“His relatives recounted stories he’d told them about being starved and beaten by guards on Rikers. They spoke about his paranoia, about how he often suspected that the cops or some other authority figures were after him. His mother explained that the night before he told her, “Ma, I can’t take it anymore.” “Kalief, you’ve got a lot of people in your corner,” she told him.
One cousin recalled that when Browder first got home from jail, he would walk to G.E.D. prep class every day, almost an hour each way. Another cousin remembered seeing him seated by the kitchen each morning with his schoolwork spread out before him.
His parents showed me his bedroom on the second floor. Next to his bed was his MacBook Air. (Rosie O’Donnell had given it to him.) A bicycle stood by the closet. There were two holes near the door, which he had made with his fist some months earlier. Mustard-yellow sheets covered his bed. And, to the side of the room, atop a jumble of clothes, there were two mustard-yellow strips that he had evidently torn from his bedsheets.”
Read the rest at the New Yorker.
Tags: kalief browder, news, prison
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So, I think it’s important that we not call something like this a tragedy, because the thing about tragedy is that it’s there to remind us of the fragility of human life and of the futility of battling what is ultimately an uncaring universe. Oedipus trying to change his fate is a tragedy, because he’s a human being caught up in a cosmic order that is immutable; the collapse of the bridge over the San Luis Rey is a tragedy, because it couldn’t be predicted and it couldn’t be stopped and because the people who died were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and sometimes the universe is just bad.
This isn’t a tragedy, and thinking that it’s a tragedy relieves us of the responsibility for doing something about it. We couldn’t save Oedipus, we couldn’t save the bridge, planes will sometimes crash, earthquakes are going to happen. It’s sad, yeah, and their tragic affect let’s us mourn but kind of be released from it.
This isn’t a tragedy, this is a fucking crime. It is a crime that we built a system that would do this to anyone.
I got a bunch of friends that reposted this on Facebook saying “what a tragedy” and this situation makes me so angry and then I guess their saying it makes me so angry that I am resorting to being super-pedantic as a kind of emotional defense about it, sorry.
I don’t think you should apologize. I think you’re exactly right. It’s really easy to respond to something like this by just throwing our metaphorical hands up and going “Well, that’s awful”–and it IS, unimaginably so–but that response should be followed up with “Now, how do we keep this from happening all over again to someone else?”
Yeah, I mean, I agree with me in principle, but every time I write something I immediately wish I’d thought of a less condescending way to say it.
Well, it is awful, and there are hundreds of cases like this in New York and all over the place — I work for the welfare office in Pennsylvania, and I see cases (usually not quite this bad) like this all the time. People who lose their jobs and their apartments because they get arrested, usually for “Being too black near the scene of a crime”, and then released without ever even going to trial.
“Ooops, sorry about the six months we had you in jail for nothing, hope your landlord is understand about your lease!”
It’s weird, because when we’re taught about the way our criminal justice system works, it’s presented as a fairly simple “get arrested –> get a lawyer –> go to trial –> either go free or go to prison, depending on the result.” Whereas in reality it is way more complicated and the system is super overburdened and the percentage of cases that never make it to trial is staggering. :/
Also, I think as kids we’re never really educated about how disruptive even a “not guilty” verdict can be to someone who isn’t financially well-off. The notion that it’s better to let a hundred guilty men go free than put one innocent man in jail is nice enough (and, I think, true), but I’m not sure we’re ever shown just how badly we tend to miss this ideal.
I don’t disagree at all, but I do want to point out that planes and bridges are made by humans, and the frequency with which they crash or collapse is affected by the systems we build around dealing with them. It’s possible that we will never prevent every such disaster, so perhaps some of them can be counted as tragedies, but in many cases they’re indicators of systemic problems that need fixing.
The big difference between that sort of disaster and something like what was done to Kalief Browder is that a real-world bridge collapse is much more likely to lead to an investigation into how the system failed, and the recommendations resulting from that investigation are fairly likely to actually be implemented.
(I’m preparing for my engineering professional practice exam, which may have made me extra-pendantic myself. Sorry.)
Yeah that’s true, but on the other hand we do at a certain level have to accept that sometimes planes are going to crash, and sometimes it’s because someone did something wrong, but also we have to accept that there’s never going to be a way that we can completely be sure that we can keep someone who might do something wrong out of that system.
(In the case of the Bridge of the San Luis Rey, it collapsed because it was a century-old Incan rope bridge, so, I mean. That was a bridge that was bound to collapse anyway, no investigation required, and it was basically a crapshoot who was going to be on it when it did.)
I don’t know, I kind of have a problem with thinking about bridges and plane crashes as tragedies too, but they seemed like a better example in this case.
At a certain level, we may also have to accept that sometimes the wrong person is going to be arrested, and that we can’t be completely sure that we can keep every violent asshole from becoming a prison guard. (Or perhaps keep every prison guard from becoming a violent asshole. Or both.)
I don’t know what a better example of tragedy would be for this. But I think bridges and planes work better as a parallel than as a contrasting example. For bridges, planes, and the justice system, we may never prevent every disaster, but we can prevent a lot if we make preventing disasters a priority. And as you said, treating disasters as inevitable stops us from working to prevent them.
(Based on reading Wikipedia, the Bridge of the San Luis Rey collapsed because the story required it to. In the real world, there definitely should be an investigation, probably focusing on the organization responsible for inspecting/maintaining/replacing bridges in the area. Given the book’s setting, it’s possible that it would be a very short investigation, concluding with the recommendation that there should in fact be someone responsible for inspecting/maintaining/replacing bridges in the area.)
Yeah, okay. I guess a better example would be if you found out you were fated to murder your own father and wed your mother, and that in trying to avert and control your fate you ended up causing it to happen anyway, because sometimes the universe is actually just a bad place where shitty things happen, and our knowledge and understanding of the cosmic disinterest of that universe is the essential tragedy of human consciousness.
Words I would use instead:
“sickening”
“horrorshow”
“travesty”
I would not argue with any of those words.
It is awful how unjust and terrible pretrial detention is and bail more broadly. We jail the poor for being poor. Even if Kalief Browder had gotten a relatively speedy trial, 2 months in jail is still awful.
https://youtu.be/IS5mwymTIJU
John Oliver talked about this just yesterday.
I read both pieces about Kalief in The New Yorker and his story has absolutely broken my heart. This poor kid stood up for himself and refused to accept consequences for for crimes he didn’t commit. He was clearly suffering from PTSD and it is complete and utter bullshit that he spent OVER 1000 DAYS in jail.
So what do we, as humans with relatively little influence over our states’ police and prisons, do to fix this? How do we work on changing it?
honestly, I don’t know, which is part of my crushing sadness.
Little influence isn’t the same as no influence. Look at if your local DA is elected and if so, elect better people by talking to people you know. Write letter’s to all levels of state officials. Donate money to organizations in the area doing the work on these cases, whether it’s ACLU or whoever.
this is just off the top of my head and is by no means exhaustive.
So what do we, as humans with relatively little influence over our states' police and prisons, do to fix this? How do we work on changing it?
This is the line that was quoted in the LA Times article that really got me:
““I’m not all right,” Browder told the New Yorker in its October story. “I’m messed up. I know that I might see some money from this case, but that’s not going to help me mentally. I’m mentally scarred right now. That’s how I feel. Because there are certain things that changed about me and they might not go back.””
It seems to have reached the point where our society operates on the assumption that a pay-out is going to make things all better. Wrongful imprisonment? Oooops, our bad. Here’s some money. Aren’t we all happy now?
No. We’re not. These things are irrevocable.
I would not argue with any of those words.
Yeah, okay. I guess a better example would be if you found out you were fated to murder your own father and wed your mother, and that in trying to avert and control your fate you ended up causing it to happen anyway, because sometimes the universe is actually just a bad place where shitty things happen, and our knowledge and understanding of the cosmic disinterest of that universe is the essential tragedy of human consciousness.
Worth reading, as always: Ta-Nehisi Coates
The numbers which people like me bring forth to convey the problems of our justice system are decent tools. But what the numbers can’t convey is what the justice system does to the individual black body. Kalief Browder was an individual, which is to say he was a being with his own passions, his own particular joys, his own strange demons, his own flaws, his own eyes, his own mouth, his own original hands. His family had their own particular stories of him. His friends must remember him in their own original way. The senseless destruction of this individual must necessarily be laid at the feet of the citizens of New York, because it was done by our servants, and it was done in our name.
Everyone needs to read this, period. And be forced to click on the links. Every. Fucking. One.