fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3516 ]

[ SECRET POST #3516 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3516 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

__________________________________________________

The entire rest of this post is either spoilers or have content warnings.

02. [SPOILERS for Over the Hills and Far Away]

__________________________________________________

03. [SPOILERS for Pokemon Sun and Moon]

__________________________________________________

04. [SPOILERS for Inside]

__________________________________________________

05. [SPOILERS for The Girl With All The Gifts]

__________________________________________________

06. [SPOILERS for Steven Universe]
[WARNING for suicide]

__________________________________________________

07. [WARNING for non-con]

__________________________________________________

08. [WARNING for incest]

__________________________________________________

09. [WARNING for suicide]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #502.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

This pretty much blew the lid off the private prison industry. The Justice Dept. recently announced they're ending the use of private prisons.

The three publicly-traded private prison companies all saw their stock go in the toilet. So, so good.

Oh, wow. That's good at least.

The best news we've had in a long time regarding justice/prison in this country.

The American prison system is appalling. Reform is urgent, but it's not sexy and hot button like immigrants or abortion, so it doesn't get the attention it needs. Nobody wants to stress about the well-being of people in jail. But our system is dysfunctional on every level and a travesty on a human rights level. So I'm happy a ball is rolling, however slowly, for reform.

The thing is it's really not just the prison system. Literally every aspect of the American criminal justice system is completely and totally fucked from top to bottom. Criminal law, public defenders, district attorneys, policing, prisons - all of those systems are completely and totally fucking broken.

The prison system is actually kind of a good case in point here. Because private prisons are, obviously, horrible and profoundly unjust. And eliminating them would be a huge improvement in terms of the conditions of imprisoned people. But you would still have massively too large a prison population, and they'd still be in inhumane conditions. Just less so.

And the really distressing point is that, even before all of the money and organizing it would take to fix all of this stuff - to build a criminal justice system that works - we can't even get to that point, because the political will doesn't exist. Because I honestly think the existing prison system is actually responsive to the views of people in this country. At the end of the day, the root of the problem - to me - is that a lot of people in this country understand the function of criminal justice to be keeping things in line, using whatever force necessary to keep poor and black and brown people in place. Who understand it to be part of the legitimate purpose of police to beat the shit out of poor black kids, because the point isn't whether or not they're guilty of a crime, the point is that regardless of guilt they're troublemakers whose very existence threatens the racialized order of society and who need to be kept in check using force. At the end of the day, a lot of the population don't seem to care about investigating crime, they care about containing threats, and at the same time have a general tendency to treat blackness itself as a threat. And so this shit is what you get.

It is entirely fucked and it is a massive shame for the nation. And practically speaking, it's really hard to see what the fuck we can actually do to change it.

Sorry I know you probably know all this I guess I just feel a bit ranty.

This comment is perfect and should be required reading

At the end of the day, the root of the problem - to me - is that a lot of people in this country understand the function of criminal justice to be keeping things in line, using whatever force necessary to keep poor and black and brown people in place. Who understand it to be part of the legitimate purpose of police to beat the shit out of poor black kids, because the point isn't whether or not they're guilty of a crime, the point is that regardless of guilt they're troublemakers whose very existence threatens the racialized order of society and who need to be kept in check using force. At the end of the day, a lot of the population don't seem to care about investigating crime, they care about containing threats

Excellent post in general, but...bingo on this especially.

It's quite disturbing to me that people just tend to assume that if you get arrested by the cops or put in jail, then clearly you did something wrong and who cares about your well-being or civil rights or whatever at that point? Way too many people don't seem to understand how many innocent people get put away (or are sitting on death row). Nor do they think about the fact that a lot of people who are in jail are there for things that shouldn't be/aren't jailable offenses to begin with.

I suppose it's because most people think, "Well, there's no way that would ever happen to me", but, y'know, I'm pretty sure the innocent people sitting in jail thought the same thing themselves at one point.

But yeah, even if people don't give a shit about actual criminals themselves (and they should, for a whole host of reasons), they should at least care about prison reform on behalf of the people who shouldn't even be there in the first place, but wound up there for all kinds of bullshit reasons.

I think people do tend to think "Well, there's no way that would ever happen to me". But I think it's in a much more racialized way than you have it here. The reason it would never happen to the people here is because they're white and (therefore, implicitly) law-abiding and a good citizen and non-threatening. Whereas, when they think of the people in jail, they think of black people, and they don't really want to think of them in those terms. They'll probably say, "Well, they probably did something."

Again, at the end of the day, I really think there are people who think of blackness (especially poor blackness) as just almost intrinsically threatening. And that directly leads to justifying policies that are punitive and forceful, because it's a necessary measure to check that threat. I don't think you can really ignore the role that racism plays in the way the whole thing operates. It is profoundly racist. It's not just racist but it is very, very racist.

Oh, absolutely. Completely agreed on that. We can just point to all the comments people make about the black people who've been shot and killed by police of late as a prime example of that, and obviously there's plenty more examples of similar attitudes and comments going back years, too.

There's been the whole thing with the news about Baltimore and the racist crap the police there have been covering up recently, too, but I think there's probably very, very few, if any, police forces anywhere in the country who DON'T have some sort of nasty skeletons of that kind in their closet :/.

My dad lived in the L.A. area in the 1960s, when he was a kid, and he told stories about actually seeing police officers roughing up black people when out and about.

Gods, this is so it.

To a large number of people, the system isn't about justice, let alone rehabilitation; it's about vengeance. You can see it and hear and it and feel it whenever people discuss what should be done to criminals and what "law-abiding citizens" should do to protect themselves. It's all fear and anger and hatred, and there's no room for compassion because those "people" deserve it, and they're rotten and can't be changed, anyway. Lock 'em up and throw away the key.

And that attitude is encouraged by the manner in which crimes are reported and the way in which we portray criminals. We tend to treat suspects as if they've already been convicted, and construct tidy narratives around that assumption, and shift the nature of the narrative depending on what the suspect looks like.

We're returning to the times when we've overtly, as a matter of course, considered entire swaths of people to have been born "undesirable," and those people fall into the exact same groups that they once did (or, well...always have, I suppose): they're poor; they belong to a race other than the dominant one; and/or they're mentally ill.

Edited 2016-08-20 01:27 (UTC)

Well, that's good, at least. But I find it sad that this report is what did it, considering that when I read it, pretty much nothing in it surprised me. And it's not like I have a ton of experience with prisons; I've never been arrested or seen the inside of a jail. The abuses detailed in the article are awful, but seem like the kind of thing that "everyone knows" happens in prisons.

It's impossible to turn a blind eye so to thorough an investigation. Before, may e everybody knew it but it was sort of officially swept under the rug

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #3516 ]

Re: "My Four Months As A Private Prison Guard." Read this.

Re: "My Four Months As A Private Prison Guard." Read this.

Re: "My Four Months As A Private Prison Guard." Read this.

Re: "My Four Months As A Private Prison Guard." Read this.

Re: "My Four Months As A Private Prison Guard." Read this.

Re: "My Four Months As A Private Prison Guard." Read this.

Re: "My Four Months As A Private Prison Guard." Read this.

Re: "My Four Months As A Private Prison Guard." Read this.

Re: "My Four Months As A Private Prison Guard." Read this.

Re: "My Four Months As A Private Prison Guard." Read this.

Re: "My Four Months As A Private Prison Guard." Read this.