Conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons are so bad that they violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday, ordering the state to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates.
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[Justice Scalia, dissenting] added that the prisoners receiving inadequate care were not necessarily the ones who would be released early.
“Most of them will not be prisoners with medical conditions or severe mental illness,” Justice Scalia wrote, “and many will undoubtedly be fine physical specimens who have developed intimidating muscles pumping iron in the prison gym.”
Not to be left out, Justice Alito wrote his own dissent warning Californians that "The three-judge court ordered the premature release of approximately 46,000 criminals — the equivalent of three Army divisions." Ladies and gentleman, Rodney King is back -- and he's brought enough friends to fill the I Corps.
Yes, Californians, the Supreme Court has just unleashed an army of huge, muscular, probably dark-skinned convicts, coming to rape you and your family. Probably while you're sleeping (well, they'll wake you up to make you watch).
I don't mean to demean the problem of criminals being released before their sentences are up -- though California's three-strikes rules mean that some of these inmates are serving life sentences to ensure they never steal a set of clubs again. One way to avoid the hellscape of violent criminals running free is for California to release non-violent offenders, like our aforementioned golf-club thief.
But the bigger point is that violating the constitution has consequences. It means criminals go free, for instance. It means local budgets have to pay settlements to persons abused -- money that comes out of police, education, and sanitation budgets. It's a bad thing to violate the constitution. And if California wants to maintain the hyper-carceral state its been building up, well, it either has to pony up the dough for it, or it's going to have to settle for letting folks loose some of the time. Because maintaining a prison system with inhumane conditions isn't the American way.
PS: Anybody remember The Boondocks parody reality TV show "Big Bruthah"? Which White guy can last the longest living in a house filled with big BLACK convicts? God, I miss that comic strip.
Your point about violations of the Constitution meaning something is so important, and so often overlooked by the Court. Like the rationale for Monell liability and one of the state sovereign immunity rationales: "It'll bankrupt the city/state!" Yeah, that's how the entire tort system functions... Or the 4th Amendment exclusionary rule, where the Court is always worried "but we'll lose good evidence if we penalize cops for violations!"
ReplyDeleteIt's so utterly frustrating.
While I agree that this passage from Scalia is pretty telling about the man, I don't quite see the racial element. As the Court is well-aware from its prior case on racial segregation in the state's prisons, California's got a Benetton ad of a prison population: black, white, Latino, Asian, and they've all got their own gangs for "protection" that exacerbate racial tensions among the groups. And yes, a lot of those guys are pumping up like an Abercrombie model. Honestly, I didn't get any racial implication from that passage. The most recent thought I've had about scary people in American prisons was when someone told me he had to drop "Dead Men, Inc." as a screenplay title because he'd discovered it was the name of a *white* supremacist prison gang.
ReplyDeleteSpeakers' past statements can infuse future ones with a racial undertone; once Reagan referred to a "strapping young buck," anything he'd ever say about welfare would be shaded by his false assumption that it was mostly used by POC. However, I don't know of Scalia's ever saying anything about those muscle-bound guys who were always kicking sand in his face (or whatever bizarre node of his psyche inspired that sentence) being black.
I'd forgotten or not seen The Boondocks strip you mention, but you know they're running episodes on Adult Swim, right? Also, the strip you mention sounds a lot like Dave Chappelle's "Mad Real World" sketch.
Actually, my understanding is that California prisons no longer include weights.
ReplyDeleteNow, obviously, there are scary White people in prison too. But the image of the convict pumping iron and bulging muscles historically involves someone rather swarthy. It's about appealing to certain images in the collective national conscious -- I think these is a classic case of known "cultural meaning" as per Charles Lawrence's The Id, the Ego, and Equal Protection article.
I don't like the TV boondocks as much as the strip, alas.
Do you apply that assumption about the "collective national consciousness" to anyone's reference to prisoners' pumping iron, or just conservatives' references?
ReplyDelete"Might viewers looking at images of huge tattooed men crowded into small spaces not react with terror that these men are about to be released back into their communities?" -- Not Justice Scalia, but the person who first alerted me to that Scalia quote.
I'm not sure what you mean? I think that in general, the psychic image that comes to mind when told of "big, tattooed prisoners pumping iron" is of a scary Black man. Context can obviate that to some degree, but particularly when your goal is to conjure up a fearsome image (as Scalia's was), one has to be aware of what mental brushes will paint the canvass.
ReplyDeleteBecause you are a mind reader and/or our collective consciousness is all in sync?
ReplyDelete