One of the most interesting presentations was by Maggie McNeill, a retired sex worker who blogs at The Honest Courtesan. Her talk debunked a variety of common myths surrounding sex work, and made a compelling case for decriminalizing prostitution. Moreover, she argued that the criminalization of sex work undermines everyone’s liberties, even for people who never intend to buy or sell sex, and that the “War on Whores” is beginning to take the place of the War on Drugs.

Increasing enforcement of anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking laws enables the state to target the same people they’ve targeted under drug prohibition, McNeill argued. She explains that when young people join gangs, one of their roles is bringing in revenue. Men largely do this by selling drugs, while women often do this by selling sex. Thus, the War on Drugs enables the police to arrest and incarcerate young men of color for selling drugs. In the case of prostitution, however, the men in the gang can be arrested and indicted as “traffickers” or “pimps.” In both cases, McNeill argues, young men of color are criminalized.

Another similarity between prostitution prohibition and drug prohibition is the way they empower police to detain, search, and arrest people for utterly absurd reasons. In some cities, police arrest women for prostitution simply for possessing condoms. Yes, the desire to have safe sex is considered evidence of prostitution, especially if you’re a transgender woman of color. In my home state of Utah, police can arrest someone basically for “acting sexy.” When Andrew McCullough and I argued before the Utah State Legislature that this law was overly broad and would criminalize perfectly legal speech, especially that of strippers, the bill’s proponents adamantly denied this. However, our view was grounded in direct quotes from the bill’s text, while the bill’s proponents never referenced the bill’s text and instead indulged in paternalistic fear mongering about prostitution. The bill was sponsored by Democrat Jennifer Seelig and argued for by Chris Burbank, a police chief who is praised for his liberal approach by ordinarily skeptical commentators like Radley Balko.

Anti-prostitution laws often get support from liberals, progressives, and even some leftists, largely because they are promoted in the name of protecting women and stopping sex trafficking. Just as prison abolitionists invoke the name and the moral appeal of the struggle to abolish chattel slavery, anti-prostitution activists cast their work as a struggle against slavery and name their movement for increased police state power after abolitionism. One anti-prostitution group calls themselves “Demand Abolition,” for example. Conflating prostitution with slavery has a long history. The early 20th Century movement against so-called “white slavery” was used to criminalize people of color and lay the groundwork for the surveillance state, Thaddeus Russell argues.

Today, pro-criminalization radical feminists smear opponents of criminalization as misogynists. Amnesty International has been repeatedly attacked for supporting the decriminalization of prostitution, for example. Feminist support for criminalizing consensual sex acts and enabling racist, misogynistic, and transphobic police repression represents a disturbing theme that Angela Keaton explored in her talk at the NOLA Conference: the co-option of liberation movements by the state. Keaton pointed to Gay Inc’s silence on the plight of Chelsea Manning, the push to allow gays and lesbians to serve in the imperialist armed forces, and the Feminist Majority Foundation’s support for war in Afghanistan (against the wishes of feminists in Afghanistan). Other examples include the push for hate crimes laws and the carceral feminist positions on both domestic violence and prostitution.

Presentations at the NOLA Conference by Maggie McNeill, Thaddeus Russell, and Angela Keaton all touched on this crucial issue in various ways. I’m glad young libertarians were introduced to serious and radical thinking on issues of social oppression, as well as critiques of the co-option of liberation movements to serve the interests of the state. There are still more SFL regional conferences happening this fall. Check here to see if there’s one coming up in your area.

Moreover, the state tends to secure its own interests and those of concentrated special interest groups first and foremost. Bills that pose a substantial threat to the NSA, their telecom company collaborators or profiteers like Booz Allen Hamilton will tend to be eroded or defeated due to the power of these predatory interest groups. Or worse, they will be twisted to serve the interests of these oligarchs.

Legislative reform is a dead end, but there’s a better way. We can route around the state, thwart its surveillance efforts, and make it progressively harder to intercept and watch our communications.

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This injustice primarily impacts the poor. The key ways to being released from pretrial detention are hiring an attorney, paying bail, or bribing officials. Naturally, the poor have the least access to these options. There are also racist impacts from pretrial detention. As Schoenteich notes, “Ethnic minorities are also disproportionately represented in pretrial detainee populations around the world — Dalits in India, African Americans in the United States, Aboriginal people in Australia.” The report also notes that individuals with mental illnesses and cognitive disabilities are more likely to be detained awaiting trial.

The Open Society report examines the problem globally. But when I think about pretrial detention, two specific cases come to mind: Chelsea Manning and Matthew Stewart.

Chelsea Manning is the heroic whistleblower who released classified evidence of war crimes and other US government misconduct to the journalistic organization WikiLeaks. Manning’s disclosures shed light on what McClatchy Newspapers called “evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence.” The outrage caused by exposure of this brutal war crime helped end the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Manning’s disclosures revealed that Hillary Clinton ordered diplomats to spy on and commit identity theft against UN officials. Her disclosures also uncovered evidence related to child sexual abuse by US military contractors in Afghanistan. 

Were any of the criminals Manning exposed held accountable? Of course not. Instead, Chelsea Manning was held in pretrial detention for years before being convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison, simply for releasing information. She was held in solitary confinement, a cruel form of psychological torture, throughout her detention. UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez investigated the conditions under which Manning was held and concluded “that the 11 months under conditions of solitary confinement… constitutes at a minimum cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of article 16 of the convention against torture. If the effects in regards to pain and suffering inflicted on Manning were more severe, they could constitute torture.” Moreover, there is some evidence that the torture was a bigoted response to Manning’s gender identity and expression. As Joanne McNeil reported in Jacobin,

Manning was tortured in part because he [sic] signed a few letters from the brig as “Breanna Elizabeth.” Marine Corps Master Sgt. Craig Blenis defended his cruelty in a December pre-trial hearing. Coombs asked why the marine thought Manning’s gender dysphoria should factor into his “prevention of Injury” status. Blenis answered because “that’s not normal, sir.”

In a sense, the pretrial torture of Chelsea Manning was not just a crime, it was a hate crime.

Matthew Stewart did not survive pretrial detention long enough to be convicted or acquitted. Late at night on January 4th, 2012, armed men broke into his home with guns blazing. Matthew, a startled gun owner and Iraq war veteran, fired back on the home invaders, killing one and wounding several others. But because they were police officers carrying out a drug raid, Matthew was not treated as a homeowner engaged in legitimate self-defense. Instead, he was locked up in the Weber County Jail and charged with murder. He was subjected to social isolation and other abuses for a year and a half before he eventually committed suicide. He was found in his cell hanging from a bedsheet. After his death, the degradation still didn’t end. Police officers trespassed in his home again even after he was dead and the state’s case against him was closed. Officer Jason Vanderwarf harassed Matthew’s grieving family members on Facebook, writing “now you all can feel our pain.” Vanderwarf was one of the initial aggressors, having lied on the initial search warrant and participated in the home invasion.

Pretrial detention is an appalling human rights abuse. Obviously, it undermines the right to due process and the presumption of innocence. It can be used to torture and brutalize detainees, especially political prisoners who have offended state functionaries, as Matthew Stewart and Chelsea Manning did. And pretrial detention is most often used to cage and abuse the most vulnerable in our society: the poor, ethnic minorities, and people with psychiatric and cognitive disabilities. Let’s end this injustice.

Quando qualcuno commette un crimine contro qualcun altro, solo l’autore di questo crimine dovrebbe essere considerato responsabile. Non la famiglia o i compagni di camera, non quelli della sua razza o nazionalità, non quelli che condividono le sue idee politiche, non quelli che vivono nella stessa area geografica. La punizione collettiva è immorale. La Convenzione di Ginevra la considera un crimine, un’aggressione violenta che tutti quelli che tengono ai diritti dell’individuo dovrebbero odiare. Ora, in risposta alla morte di questi adolescenti, il governo israeliano ha deciso di commettere questo crimine.

Soldati israeliani hanno demolito le case di Marwan al-Qawasmeh e Amer Abu Aisheh, sospettati del rapimento e dell’uccisione. Questa punizione è avvenuta senza processo. La demolizione ha terrorizzato membri di famiglie innocenti e vicini di casa, e ha danneggiato i loro beni. Secondo la Reuters, “Prima di far saltare in aria la casa, i soldati hanno mandato in frantumi le finestre e scaraventato a terra i sofà. Hanno fatto a pezzi con una mazza il water e il lavandino, oltre ai gradini della scala uno per uno. Zucchero, yogurt e pane sono stati gettati sul pavimento della cucina.”

Questa distruzione gratuita non è stata d’aiuto alla cattura dei sospetti, né ha risarcito le famiglie delle vittime. È solo una distruzione stupida che terrorizza un vicinato e impoverisce il mondo.

E non finisce qui. Secondo Amnesty International, il governo israeliano “la mattina del primo luglio ha lanciato almeno 34 attacchi aerei in diverse località di Gaza. Ci sono notizie di feriti palestinesi.” Com’è facile immaginare, queste azioni colpiscono innocenti, lasciandosi dietro indiscriminatamente feriti, morti e distruzione.

Amnesty parla anche di persone morte per mano delle forze di sicurezza israeliane da quando è iniziata la ricerca dei giovani rapiti. Secondo il governo israeliano, uno dei morti, Yousef Abu Zagha, lanciò una granata; ma secondo la Associated Press “la famiglia dice che stava portando a casa delle uova per il pasto prima dell’alba, come previsto dal digiuno del Ramadan.”

La punizione collettiva non è una novità per lo stato di Israele. Da tanto tempo costringe il popolo di Gaza alla povertà con un embargo draconiano che divide le famiglie, priva le persone della libertà di cercare cure mediche, e impedisce quel commercio pacifico che potrebbe dare benefici e prosperità ad entrambe le parti. L’Onu ha condannato l’embargo come una violazione dei diritti umani.

Lo stato di Israele, inoltre, arresta arbitrariamente i palestinesi. Secondo Amnesty, sono “almeno 364 i palestinesi attualmente agli arresti amministrativi, un numero che non si vedeva da anni.”

E sono numerosi i posti di blocco che limitano la libertà di movimento dei palestinesi, a molti dei quali Israele demolisce le case per costringerli ad andare altrove e rubare loro le terre.

Lo stato di Israele cerca di giustificare tutta questa violenza nel nome della lotta al terrorismo. Ma è lo stesso stato che fa violenza alle popolazioni civili per terrorizzarle e raggiungere i propri scopi. Terrorismo è semmai la violenza praticata dallo stato di Israele.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Knefel discusses the various norms that bias jurors in favor of conviction, from legal norms that prohibit lawyers from mentioning jury nullification in court to an authoritarian bias that inclines jurors to defer to police and prosecutors. She then describes nullification’s history, from its origins in 1670 to its use in the trial of the Camden 28, a group of peace activists who broke into a draft board office in protest of the Vietnam War.

The article’s conclusion is excellent:

People must know their rights before they get called to jury duty. Telling a sitting juror about nullification can be considered illegal tampering. But ensuring that all potential jurors know about nullification is not only legal but critical to the administration of justice. “When people start to understand the power they can exercise as jurors, I think that makes them more enthusiastic about jury service,” Butler says. And in an era of mass incarceration, harsh sentencing, racial profiling and police repression, the jury box is arguably the most powerful spot in the courtroom.

Now this is what I’m talking about!

Late last month I presented alongside Kirsten Tynan of the Fully Informed Jury Association on how jury nullification can be used as a tactic against a growing and brutal prison state. Kirsten discussed much of the history that Knefel covers in her piece. I mostly focused on the abuse that occurs inside American prisons, and why jurors should be aware of this as they consider whether someone should be convicted of a crime.

I’ve considered jury nullification a key part of any prison abolitionist toolkit for a while. About a year ago, in my op-ed Prison Abolition Is Practical, I mentioned jury nullification as one tactic for restraining the prison state, writing:

Resist the prison growth industry. Organize against construction of any new prisons, jails, and detention centers. Divest from banks that profit off prisons, such as Wells Fargo, and urge others to do the same. Expose prison profiteers like Jane Marquardt and undermine their political influence. Film cops, finance legal defenses, and promote jury nullification, so fewer people are sent to prison.

But this perspective on jury nullification has in my experience been too often absent from leftist movements against mass incarceration. The Fully Informed Jury Association does amazing work for jury nullification, but has mostly been heard by the libertarian right. So when left-wing publications like The Nation bring up jury nullification explicitly as a tactic against mass incarceration, this gives me hope and suggests I’m not alone. Let’s fight against mass incarceration, disproportionate punishment, and abusive power on all fronts, with juror education and jury nullification as one key tactic.

When someone commits a violent crime against another person, the perpetrator should be held accountable. Not the perpetrator’s family or roommates, not those of the same race or nationality, not those with similar political views, not those who live in the same geographical area. Collective punishment is immoral. It is a war crime under the Geneva Convention and it constitutes aggressive violence that all who care about individual rights should abhor. But in response to the deaths of these teenagers, the Israeli government chose to engage in it.

Israeli soldiers demolished the homes of Marwan al-Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Aisheh,  suspects in the abduction and killing of the Israeli teenagers. This punishment was inflicted without trial. The demolitions terrorized innocent family members and neighbors and damaged their property. According to Reuters, “Before blowing up the house, soldiers shattered the windows and threw sofas to the ground. Toilets and sinks, along with every step in the staircase, were smashed with a sledgehammer. Sugar, yogurt and bread were thrown across the kitchen floor.”

This gratuitous destruction didn’t help apprehend the suspects, nor did it provide restitution to the families of the victims. This is senseless destruction that terrorizes a neighborhood and makes the world less prosperous.

The collective punishment doesn’t end there. According to Amnesty International, the Israeli government “launched at least 34 air strikes on locations across Gaza on the morning of 1 July. There have been reports of Palestinian injuries.” Such actions predictably harm innocents by causing injuries, death and property destruction indiscriminately.

Amnesty also reports multiple deaths at the hands of Israeli security forces since the search for the abducted teens began. While the Israeli government alleges that one of the dead, Yousef Abu Zagha, hurled a grenade, the Associated Press reports that “his family said he had been carrying eggs home for a predawn meal before the daylight fast for the Ramadan holiday.”

Collective punishment is not a new practice for the Israeli state. That state has long forcibly kept the people of Gaza in poverty with a draconian blockade which separates families, deprives individuals of the freedom to seek medical care, and forcibly prevents peaceful trade that could produce mutual benefit and prosperity. The UN has condemned this blockade as a violation of human rights.

The Israeli state arbitrarily locks up Palestinians, according to Amnesty, “with at least 364 Palestinians currently under administrative detention, the highest number in years.”

Checkpoints are used to restrict Palestinians’ freedom of movement. Palestinians’ homes are demolished as the Israeli state forcibly displaces them and steals their land.

The Israeli government seeks to justify all of this violence in the name of fighting terrorism. Yet the Israeli state is engaging in violence against civilian populations in order to terrorize those populations and thus achieve their political aims. Israeli state violence is terrorism.

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Punizione Collettiva e Terrore di Stato Israeliano.

According to the Miami Herald, “Florida’s Department of Corrections is facing a third potential criminal probe in the wake of another inmate death at a state prison.” The most recent death is that of Damion Foster, a 36 year old man who “died when corrections officers were attempting a ‘cell extraction.'” In other words, he died while experiencing direct coercive violence from prison guards. This seems like a case of possible murder or manslaughter, but it is likely to be shrouded in euphemism, because the violent extraction of prisoners from their cells is considered a normal or essential part of prison operations. Perhaps even more disturbing is the death of Darren Rainey. According to the Herald:

Rainey, serving two years on a cocaine charge, was placed in the shower by prison guards and left there for more than an hour, allegedly under a spray of water heated to in excess of 160 degrees. He was placed in the shower for a prolonged period as punishment after defecating in his cell and refusing to clean it up, according to repeated written grievances filed by Harold Hempstead, a burglar who was an orderly in the mental-health unit. Hempstead said he was assigned to a cell beneath the shower and could hear Rainey screaming for mercy. … When Rainey was found, he was so badly burned that portions of his skin had slipped from his body, a witness and several former employees at the prison told the Herald.

So guards scalded Rainey’s skin off with water hotter than 160 degrees as a method of punishment. Rainey was killed in June 2012. If any ordinary citizen did this, it would be quickly recognized as murder and prosecuted as such. By contrast, the guards responsible were subjected to a criminal investigation, but as of May 22nd this year, the police had not yet concluded whether there was any inappropriate or criminal behavior to prosecute. The story is even more disturbing in light of the fact that “Rainey was not the only prisoner who got the shower treatment.”

Disturbing prison deaths are certainly not unique to Florida. On February 15th this year, homeless veteran Jerome Murdough baked to death in his 101-degree cell at New York’s Riker’s Island jail. It’s all too common for prisoners to bake to death in overheated prisons and jails. A recent report from the University of Texas School of Law Human Rights Clinic points out at least 14 inmate deaths in Texas related to overheating since 2007. The report “concludes that current conditions in TDCJ facilities constitute a violation of Texas’s duty to guarantee the rights to health, life, physical integrity, and dignity of detainees, as well as its duty to prevent inhuman or degrading treatment of its inmates.”

In 2011, the Center for a Stateless Society’s own Brad Spangler noted that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was “literally roasting prisoners alive.” Spangler explained that “Temperatures inside the tents at the prison camp the Sheriff operates are reaching 145°F. By way of comparison, a round of roast beef is said to be medium-rare when it reaches a core temperature of 130°F to 140°F.” Furthermore, he argued that such abuses “are logical consequences of the perverse economic incentives of monopoly government.” Given that similarly abusive conditions are seen in prisons and jails from New York to Florida to Texas to Arizona, I’m inclined to agree.

People often ask what we would do about murderers without prisons. But the sad truth is that prisons themselves kill. As Dean Spade puts it, “The prison is the serial killer.”

Trevor Timm at the Guardian writes, “in a compromise that moved the formerly strong legislation out of committee and into action, the bill was weakened significantly: in came more immunity for telecoms, and out went tough transparency and provisions for the Fisa court, along with protections against warrantless “backdoor” searches of your communications.”

The bill was later watered down further, widening NSA’s search powers and placing even more power in the hands of the Director of National Intelligence.

The bill’s original backers dropped their support for the USA Freedom Act.  “Under the finalized floor version of the USA Freedom Act, it would be completely legal for the NSA to request all records for an area code, zip code, or even all of the emails for accounts that start with the letter ‘A,’ all without a warrant,” US Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) says. Many civil liberties groups also abandoned support for the bill.

These developments are disappointing, but not surprising. This is how government works. Bills are passed largely through logrolling, a process of give and take where propositions supported by different ideologies or interest groups are put together under one bill to increase its chance of passing. So bills originally intended to protect civil liberties often have provisions added to secure the support of hawks, statists and surveillance enthusiasts.

Moreover, the state tends to secure its own interests and those of concentrated special interest groups first and foremost. Bills that pose a substantial threat to the NSA, their telecom company collaborators or profiteers like Booz Allen Hamilton will tend to be eroded or defeated due to the power of these predatory interest groups. Or worse, they will be twisted to serve the interests of these oligarchs.

Legislative reform is a dead end, but there’s a better way. We can route around the state, thwart its surveillance efforts, and make it progressively harder to intercept and watch our communications. A coalition of civil liberties groups, progressive advocacy organizations and libertarian organizations is urging people to do just that. They’re calling it Reset the Net. On June 5th, they urge Internet users and web developers to begin using a wide variety of internet security tools to thwart the NSA. These tools include everything from open source encryption protocols to anonymity services like Tor. Reset the Net’s privacy pack specifically offers open source tools because these tools allow any user to test, verify and improve their security. Tools like this can be installed, designed and improved by any individual, with no permission needed from any government.

Reset the Net is an inspiring example of mainstream civil liberties groups from across the political spectrum embracing the anarchist tactic of direct action. Rather than begging governments to limit themselves or pass benevolent reforms, direct action takes change into our own hands without asking permission.

Direct action allows us to route around the state, to make its mass surveillance operations much more difficult to perpetuate. This is how we can and must end state criminality. Not by reforming the state, but by treating it as damage and routing around.

Kids are being locked in cages by the government all across the country. The consequences are devastating. According to a report from the Justice Policy Institute:

A recent literature review of youth corrections shows that detention has a profoundly negative impact on young people’s mental and physical well-being, their education, and their employment. One psychologist found that for one-third of incarcerated youth diagnosed with depression, the onset of the depression occurred after they began their incarceration, and another suggests that poor mental health, and the conditions of confinement together conspire to make it more likely that incarcerated teens will engage in suicide and self-harm. Economists have shown that the process of incarcerating youth will reduce their future earnings and their ability to remain in the workforce, and could change formerly detained youth into less stable employees. Educational researchers have found that upwards of 40 percent of incarcerated youth have a learning disability, and they will face significant challenges returning to school after they leave detention. Most importantly, for a variety of reasons to be explored, there is credible and significant research that suggests that the experience of detention may make it more likely that youth will continue to engage in delinquent behavior, and that the detention experience may increase the odds that youth will recidivate, further compromising public safety.

So the state is engaging in violence that scars young people physically and mentally, and hurts their economic prospects; and this practice may even increase rather than decrease the chance of future crime. Moreover, according to the same report, most of these youth are not even a threat to others, as “about 70 percent are detained for nonviolent offenses.”

Once incarcerated, youth are subjected to severe abuses. For example, many youth are isolated in solitary confinement, which is widely recognized as a form of psychological torture. According to the American Civil Liberties Union:

Solitary confinement can cause extreme psychological, physical, and developmental harm. For children, who are still developing and more vulnerable to irreparable harm, the risks are magnified – particularly for kids with disabilities or histories of trauma and abuse. While confined, children are regularly deprived of the services, programming, and other tools that they need for healthy growth, education, and development.

The impacts of solitary on adults are harmful enough. “It’s an awful thing, solitary,” wrote John McCain, “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” Subjecting youth to this kind of torture is monstrous.

Incarcerated youth are also all too often raped and sexually assaulted by guards. According to David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow, “4.5 percent of juveniles in prison and 4.7 percent of those in jail reported such [sexual] victimization—rates that ought to be considered disastrously high.” Their risk was higher in youth detention centers, “minors held in juvenile detention suffered sexual abuse at twice the rate of their peers in adult facilities.” Most of this abuse is committed by guards employed and paid with tax dollars:

Some 2.5 percent of all boys and girls in juvenile detention reported having been the victims of inmate-on-inmate abuse. This is not dramatically higher than the corresponding combined male and female rates reported by adults or juveniles in either prison or jail. The reason why the overall rate of sexual abuse (9.5 percent) was so much higher in juvenile detention than in other facilities is the frequency of sexual misconduct by staff. About 7.7 percent of those in juvenile detention reported sexual contact with staff during the preceding year. Over 90 percent of these cases involved female staff and teenage boys in custody.

Government employees are committing child sexual abuse against caged victims. These guards are often repeat offenders. “In juvenile facilities, victims of sexual misconduct by staff members were more likely to report eleven or more instances of abuse than a single, isolated occurrence.” All of this data comes from research conducted by the government’s own Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The impacts of the state’s systematic caging and abuse of children are not equally distributed across the population. The Center for Children’s Law and Policy documents many studies showing the racially disparate impacts of youth incarceration and juvenile justice policies. LGBTQ youth also face disproportionate impacts from the juvenile justice system. According to an article in The Nation:

The road to incarceration begins in pretrial detention, before the youth even meets a judge. Laws and professional standards state that it’s appropriate to detain a child before trial only if she might run away or harm someone. Yet for queer youth, these standards are frequently ignored. According to UC Santa Cruz researcher Dr. Angela Irvine, LGBT youth are two times more likely than straight youth to land in a prison cell before adjudication for nonviolent offenses like truancy, running away and prostitution. According to Ilona Picou, executive director of Juvenile Regional Services, Inc., in Louisiana, 50 percent of the gay youth picked up for nonviolent offenses in Louisiana in 2009 were sent to jail to await trial, while less than 10 percent of straight kids were. “Once a child is detained, the judge assumes there’s a reason you can’t go home,” says Dr. Marty Beyer, a juvenile justice specialist. “A kid coming into court wearing handcuffs and shackles versus a kid coming in with his parents—it makes a very different impression.”

Queer and transgender youth are treated differently by the justice system before they are even tried and convicted. Once incarcerated, they face brutal violence. From beatings to victim blaming to bigoted slurs from guards, queer and transgender youth are regularly abused in juvenile corrections facilities.

Some of America’s youth incarceration problem begins in the schools. “Zero-tolerance” policies in public schools criminalize violating school rules, producing what is often called the school to prison pipeline. The racially disparate impacts of this school to prison pipeline are well documented, and they often criminalize minor infractions.

Outside of school, youth are often directly targeted by police thanks to ageist laws like curfews. Laws often restrict freedom of movement and bodily autonomy for youth, and justify this coercion through condescending and paternalistic platitudes. In a particularly appalling recent case of paternalism sending youth to prison, a transgender girl was sent to an adult prison without charges or trial, because the state had power over her as her “guardian.” The desire to protect youth provides ideological cover for the state to treat them even more abusively than it treats adults.

The American state is uniquely punitive in some respects. According to Amnesty International, “The United States is believed to stand alone in sentencing children to life without parole.” Amnesty identifies “at least 2,500 people in the US serving life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for crimes committed when they were under 18 years old.” Before turning 18, these youth were permanently separated from society, permanently sent to violent hellholes.

The essence of imprisonment as we know it is throwing away a human being, treating them as disposable. Prisoners are subjected to violence, abuse, and torture. They are held in austere and inhumane conditions. And they are kept out of the general public’s sight. They are punished rather than being made to make amends or provide restitution to victims. It’s bad enough to treat any human being this way. To treat children this way is unconscionable. Stop caging kids.

Riportiamo indietro l’orologio. Cinquanta anni fa, un colpo di stato cacciò via la dittatura militare in Brasile. I suoi funzionari, agendo in contrasto netto con la legge, torturarono, inscenarono finti suicidi e fecero “scomparire” centinaia di persone. La colpa del governo civile sta nel fatto di aver favorito una “ri-democratizzazione lenta e graduale” dei diritti dell’individuo. La costituzione brasiliana del 1988, detta “Carta del Cittadino”, fu strumentale a quella ingiustizia.

Che ha un nome: L’amnestia, la legge numero 6.683 del 1970. Il problema non fu tanto la grazia concessa ai prigionieri politici, cosa giusta e nobile, ma il relativo contraccambio: Il governo distribuì grazie anche ai suoi stessi funzionari in una sorta di “auto-amnistia”.

Alle vittime e ai loro familiari fu negata la speranza di vedere un giorno i loro aggressori condannati per queste violazioni del loro diritti; che per loro non erano un semplice termine in gergo tecnico ma dolore e sofferenza causati da uomini che erano agli ordini delle autorità, questo terribile strumento di ratifica e insensibilità; come nel famoso esperimento di Stanley Milgram. La speranza è l’ultima a morire, è vero, ma lo stato che perdona se stesso è la pena capitale applicata alla speranza.

L’attuale diritto internazionale mostra un rispetto esagerato per la “sovranità statale” (non riconosce il diritto alla secessione, ad esempio), ma fortunatamente riconosce il dovere degli stati di rispettare i diritti umani fondamentali. Lo stato brasiliano ha accettato la giurisdizione della Corte Inter-Americana per i Diritti Umani in materia di violazioni dei diritti umani.

Nel caso Gomes Lund e altri (“Afaguaia Guerrilla”) vs. Brasile, l’accusa rivolta allo stato brasiliano fu di non aver condonato i crimini commessi dai suoi funzionari, nonostante il fatto che “le amnistie per gravi violazioni dei diritti umani siano incompatibili con il diritto internazionale”, e per questo fu condannato. Ecco perché turba un po’ vedere sedicenti “libertari” criticare iniziative come la Commissione Nazionale per la Verità o il processo contro funzionari del regime, come se fossero questioni che importano solo alla sinistra.

Accertare i fatti, e dunque punire i crimini, è libertario. Nessuno stato ha il diritto di ritagliarsi una deroga per i suoi stessi crimini. Come si può considerare giusto il fatto che un regime commetta crimini barbari e ne esca pulito solo perché il governo ne ha decretato l’onesta? Solo un sostenitore convinto dello stato, solo chi lo vede come un dio in terra, potrebbe ragionare così.

Le vittime sono vittime, a prescindere dall’affiliazione politica. Il loro sangue deve essere riscattato. Come può uno stato dichiarare che le vittime non hanno il diritto di vedere processati i loro aguzzini? Non si può essere libertari e credere che un’organizzazione criminale professionista possa legittimamente perdonare i crimini dei suoi funzionari semplicemente perché si chiama “stato”.

Fare luce su crimini come assassinî, mutilazioni e occultamenti di cadavere non è una manovra di sinistra; è una norma basilare del vivere civile. Non si può essere libertari senza sostenere queste cose.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.