.

The system is doing what it is meant to do.  It teaches compliance, it teaches hopelessness and it identifies those who will not obey laws that don’t make sense (marijuana possession, for example), or who will fight or organize against the system and then it destroys them economically and often psychologically through practices like solitary confinement and prison rape.

The system will not change until those who want it to change have the raw power to force it to change, because it does serve the interests of its masters by destroying or marginalizing anyone who is actually a danger to oligarchical control of the system.

Race is an effective tool in this system, dividing the lower classes (and almost everyone is lower class now) against each other.  No matter how bad a poor white’s life is, well hey, he ain’t black.  He or she can feel superior to someone, can have someone to kick down at.

And understand this, most of what police are paid in is social coin: the right to demand immediate obedience and fuck people up; the solidarity of the blue line; the feeling of belonging and power, is what makes the job worth having for (probably most) of the people who are now attracted to it.

Being a thug; having social sanction to be a thug, is enjoyable to a lot of people. Since that’s what cops get to do, those are the sort of people who tend to be attracted to the job.  The police are the biggest toughest gang around, and belonging to them has most of the rewards of gang life, without the dangers of going to jail.

Working as intended

 

 

Ferguson and the brokenness of America’s “Justice” System

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On November 26, 2014

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There isn’t much to say that others haven’t, but let’s go through it anyway:

  • There was never any chance that Darren Wilson would be charged;
  • the prosecutor acted as defense attorney, not as prosecutor;
  • A grand jury, for all intents and purposes does what the prosecutor tells it to;
  • Doing the announcement at 8pm at night was intended to incite violence;
  • Police in America are completely out of control, and police have a license to kill;
  • this is bad for anyone, but it is terrible for African Americans and Muslims.

At this point, in America, calling the police for anything short of a murder is more likely to make your situation worse than better if you aren’t solidly middle upper class or better, and white.  If you are black or Muslim, you might not even want to call them for murder.

Police can beat your, rape you or kill you, and the odds are very high they will get away with it.  In far too many cases they are nothing but the strongest gang.

The police are so militarized that they amount to a domestic army, stationed in every city.  The civil forfeiture laws, RICO statutes and the cost of an effective defense, plus the removal of most judicial discretion and the fact that the vast majority of cases are plea bargained, not tried, means that for most accused of a crime there is no justice.

The police have huge incentives to charge people with crimes, because they can seize the assets of those charged (well, strictly speaking, they can seize your money without ever charging you, and do.)  For profit prisons and prison guard unions support prosecutors and judges who will imprison more people, not less.   The incentives in the system are almost all towards incarcerating more people and seizing more assets, because that’s how police and prosecutors improve their personal situation.

Prisons are rural support projects where poor whites are paid to lock up poor blacks.

The entire system stinks from one end to another.  The simple solution would be to repeal all drug ordinances, make civil forfeiture illegal, get rid of the RICO statutes, most of the anti-terrorism statutes and mandate that plea bargains are illegal and all criminals must have a trial.  The fact that the current system cannot run if a trial is necessary is the point, too many things are crimes which should not be.

If you really want to make the system work, make all private lawyers for criminal charges illegal, and use only public defenders, chosen by lot. I guarantee that the pay and competence of public defenders would soar and their case load would drop as soon as rich people realized that they could be the one being defended by an overworked and underpaid lawyer.

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