Forum Post: #occupy the courthouse- the jail system is bullshit
Posted 13 years ago on Nov. 8, 2011, 9:58 a.m. EST by 99percentbrigade
(17)
from Richmond, CA
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
This movement is hope for felons. I had a job interview yesterday and aced it he said I was hired. Then he asked me if I had a felony I said yes from 7 years ago but I changed. He said it goes back ten years now. I needed this job. The system is wrecked they want to reform you then you reform and they still punish you. This movement is my hope I will fight and die for it!!!
The 'reform' the prison system is designed to effect is obedience. The health of a man's rational faculty requires that he be able to exercise it. Break his rational faculty and he will be unable to take care of himself, he will be dependent on others; he will be obedient. If you find it preposterous that over $22,000 per person, per year in prison is spent on keeping people's minds stagnant, it begins to make sense once you realize that an authoritarian government has a great deal to gain from an obedient public. I would fully support an occupy the courthouse movement, but only for Federal criminal statutes made possible by the commerce clause (which, you'll find, constitutes most of them).
You may find http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/18/MNT31LISSG.DTL useful - it talks about programs in San Francisco and Philadelphia to pay businesses subsidies ($10,000/year) for hiring people previously convicted of felonies.
I think that this small effort is the prototype for a general solution to provide all Americans with a right to employment. We should provide any identifiable group with a higher unemployment rate with such subsidies - blacks, veterans, people on Indian reservations, fat people, short people, anyone whose unemployment rate is over a certain numeric threshold, raising the subsidy until the rate falls beneath that threshold. Plus we have a general subsidy per employee for every American citizen or lawful resident hired until the overall unemployment rate falls below a designated threshold. And we charge it all as a tax to the corporations, which they pay according to their profits - so that those making money without hiring people are subsidizing those with the most employees and the hardest-to-place employees. In this way we can genuinely guarantee a positive right to employment for every American. (Almost incidentally, this also deals a severe blow to illegal immigration)
Yes the criminal system is not about stopping crime, crime continues just like pot smoking. it is about suppression of the people and making more money off the people. And they make the people pay for a system that clearly does not rehabilitate or prevent crime.
Don't just occupy, break them out. All of them. Them little piggys can't be everywhere at once.