Blogging for Freedom

Clanging steel doors, the smell of antiseptic, uniformed cops, deputies, clerks, all with latex gloves, busy bustling inmates in and out.  Stand here, sit there, wait in the corner, smile for your mugshot, hold out your fingers to be printed.  Pretty much what I anticipated.  The authorities who processed me were nice enough, detached, professional.  I was booked into the County Jail and booked out on my Own Recognizance within an hour.

While I was waiting, I watched.  One young woman was released and, as she hit the doors to the outside, she jumped into the air, whooping and hollering, so grateful not to be inside anymore.  A street kid came out after her.  He sat down on the jail lobby floor, put all his jewelry back into his piercings,  freshened up with deodorant, grabbed a bag of granola snacks out of his backpack, and headed out quietly, but not disgracefully, down his same road.

A couple in their 40's maybe sat holding each other, draped around each other, not really speaking.  I noticed she was barefoot when she stepped up to the window before me and said, "I'm so-and-so and I'm here to turn myself in."  The clerk looked at her papers and asked "Eight months?"  Yes. I wonder, of course, what she did to get eight months in jail.  Will it help her if she goes to jail? Will it help society, her family, our community if she, and people like her, are locked up?

Do we even know what people in our country are being incarcerated for anymore?  The people I saw today in jail and yesterday in court are sad, poor folks with very little money, resources, education or even an adequate awareness of their legal and civil rights. Cogs in the Wheels of the System.

While I waited yet again, a woman in jail dress and slippers sat across from me fidgeting. She was probably being booked out and the process to her seemed never-ending.

As they paraded a 20's something kid past, I overheard his booking charge: "3rd degree misdemeanor possession of controlled property"  What? The kid was in jail for having a marijuana pipe in his possession?  No drugs, they confirmed, just "controlled property." He probably hadn't even had the chance to use it yet.  Lucky for him.

I like this charge I heard yesterday: "Conspiracy to Attempt to Possess Drug Paraphernalia".  So, this person is being prosecuted for thinking about buying a marijuana pipe? Or, maybe they put some time into him for some reason and needed to charge him with something, anything in order to justify their own jobs. And, pay their bills for new cop toys and military gadgetry through the seizure and confiscation racket.

This is what our our judicial system has become. Drug Police. 

** GC note - that's me up there getting ready to go get booked.  I'm standing by my front door bulletin board where I've kept track of US troops killed and wounded in this (illegal, immoral) Iraq War, along with tributes to peace and notices to law enforcement. Can't see my T-shirt but it reads "War, What Is It Good For?"

"Absolutely NOTHING!"