Carly > Recent Status Updates

"Those of us who hope to be their allies should not be surprised, if [...] when those who have been locked up and locked out finally have the chance to speak and truly be heard, what we hear is rage. The rage may frighten us; it may remind us of riots, uprisings, and buildings aflame. We may be tempted to control it, or douse it with buckets of doubt, dismay, and disbelief. But we should do no such thing."

In related news, this just happened: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...

"The Supreme Court’s famous proclamation in 1857—“[the black man] has no rights which the white man is bound to respect”—remains true to a significant degree today, so long as the black man has been labeled a felon."

[Echoes of 3/5 Compromise]"Imprisoned individuals [count] as residents of the jurisdiction in which they are incarcerated. Because most new prison construction occurs in predominately white, rural areas, white communities benefit from inflated population totals at the expense of the urban, overwhelmingly minority communities from which the prisoners come. This has enormous consequences for the redistricting process."

"With respect to shaming those trapped in ghettos: are we willing to demonize a population, declare a war against them, and then stand back and heap shame and contempt upon them for failing to behave like model citizens while under attack?"

This is difficult to read, but it is just as hard to think about how (1) this is my country and it is inexcusable to realize how little of it I fully recognized; and (2) it is only because of my white privilege that I have the option of putting the book down and turning away from its substance.

"No other country in the world disenfranchises people who are released from prison in a manner even remotely resembling the United States. In fact, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has charged that U.S. disenfranchisement policies are discriminatory and violate international law."

"Housing discrimination against people branded felons (as well as *suspected* “criminals”) is perfectly legal...
[The act] not only authorized public housing agencies to exclude automatically (and evict) drug offenders and other felons; it also allowed agencies to bar applicants *believed* to be using illegal drugs or abusing alcohol—whether or not they had been convicted of a crime."

"Criminals, it turns out, are the one social group in America we have permission to hate.
...
Hundreds of years ago, our nation put those considered less than human in shackles; less than one hundred years ago, we relegated them to the other side of town; today we put them in cages. Once released, they find that a heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon them."

"In Purkett v Elm, in 1995, the Supreme Court ruled that any race-neutral reason, no matter how silly, ridiculous, or superstitious, is enough to satisfy the prosecutor’s burden of showing that a pattern of striking a particular racial group is not, in fact, based on race...
[incl] 'I don’t like the way they looked, with the way the hair is cut, both of them. And the mustaches and the beards look suspicious to me.'

"To date, not a single successful challenge has ever been made to racial bias in sentencing under McCleskey v. Kemp anywhere in the United States."

"Georgia’s district attorneys, who have unbridled discretion to decide whether to seek this harsh penalty, had invoked it against only 1% of white defendants facing a second drug conviction but against 16% of black defendants...the Georgia Supreme Court reversed itself, holding that the fact that 98.4% of the defendants selected to receive life sentences for repeat drug offenses were black required no justification."

"The majority of those charged with crimes involving crack at that time were black (approximately 93% of convicted crack offenders were black, 5% were white), whereas powder cocaine offenders were predominantly white...The fact that most of the evidence in support of anydisparity had since been discredited was deemed irrelevant; what mattered was whether the law had seemed rational at the time it was adopted."

"Not only did the Court reject the petitioners’ central claim—that using traffic stops as a pretext for drug investigations is unconstitutional—it ruled that claims of racial bias could not be brought under the Fourth Amendment. In other words, the Court barred any victim of race discrimination by the police from even alleging a claim of racial bias under the Fourth Amendment."

"How exactly does a formally colorblind criminal justice system achieve such racially discriminatory results? Rather easily, it turns out. [...] The first step is to grant law enforcement officials extraordinary discretion regarding whom to stop, search, arrest, and charge for drug offenses, thus ensuring that conscious and unconscious racial beliefs and stereotypes will be given free reign."

"Human Rights Watch reported in 2000 that, in seven states, African Americans constitute 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison.
...
Although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses have been black or Latino.
...
White youth have about three times the number of drug-related emergency room visits.

"About as many people were returned to prison for parole violations in 2000 as were admitted to prison in 1980 for all reasons. Of all parole violators returned to prison in 2000, only one-third were returned for a new conviction; two-thirds were returned for a technical violation such as missing appointments with a parole officer, failing to maintain employment, or failing a drug test."

"Under three-strikes regimes, such as the one in California, a “repeat offender” could be someone who had a single prior case decades ago. First and second strikes are counted by individual charges, rather than individual cases, so a single case can result in first, second, and even third strikes."

"A conviction for selling a kilogram of heroin yields a mandatory ten-year sentence in U.S. federal court, compared with six months in prison in England.78 Remarkably, in the United States, a life sentence is deemed perfectly appropriate for a first-time drug offender."

The U.S. Sentencing Commission itself has noted that “the value of a mandatory minimum sentence lies not in its imposition, but in its value as a bargaining chip to be given away in return for the resource-saving plea from the defendant to a more leniently sanctioned charge.”

"In Virginia, for example, fees paid to court-appointed attorneys for representing someone charged with a felony that carries a sentence of less than twenty years are capped at $428. And in Wisconsin, more than 11,000 poor people go to court without representation every year because anyone who earns more than $3,000 per year is considered able to afford a lawyer."

"The owner of the property is not entitled to the appointment of counsel in the forfeiture proceeding, unless he or she has been charged with a crime. The overwhelming majority of forfeiture cases do not involve any criminal charges, so the vast majority of people who have their cash, cars, or homes seized must represent themselves in court, against the federal government."

"State and local law enforcement agencies were granted the authority to keep, for their own use, the vast majority of cash and assets they seize when waging the drug war.
...
Neither the owner of the property nor anyone else need be charged with a crime, much less found guilty of one. Indeed, a person could be found innocent of any criminal conduct and the property could still be subject to forfeiture."

"The resistance within law enforcement to the drug war created something of a dilemma for the Reagan administration. [...] The solution: cash. Huge cash grants were made to those law enforcement agencies that were willing to make drug-law enforcement a top priority."

"It does not matter, the Court declared, why the police are stopping motorists under the Fourth Amendment, so long as some kind of traffic violation gives them an excuse. The fact that the Fourth Amendment was specifically adopted by the Founding Fathers to prevent arbitrary stops and searches was deemed unpersuasive."

"Today it is no longer necessary for the police to have any reason to believe that people are engaged in criminal activity or actually dangerous to stop and search them. As long as you give “consent,” the police can stop, interrogate, and search you for any reason or no reason at all...consent searches are valuable tools for the police only because hardly anyone dares to say no."

"In two short decades, between 1980 and 2000, the number of people incarcerated in our nation’s prisons and jails soared from roughly 300,000 to more than 2 million. By the end of 2007, more than 7 million Americans—or one in every 31 adults—were behind bars, on probation, or on parole."

After a multi-month deluge of unexpected late arc acceptances and book club books, I'm finally back to this.

Second book in and I still can't decide if I actually *like* these books, but they're weirdly addictive. I think I'm as fascinated by the worldbuilding as I am put off by the gore and violence. Plus, I really want to find out what happens next...

Omg, this book is crazy. If I didn't owe so many NG reviews, I'd definitely write something up for it.
As it goes, if you want to understand North Korea, this is a surprisingly helpful read. It turns out that film was actually integral to who Kim Jong Il was.