a princess of now

 As always, if you're interested in context and sensible thoughts you can check out ioplokon 's post. 

I am inclined to think that no one should go to prison, but of course that's not exactly true. Certain things that are illegal, say, sex work or drug use or trying to save the world, are unfairly criminalized. Other things that are illegal, such as rape or murder, are fairly so, though one could debate whether prison is necessarily the most effective way of dealing with them. And some things that are legal, such as building a pipeline on stolen land, or cutting down the Amazon rainforest, or jerking around the global economy so that your buddies can make a quick buck, ought to be punishable with Forever Jail at the least, if not execution by space trebuchet into the fucking sun. If you're a 13-year-old kid torrenting an album, that's illegal, but if you are a huge corporation stealing the work of every creative person alive, it's not illegal, even though it is, like, illegal under current laws. So I'm not 100% a prison abolitionist. Smarter people about me have written about this; let's instead talk about civil disobedience, which is another free association my brain makes with this prompt.

I have a dear friend who, for years, was involved in Extinction Rebellion in [redacted country]. The strategy there was mass nonviolent civil disobedience; they would often deliberately try to get as many peaceful demonstrators arrested as possible to draw attention to the cause. Or to grind up the gears of the legal system. This is in contrast to many of the movements I've been involved in here, where they do not deliberately get as many peaceful demonstrators as possible arrested, but it happens anyway because we keep letting ourselves get kettled for some reason.

This technique has worked well in the past. Most famously, during the Spokane Free Speech Fights in 1909, the Wobblies would stand on a soap box (legal for the Salvation Army but not for anarcho-syndicalists) and give a speech, and the cops would arrest them. Eventually, the jail would get so full that they had to let everyone go. This strategy was effective because neither the prison-industrial complex nor digitized information and surveillance systems were advanced like they are today. These days, this would be a great opportunity for a private-public partnership to build a larger, supermax jail and profit massively per prisoner.

The other day, the Indigo 11, anti-genocide protestors who were violently arrested for the crime of putting paint on the wall of the worst bookstore in the country, were acquitted of all charges. Which is great news! But I wonder how many wasted hours, legal fees, disrupted careers, emotional trauma were suffered, and whether there might be a better way. At least here, and I assume in most alleged Western democracies, the state's strategy to deal with political expression that it doesn't like is to arrest people for charges that everyone knows won't stick. They then spend years grinding down the accused through the courts and disrupting the movement through house arrest and non-association conditions. By the time the person is inevitably free, their name has been dragged through the mud, they've been separated from friends and comrades, they've lost their job or education, and they're broke. You beat the rap but not the ride.

Add to this the context of the US, which could easily be exported here, even if the Tories lose. As the cases of Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil and Abrego Garcia show, in America you can be thrown in a secret prison for any reason, whether or not you violate the law. It's very clear that we will have to devote a lot of time to prisoner support and legal costs to free innocent people. Movement lawyers are going to be incredibly busy and GoFundMe's are going to be incredibly empty. We cannot fuck around with pretending the state has a conscience anymore.

Therefore I propose: No going to jail for justice if you can avoid it. Run, don't go limp. If you're going to get arrested, make sure you do so for a reason that justifies taking you out of the game for potentially years at a time. Do not make mass arrests at demos part of your strategy.

 It's another tough week to decide, but I'm going to go with It Could Happen Here's "How ICE Kidnapped a Farmworker Union Organizer." Basically, in all the economic chaos that is fucking everyone in the entire world, we shouldn't forget that Trump has his own Gestapo and they're disappearing people. This focuses on one of the people who he tried to disappear, Familias Unidas por la Justicia organizer Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez.

The US has particularly screwed its own food supply long term, because no Americans will do the job that migrant farmworkers, many of them undocumented, do. It is trying to make up for that with prisoner and child labour, so I guess it's possible that they will throw tens of thousands of people in prison and use them to replace all the humans that they've deported to the concentration camp in El Salvador, but like. This actually requires skill. As in Canada, farmworkers don't have any of the labour protections that other workers have. Lelo is one of the brave souls who waded into this mess and for his bravery, was targeted by the Gestapo. This is the story of the work he was doing and the community's organizing to free him. As the guest, Mark Medina, puts it, you need to fight this not just because you care about this one guy but because it could happen to you next.

(By the way, and unrelated to the podcast, we really need to name and shame people who are turning in other humans to the Gestapo. I've been called a kapo a lot in my life, which is a historically ignorant insult, but when I see pieces of shit like StopAntisemitism and Betar openly bragging about reporting people to the goon squad, I feel like there has to be a directed response to these weak-minded little Nazis.)