December 29, 2017
While pundits everywhere were busy parsing The New York Times’ interview with Donald Trump, stunning for the lies that went unchallenged and chilling for Trump’s statement, “ ‘I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department,’ “ (Source: “Trump Says Russia Inquiry Makes U. S. ‘Look Very Bad’” by Michael S. Schmidt and Michael D. Shear, The New York Times, 12/18/17), we were overlooking the way in which his administration was busily advancing its ongoing project of depriving wide swathes of Americans of their basic civil rights.
Last week, the Department of Justice rescinded a 2016 Obama era memo recommending that jurisdictions cease levying fines on indigent defendants and incarcerating them for their inability to pay. That guidance was an outgrowth of the recognition that jurisdictions from Ferguson, Missouri to Marion, Alabama were financing their local court systems on the backs of their poorest residents, who were disproportionately African American (Source: “Sessions Says to Courts: Go Ahead, Jail People Because They’re Poor,” by Chiraag Bains, The New York Times, 12/28/17).
Steep fines were levied for minor offenses such as jaywalking or failing to maintain a front lawn and those who were unable to pay were jailed. This widespread policy was all but invisible to the majority of Americans until widespread activism in the wake of the murder of Mike Brown led President Obama to convene the Task Force on 21st Century Policing in 2014, comprised of community activists, law enforcement professionals and academics, to develop recommendations to make law enforcement more equitable and more responsive to the communities it served.
There was a recognition that the policy of jailing indigent defendants for their inability to pay fines was nothing less than debtors’ prison, a practice that had been outlawed by federal law since 1833 and deemed unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court since 1970 (Source: “Debtors’ Prisons Then and Now: FAQ,” by Eli Hager, The Marshall Project.org 2/24/15).
A review of this recent history is critical to recognizing just how far the current Department of Justice has strayed from its mission of upholding the civil rights of all American citizens. Under the “leadership” of serial perjurer and committed racist, Jeff Sessions, this Justice Department has perverted the meaning of the word, “justice.” In the past year, it has weighed in against protecting transgender citizens from employment discrimination under Title VII. It has sided with Texas in upholding its discriminatory, voter suppressing I.D. law. It has increased the contract for private prisons while mandating that its United States Attorneys seek the harshest available penalties under the law for those it charges.
The mistake for us, though, would be to see these polices as regrettable moves that only impact the marginalized among us, rather than as a blueprint for more widespread repression to come. We can ill afford to murmur (or even shout) our disapproval from isolated cocoons of smug safety. If we’ve learned anything from history, we know that this is how authoritarian regimes start — by persecuting the least among us; wagering that we won’t pay attention until it is too late. We look away at our peril. In 2018, we would do well to remember the prescient words of George Santayana: “Those who are ignorant of their history are doomed to repeat it.”