There's a line in Plato's Republic that's been rattling around in my head recently because it reads like something out of Machiavelli: "The court serves to protect its friends and punish its enemies." And the enemies of the court are always poor, old, black, brown, white trash, beggars, borrowers and the mentally ill.
There are people in Mexican prisons serving life sentences for stealing bread. And I know two creeps here in El Salvador who killed many people and walked out of prison after a little more than a year.
Nor is it true that the justice system is somehow better in the States, where stakes are higher because of, for example, the death penalty. When I covered federal courts in Laredo, Texas - mostly drug and immigration cases - I saw a lot of decent people sent to prison for bullshit. I remember the guy - mentally ill in my opinion from untreated epilepsy - who went up for a year for sending angry e-mails to his former employer - the US Postal Service.
According to prosecutors, what made it a federal crime rather than a local one is that his e-mail messages bounced around from server to server in multiple states. Which is convenient for a prosecutor but a disgustingly unethical argument.
I remember an undocumented immigrant sent to a special prison in Texas for people convicted of immigration violations. He refused to speak to his lawyer. He refused to bathe in jail. By all accounts he was mentally unstable. His first day in prison he tried to climb the fence and leave. Guards ordered him three times to come down. He acted as if he didn't hear them, and maybe he didn't. They shot him to death.
These are cynical times. I have seen more humanity in prisons than I have seen in shopping malls. My neighbor poisoned my cat because he doesn't like cats. And now, I don't like him. When I confronted him about the cat - in a very civil manner - his son spat out a confession on behalf of his father.
I said, "You're a fine example to your son, sir." The father accused me of being a marihuana addict.
I have no idea where this blog post is going. But I have a few more thoughts.
Most people cannot fathom the fact that there are many kinds of violence. Rape, murder and assault are forms of direct violence. Institutional violence is something else. And then there is structural violence, in which the perpetrators, for example a state, have no direct contact with victims.
Putting very old and mentally ill people in prison for years or decades is a form of violence. Killing cats is violence. Shooting prisoners in the back, when an army of guards is fully capable of retrieving him, is violence, too.
And while I am glad there are prosecutors to put bad people in jail, I have always seen prosecutors as purveyors of state violence. If that makes me an anarchist, then so be it.