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In her 1999 article titled, "Prisons, Social Control and Political Prisoners," former political prisoner Marilyn Buck called prisons warehouses to "disappear the unacceptable....to deprive their captives of their liberties, their human agency, and to punish....(to) stigmatize prisoners through moralistic denunciations and indictment based on bad genes - skin color (ethnicity, or other characteristics) as a crime."
Millions of prisoners aren't incarcerated "because they are 'criminal,' but because they've been accused of breaking (a law) designed to exert tighter social control and State repression," scapegoating, demonizing, and criminalizing them for their beliefs and activism.
America's militarized police state brutalizes them, locking them in cages for advocating peace, not war, for their courage to resist injustice, defend freedom, equality, and human rights, and believe another world isn't just possible but struggling for it nonviolently is noble and needed.
In a 1986 Quinn v. Robinson ruling, the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit differentiated between political and other crimes, saying:
"It is the fact that the insurgents are seeking to change their governments that makes the political offense exception applicable, not the reasons for wishing to do so or the nature of the acts by which they hope to accomplish that goal."
In other words, advocating beneficial social or political change is criminal, turning justice on its head, the same kind that imprisons lawyers for defending unpopular clients to intimidate others not to try.
In the Vol. 18, 2002 Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal, J. Soffiyah Elijah headlined, "The Reality of Political Prisoners in the United States: What September 11 Taught Us About Defending Them," saying:
In a post-9/11 climate, they "and their lawyers have been targeted for renewed abuse," constitutional protections not shielding against spurious charges, corrupt prosecutors, hanging judges, and long imprisonments, many under extremely harsh conditions, including long-term isolation, over time producing severe anxiety, panic attacks, irrational anger, social withdrawal, and a profound sense of hopelessness and despair, for many a totally dysfunctional state and inability ever to live normally outside of confinement.
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