Ten Years of Sandra Bland
or; Justice? Abolition!
Ten years ago today, July 13th, Sandra Bland was found dead in Waller County Jail after she was arrested for a bullshit traffic stop that—by the fault and lies of the rancid, good-for-nothing pig—implicated Sandra in "assaulting" an officer. Not only was her arrest and treatment unjust, her death became a coverup. The state reports called it a suicide. The independent reports made it clear there was more to her death than officials let on, for a number of reasons, yet the state never acknowledged this or changed the ruling. The only actions taken in the aftermath were a couple of firings, slaps on the wrists, and the passing of the Sandra Bland Act as a bandage of performative reform legislation.
Let me be unequivocal: the carceral system—the prison industrial complex and the state-organized gangs called police—is a foundationally racist, classist, and irredeemable system. It is a predatory beast built to rebrand the institutions of slavery, and weaponized against the poor and disaffected to maintain control over, and fear among, the working class and the most marginalized. Black folks at large are regularly taken advantage of, preyed upon, abused, and murdered by this system by design. Traffic stops are well-documented death traps for black folks. If you wish to live the lie that she killed herself, then I tell you Sandra Bland was lynched by the carceral system itself!
Assata Shakur penned the reality of the carceral system in her essay Women in Prison: How it is With Us, written during her time at Rikers after a 1977 sentencing for a fictitious attempt to murder a state thug (police officer, slave patrol, pig; they go by many names) during a traffic stop. She said that, "There are no criminals here at Riker's Island Correctional Institution for Women, (New York), only victims."
Crime is a shackle for the poor. Any white-collar convict is merely part of the theater of "equality" and "justice" in AmeriKa. Incarceration is exploitation! In our worst moments, in our desperate acts for freedom, when any one of us does what it takes to survive in the world, when we act out of violence we have suffered under capitalism and patriarchy and racism, even in our minute mistakes or demands for sovereignty and dignity, we all become fodder for the ruling class' assault of control on the working class. The crime is being poor, the punishment is exclusion, slavery, death.
There is no possible reform for this system. Much like its mother, capitalism, it is a death machine. Prisons and policing serve to maintain one of the finest-tuned cycles of violence ever created by man! Cut from the cloth of slavery! There is no real justice served by prisons. There is no real safety in the police. The only road to freedom and true justice is complete and total abolition of the carceral project. In our minds, in our actions, in our organizing and societies, we must set fire to the prisons and the officers that fill them.