Jail Officer Quotes

But let me say this. I am a superstitious man, a ridiculous failing but I must confess it here. And so if some unlucky accident should befall my youngest son, if some police officer should accidentally shoot him, if he should hang himself while in his jail cell, if new witnesses appear to testify to his guilt, my superstition will make me feel that it was the result of the ill will still borne me by some people here. Let me go further. If my son is struck by a bolt of lightning I will blame some of the people here. If his plane show fall into the sea or his ship sink beneath the waves of the ocean, if he should catch a mortal fever, if his automobile should be struck by a train, such is my superstition that I would blame the ill will felt by people here. Gentlemen, that ill will, that bad luck, I could never forgive. But aside from that let me swear by the souls of my grandchildren that I will never break the peace we have made. After all, are we or are we not better men than those pezzonovanti who have killed countless millions of men in our lifetimes?

The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way--a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word 'beat' spoken on streetcorners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America--beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction--We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer--It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization--the subterraneans heroes who'd finally turned from the 'freedom' machine of the West and were taking drugs, digging bop, having flashes of insight, experiencing the 'derangement of the senses,' talking strange, being poor and glad, prophesying a new style for American culture, a new style (we thought), a new incantation--The same thing was almost going on in the postwar France of Sartre and Genet and what's more we knew about it--But as to the actual existence of a Beat Generation, chances are it was really just an idea in our minds--We'd stay up 24 hours drinking cup after cup of black coffee, playing record after record of Wardell Gray, Lester Young, Dexter Gordon, Willie Jackson, Lennie Tristano and all the rest, talking madly about that holy new feeling out there in the streets- -We'd write stories about some strange beatific Negro hepcat saint with goatee hitchhiking across Iowa with taped up horn bringing the secret message of blowing to other coasts, other cities, like a veritable Walter the Penniless leading an invisible First Crusade- -We had our mystic heroes and wrote, nay sung novels about them, erected long poems celebrating the new 'angels' of the American underground--In actuality there was only a handful of real hip swinging cats and what there was vanished mightily swiftly during the Korean War when (and after) a sinister new kind of efficiency appeared in America, maybe it was the result of the universalization of Television and nothing else (the Polite Total Police Control of Dragnet's 'peace' officers) but the beat characters after 1950 vanished into jails and madhouses, or were shamed into silent conformity, the generation itself was shortlived and small in number.

You talk about vengeance. Is vengeance going to bring your son back to you or my boy to me? I forgo the vengeance of my son. But I have selfish reasons, my youngest son was forced to leave this country because of this Sollozzo business. All right, now I have to make arrangements to bring him back here safely cleared of all these false charges. But I'm a superstitious man and if some unlucky accident should befall him, if he should get shot in the head by a police officer, or if should hang himself in his jail cell, or if he's struck by a bolt of lightening, then I'm going to blame some of the people in this room, and that I do not forgive. But, that aside, let me say that I swear, on the souls of my grandchildren, that I will not be the one to break the peace we have made here today.

Recently I interviewed a psychopath. This is always a humbling experience because it teaches over and over how much of human motivation and experience is outside my narrow range. Despite the psychopath's lack of conscience and lack of empathy for others, he is inevitably better at fooling people than any other type of offender. I suppose conscience just slows you down. A child convicted molester, this particular one made friends with a correctional officer who invited him to live in his home after he was released - despite the fact the officer had a nine-year-old daughter. The officer and his wife were so taken with the offender that, after the offender lived with them for a few months, they initiated adoption proceedings- adoption for a man almost their age. Of course, he was a child molester living in the same house as a child. Not surprisingly, he molested the daughter the entire time he lived there. [...] What these experiences taught have me is that even when people are warned of a previously founded case of even a conviction, they still routinely underestimate the pathology with which they are dealing.

This was not a political party. It was an army. The purpose of the display, Lloyd figured, was to give them false authority. They wanted to look as if they had the right to close meetings and empty buildings, to burst into homes and offices and arrest people, to drag them to jails and camps and beat them up, interrogate and torture them, as the Brownshirts did in Germany under the Nazi regime so admired by Mosley and the Daily Mail’s proprietor,

Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations. To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically follow that all conspiracies are imaginary. Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon’s downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as “a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,” the greatest financial crime in history. Often the term “conspiracy” is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against “overheating” the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, “Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?” In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people. At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, “Do you really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?” I pointed out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly announced their commitment to seeing that “free-market reforms” are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995, “more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a program to privatize state-owned companies” (New York Times 11/25/95). Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.

I spent the last Friday of summer vacation spreading hot, sticky tar across the roof of George Washington High. My companions were Dopey, Toothless, and Joe, the brain surgeons in charge of building maintenance. At least they were getting paid. I was working forty feet above the ground, breathing in sulfur fumes from Satan's vomitorium, for free. Character building, my father said. Mandatory community service, the judge said. Court-ordered restitution for the Foul Deed. He nailed me with the bill for the damage I had done, which meant I had to sell my car and bust my hump at a landscaping company all summer. Oh, and he gave me six months of meetings with a probation officer who thought I was a waste of human flesh. Still, it was better than jail. I pushed the mop back and forth, trying to coat the seams evenly. We didn't want any rain getting into the building and destroying the classrooms. Didn't want to hurt the school. No, sir, we sure didn't.

Well, as Hannah Arendt famously said, there can be a banal aspect to evil. In other words, it doesn't present always. I mean, often what you're meeting is a very mediocre person. But nonetheless, you can get a sort of frisson of wickedness from them. And the best combination of those, I think, I describe him in the book, is/was General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, who I met in the late 1970s when the death squad war was at its height, and his fellow citizens were disappearing off the street all the time. And he was, in some ways, extremely banal. I describe him as looking like a human toothbrush. He was a sort of starch, lean officer with a silly mustache, and a very stupid look to him, but a very fanatical glint as well. And, if I'd tell you why he's now under house arrest in Argentina, you might get a sense of the horror I felt as I was asking him questions about all this. He's in prison in Argentina for selling the children of the rape victims among the private prisoners, who he kept in a personal jail. And I don't know if I've ever met anyone who's done anything as sort of condensedly horrible as that.

Modern states with democratic forms of government dispense with hereditary leviathans, but they have not found a way to dispense with inequalities of wealth and power backed up by an enormously complex system of criminal justice. Yet for 30,000 years after takeoff, life went on without kings, queens, prime ministers, presidents, parliaments, congresses, cabinets, governors, mayors, police officers, sheriffs, marshals, generals, lawyers, bailiffs, judges, district attorneys, court clerks, patrol cars, paddy wagons, jails, and penitentiaries. How did our ancestors manage to leave home without them?

Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned slaves; Albert Einstein and Mohandas Gandhi were imperfect husbands and fathers. The list goes on indefinitely. We are all flawed and creatures of our times. Is it fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future? Some of the habits of our age will doubtless be considered barbaric by later generations – perhaps for insisting that small children and even infants sleep alone instead of with their parents; or exciting nationalist passions as a means of gaining popular approval and achieving high political office; or allowing bribery and corruption as a way of life; or keeping pets; or eating animals and jailing chimpanzees; or criminalizing the use of euphoriants by adults; or allowing our children to grow up ignorant.

Bailee had watched them come in and out of the sheriff’s office the week she’d been in jail. She, Sarah, and Lacy had sworn daily that if any one of the three won the lottery to become a husband, the other two women would help their friend become a widow as fast as possible.

Putin isn’t a full-blown Fascist because he hasn’t felt the need. Instead, as prime minister and president, he has flipped through Stalin’s copy of the totalitarian playbook and underlined passages of interest to call on when convenient. Throughout his time in office, he has stockpiled power at the expense of provincial governors, the legislature, the courts, the private sector, and the press. A suspicious number of those who have found fault with him have later been jailed on dubious charges or murdered in circumstances never explained. Authority within Putin’s “vertical state”—including directorship of the national oil and gas companies—is concentrated among KGB alumni and other former security and intelligence officials. A network of state-run corporations and banks, many with shady connections offshore, furnish financial lubricants for pet projects and privileged friends. Rather than diversify as China has done, the state has more than doubled its share of the national economy since 2005.

to dodge any dress code and looked like he was about to step into a bar—or jail—rather than into the office of the realty business’s hotshot

Mr Judge, Jury & Executioner of Micah Xavier Johnson‬ needs to go to jail as soon as possible – he is a danger to civilized society.

I've never been in trouble before. Never even been sent to the principal’s office. But now I'm in jail, being threatened with some half-baked vagrancy charge.

If the police enforced the law, there would be thousands of police officers in jail!

As journalist Matt Taibbi recalls in his book The Divide: It’s become cliché by now, but since 2008, no high-ranking executive from any financial institution has gone to jail, not one, for any of the systemic crimes that wiped out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. Even now, after JP Morgan Chase agreed to a settlement north of $13 billion for a variety of offenses.… the basic principle held true: nobody went to jail. Not one person. (...) On the one hand, he finds, “Twenty-six billion dollars of fraud: no charges”; on the other, the San Diego County District Attorney’s office conducts 26,000 warrantless, preemptive searches every year to make sure that welfare recipients really are exactly as poor as the poverty bureaucracy demands that they be.

The wife of a junior officer cooped up in a horrible canvas partition in steerage for five months wrote: "I had enjoyed much peace there in the absence of every comfort, even of such as are now enjoyed in jail. I used to say that there were four privations in my situation - fire, water, earth and air. No fire to warm oneself on the coldest day, no water to drink but what was tainted, no earth to set the foot on, and scarcely any air to breathe. Yet, with all these miserable circumstances, we spent many a happy hour by candlelight in that wretched cabin whilst I sewed and he read the Bible to me.

When you hire criminals to be police officers. It is easy for innocent people to be arrested, convicted and jailed, but It is difficult ,close to impossible to have criminals arrested, convicted and jailed.

They wanted to look as if they had the right to close meetings and empty buildings, to burst into homes and offices and arrest people, to drag them to jails and camps and beat them up, interrogate and torture them, as

The basic conviction of a Christian is that God intends good for us and that he will get his way in us. He does not treat us according to our deserts, but according to his plan. He is not a police officer on patrol, watching over the universe, ready to club us if we get out of hand or put us in jail if we get obstreperous. He is a potter working with the clay of our lives, forming and reforming until, finally, he has shaped a redeemed life, a vessel fit for a kingdom. A LONG OBEDIENCE

Listen very carefully. Because I'm only going to lay this out for you once. I'm no longer the easy prey I once was and if you go up against me I will make sure you end up behind bars. You've fraudulently pocketed the money from the video. Our lawyers already have a criminal suit against you ready to go. Unless you're particularly keen on jail, you will leave my family alone, and you will withdraw the video and return all that money to the people you stole it from." Julia opened her mouth, but Trisha held up her hand and she closed it. "And if you do one thing to harm DJ"- because suddenly Trisha was sure Julia had something on DJ; her nineties-Bollywood-plot theory didn't seem so farfetched- "I will make sure that every one of the families you've preyed on to make money off their tragedies gets together and sues your ass until every penny you've ever leeched is gone. Now get out of my office. Get out of my building- which by the way is private property. Soliciting business here is illegal. So the next time you think of setting foot here, know that I will have security throw you out on your cowardly, pathetic ass.

Democratic periodicals in the North warned that the governor’s stance would compromise highly profitable New York trade connections with Virginia and other slave states. Seward was branded “a bigoted New England fanatic.” This only emboldened Seward’s resolve to press the issue. He spurred the Whig-dominated state legislature to pass a series of antislavery laws affirming the rights of black citizens against seizure by Southern agents, guaranteeing a trial by jury for any person so apprehended, and prohibiting New York police officers and jails from involvement in the apprehension of fugitive slaves.

What do you do with all of these people on the street? Surround them with an army of police officers to mimic their jail experience? No, you help them to assimilate into a society that wants them to be productive and healthy. We cannot solve our homeless problem by shuffling it to the corners of the city.

He spurred the Whig-dominated state legislature to pass a series of antislavery laws affirming the rights of black citizens against seizure by Southern agents, guaranteeing a trial by jury for any person so apprehended, and prohibiting New York police officers and jails from involvement in the apprehension

VERY EARLY ONE MORNING in July 1977, the FBI, having been tipped off about Operation Snow White, carried out raids on Scientology offices in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, carting off nearly fifty thousand documents. One of the files was titled “Operation Freakout.” It concerned the treatment of Paulette Cooper, the journalist who had published an exposé of Scientology, The Scandal of Scientology, six years earlier. After having been indicted for perjury and making bomb threats against Scientology, Cooper had gone into a deep depression. She stopped eating. At one point, she weighed just eighty-three pounds. She considered suicide. Finally, she persuaded a doctor to give her sodium pentothal, or “truth serum,” and question her under the anesthesia. The government was sufficiently impressed that the prosecutor dropped the case against her, but her reputation was ruined, she was broke, and her health was uncertain. The day after the FBI raid on the Scientology headquarters, Cooper was flying back from Africa, on assignment for a travel magazine, when she read a story in the International Herald Tribune about the raid. One of the files the federal agents discovered was titled “Operation Freakout.” The goal of the operation was to get Cooper “incarcerated in a mental institution or jail.

I want you to open that cabinet over the sink slowly,” Officer Spence ordered. “And then back away. No false moves, Cooney!” Mrs. Cooney went and opened the cabinet over the sink. There were some bandages in there and some bottles of aspirin. “Aha!” Officer Spence hollered. “Aspirin! Can you get that stuff in a drugstore?” “Well, yes, of course,” Mrs. Cooney said. “Just as I suspected!” Officer Spence shouted. “You’re a drug dealer!” “WHAT?!” “You’re handing out drugs to innocent children!” Officer Spence yelled as he wheeled in a portable jail cell. “You should be ashamed of yourself. How do you sleep at night?” “I take NyQuil,” Mrs. Cooney said.

Office Peone looked at John and wondered what mental illness he had. The Seattle streets were filled with the mostly-crazy, half-crazy, nearly crazy, and soon-to-be crazy. Indian, white, Chicano, Asian, men, women, children. The social workers did not have anywhere near enough money, training, or time to help them. The city government hated the crazies because they were a threat to the public image of the urban core. Private citizens ignored them at all times of the year except the few charitable days leading up to and following Christmas. In the end, the police had to do most of the work. Police did crisis counseling, transporting them howling to detox, the dangerous to jail, racing the sick to the hospitals, to a safer place. At the academy, Officer Peone figured he would be fighting bad guys. He did not imagine he would spend most of his time taking care of the refuse of the world. Peone found it easier when the refuse were all nuts or dumb-ass drunks, harder when they were just regular folks struggling to find their way off the streets.

Harold figured that one of the most important parts of the brain had to be the part that helps you decide what to say and what not to say. He figured that lots of times there was almost no control over your thinking but what to communicate was very much controllable. It could keep you from being beat up or going to jail or being elected to public office.

Any candidate who suggests that too many people are going to jail for too long will be targeted in an opponent’s television ads as “soft on crime” and booted out of office. The result is that the United States imprisons far more people than it should, with disproportionate harm falling on African American communities who have been stripped of large numbers of men. A

Every year, without fail, we outlaw more things, catch more people doing them, and put more of them in jail. The outlawed behavior never goes away, because, directly or indirectly, it's supported by the strong, invisible, unrelenting force called vision. This explains why police officers are much more likely to take up crime than criminals are to take up law enforcement. It's called 'going with the flow.

Who’s influenced you the most in your life?” “My principal, Ms. Lopez.” “How has she influenced you?” “When we get in trouble, she doesn’t suspend us. She calls us to her office and explains to us how society was built down around us. And she tells us that each time somebody fails out of school, a new jail cell gets built. And one time she made every student stand up, one at a time, and she told each one of us that we matter.

Impressive, indeed. Evaluations of the Memphis CIT program reveal improvements in community safety, reduced officer call time on mental illness (MI) dispatches, and reduced response times. Injuries to officers dropped from over five per thousand events to under one per thousand. And, most impressive: prior to the introduction of the program, officers were jailing 20 percent of the mentally ill people they encountered; today it’s 2 percent.8

Civilization has a built-in lag time. Just like light delay. We fly out here to this new place, and because we're civilized, we think civilization comes with us. It doesn't. We build it. And while we're building it, a whole lot of people die. You think the American west came with railroads and post offices and jails? Those things were built, and at the cost of thousands of lives. They were built on the corpses of everyone who was there before the Spanish came.

For many years, discussing female sexuality in the doctor’s office was taboo, but that oppression is not a failing unique to medicine. In 1938, a Los Angeles teacher, Helen Hulick, was held in contempt of court for daring to show up in pants to testify as a witness and for refusing to change into a dress when the male judge insisted. She was given a five-day jail sentence. Much of women’s health, especially sexual health, was deemed unimportant or irrelevant because that is how women were viewed.

It seems to me just as imbecile, just as infernal, to have to go to the office on Monday,' said Jonathan, 'as it always has done and always will do. To spend all the best years of one's life sitting on a stool from nine to five, scratching in somebody's ledger! It's a queer use to make of one's...one and only life, isn't it? Or do I fondly dream?' He rolled over on the grass and looked up at Linda. 'Tell me, what is the difference between my life and that of an ordinary prisoner? The only difference I can see is that I put myself in jail and nobody's ever going to let me out. That's a more intolerable situation than the other. For if I'd been--pushed in, against my will--kicking, even--once the door was locked, or at any rate in five years or so, I might have accepted the fact and begun to take an interest in the flight of flies or counting the warder's steps along the passage with particular attention to variations of tread and so on. But as it is, I'm like an insect that's flown into a room of its own accord. I dash against the walls, dash against the windows, flop against the ceiling, do everything on God's earth, in fact, except fly out again. And all the while I'm thinking, like that moth, or that butterfly, or whatever it is, "The shortness of life! The shortness of life!" I've only one night or one day, and there's this vast dangerous garden, waiting out there, undiscovered, unexplored. [...] I'm exactly like that insect again. For some reason, it's not allowed, it's forbidden, it's against the insect law, to stop banging and flopping and crawling up the pane even for an instant.

When one person got involved, it took everybody else along. I went to jail first, but my entire family soon joined the Movement. One time, Faith & I ended up at home w all the babies from 2 households, because the mamas & the other older sisters were in jail. In the morning we had to plait everybody's hair & feed them--it was a mess! We had all the babies except Peaches Gaines, who was in jail with her mother & my mother. Peaches was jailed because she had not obeyed an officer. She was about 2. Her bond was set at, I believe, $125.00. --Joann Christian Mants

On the labour front in 1919 there was an unprecedented number of strikes involving many millions of workers. One of the lager strikes was mounted by the AF of L against the United States Steel Corporation. At that time workers in the steel industry put in an average sixty-eight-hour week for bare subsistence wages. The strike spread to other plants, resulting in considerable violence -- the death of eighteen striking workers, the calling out of troops to disperse picket lines, and so forth. By branding the strikers Bolsheviks and thereby separating them from their public support, the Corporation broke the strike. In Boston, the Police Department went on strike and governor Calvin Coolidge replaced them. In Seattle there was a general strike which precipitated a nationwide 'red scare'. this was the first red scare. Sixteen bombs were found in the New York Post Office just before May Day. The bombs were addressed to men prominent in American life, including John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. It is not clear today who was responsible for those bombs -- Red terrorists, Black anarchists, or their enemies -- but the effect was the same. Other bombs pooped off all spring, damaging property, killing and maiming innocent people, and the nation responded with an alarm against Reds. It was feared that at in Russia, they were about to take over the country and shove large cocks into everyone's mother. Strike that. The Press exacerbated public feeling. May Day parades in the big cities were attacked by policemen, and soldiers and sailors. The American Legion, just founded, raided IWW headquarters in the State of Washington. Laws against seditious speech were passed in State Legislatures across the country and thousands of people were jailed, including a Socialist Congressman from Milwaukee who was sentenced to twenty years in prison. To say nothing of the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 which took care of thousands more. To say nothing of Eugene V. Debs. On the evening of 2 January 1920, Attorney General Palmer, who had his eye on the White House, organized a Federal raid on Communist Party offices throughout the nation. With his right-hand assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, at his right hand, Palmer effected the arrest of over six thousand people, some Communist aliens, some just aliens, some just Communists, and some neither Communists nor aliens but persons visiting those who had been arrested. Property was confiscated, people chained together, handcuffed, and paraded through the streets (in Boston), or kept in corridors of Federal buildings for eight days without food or proper sanitation (in Detroit). Many historians have noted this phenomenon. The raids made an undoubted contribution to the wave of vigilantism winch broke over the country. The Ku Klux Klan blossomed throughout the South and West. There were night raidings, floggings, public hangings, and burnings. Over seventy Negroes were lynched in 1919, not a few of them war veterans. There were speeches against 'foreign ideologies' and much talk about 'one hundred per cent Americanism'. The teaching of evolution in the schools of Tennessee was outlawed. Elsewhere textbooks were repudiated that were not sufficiently patriotic. New immigration laws made racial distinctions and set stringent quotas. Jews were charged with international conspiracy and Catholics with trying to bring the Pope to America. The country would soon go dry, thus creating large-scale, organized crime in the US. The White Sox threw the Series to the Cincinnati Reds. And the stage was set for the trial of two Italian-born anarchists, N. Sacco and B. Vanzetti, for the alleged murder of a paymaster in South Braintree, Mass. The story of the trial is well known and often noted by historians and need not be recounted here. To nothing of World War II--

As he breathed the black and grey air into his body he no longer thought of anything as lovely, the way the retiring trees of his boyhood had been; for everything was made up of dirt-clods; and you do construct a mountain from molehills or other over-codified facts. If only the cities had been dynamited before it was too late for him! -- That Pol Pot sure had the right idea, blowing down those ticky-tacky rice paper offices and illuminating the middlemen with bullets of vanguardist light so everyone could get back to the country, don’t you think? -- As things stood, even had Bug been able to cover the earth again with forests, after having lived so long in the excremental piles of cement and rusted steel he never could have seen trees as more than tedious identical dirty giant toothpicks unfit to be taken into the mouth’ his summer camp, as a dishwasher jail where you breathed in the steam of bad food; and the islands to which he had rowed, as sad unwholesome protuberances, polyps and land-cancers still in the stink of the outhouse -- and all the girls had long since grown up completely to make travesties of their lives, even though some inherited great riches as we used to reckon riches in those days. -- But surely this change in him was necessary, for without wretchedness and degradation of self one will never accomplish anything.

EMERSON MOORE JR was arrested for drunken driving and bailed to appear in court the next day. When he showed up at the court in Muhlenberg, Pennsylvania, he saw the officer who had arrested him and a row blew up between them. During the argument, the officer – Trooper Roberto Soto – smelled alcohol on 46-year-old Moore’s breath. Given that he had driven himself to court, this was not a good thing. He was breath-tested, found to be over the limit again, had his bail revoked and was sent to jail. ‘You don’t show up drunk for a preliminary hearing, especially when it’s a drunk-driving case,’ said the judge, District Justice Dean Patton. ‘I asked him what he was thinking and he said, “You told me I could drink at home.

Like many in his generation, Billy had grown up playing first-person-shooter video games. He decided to take that experience a few steps further and resolved to join a SWAT team and shoot bad guys for real. He visited the local police station to find out what requirements and training were necessary to become a SWAT team member. He found out that the process was a lot more involved than he expected. He first needed to attend a police academy and become a police officer. Afterwards he would have to work his way onto a SWAT team over time. There were no guarantees. During his visit to the police station he learned that many SWAT members were former Marine Corps snipers. During that same visit the cops ran Billy’s plates through their criminal database and learned that he had outstanding warrants for speeding tickets. They unceremoniously arrested him and tossed him into jail.

In July of 2012, an 18 year old with the last name Stoudemire, was pulled over by a deputy. The young woman was asked to roll down her window, and after several tries, she eventually managed to get the window down. She then began to explain that it was a new car, and there was a bad blind spot. The officer immediately noticed that the young woman smelled like alcohol, and the girl soon admitted to drinking "just a little bit."   The officer then asked for her license, which she quickly handed over. Too bad she had also handed over her fake ID, for the state of South Carolina, which had a real photo and name, but a fake date of birth. She then refused to take a field sobriety test, and during the transport to jail, she began to plead with the officer to not take her fake ID away, since it took her a long time to save up for it. She even offered the officer $15, in a (rather pathetic) attempt to get the officer to let her keep her fake ID.

My civil neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man I have to deal with—for it is, after all, with men and not with parchment that I quarrel—and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government. How shall he ever know well that he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he will treat me, his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighbor and well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and see if he can get over this obstruction to his neighborlines without a ruder and more impetuous thought or speech corresponding with his action. I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name—if ten honest men only—ay, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this co-partnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America.

Ludendorff was arrested on the spot. He was contemptuous of the rebels who had not had the courage to march on with him, and so bitter against the Army for not coming over to his side that he declared hence forth he would not recognize a German officer nor ever again wear an officer’s uniform. The wounded Goering was given first aid by the Jewish proprietor of a nearby bank into which he had been carried and then smuggled across the frontier into Austria by his wife and taken to a hospital in Innsbruck. Hess also fled to Austria. Roehm surrendered at the War Ministry two hours after the collapse before the Feldherrnhalle. Within a few days all the rebel leaders except Goering and Hess were rounded up and jailed. The Nazi putsch had ended in a fiasco. The party was dissolved. National Socialism, to all appearances, was dead. Its dictatorial leader, who had run away at the first hail of bullets, seemed utterly discredited, his meteoric political career at an end.

[Talking about Othello] His dying words are about the service he has done to the state -not what he has done to Desdemona. (...) He acknowledges not love but the power structure (...). Othello believes his fellow officer [Iago] rather than his wife, believes death is suitable punishment for infidelity (...). It makes me uneasy that we so easily state that Othello is a play about race. Race is one of its ingredients, but the most pervasive subject that Shakespeare is tackling is sexism. The two women [Desdemona and Emilia, Iago's wife] end up dead. Bianca, the third woman in the play, Cassio's mistress, ends up in jail for something she never did, and nobody bothers to get her out. Iago, the symbol of evil, remains alive. Brabantio, Desdemona's father, dies of a broken heart because of his daughter's disobedience. And everyone is very regretful about what has happened. But no one, other than Emilia, has pointed out that there is a terrible double standard, something rotten in the system itself.

Slovik was arrested in October after living for weeks with a Canadian unit. Offered amnesty if he went to the front, he refused, vowing, “I’ll run away again if I have to.” He was convicted following a two-hour court-martial in the Hürtgen Forest on November 11. From a jail cell in Paris he appealed his death sentence to Eisenhower in a six-paragraph clemency plea. “How can I tell you how humbley sorry I am for the sins I’ve comitted.… I beg of you deeply and sincerely for the sake of my dear wife and mother back home to have mercy on me,” he wrote, according to the author William Bradford Huie. “I Remain Yours for Victory, Pvt. Eddie D. Slovik.” Unfortunately for the condemned, the supreme commander reviewed the petition at the nadir of the Bulge, on December 23, during a session in his Versailles office known as “the Hanging Hour.” Eisenhower not only affirmed the sentence, but decreed that as a lesson to shirkers it be carried out by Slovik’s putative unit, the 109th Infantry Regiment, in General Dutch Cota’s 28th Division.

Out on the northwest side of Nashville, Tennessee, Judge Seth Norman has come to expect phone calls to start pouring in around late January every year. “The legislature comes back in session in January,” Norman said. The calls come from state legislators, each with the same problem: an addicted son, a daughter, a brother-in-law. “‘Um, uh, my nephew down in Camden, you think maybe you might be able to help?’ I get those kinds of calls,” he told me while we sat in the office adjacent to his courtroom. Most of the country’s twenty-eight hundred drug courts are set up to divert drug abusers away from jail and prison and into treatment somewhere. Seth Norman runs the only drug court in America that is physically attached to a long-term residential treatment center. He takes addicts accused of drug-related nonviolent felonies—theft, burglary, possession of stolen property, drug possession—and puts them in treatment for as long as two years as an alternative to prison. Down the hall from his court are dorms with beds for a hundred people—sixty men and forty women. I

We may think we know how the criminal justice system works. Television is overloaded with fictional dramas about police, crime, and prosecutors—shows such as Law & Order. These fictional dramas, like the evening news, tend to focus on individual stories of crime, victimization, and punishment, and the stories are typically told from the point of view of law enforcement. A charismatic police officer, investigator, or prosecutor struggles with his own demons while heroically trying to solve a horrible crime. He ultimately achieves a personal and moral victory by finding the bad guy and throwing him in jail. That is the made-for-TV version of the criminal justice system. It perpetuates the myth that the primary function of the system is to keep our streets safe and our homes secure by rooting out dangerous criminals and punishing them. These television shows, especially those that romanticize drug-law enforcement, are the modern-day equivalent of the old movies portraying happy slaves, the fictional gloss placed on a brutal system of racialized oppression and control. Those

Early on as news of the sextuple execution in Fort Smith spread, rooted itself in the umber soil of the western Indian Nations, and grew inthe the solid stalk of legend, the men whom Marshal Fagan appointed to swell the judge's standing army abanddonded the practice of introducing themselves as deputy U.S. marshals. Instead, when they entered the quarters of local law enforcement officers and tribal policemen to show their warrants, they said: "We ride for Parker." Sometimes, in deference to rugged country or to cover ground, they broke up and rode in pairs or singles, but as the majority of the casualties they would suffer occurred on these occasions, they formed ragged escorts around stout little wagons built of elm, with canvas sheets to protect the passengers from rain and sun for trial and execution. With these they entered the settlements well behind their reputations. The deputies used Winchesters to pry a path between rubbernecks pressing in to see what new animals the circus had brought. Inside, accused felons, rounded up like stray dogs, rode in manacles on the sideboards and decks. At any given time-so went the rumor-one fourth of the worst element in the Nations was at large, one fourth was in the Fort Smith jail, and one fourth was on its way there in the 'tumbleweed wagons.' "That's three-fourths," said tenderheels "What about the rest?' "That fourth rides for Parker.

Syn pulled his boxers on and quietly left the bedroom, walking angrily to the kitchen. He turned the corner and wanted to throw a shit-fit at the sight before him. Day was standing at his stove loading some type of egg dish onto a plate before turning and setting it in front of God. God folded down one side of his newspaper, peering at Syn from behind it. “Well good morning, sunshine,” Day said way too cheerily for five-fucking-a.m. “We brought breakfast.” Syn clenched his jaw, trying not to yell at his superior officers. “Have you two lost your fuckin’ minds? Come on. It’s, it’s ... early.” Syn turned his wrist, forgetting he didn’t have his watch on yet. “Damn, you guys are always at the office, or at a crime scene, or over fucking here at god-awful hours.” “Oh, it’s early?” Day said disbelievingly. God shrugged like he hadn’t realized either. “Seriously. When the fuck do you guys sleep?” “Never,” God said nonchalantly. “When do you fuck?” Syn snapped. “Always,” Day quipped. “Just did thirty minutes ago. Nice couch by the way, real comfy, sorry for the stain.” Syn tiredly flipped Day off. “Don’t be pissed,” Day sing-songed. “A dab of Shout will get that right out.” Syn rubbed angrily at his tired eyes, growling, “Day.” “He’s not in a joking mood, sweetheart,” God said from behind his paper. “You know we didn’t fuck on your couch so calm the hell down. Damn you’re moody in the morning. Unless ... We weren’t interrupting anything, were we? So, how’s porn boy?” God’s gruff voice filled the kitchen, making Syn cringe. “First of all. Don’t fucking call him that, ever, and damnit God. Lower your voice. Shit. He’s still asleep,” Syn berated his Lieutenant, who didn’t look the slightest bit fazed by Syn’s irritation. “You guys could let him sleep, he’s had a rough night, ya know.” Day leaned his chest against God’s large back, draping his arms over his shoulders. “Oh damn, what kind of friends are we? It was rough, huh?” Day looked apologetic. “Yes, it was, Day. He just–” “Try water-based lube next time,” Day interrupted, causing God to choke on his eggs. “Day, fuck.” Syn tried not to grin, but when he thought about it, it really was funny. “I knew I’d get you to smile. Have some breakfast Sarge, we gotta go question the crazy chicks. You know how much people feel like sharing when they’ve spent a night in jail.” “Damn. Alright, just let me–” “Wow. Something smells great.” Furi’s deep voice reached them from down the hall as he made his way to the kitchen. “You cook babe? Who knew? I’ll have the Gladiator portion.” Furi used his best Roman accent as he sauntered into the kitchen with his hands on hips and his head high. Syn turned just as Furi noticed God and Day. “Oh, fuck, shit, Jesus Christ!” Furi stumbled, his eyes darting wildly between all of them. “Damn, I’m so sorry.” Furi looked at Syn trying to gauge exactly how much he’d fucked up just now. Syn smiled at him and Furi immediately lost the horrified expression. Syn held his hand out and mouthed to him 'it's okay.

Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, South Carolina. After serving four years in the army in World War II, where he had earned a battle star, he had received an honorable discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard asked the white driver if he could go to the restroom and a brief argument ensued. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from the stairs and saw white police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the officers struck him in the head with a billy club, then continued to beat him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just four and a half hours after the soldier’s military discharge. At twenty-six, Woodard would never see again.83 There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It was part of a wave of systemic violence that had been deployed continuously against Black Americans for decades since the end of Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the racially egalitarian spirit of post–Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, Black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded Black people almost entirely from

Is Joanna Gaines here? We have a warrant here for her arrest,” the officer said. It was the tickets. I knew it. And I panicked. I picked up my son and I hid in the closet. I literally didn’t know what to do. I’d never even had a speeding ticket, and all of a sudden I’m thinking, I’m about to go to prison, and my child won’t be able to eat. What is this kid gonna do? I heard Chip say, “She’s not here.” Thankfully, Drake didn’t make a peep, and the officer believed him. He said, “Well, just let her know we’re looking for her,” and they left. Jo’s the most conservative girl in the world. She had never even been late for school. I mean, this girl was straitlaced. So now we realize there’s a citywide warrant out for her arrest, and we’re like, “Oh, crap.” In her defense, Jo had wanted to pay those tickets off all along, and I was the one saying, “No way. I’m not paying these tickets.” So we decided to try to make it right. We called the judge, and the court clerk told us, “Okay, you have an appointment at three in the afternoon to discuss the tickets. See you then.” We wanted to ask the judge if he could remove a few of them for us. “The fines for our dogs “running at large” on our front porch just seemed a bit excessive. We arrived at the courthouse, and Chip was carrying Drake in his car seat. I couldn’t carry it because I was still recovering from Drake’s delivery. We got inside and spoke to a clerk. They looked at the circumstances and decided to switch all the tickets into Chip’s name. Those dogs were basically mine, and it didn’t make sense to have the tickets in her name. But as soon as they did that, this police officer walked over and said, “Hey, do you mind emptying out all of your pockets?” I got up and cooperated. “Absolutely. Yep,” I said. I figured it was just procedure before we went in to see the judge. Then he said, “Yeah, you mind taking off your belt?” I thought, That’s a little weird. Then he said, “Do you mind turning around and putting your hands behind your back?” They weren’t going to let us talk to the judge at all. The whole thing was just a sting to get us to come down there and be arrested. They arrested Chip on the spot. And I’m sitting there saying, “I can’t carry this baby in his car seat. What am I supposed to do?” I started bawling. “You can’t take him!” I cried. But they did. They took him right outside and put him in the back of a police car. Now I feel like the biggest loser in the world. I’m in the back of a police car as my crying wife comes out holding our week-old baby. I’m walking out, limping, and waving to him as they drive away. And I can’t even wave because my hands are cuffed behind my back. So here I am awkwardly trying to make a waving motion with my shoulder and squinching my face just to try to make Jo feel better. It was just the most comical thing, honestly. A total joke. To take a man to jail because his dogs liked to walk around a neighborhood, half of which he owns? But it sure wasn’t funny at the time. I was flooded with hormones and just could not stop crying. They told me they were taking my husband to the county jail. Luckily we had a buddy who was an attorney, so I called him. I was clueless. “I’ve never dated a guy that’s been in trouble, and now I’ve got a husband that’s in jail.

Jackaby did not speak as we left the building. We were three or four blocks away from the station house when Lydia Lee caught up to us, the coach rattling and clinking and the dappled gray horse stamping its hooves impatiently on the cobblestones. Miss Lee managed to convince the Duke to clop to a halt just ahead of us, and my employer climbed into the carriage wordlessly. Miss Lee gave me an inquisitive look, but Jackaby finally broke his silence before I could explain. “Don’t bother with niceties. Take me home, Miss Lee.” He thought for a moment. “I’m going to need you to go to jail for me afterward.” “That is the second time a man’s said those words to me,” she replied gamely. “Although the last time I got flowers and a dance first, if memory serves.” “Bail,” amended Jackaby as Miss Lee hopped back into the driver’s box. “They usually do, in the end,” she said, sighing. “What? Listen, I have a jar of banknotes in my office earmarked for bail. I’ll bring it out to you as soon as we arrive. I need you to bring it to the processing officer at the Mason Street Station. He’ll sort out the paperwork. Just sign where he tells you to. Ask for Alton.” “Allan,” I corrected. “I’m fairly sure it’s Alton,” said Jackaby. “You want me to post bail for somebody?” Miss Lee called down as the carriage began to rattle on down the street. “I guess I can do that.” “Thank you,” Jackaby called back to her. “Who am I bailing out?” “Everyone.” The carriage bumped along the paving stones for a silent stretch. “By everyone, you mean . . . ?” “It is a rather large jar of banknotes,” said Jackaby. “Right,” came Miss Lee’s voice at length. “You’re the boss.

Approximately 80 percent of criminal defendants are indigent and thus unable to hire a lawyer. Yet our nation's public defender system is woefully inadequate. The most visible sign of the failed system is the astonishingly large caseloads public defenders routinely carry, making it impossible for them to provide meaningful representations to their clients. Sometimes defenders have well over one hundred clients at a time; many of these clients are facing decades behind bars or life imprisonment. Too often the quality of court-appointed counsel is poor because the miserable working conditions and low pay discourage good attorneys from participating in the system. And some states deny representation to impoverished defendants on the theory that somehow they should be able to pay for a lawyer, even thought they are scarcely able to pay for food or rent. In Virginia, for examples, fees paid to court-appointed attorneys for representing someone charged with a felony that carried a sentence of less than twenty years are capped at $428. And in Wisconsin, more than 11,000 poor people go to court without representation each year because anyone who earns more than $3,000 per year is considered able to afford a lawyer. In Lake Charles, Louisiana, the public defender office has only two investigators for the 2,500 felony cases and 4,000 misdemeanor cases assigned to the office each year. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta sued the city of Gulfport, Mississippi, alleging that the city operated a 'modern day debtor's prison' by jailing poor people who are unable to pay their fines and denying them the right to lawyers.

As it is my practice here to conceal nothing, I shall relate on this page the episode of the wall. Virigilia and Lobo Neves were soon to sail. Entering Dona Placida’s house, I saw on the table a folded piece of paper. It was a note from Virgilia. It said that she would be waiting for me in the garden at sundown, without fail. It concluded, “The wall is low on the side toward the little path.” I made a gesture of displeasure. The letter seemed to me extraordinary audacious, ill-considered, and even ridiculous. It not only invited scandal, it invited it together with laughter and sneers. I pictured myself leaping over the wall and caught in the act by an officer of the law, who led me off to jail. “The wall is low…” And what if it was low? Obviously Virgilia did not know what she was doing; perhaps by now she wished she had not sent the note. I looked at it, a small piece of paper, wrinkled by inflexible. I felt an urge to tear it in thirty thousand pieces and to throw it to the wind as the last vestige of my adventure; but I did not do so. Self-love, shame at the thought of fleeing from danger…There was no way out; I would have to go. “Tell her I’ll go.” “Where?” asked Dona Placida. “Where she said she would wait for me.” “She said nothing to me.” “In this note.” Dona Placida stared. “But this paper, I found it this morning in your drawer, and I thought that…” I felt a queer sensation. I reread the paper and looked at it a long time; it was, indeed an old note that Virgilia had sent me in the early days of our love, and I had leaped the cooperatively low wall and had met her in the garden. I had put the note away and…I felt a queer sensation.

Well, my epic freedom moment was short-lived, because I realized my cell phone was dead. I walked down the road to a gas station and asked if I could use the phone. I called Tracy and told her where I was and asked her to pick me up. When Tracy arrived I hopped in the car and the very first thing I said to her was “I gotta get home. I have to print out some TV guides and I need to write a letter to some of the guys in there.” She started laughing and when she could compose herself enough to talk said, “My sisters and I all said we guarantee Noah is going to come out of jail with new friends. He’s going to be friends with everybody.” I got home and immediately wrote a letter to Michael Bolton. I put my email address at the bottom. I printed out TV guides. I printed out crossword puzzles. I even printed a couple of pages of jokes and riddles and whatever would be fun to read and do and folded them up and put them in an envelope. All that was left to do was to write the address, put a stamp on the envelope, and put it in the mailbox. I put the envelope in the car in between the seat and the center console to take to the post office. I must have been distracted or had to do something else because the envelope sat there for months. Every so often I would look at it and go, Oh crap, I haven’t sent that yet. And then at some point I spilled something on it so I knew I would never send it now. I threw it out. To this day I’m worried that one day I’m going to be at the gas station in line and hear a voice behind me say, “I’m Michael Bolton and you never sent me my damn TV guide. You’re just like the rest.” He’s going to shank me in my side and that will be the end of the Noah Galloway story.

Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, South Carolina. After serving four years in the army in World War II, where he had earned a battle star, he had received an honorable discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard asked the white driver if he could go to the restroom and a brief argument ensued. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from the stairs and saw white police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the officers struck him in the head with a billy club, then continued to beat him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just four and a half hours after the soldier’s military discharge. At twenty-six, Woodard would never see again.83 There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It was part of a wave of systemic violence that had been deployed continuously against Black Americans for decades since the end of Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the racially egalitarian spirit of post–Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, Black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded Black people almost entirely from mainstream American life—a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.84

Shortly before you were born, I was pulled over by the PG County police, the same police that all the D.C. poets had warned me of. They approached on both sides of the car, shining their flashing lights through the windows. They took my identification and returned to the squad car. I sat there in terror. By then I had added to the warnings of my teachers what I’d learned about PG County through reporting and reading the papers. And so I knew that the PG County police had killed Elmer Clay Newman, then claimed he’d rammed his own head into the wall of a jail cell. And I knew that they’d shot Gary Hopkins and said he’d gone for an officer’s gun. And I knew they had beaten Freddie McCollum half-blind and blamed it all on a collapsing floor. And I had read reports of these officers choking mechanics, shooting construction workers, slamming suspects through the glass doors of shopping malls. And I knew that they did this with great regularity, as though moved by some unseen cosmic clock. I knew that they shot at moving cars, shot at the unarmed, shot through the backs of men and claimed that it had been they who’d been under fire. These shooters were investigated, exonerated, and promptly returned to the streets, where, so emboldened, they shot again. At that point in American history, no police department fired its guns more than that of Prince George’s County. The FBI opened multiple investigations—sometimes in the same week. The police chief was rewarded with a raise. I replayed all of this sitting there in my car, in their clutches. Better to have been shot in Baltimore, where there was the justice of the streets and someone might call the killer to account. But these officers had my body, could do with that body whatever they pleased, and should I live to explain what they had done with it, this complaint would mean nothing. The officer returned. He handed back my license. He gave no explanation for the stop.

God damn you!” Alfred said. “You belong in jail!” The turd wheezed with laughter as it slid very slowly down the wall, its viscous pseudopods threatening to drip on the sheets below. “Seems to me,” it said, “you anal retentive type personalities want everything in jail. Like, little kids, bad news, man, they pull your tchotchkes off your shelves, they drop food on the carpet, they cry in theaters, they miss the pot. Put ’em in the slammer! And Polynesians, man, they track sand in the house, get fish juice on the furniture, and all those pubescent chickies with their honkers exposed? Jail ’em! And how about ten to twenty, while we’re at it, for every horny little teenager, I mean talk about insolence, talk about no restraint. And Negroes (sore topic, Fred?), I’m hearing rambunctious shouting and interesting grammar, I’m smelling liquor of the malt variety and sweat that’s very rich and scalpy, and all that dancing and whoopee-making and singers that coo like body parts wetted with saliva and special jellies: what’s a jail for if not to toss a Negro in it? And your Caribbeans with their spliffs and their potbelly toddlers and their like daily barbecues and ratborne hanta viruses and sugary drinks with pig blood at the bottom? Slam the cell door, eat the key. And the Chinese, man, those creepy-ass weird-name vegetables like homegrown dildos somebody forgot to wash after using, one-dollah, one-dollah, and those slimy carps and skinned-alive songbirds, and come on, like, puppy-dog soup and pooty-tat dumplings and female infants are national delicacies, and pork bung, by which we’re referring here to the anus of a swine, presumably a sort of chewy and bristly type item, pork bung’s a thing Chinks pay money for to eat? What say we just nuke all billion point two of ’em, hey? Clean that part of the world up already. And let’s not forget about women generally, nothing but a trail of Kleenexes and Tampaxes everywhere they go. And your fairies with their doctor’s-office lubricants, and your Mediterraneans with their whiskers and their garlic, and your French with their garter belts and raunchy cheeses, and your blue-collar ball-scratchers with their hot rods and beer belches, and your Jews with their circumcised putzes and gefilte fish like pickled turds, and your Wasps with their Cigarette boats and runny-assed polo horses and go-to-hell cigars? Hey, funny thing, Fred, the only people that don’t belong in your jail are upper-middle-class northern European men. And you’re on my case for wanting

Imagine you are Emma Faye Stewart, a thirty-year-old, single African American mother of two who was arrested as part of a drug sweep in Hearne, Texas.1 All but one of the people arrested were African American. You are innocent. After a week in jail, you have no one to care for your two small children and are eager to get home. Your court-appointed attorney urges you to plead guilty to a drug distribution charge, saying the prosecutor has offered probation. You refuse, steadfastly proclaiming your innocence. Finally, after almost a month in jail, you decide to plead guilty so you can return home to your children. Unwilling to risk a trial and years of imprisonment, you are sentenced to ten years probation and ordered to pay $1,000 in fines, as well as court and probation costs. You are also now branded a drug felon. You are no longer eligible for food stamps; you may be discriminated against in employment; you cannot vote for at least twelve years; and you are about to be evicted from public housing. Once homeless, your children will be taken from you and put in foster care. A judge eventually dismisses all cases against the defendants who did not plead guilty. At trial, the judge finds that the entire sweep was based on the testimony of a single informant who lied to the prosecution. You, however, are still a drug felon, homeless, and desperate to regain custody of your children. Now place yourself in the shoes of Clifford Runoalds, another African American victim of the Hearne drug bust.2 You returned home to Bryan, Texas, to attend the funeral of your eighteen-month-old daughter. Before the funeral services begin, the police show up and handcuff you. You beg the officers to let you take one last look at your daughter before she is buried. The police refuse. You are told by prosecutors that you are needed to testify against one of the defendants in a recent drug bust. You deny witnessing any drug transaction; you don’t know what they are talking about. Because of your refusal to cooperate, you are indicted on felony charges. After a month of being held in jail, the charges against you are dropped. You are technically free, but as a result of your arrest and period of incarceration, you lose your job, your apartment, your furniture, and your car. Not to mention the chance to say good-bye to your baby girl. This is the War on Drugs. The brutal stories described above are not isolated incidents, nor are the racial identities of Emma Faye Stewart and Clifford Runoalds random or accidental. In every state across our nation, African Americans—particularly in the poorest neighborhoods—are subjected to tactics and practices that would result in public outrage and scandal if committed in middle-class white neighborhoods.

Five minutes later he was out of there. About thirty seconds to do the job, and three minutes thirty to cover his tracks. He could have done anything he liked in the virtual structure, more or less. He could have transferred ownership of the entire organization into his own name, but he doubted if that would have gone unnoticed. He didn’t want it anyway. It would have meant responsibility, working late nights at the office, not to mention massive and time-consuming fraud investigations and a fair amount of time in jail. He wanted something that nobody other than the computer would notice: that was the bit that took thirty seconds. The thing that took three minutes thirty was programming the computer not to notice that it had noticed anything. It had to want not to know about what Ford was up to, and then he could safely leave the computer to rationalize its own defenses against the information’s ever emerging. It was a programming technique that had been reverse-engineered from the sort of psychotic mental blocks that otherwise perfectly normal people had been observed invariably to develop when elected to high political office. The other minute was spent discovering that the computer system already had a mental block. A big one. He would never have discovered it if he hadn’t been busy engineering a mental block himself. He came across a whole slew of smooth and plausible denial procedures and diversionary subroutines exactly where he had been planning to install his own. The computer denied all knowledge of them, of course, then blankly refused to accept that there was anything even to deny knowledge of and was generally so convincing that even Ford almost found himself thinking he must have made a mistake. He was impressed. He was so impressed, in fact, that he didn’t bother to install his own mental block procedures, he just set up calls to the ones that were already there, which then called themselves when questioned, and so on. He quickly set about debugging the little bits of code he had installed himself, only to discover they weren’t there. Cursing, he searched all over for them, but could find no trace of them at all. He was just about to start installing them all over again when he realized that the reason he couldn’t find them was that they were working already. He grinned with satisfaction. He tried to discover what the computer’s other mental block was all about, but it seemed, not unnaturally, to have a mental block about it. He could no longer find any trace of it at all, in fact; it was that good. He wondered if he had been imagining it. He wondered if he had been imagining that it was something to do with something in the building, and something to do with the number thirteen. He ran a few tests. Yes, he had obviously been imagining it.

The conditions suffered by the American soldiers captured by the British in and around New York were almost too horrible to describe. They were stuffed into jails, churches, warehouses, and decrepit ships in the harbor and left to rot. Their cells had no heat. They used a corner or a bucket for their toilet and were never allowed to bathe. They did not have blankets, warm clothes, or medical care. They had to drink dirty water. Their meals were raw pork, moldy biscuits infested with maggots, peas, and rice. About half of the two thousand Americans captured at Fort Washington died from disease and starvation within weeks. If the British had not allowed the citizens of New York to bring blankets and food to the prisoners, the death toll would have been higher. Captured officers, however, were treated differently. They were allowed to stay in boardinghouses, to work, and to walk around the city as long as they did not try to escape. The British felt that officers were gentlemen and deserved to be treated according to their higher social class. More than 10,000 American prisoners of war died in British captivity.

The customs officers will never let us enter America carrying all her powders. I haven’t been sleeping at night thinking of all that could happen. And your mother blithely keeps packing away.” Mom was equally irritable on the other line. “What can these customs people do?” she asked. “If they ask what it is, I will tell them that I am carrying Indian medicines.” “Ha!” said Dad. “Indian medicines indeed. They will throw everything into the trash can.” “Let them throw,” Mom said. “It will reduce my load. Why can’t you think of your poor daughter instead of those prying customs officers?” “What if those prying customs officers jail us indefinitely when we transit through London? What if they deport us back to India? What if they think we’re terrorists because of my moustache?” My parents fought all the way across the Atlantic and arrived without any of the powders, pickles, papads, and sweets. The customs people at Kennedy Airport had tossed them all

Sullivan was quoted as saying. “We took the fight to them and it’s over.” It certainly felt over, Rye thought as he stared into the fire. There was no mention of Gig in the news story, and he wondered if Lem Brand had lied about getting his brother out of jail. He slept uneasily again, repeating over and over in his mind what he’d say to Early if he came back (Look, I don’t want any trouble for Gig and me . . . ). In the morning, another skiff of snow had fallen, like sugar onto a biscuit. After breakfast, Rye swept Mrs. Ricci’s steps and walked downtown along the old hobo highway. It was rare to walk the trail and see no one, but with so many men in jail or wintered up, Rye felt alone in the world. He emerged in the fuel and freight yards east of downtown, then walked the tenderloin into the center of downtown and eventually to the building where Fred Moore had a small office on the second floor, and where Rye took off his bowler and asked to see his old lawyer. Fred came out of his office in shirtsleeves. He clapped Rye on the shoulder

Let us explore the deep involvement of G4S in the global prison-industrial complex. I am not only referring to the fact that the company owns and operates private prisons all over the world, but that it is helping to blur the boundary between schools and jails. In the US schools in poor communities of color are thoroughly entangled with the security state, so much so that sometimes we have a hard time distinguishing between schools and jails. Schools look like jails; schools use the same technologies of detection as jails and they sometimes use the same law enforcement officials. In the US some elementary schools are actually patrolled by armed officers. As a matter of fact, a recent trend among school districts that cannot afford security companies like G4S has been to offer guns and target practice to teachers. ... it is actually a striking example of the extent to which security has found its way into the educational system, and thus also of the way education and incarceration have been linked under the sign of capitalist profit. This example also demonstrates that the reach of the prison-industrial complex is far beyond the prison.

This story is littered with hundreds of individual human tragedies rendered almost unremarkable by the scale of what went wrong. One miscarriage of justice should make us angry. Five hundred miscarriages of justice should make us five hundred times more angry, but it doesn’t. As human beings we’re not capable of processing information in that way. The inevitable consequence is that people responsible for the widespread destruction of multiple livelihoods are never punished proportionately (if they get punished at all). In this, as in other cases, they should be. The Post Office, the government, Fujitsu, the NFSP and the justice system ruined hundreds of people over two decades. The individuals responsible should not be allowed to get away with it, but I suspect they will.

What the fuck just happened? As Bryce’s white Audi streaked off the lot, I shook my head and replayed the last five minutes. After a hot cup of coffee with Dad in the office, I’d come out to the garage, ready to get to work on the red ’68 Mustang GT I’d been restoring. My morning had been shaping up pretty damn great when a hot, leggy brunette with a nice rack came in for an oil change. Got even better when she flirted back and flashed me that showstopper smile. Then I hit the jackpot because she turned out to be witty too, and the heat between us was practically blue flame. I should have known something was up. Women too good to be true were always out for trouble. This one was only baiting me for a story. And damn, I’d taken that bait. Hook, line and sinker. How the hell had Bryce known Dad was going to be arrested for murder even before the cops had shown up? Better question. How the hell hadn’t I? Because I was out of touch. Not long ago, when the club was still going strong, I would have been the first to know if the cops were moving in my or my family’s direction. Sure, living on the right side of the law had its advantages. Mostly, it was nice to live a life without the gnawing, constant fear I’d wake up and be either killed or sent to prison for the rest of my life. I’d become content. Lazy. Ignorant. I’d let my guard down. And now Dad was headed for a jail cell. Fuck. “Dash.” Presley punched me in the arm, getting my attention. I shook myself and looked down at her, squinting as her white hair reflected the sunlight. “What?” “What?” she mimicked. “What are you going to do about your dad? Did you know about this?” “Yeah. I let him go about drinking his morning coffee, bullshitting with you, knowing he’d get arrested soon,” I barked. “No, I didn’t know about this.” Presley scowled but stayed quiet. “She said murder.” Emmett swept a long strand of hair out of his face. “Did I hear that right?” Yeah. “She said murder.” Murder, spoken in Bryce’s sultry voice I’d thought was so smooth when it had first hit my ears. Dad had been arrested and I’d been bested by a goddamn nosy reporter. My lip curled. I avoided the press nearly as much as I avoided cops and lawyers. Until we got this shit figured out, I’d be stuck dealing with all three.

Democrats from Johnson to Bill Clinton, in calling for and largely receiving more police officers, tougher and mandatory sentencing, and more jails. But they also called for the end of police brutality, more jobs, better schools, and drug-treatment programs. These calls were less enthusiastically received.

Richard was handed over to heavily armed, grim-faced San Quentin officials. He was put in the A/C block, known as Reception. His prison number was E37101. All prisoners—except death row inmates—were kept in Reception while they were evaluated and it was decided where they would do their actual time. Richard still had the Pan assault and murder charges against him, and until that case had been adjudicated, he would not be moved to E block after his obligatory three-month stay in Reception. He would, after evaluation, be transferred to the San Francisco County Jail, to be closer to court for hearings and motions on the Pan matter. Lawyers from the San Francisco public defender’s office would be representing Richard in the Pan incident. Richard was put in another six-by-eight-foot cell with an aluminum toilet, a sink, and a bunk bed. Prisoners in reception did not have access to phones, and their visits were for only two hours a week. In E block, the inmates were allowed twenty-four hours a week for visits, and Reception inmates were kept in the cell nearly twenty-four hours a day. Richard was assigned cell number 3AC8.

Back at his office, knowing he could now never be Richard’s lawyer, Adashek phoned Gallegos and asked him to visit Richard at the jail. To keep Richard from calling the press, Adashek phoned Judge Soper and asked her if she’d bar Richard from having access to the phone and telling reporters that he was guilty. Such a story would virtually destroy Richard’s chances at trial if his new counsel decided to litigate the case. Judge Soper took his request under advisement.

So here it goes: get out there and fucking do something with your life, it's not too late. Have love affairs, protest the government and go to jail for it, get into fights, run for office, set fire to a police car or to an oil well, go to other countries and feed the poor, kill someone who deserves to die, save someone's life, take too many drugs, start a business or a band or a drug smuggling ring. For God's sakes, do something, anything, so you'll have something to write about other than your own pathetic life and your own pathetic reflections on how obviously unfair the world is.

This is a story of personal fascism as opposed to organized fascism. [It] indicates how it is possible for us to have a Gestapo, if the country should go fascist. A character like Monty would qualify brilliantly for the leadership of the Belsen concentration camp. Fascism hates weakness in people; minorities. Monty hates fairies, Negroes, Jews, and foreigners. In the book, Monty murders a fairy. He could have murdered a Negro, a foreigner, or a Jew.” Despite the message being thickly ladled at times, Crossfire’s story was deftly told. Robert Young’s earnest homilies about brotherhood don’t carry half the weight of Robert Mitchum explaining how ugly realities released by the war can’t be neatly tucked away. “The snakes are loose,” he says, like a man who knows how bad it’s going to get. Crossfire shocked everyone, including Schary and Scott, by being a box-office hit. Whether its success was due to a timely message or taut storytelling, no one was sure (although surveys prior to the film’s release suggested little public interest in ethnically themed stories). As the picture reaped humanitarian awards, anti-Communist crusaders moved in on Scott and Dmytryk. Both were branded Red and sent to jail, members of the infamous Hollywood Ten.

In September 1942, a month after Gandhi was jailed, Winston Churchill wrote to the secretary of state for India, Leo Amery: ‘Please let me have a note on Mr.Gandhi’s intrigues with Japan and the documents the Government of India published, or any other they possessed before on this topic.’ Three days later, Amery sent Churchill the note he asked for, which began: ‘The India Office has no evidence to show, or suggest, that Gandhi has intrigued with Japan.’ The ‘only evidence of Japanese contacts [with Gandhi] during the war’, the note continued, ‘relates to the presence in Wardha of two Japanese Buddhist priests who lived for part of 1940 in Gandhi’s Ashram’. Before the Quit India movement had even begun, Churchill had convinced himself that Gandhi was intriguing with the Japanese. In February 1943, when Gandhi went on a fast in jail, Churchill convinced himself that Gandhi was secretly using energy supplements. On 13 February, Churchill wired Linlithgow: ‘I have heard that Gandhi usually has glucose in his water when doing his various fasting antics. Would it be possible to verify this.’ Two days later, the viceroy wired back: ‘This may be the case but those who have been in attendance on him doubt it, and present Surgeon-General Bombay (a European) says that on a previous fast G. was particularly careful to guard against possibility of glucose being used. I am told that his present medical attendants tried to persuade him to take glucose yesterday and again today, and that he refused absolutely.’ On 25 February, as the fast entered its third week, Churchill wired the viceroy: ‘Cannot help feeling very suspicious of bona fides of Gandhi’s fast. We were told fourth day would be the crisis and then well staged climax was set for eleventh day onwards. Now at fifteenth day bulletins look as if he might get through. Would be most valuable [if] fraud could be exposed. Surely with all those Congress Hindu doctors round him it is quite easy to slip glucose or other nourishment into his food.’ By this time, the viceroy was himself increasingly exasperated with Gandhi. But there was no evidence that the fasting man had actually taken any glucose. So, he now replied to Churchill in a manner that stoked both men’s prejudices. ‘I have long known Gandhi as the world’s most successful humbug,’ fumed Linlithgow, ‘and have not the least doubt that his physical condition and the bulletins reporting it from day to day have been deliberately cooked so as to produce the maximum effect on public opinion.’ Then, going against his own previous statement, the viceroy claimed that ‘there would be no difficulty in his entourage administering glucose or any other food without the knowledge of the Government doctors’ (this when the same government doctors had told him exactly the reverse). ‘If I can discover any firm of evidence of fraud I will let you hear,’ said Linlithgow to Churchill, adding, somewhat sadly, ‘but I am not hopeful of this.’ This prompted an equally disappointed reply from Churchill: ‘It now seems certain that the old rascal will emerge all the better from his so-called fast'.

All officers learn that if they obey an unlawful order, an order in contravention of the Constitution or against the laws of war, they will go to jail.

Let us ask the parents in any county throughout this land, and see what they will generally say. Who in their families give them the most pain and trouble? Who need the most watchfulness, and most often provoke and disappoint them? Who are the first to be led away from what is right, and the last to remember cautions and good advice? Who are the most difficult to keep in order and limits? Who most frequently break out into open sin, disgrace the name they bear, make their friends unhappy, embitter the older relatives, and cause them to die with sorrow in their hearts? Depend on it, the answer will generally be, "The Young Men." Let us ask the judges and police officers, and note what they will reply. Who goes to the night clubs and bars the most? Who make up street gangs? Who are most often arrested for drunkenness, disturbing the peace, fighting, stealing, assaults, and the like? Who fill the jails, and penitentiaries, and detention homes? Who are the class which requires the most incessant watching and looking after? Depend on it, they will at once point to the same group, they will say, "The Young Men.

And Peter, my cop friend, isn’t any better; he’s worse. He drugged one of our classmates, assaulted her, claimed that she liked it, then became a police officer out of guilt. At one point, I put his past aside since he wanted to help put my stepdad in jail, but years passed. He probably doesn’t remember that anymore. “What if I brought a friend?” I ask. “Maybe

Thursday, John was arrested. His mug shot was plastered all over the news and social media. Our house was in shambles, ransacked by police, and left in utter disarray, with my files thrown around like confetti by the officers executing the search warrant. I searched for comforting words for my young daughters, while trying to reconcile what I knew and didn’t know about my husband and his secret life. All this under the spotlight of the public watching our family catastrophe unfold in real time. My husband of ten years went to jail, guilty as charged of something no one wants to talk about: sexual assault of a minor he had met online. And there I was, at the base of Mount Crisis.

Now Post Office employees were engaging in public virtue-signalling about their organisation’s supposed commitment to mental health, whilst simultaneously trying to prevent justice for hundreds of people who had suffered the most appalling treatment at their hands.

According to Kay, criminal prosecution ‘was used as a threat and executed without any underlying investigation, proper review or understanding of CPS guidelines – in one case we reviewed, an in-house Post Office lawyer had marked a file as “insufficient evidence to prosecute.” Then a few days later that lawyer filled in a “prosecute this person” form. This was an absolute abuse of the right to bring prosecutions. If the CPS had been involved those prosecutions would never have taken place.

Colin says, ‘It became clear we needed to “switch” and start discrediting Second Sight. And that’s what began to happen. Post Office began to discredit the people we had hired by saying things like … they’re “too old”, or it’s been too long since they did a job like this, or they’re not up to the job. And that was purely because the Post Office did not like the conclusions that Second Sight were coming to.

And this is what rankled. The Subpostmasters who were calling in the problems and whose livelihoods depended on Horizon functioning properly, did not appear to feature much in Fujitsu’s corporate thinking. The Post Office was the client, not the Subpostmasters, and Horizon was the golden goose. So long as Horizon gave the appearance of functioning as it should, the client was going to be happy. What they didn’t know, couldn’t hurt them.

The more Subpostmasters the Second Sight team spoke to, the more issues came to light. The more issues came to light, the harder it seemed to get any answers.

Here was an independent investigator giving evidence to a parliamentary inquiry that a publicly-owned company run by the person sitting next to him had brought criminal prosecutions without sufficient evidence, and that miscarriages of justice had very possibly occurred.

In the four years leading up to the rollout of the Horizon system, the Post Office prosecuted 52 Subpostmasters or Post Office staff for shortfall-related offences. In the four years after the rollout, the number more than quadrupled to 220. No one outside the Post Office queried this leap in prosecution activity because no one was aware of it. The Post Office was not required to publish its numbers.

Over the 14-year period the Post Office was prosecuting people, dozens of Subpostmasters have reported they were told by Post Office contract managers, investigators and helpline operators that they were the only ones having problems with Horizon.

Their ability to investigate transactional discrepancies, or to defend themselves against allegations made by Post Office, were often thwarted because, following their suspension (usually on the day of an audit) they were, as a matter of Post Office policy, denied access to the branch… Post Office investigators also removed records, often including personal documents such as diaries… Applicants have also reported that, despite their requests, they never regained access to any of the records they needed to prove their innocence.

The programme also strengthened the commonly-held suspicion that slapping theft charges on Subpostmasters who had large discrepancies was nothing to do with evidence but a tactic to secure convictions. One document revealed a discussion about the best approach for securing a Proceeds of Crime Act order against a Subpostmaster. It read: ‘I am never confident with false accounting charges … the theft charge makes life so much easier.

The judges found the idea that a government-owned company should in 2013 have to be warned about the legality of shredding documents in these circumstances and perverting the course of justice was ‘extraordinary.

Add £300m to £780m and you get a minimum of £1.08bn of public money either already spent or allocated towards dealing with the Horizon scandal and its fallout. This sum fulfilled a prediction Ron Warmington made to me many years ago – that the Post Office was sitting on a billion pound disaster, it was just too clueless to realise it. The realisation has now set in. Of course, it is taxpayers who are footing the bill.

With the government’s tacit backing, the Post Office board had spent millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money trying to deny it had been responsible for some of the most appalling behaviour in UK corporate history. Now it was admitting responsibility for prosecuting 44 innocent people.

See I grew pessimistic. Unsure if reading the book would make any difference. For her. For the Justice. To prevail. Law. Order. Females like psychopaths and criminals. Fairy tales and vampires. Bad guys. Not the good guys. They are attracted to the bad guys. Using good guys. „Being smarter.” Until: caught. They enjoy using and hurting good people. It is not only their way of living. Killing. They have no inner control or conscience influenced by society. They allow themselves to be happy without any restraint, associating with bad people and engaging in unlawful activities. Bad people / Psychopath females Them and their owners. The Sin. The Crime. The Knowledge. The Secret. The Wisdom. The Snake. The Apple. Adam. Paradise. Hell. This is how they often end up in jail or dead, or occasionally getting splashed with acid, riding wheelchairs, usually due to their involvement with drug-dealing boyfriends. Getting: „surprised.” No one gets „acid” in his/her face for no reason. This is an honest book. Do you want me to say a name, an example or add a list? „Say her name.” ... ? OKAY. I will not add any other examples, or names, to the list, as I choose to mention, point out the story of: Breonna Taylor as both the beginning and end of the list. I do not want to spend time searching for more instances, ladies, as my intention is not to defend or advocate for individuals who have engaged in wrongdoing, regardless of their gender. I am not trying to save the lives of criminals anymore. I have no girlfriend/abuser. To save. From herself. I don't believe it is productive to compile a list of examples or names of females who were involved in criminal activities or found themselves in dangerous situations. Beds. Doing so would be a futile use of time. „The problem is, that women, they have/got all the pussies.” – Serbian proverb Perhaps the police used excessive force. Perhaps. Alright. I don't doubt it. I don't agree either. It was a dangerous guy. Warrants. Danger. Dangerous situation. Lawful enter or not. ... These bodycam videos don't show you the level of adrenaline you have in such situations. "Kill or be killed." The officers want to get home tonight as well to see their loved ones. I wouldn't call that "trigger-happy." But I think it fits to call the criminals: cowardly. Using live body shield: their girlfriends. In general. Hiding. Behind girls. Just like: Adam Maraudin. And so many more.

I was standing by the car when two police officers showed up in the alley, very interested in me and the BMW in an alley where car traffic was not allowed at all, sitting there with a Belgian plate tag in the middle of the coffeeshop district, with me, the Hungarian guy, leaning to it smoking a cigarette, obviously waiting for something to happen. They began to examine my IDs and started searching the car. They were looking for drugs, apparently. I had been dealing with them for a few minutes when Adam showed up at the end of the alley. I was the only one looking that way, seeing Adam walking to turn into the alley; the two officers were too busy to notice what I had witnessed. The moment Adam looked up and noticed the officers around me, the moment he was about to turn right towards us into the alley, he made a 180-degree turn, the way a bad kid would do when playing hide and seek. Catching his steps the way Mr. Bean or Benny Hill would do—I could almost hear the music too—was both very funny and very concerning. He was too stupid to be a criminal; he was such a lame criminal that he didn't even think of walking past the alley's entrance like nothing happened instead of turning around and acting so suspiciously and obviously being in the wrong. I began to wonder how the coffeeshop business would work out with this guy if he was suddenly on cocaine all the time before we even opened the club? How would not he get me in trouble when there would be kilograms of marijuana and tons of cash flying around? How could I ever quit this job even if we could manage to run the place and get rich over the next 2-3 years? How would I ever get rid of this embarrassing, childish, dangerously silly criminal guy? By some miracle, in the car—which was used by these junkies and was usually full of smoking accessories—the cops didn't find a cigarette paper either, although they were very, very thorough. Belgian BMW wagon with a Hungarian guy, in an alley in the area full of marijuana clubs. They were sure they had me now, that they would be rewarded for such a catch. But there was nothing in the car. I was able to show them Rachel's Belgian registration and everything, explaining that she was my girlfriend who was in Belgium at that time and we were both working for a company selling smoking accessories; I gave them my business card. I apologized for parking there and even driving into that alley with the car. They fined me regardless. Before we started dealing with the marijuana behalf my name, we were collecting fines attributed to Adam on my name. Talk about being cheap. Apparently, he had started growing a lot of marijuana without my knowledge in a place he did not want me to find out about. As I was driving back to Urgell, we were both very silent. I was calm but he was anxious and I could almost hear the gears spinning in his mind. Perhaps at the same moment, we both realized that if I got arrested for any reason and ended up in jail, Adam could keep the 33% profit of the coffeeshop which I had signed up for and which belonged to me. ‘Thinking quickly. Acting quicker.’ Never quick enough. The sneaker. Adam was usually very slow, whether he was high or low.

Ferran was not as mad the next day; he even cracked a smile and seemed to be normal. Nice to Martina. He had brought a pair of glasses for Adam, made in Israel, and asked me to make sure that I gave them into his hands. He said he would not be able to see without them. I wish I had known that I was supposed to break those glasses. Interestingly, Ferran also handed me Adam's brand new Israeli passport, although Adam had not been in Israel for over 10 years. The signature in Adam Maraudin's Israeli passport was the same signature as the letter “L” in Tom Titelany's French passport, which I had photocopy of. How did they do that without Adam entering Israel or sitting in a jail in Israel? It must be: “Magic.” Martina was reading a book, George Orwell's 1984, in the store. One of my favorite books of all time. One of my favorite authors of all time. The strange thing was only that Martina should have read it before in high school. In Hungary, it was part of the curriculum, being a crucial piece. To recognize the Evil and terror in all its forms and shapes. She was so cute, reading in wintertime Barcelona, in Urgell, that I couldn’t just watch her; I had to interrupt her and kiss her from time to time, as I checked up on her while working in the office and the storage during the day when I stopped by. Poor baby, she was bored. Somehow like Sabrina had been, arriving in the same rhythm at the end of summer, with not much to do in wintertime Barcelona. But. Drugs. And. For. Some. Reason. In. Secret. Behind. My. Back. With. Strangers. I didn't consider how it would sound when I told Martina Sabrina's story - how she had fallen so low, becoming unemployed, sleeping with strangers, and indulging in drugs and alcohol. It didn't come across as a success story at all. I thought. “The Dream of Venus” by Salvador Dali. Also, Martina had come from the Southern hemisphere at the end of winter there, and had arrived in the Northern hemisphere when winter started here. She was in the middle of her personal year-long winter, reading so cutely with her cute glasses in the dark Urgell store upstairs with Pinto cat. Martina was wearing glasses for reading only; they had a cute frame. She seemed like she was just waiting for something to happen, almost as if she was waiting for Santa Claus to arrive. And I should have been listening to my instincts, because that was precisely what was happening, what she was doing - waiting for Santa to appear.

King refused to accept protection from police or the FBI. During one arrest, he was choked, kicked, tried, convicted, fined, jailed, spit upon, and cursed by a Montgomery police officer who also tried to break his arm. He never pressed charges[...] He was stabbed in New York City. He was stoned in Chicago, beaten in Selma, and booed in Los Angeles. They threw eggs at him in Harlem and heckled him in London. Racists threw a knife and stones at him in Cicero, Illinois. He received scores of life-threatening telephone calls and hate mail. By the time of his assassination in Memphis, he had gone through arrests, jail transfers, court hearings, and release proceedings twenty-nine times. King's response to his suffering and trials was not 'compassionate conservatism.' It was extravagant love, unconditional charity, and responsibility. It was agape-- the love which knows no boundaries. It has justice at its heart.

the commanding officer took to the barracks loudspeaker one night and began calling out names. “Everybody’s looking at one another, like, What the fuck?” One by one, he called each woman into his office and asked her to name who they thought was gay. When Laura refused, he said that someone had identified her. “It was 1993. Bill Clinton had just signed ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’ I said, ‘We’re in a barracks with twenty-eight women. We’ve had no days off. What are you talking about?’ ” He didn’t care. Based on one accusation, Laura was charged with an Article 15 offense and thrown into the stockade. She was given an ultimatum: Accept a dishonorable discharge or face court martial and up to five years in jail. “I chose the latter. Because one, I’m bullheaded, and two, I had no place to go. They gave me one phone call a week, and I didn’t even use it, because I could never call my family.” Still imprisoned two months later, Laura changed her mind. She signed a confession, was stripped, given civilian clothes, and handed a manila envelope with the word homosexual stamped on the front.

The idea of art being lent to a thief seems preposterous, but was brilliantly argued by the British barrister Jeremy Hutchinson, following the 1961 theft of Goya’s Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London. The fifty-seven-year-old thief, Kempton Bunton, kept the work in his apartment for four years, then deposited the painting at a checked-luggage office in a Birmingham train station and turned himself in. At his trial, Bunton was acquitted entirely of the painting’s theft. He was, however, charged with stealing the frame, which was never returned, and served three months in jail.

It seems to me just as imbecile, just as infernal, to have to go to the office on Monday,’ said Jonathan, ‘as it always has done and always will do. To spend all the best years of one’s life sitting on a stool from nine to five, scratching in somebody’s ledger! It’s a queer use to make of one’s… one and only life, isn’t it? Or do I fondly dream?’ He rolled over on the grass and looked up at Linda. ‘Tell me, what is the difference between my life and that of an ordinary prisoner. The only difference I can see is that I put myself in jail and nobody’s ever going to let me out. That’s a more intolerable situation than the other. For if I’d been – pushed in, against my will – kicking, even – once the door was locked, or at any rate in five years or so, I might have accepted the fact and begun to take an interest in the flight of flies or counting the warder’s steps along the passage with particular attention to variations of tread and so on. But as it is, I’m like an insect that’ flown into a room of its own accord. I dash against the walls, dash against the windows, flop against the ceiling, do everything on God’s earth, in fact, except fly out again. And all the while I’m thinking, like that moth, or that butterfly, or whatever it is, ‘The shortness of life! The shortness of life! I’ve only one night or one day, and there’s this vast dangerous garden, waiting out there, undiscovered, unexplored.

He was also a burglar and an informant and his one great fear was coming to trial and being sentenced to time at the state prison in Folsom. Several of his ex-associates were there, thanks to his help. I had just been granted a further continuance of his trial, delaying it for another sixty days. Our strategy was to string out his case as long as possible so that when he inevitably pled guilty he would be credited with the time he served in county jail and avoid Folsom altogether. The district attorney’s office was cooperative; the least they owed him was county time—easy time, the prisoners called it. County was relatively un-crowded and the sheriffs relatively benign. On the other hand, county stank like every other jail I’d ever been in.

Let’s say it straight out: Hillary Clinton lied about the reason for the Benghazi attack. She lied about it to the nation as a whole and she lied right to the faces of the grieving family members of those who died there—and then lied about her lying. And she keeps telling Americans one huge, disgusting lie after another. As I wrap up writing this book, Hillary has claimed that we “didn’t lose a single person” in Libya. Really? Try telling that to the families of the four men we lost on September 11, 2012. Not too long before Mrs. Clinton committed that amazing, bizarre falsehood, the late Sean Smith’s mother, Pat, broke down on national television, exclaiming, “Hillary is a liar! I know what she told me.” Pat went on to say that she wanted to “see Hillary in jail” for her misdeeds at Benghazi. “She’s been lying. She’s turned the whole country into a bunch of liars.” Two decades ago the late New York Times columnist William Safire wrote: “Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our first lady—a woman of undoubted talents who was a role model for many in her generation—is a congenital liar.” The lies change. The liar doesn’t. I don’t know where the future will lead, but I know enough of history and I know my own personal experiences. I trust in the Constitution. I know who I am, what I do, and whom I’m doing it for. My God, my family, and my country are my riches. I’m not looking for a fight, but I don’t run from one, either: I walk softly and carry my standard-issue stick. I’m proud of my legacy, but it’s not over, not yet. No matter what, I never stop hearing Genny in my ear: “Just do the right thing.” That’s why I told you my story. Me, I’m not important. But what I learned about the Clintons firsthand—the hard way—is very important. It’s 2016, but with Hillary Clinton again running for president, it feels uncomfortably like the 1990s again—as if America were trapped in some great, cruel time machine hurtling us back to the land of Monica and Mogadishu and a thousand other Clinton-era nightmares. Fool me once, as the saying goes—your fault. Fool me twice… The bottom line: My job in the 1990s was to lay down my life for the presidency. My obligation today is to raise my voice, to help safeguard the presidency from Bill and Hillary Clinton—to remind readers like you of what happened back then. We all remember—or should remember—what a Clinton White House was like. If we board that time machine for a return trip—it’s our fault.

Supposing the governor of your state was so tender-hearted that he could not bear to have a man suffer, could not bear to see a man put in jail, and he should go and set all the prisoners free. How long would he be governor? You would have him out of office before the sun set. These very men that talk about God’s mercy, would be the first to raise a cry against a governor who would not have a man put in prison when he had done wrong.