A rhetorical trick that conservatives (and centrists) use to great effect on liberals is to paint a picture of the worst possible person who no one feels comfortable defending, and then say “you don’t want that person allowed anywhere near you or your family, right?”

This has been used to stifle criminal justice and prison and police reforms for decades, and of course it’s now being used to hold off the idea of defunding/abolishing these institutions now that most people at least agree they need reform.

They will always cherry pick a case designed to scare you, someone who’s done something so unforgivable that you feel like any punishment is justifiable, then they hope you just decide it’s too complicated to sort out the rest and just leave it up to the “professionals”.

It’s only when you really spend time with incarcerated populations and dig into their cases and history and start putting the pieces of how police and criminal justice works holistically that you realize that the outliers aren’t good people wrongly imprisoned. It’s the opposite.

Think about it next time you read about some horrible tabloid murder or case of sexual abuse etc. Temper that conservative True Crime righteousness you feel by also reading about Kalief Browder who was imprisoned for stealing a backpack and killed himself after years in solitary.

Read about Layleen Polanco, who was picked up for a minor offense and couldn’t pay her $500 bail, only to die in solitary confinement while the guards joked and laughed at her outside her cell and left her unresponsive for 90 minutes. These cases are the norm, not the exception.

Whatever you believe should be done with the worst of the worst, bc they represent your anger and fear about what could be done to you or your loved ones, think about if you had the same fear that you or your loved ones could be tortured abused and killed by our CJ system.

For poor and marginalized people the latter is far, far more likely than the former. Our entire society is tilted towards identifying a monstrous enemy and visiting righteous punishment on them. Think long and hard about how and in what directions you want to participate in that.