Writing this post-lunch for my second round of potential juror 2510 at the Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. courthouse.
I’d be curious what the prominent civil rights activist might think about having his name stamped on a building like this a year after his death in 1985, or a few decades later when the incarceration rate had tripled.
The internet says Baltimore spends roughly $2 million dollars per homicide via our “justice system”. In a city that averages around 300 per year, that’s 600 million dollars. That’s just what we spend on homicides. The total system’s cost, end to end, is hidden between different departments, as well as city, state, and federal budgets. If you even start to thumb through the numbers, it’s upwards of a billion dollars annually.
This city has a bit of a reputation for crime, and if you live here, it’s more obvious that the real issue is poverty. 20% of the people here live below the poverty line. There was a time where I worked as a store detective, catching shoplifters for a salary, in that business, we had a saying “let’s keep the honest people honest” in that you prevent a good deal of theft, by not making it too seemingly simple or enticing to steal.
That can prevent a crime of a convenience, I imagine when most of your options look like financial dead ends, crime as a source of sustenance has an even strong allure. Violence arising from the stress and tension of being broke, seems almost completely unavoidable.
So we spend a billion dollars putting people in jail instead of making a billion dollar investment in eliminating the root causes of the problem. Why? Most likely because to eliminate poverty, it would require an investment in 20% of the population (116,000 people in Baltimore) whereas about 1,000 violent offenders are processed each year. Not that it’s easier to deal with on the back end, but it seems like a more manageable task.
We keep a rolling population of roughly 8,000 citizens in prison, at 38,000 per head, so annual spend is about 30% of that previously mentioned budget or $300 million.
So these numbers are making me bored, I’m assuming you as well, so let’s quit with the statistics. These people want me to make an impartial decision about the guilt of my neighbors.
The Supreme Court of this country believes that the president is immune from all crime conducted during official acts. White collar crime, no matter how dangerous, is no longer punishable. Think of the fraud leading to the 2008 housing market crash, the Sackler family’s lying about OxyContin research and promoting their miracle opioid which lead to 200,000 people dying, or Boeing intentionally cutting safety corners and lying about known defects to bring a poorly built 737 Max to market only to have two of them drop out of the skies within the first year. Not only do these people not go to jail, the fines their businesses incur, or penalties sought through civil action, are simply dropped or minimized as soon as the public stops paying attention.
Most people without money are encouraged to skip a trial all together and to just plea out. Give the government a simple guilty plea or at least a no-conteat plea and allow the justice system to save a few bucks on skipping the legal work of proving your guilt. It’s been stated that there isn’t actually enough money or time to process all of the people moving through the courts if everyone wanted a fair trial. This strikes me as an obvious marker that this band-aid to social distress is a wasteful, ad-hoc, solution to a problem which is truly a social lack of compassion and greed.
Avatar is the movie in here today. I can’t believe this was the choice. Aside from the cursing and nudity (there are definitely cartoon boobs), the film is about a white savior, dressing up as an indigenous native, and saving them from his own culture, who look to murder them all and steal their extremely rare, invaluable mineral: “unobtainium”.
The indigenous people’s rights aren’t even considered, because they don’t know the true value or the resources under their feet. Similarly, their lives don’t matter to the mega-corporation/government entity RDA. This public/private company has the greed of a publicly traded company with the might of all of Earth’s militaries, and there is no implication whatsoever in this film that there would be any laws governing the behavior of this organization.
An American viewer instinctually understands by watching this film, that the only people who could possibly end up before a trial in the future, are the conscientious objectors (defectors actually) who stand up against the space marines and mega-corporation to protect the peaceful and indigenous inhabitants of this planet. What do these local people gain from all of this violence? Significant deaths, casualties, and loss of their culture and history. Wait, I was talking about gains. I guess a few more years before the RDA comes back and takes what they failed to get this last time.
I can’t believe this is the film they chose. I can’t believe this jury rigged system exists without greater public criticism. I can’t believe the film I watched just prior to this piece of shit was a court propaganda piece about how your juror service is “your most significant opportunity to participate in the democratic process outside of voting”. I would argue that it’s actually activism and if Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. were alive today, he’d probably agree with me.
