#CRIMINALIZATION

[destielmemenews]

"Russia’s highest court found in favour of a motion filed by the Ministry of Justice which claimed the LGBTQ community risked “inciting social and religious discord”, in violation of Russia’s Law on Countering Extremism, according to a statement from the UN condemning the decision."

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[alwaysbewoke]

[fight-for-our-futures]

Let’s Talk About Poverty And Homelessness.

Criminalization of homeless people is a wide spread problem across the united states. It’s illegal to be homeless in almost every state (48/50). And even without the criminalization, it is still ridiculously hard for homeless people to just EXIST. Anti-homeless architecture is taking over cities, making it near impossible for someone to sit on a bench or lay down to get some rest. Those that do get arrested.

Homelessness is something that affects a large portion of the united states population. while the majority of americans aren’t homeless, it is said that nearly 60% of americans live one pay check from homelessness (source below). So while homelessness is not directly affecting them, it is something that the majority of americans have to live with on their mind consistently.

The systemic issues of federal minimum wage, hard to access financial aid programs, and little to no aid programs in general is ridiculous and needs to end. For a country so dedicated to freedom and prosperity, 60% of the population should not be in fear of the streets.

In nearly all states, you would need to make $15/hr to just barely get buy. But the federal minimum wage, $7.25, has not changed in FIFTEEN YEARS. You’re making less than HALF of what you need to be. The percent increase in housing prices, however, is about 130%.

This is America, land of the free. Home of the brave. Country of “we don’t tax the 1% but the majority are near homeless”.

Like Tupac said, they’ve got money for wars but can’t feed the poor. Billions sent to israel and nothing for our people.

Take your “land of the free” bullshit and shove it where it belongs.

[gynoidgearhead]

View on Twitter

Thread by Alec Karakatsanis from June 15, 2021:

This the story of one of the most remarkable cases in U.S. history, and you’ve probably never heard of it. The story of what the U.S. government did to Ezell Gilbert is important because it explains how our legal system works as well as any case I have ever seen.

In 1997, Ezell Gilbert was sentenced to more than 24 years in federal prison in a crack cocaine case. Because of mandatory sentencing (treating crack 100 times as severely as powder), he was put in a cage for a quarter century, and even the judge said this was too harsh.

At sentencing, Gilbert saw an error that increased his sentence by about **ten years** based on a misclassification of a prior conviction. In 1999, without a lawyer, he filed a petition complaining about the mistake. The Clinton DOJ opposed him, and a court ruled against him.

Ten years later, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in another person’s case, confirming that Gilbert had been correct about the error in his case. A public defender helped him file a new petition for immediate release from prison back to his family. He had served his time.

But Obama/Holder DOJ argued to a federal judge that even if his sentence was illegal, Gilbert must remain in prison. They said the “finality” of criminal cases was too important to allow prisoners to file more than one petition, even if the first one was wrongly denied.

The federal judge sided with Obama/Holder, and Ezell Gilbert remained in a cage even though everyone agreed he was now in prison illegally. He had the audacity to hope that courts would follow the law.

A federal appeals court disagreed with Obama/Holder, and in June 2010, three judges set Gilbert free after more than 14 years in prison.

The judges rejected the DOJ’s argument as a departure from fairness and common sense. They said that it could not be the law in the U.S. that a person had to serve a prison sentence that everyone admitted was illegal. Ezell Gilbert went home and stayed out of trouble.

Here’s where it gets interesting. There are many people like Gilbert in federal prison whose sentences are illegal. Did you know that? Instead of rushing to ensure that thousands of people illegally separated from their families were set free, DOJ decided to fight and appeal.

The Obama/Holder DOJ argued: If prisoners were allowed to file more petitions, the “floodgates” would open and many others — mostly poor, mostly Black — would have to be released. They asked a larger group of judges to reverse Gilbert’s victory.

In 2011, a larger group of judges, led by a Republican majority, agreed with Obama/Holder that the “finality” of sentences was too important to allow prisoners to be released on a second rather than first petition, even if the prisoner was correct all along.

Ezell Gilbert was rearrested and sent back to prison to serve out his illegal sentence in a cage. media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/f…

An 87-year-old Republican judge wrote a dissent. Having served in WWII, he called the explicit decision to illegally keep a human being in jail “shocking.” He wrote that a “judicial system that values finality over justice is morally bankrupt.”

Addressing Obama/Holder argument directly, he said: “[T]here are many others in Gilbert’s position — sitting in prison serving sentences that were illegally imposed. We used to call such systems ‘gulags.’ Now, apparently, we call them the United States.”

Major media ignored Ezell Gilbert’s case at the time.

In 2013, two years after sending him back to a cage, Obama granted Gilbert clemency, and the media praised Obama for his leniency. Tens of thousands of other human being remained in prison illegally. You’ve never heard their names.

(end thread)

[shrinkrants]

Our job is to attack systems of criminalization and dismantle them, not reproduce discourses about how they can be refined to target the “correct” people. -- Dean Spade

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"... the discourse of criminalization fails to capture the complexity of the relationship between the First Nations and the criminal law, because it directs our gaze only to the criminalized and away from others. As with Peaychew, many forms of engagement with the criminal law are described in this book. I have found cases in which First Nations individuals laid Informations against white men as well as men from their own communities, alleging different types of offences, such as theft and assault; cases in which Aboriginal women and girls appeared as informants and witnesses and charged white and Métis men, as well as men from their own communities, with forms of sexual interference with, or “carnal knowledge” of, them or their daughters; cases in which only a handful of First Nations women and girls appeared as accused persons, charged with or implicated in the theft of small items, such as a tea kettle from an empty house, a silver spoon from an empty schoolhouse, the clothes that First Nations children were wearing when they ran away from the industrial school, or, in the case of Betsy Horsefall and Benjamin Gordon, in the theft of a horse that Betsy said was hers.

Perhaps the strongest argument of this book concerns the form and content of law and reflects my long-standing commitment to the importance of attending to the specificity of different legal forms and the relationship between them. The book represents a sustained call for a more precise definition and use of the concept of criminalization, one in which distinctions between criminal law as a legal form and other forms of law are recognized, and that seeks to apprehend the contexts, circumstances, and sites in which actions and practices of Aboriginal peoples were prosecuted – as crimes or as regulatory or other statutory offences.

Some of the historical literature reveals a certain imprecision with respect to the definition and scope of criminal law. Many scholars adopt a wide approach to criminal law, in which all legal forms that have an air of compulsion, coercion, or sanction are coloured with a criminal law brush. Recent work examining the efforts of the Canadian state to restrict and curtail traditional forms of Aboriginal expression and activity, including dances and ceremonies, hunting, and fishing, uses the language of criminalization to characterize them. For instance, a now iconic exemplar of criminalization is said to be found in amendments to Indian Act in 1884 that prohibited particular kinds of dances and celebrations (such as the potlatch in British Columbia). For the Plains First Nations, the most expansive and relevant Indian Act restrictions were introduced in an 1895 amendment to s. 114 that prohibited dances involving giveaways and wounding or mutilation. Although historical evidence implicates the police as well as Indian Department officials in efforts to enforce the prohibitions and prosecute these offences, the historical evidence also indicates that these prohibitions were resented, resisted, and ignored as well as only occasionally and unevenly enforced (indeed, they were almost unenforceable) on the ground. In any event, these provisions fell outside the ambit of criminal law.

Admittedly, caution is in order here. Interdisciplinary scholarship in socio-legal studies argues for a broader notion of crime – one that challenges the historical preoccupation with crimes of individual wrongdoers and the historical neglect of crimes of the powerful, including the state and corporate actors and institutions, as well as the historical neglect of the experience of the environment, culture, and entire communities as victims of forms of seldom criminalized violence. If one proceeds with criminal law narrowly construed (excluding some of the coercive provisions of the Indian Act, for instance), one may risk proceeding with too narrow an understanding of crime. The importance of critical engagement with a self-referential notion of true “criminal law” cannot be denied. The content of criminal law is neither universal nor transhistorical; and, importantly, criminalization is not self-evident.

The process of criminalization occurs when people are criminally prosecuted and convicted for forms of conduct that have become defined by the state as crimes. It may encompass the extension of criminal law over formerly non-criminal behaviour, or it may involve the systemic targeting, overpolicing, and criminal prosecution of particular groups and communities for particular kinds of offences. Inevitably, it is intended to express and enforce social denunciation for socially injurious conduct. In legal scholarship, it is important to be attentive to the analytic distinction between legal and extra-legal forms of compulsion and legal coercion, between prohibition and regulation, and between committal and conviction, in order to precisely identify the nature of the law under discussion.

To insist upon specificity in the scope and definition of criminal law need not lead one to an uncritical acceptance of the legitimacy of its norms. It is important, however, to be attentive to questions of form, content, and diversity of legal instruments deployed by the state, many of which contain offences but which do not involve the denunciation and sanction normally associated with criminal law.

An important and related line of inquiry concerns the way in which legal historians have or have not addressed the specificity of the two legal regimes of the Indian Act and the criminal law, and the sites of intersection between the Canadian government’s “Indian policy” and the criminal law component of its national policy. The Indian policy of the Canadian government intensified over the last two decades of the nineteenth century with the introduction of increasingly oppressive amendments to the Indian Act.

In recent work examining the efforts of the Canadian state to restrict and curtail traditional forms of Aboriginal expression and activity, the language of criminalization has been invoked. For some scholars, the prohibition of some forms of religious ceremonies and dances, together with special practices and policies, such as the pass system, offer evidence of the nature of the Canadian state’s treatment of Aboriginal peoples. For the most part, these initiatives occurred under the legislative auspices of the Indian Act or the administrative initiatives of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and his Indian Agents in the field. It has become commonplace in some of the literature to refer to the criminalization of Indians and Indian religious celebrations.

There are other voices in the historical literature that offer different emphases. It is significant, in my view, that one recent study expressly devoted to law, colonialism, and First Nations addresses the struggle over the right to fish and the regulatory framework, including offences, of the Fisheries Act. Nowhere in Douglas Harris’s careful study of the restriction and regulation of the Aboriginal fishers of British Columbia does he characterize the process as one of criminalization. Similarly, Katherine Pettipas’s equally rigorous study of the interference with and prosecution of First Nations ceremonies on the Prairies characterizes government policy as one of regulation.

We can also, however, find instances and forms of NWMP resistance to federal Indian policy. Pettipas’s carefully researched study of the regulation and repression of indigenous religious ceremonies on the Prairies provides irrefutable evidence of the legalized campaign of repression of forms of religious celebrations. Nevertheless, although her work demonstrates the lengths to which the government went to circumscribe and curtail these forms of religious expression, including the prosecution and imprisonment of a number of Aboriginal celebrants, she also notes that some members of the NWMP actually ignored orders to prevent dances and instead facilitated the events. Both Pettipas and John Jennings cite Stipendiary Magistrate Macleod’s refusal to convict Indians who had been arrested for performing a sun dance. Macleod, a former commissioner of the NWMP, is said to have delivered “a scathing rebuff” to the police who had made the arrests, likening their conduct to having made an arrest in a church.

In sum, Pettipas’s study of the regulation of Plains Indian religious ceremonies evinces a nuanced analysis, showing the uneven and contradictory tensions that accompanied this damaging legislative initiative. She reminds her readers that only some forms of dances and celebrations (those involving “giveaways”’ and “piercings”) were prohibited by the Indian Act; that because of its vagueness, the police often declined to enforce the infamous s. 114 of the Indian Act; and that even Indian officials were of the view that a prosecution should be undertaken only as a last resort. It is also clear that some First Nations people were prepared to “test” the strength and limits of the law.

In conclusion, the “self-evidence” of criminalization is a trap for the unwary. Criminal law becomes all law; criminalization becomes an umbrella that covers all manner of legal forms (from liquor violations, to hunting and fishing offences, to the Indian Act, and sometimes even criminal law). In critical legal historical work on criminal law, criminal law is depicted “in one dimensional terms” – criminal law “acts against” subordinate people (women, indigenous peoples, workers, and so on). This is the dominant account in the critical literature – inequalities of class, race, and gender are reinforced as the criminal law bears down on those brought before it. And yet some of the literature may also be read to offer a more relational notion of criminal law, even in a colonial context."

- Shelley A. M. Gavigan, Hunger, Horses, and Government Men: Criminal Law on the Aboriginal Plains, 1870-1905. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press for the Osgoode Society, 2012. p. 19-22

[mileenaxyz]

This country is a fucking shit show.

[immaculatasknight]

The Palestine exception

[greeneyed-jade]

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The House of the Dead”

[fluoridosulphonic]

“Marginalized young people who encounter racialized punitive treatment are “not just humans-in-the-making, but resourceful social actors who take an active role in shaping their daily experiences.” I found that the young men in this study recognized, had a clear analysis of, and were resisting the criminalization they encountered. This resistance came in different forms. Some resisted by committing violent crime, others by organizing themselves and blocking off their streets with stolen cars and concrete slabs so police cars were unable to access them; and others resisted by becoming political organizers and returning to school. Much of the literature on mass incarceration has not been able to account for agency and resistance in the people most impacted by the punitive state.” (41)

- The Flatlands of Oakland and the Youth Control Complex by Victor Rios

[battleangel]

Why Do We Wear Hospital Gowns?

For the exact same reason that soldiers are required to wear uniforms in basic training, upon graduating boot camp and when deployed, why Catholic, prepatory and charter schools demand their studenrs wear uniforms, why all prisoners wear the same prison jumpsuit and why corporate America demands that employees "dress professionally".

To dehumanize, to control, to break, to debase, to unnerve, to enervate, to denigrate, to drain, to exhaust, to fatigue, to numb, to deindividualize, to commodify, to homogenize...

Hospitals, K-12 indoctrination centers aka schools, corporate America and prisons all have the following in common:

🧟‍♂️Bland identical drab uniforms/gowns/prison jumpsuits/"business professional"/"business casual"/"dress to impress" designed to dehumanize and strip away all aspects of the individuals personality (Catholic, prep & charter schools).

🧟‍♀️Constant, overly bright fluorescent lights proven to deplete melatonin levels, disrupt our natural circadian rhythyms and cause insomnia and sleep disorders.

🧟‍♂️Blind unquestioning adherence to authority figures. Dissent is suppressed and when it occurs is harshly punished.

🧟‍♀️Forced cheer, spirit days, volunteer days, holidays with visitors and movies shown, pep rallies, bake sales, celebrity visitors to distract, pizza parties, team lunches, annual holiday parties all to obfuscate and distract from how objectively depressing and unnerving these environments are and to keep the inmates from complaining too loudly.

🧟‍♀️Overly matrixed organizational hierachy, execessive bureacracy and red tape so that things are endlessly and hopelessly siloed, creativity and innovation are stifled.

🧟‍♂️Authority figures with god complexes that are overly disciplinarian in nature and are afforded the "Father Knows Best benevolent Santa Claus" benefit of the doubt for no objective reason simply because we put our trust in teachers, principals, coaches and doctors; we fear the prison guards and wardens but we also fear our coaches, school disciplinarian, vice principal, principles, supervisors, +1s, VPs, Officers, ExCo, SLT & CEO and we fear our doctors as well as they are presented as holders of the magical talisman to whether we live or die.

🧟‍♀️At all times, you are an empty vessel to be poured into by your teachers, school counselors, coaches, band directors, school disciplinarian, principals, doctors and prison guards and wardens -- they are there, at least this is the lie, to guide, instruct, teach, coach, mentor, advise, build up, influence, grow, improve, better, transform, correct, discipline, build resiliency grit courage perservarance, give hope, educate, elucidate -- they are there to simply blindly control you.

🧟‍♂️Every room looks identically exactly maddeningly the same -- every cubicles exactly the same and every cubicle row, every classroom and every deck, every locker, every hospital room and every jail cell -- same room dimensions, same size, same prison bars, same sparse mattress, same thin pillow, same desks, same cucible partitions, same cucible walls, same windows, same hospital beds, same curtains, same color walls, same gray carpeting -- as far as the eye can see, everything is identical, same, a carbon copy, endlessly repeating. Its literally designed to be maddening.

🧟‍♀️Schedules are dictated -- recess, breaks, prison yard, lunch, 15 minute breaks, cafeterias, rush hour, 9 am start time, 5 pm finish time, coffee break, water cooler conversation, lunch trays, carton of milk, apple juice box, gym, school bell, PA sytem -- you arent allowed to get food for an hour at 10 am, or leave three hours early even if you've finished all your work, you cant work in your car all day in the work parking lot, you cant come in at 1 pm and work until 9 pm, you cant spend your lunch hour sitting by your locker silently reading, you cant spend the pep rally alone in the library quietly reading a book, you cant spend your lunch hour in a locked bathroom stall reading your manga, you cant spend the pep rally in your car in the school parking lot reading a comic book, you cant take a 3.5 hour lunch and then make the time up the next day by working an extra 3.5 hours -- at all times, your time is completely controlled by the school/company/hospital/prison yet the mandated schedules and breaks are completely contrived and are not determined to maximize efficiency, it is only meant to totally control you, strip away your individuality, dehumanize you, dim your aura, psychically attack your psyche aura and energy and ensure you never come anywhere close to experiencing your ego death, self-actualizing, self-awakening, ascending and discovering your true self and truly opening your eyes for the first time by opening your third eye.

🧟‍♂️Unreasonable schedules, unrealistic demands to tax you as a person, overwhelm you, depress you, shut you down, unnerve you, drain you, exhaust you, numb you, suppress you, repress you, trigger obsessive/compulsive/neurotic/self sabotaging/harmful/mindless addictions and behaviors to keep you firmly ensconced in their pharmaceutical, psychiatric, oncological (cancer), opiod/"pain management", fast food, fast fashion, big box retail, retail, agricultural, entertainment, gaming, movie, music, television, sports, beverages (soda/juice/coffee/alcohol), tobacco & vaping, sugar, waste management, wheat, consumer electronics, cosmetics, household products, self care industrial complexes.

🧟‍♀️See these systems (hospitals, K-12 schools, corporate America & prisons) for the capitalist structures they are. Capitalism cannot be held up without these four systems underpinning and propping it up.

🧟‍♂️All four systems endlessly feed, create and reinforce the fear of death as they all massively profit from it. Realize that death is a beautiful transformation and while the transition and process of death itself may be challenging, there is even beauty that can be found in that, as you are still transforming while dying in death, from your temporary physical human form which you are shedding like a caterpillar to spread your beautiful butterfly wings and fly as the limitiless eternal energetic being you were prior to temporarily manifesting physically as a human in your "life" in "reality", our current world and universe. You originated from the dreamscape and you are an eternal being that came to our current reality to just learn and remember who you are and that you are a limitless energetic being with a boundless imagination -- which is all the dreamscape is. Its your mind and your imagination so its anything and everything. "Reality" is just a virtual simulation of the dreamscape. So, there is no need to fear death or dying or the "after life", there is no need for endless and often times extremely invasive, harmful, painful, dangerous and traumatizing execessive "medical" interventions like radiation, chemotherapy, hormone treatment, extremely invasive and damaging surgeries leaving you permanently scarred and bruised with phantom pains sometimes never returning to your pre-surgical state, harsh drugs that can shut down and/or suppress your immune system, give you cancer, blood disorders, damage your internal organs and cause organ failure, cause structural muscoloskeltal damage weakening and damaging bones causing serious falls, osteoporosis, lower bone density, broken bones, fatal falls and much much more -- for what when you're going to fucking die anyway? Just live your life every moment to the fullest, live hostically, be in nature, move and express yourself creatively every day, eat fresh vegetables and fruit drink apple cider vinegar and water eat mixed nuts and granola bars eat oatmeal 80% of the time take a break and eat whatever on the weekends just doing this will resolve 90%+ of physical and mental DIS-eases and for anything else you have to die of something see a doctor use discernment use your ancestral Akashic wisdom if the intervention is sensible try it if it is invasive harmful damaging toxic and potentially fatal (most of them) then dont do it have some cbd gummies have some weed brownies light some candles and incense have some edibles have some psychedlics like ayuhasca DMT spend time outside in nature meditate listen to sound bath healing listen to mhz audio stretch do yoga do breathwork create stuff move dance draw paint blow bubbles hula hoop pole dance do headstands and handstands and just enjoy it while it lasts like a rollercoaster cause thats all this very temporary life is...

[alwaysbewoke]

[a-queer-seminarian]

Some activists in the movement to defend Atlanta's forests are being charged as domestic terrorists. 2,000 back, Rome's charges against Jesus were similarly misleading...

ID: video features a white genderqueer person with brown hair buzzed on the sides, sitting in front of a bookcase with a personal altar in the lowest shelves, glowing with candlelight. The image below the video is an illustration from the JESUS MAFA project of 1970s Cameroon, featuring Jesus as an African man with deep brown skin, wielding a whip and upturning a merchant's blanket. The market area in which he stands is in chaos, with people dropping things and fleeing from him. / end ID

[oopsalltoxic]

Wtf is wrong with people who are pro-anti-loitering like doesn't the criminalization of existence terrify you? I need to know

[freshnewsnow]

420 Prominent Cannapreneurs (6 Mentioned)

Cannabis is quite the strange fruit with unusual connotations. The strange fruit aspect surrounding cannabis involves the stipulations, the fact that it is most commonly referred to as “marijuana” and the pick-and-choose aspects that are involved.