โIf you are a car owner, you are red meat for whoever wants to prey upon you, whether it is police, auto lenders, or state agencies.โ
The post Car Creditocracy: An Interview with Julie Livingston & Andrew Ross appeared first on Public Books.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Hickmanโs had a problem. The massive egg farm in Arizona relied on the wildly undercompensated labor of incarcerated people. How would it operate during the looming lockdown? The solution, engineered by Hickmanโs and the Arizona penal system, was a prison labor camp:
Hickmanโs remained the only private company in Arizona allowed to use incarcerated workers on its own turf. Two national experts in prison labor who spoke withย Cosmopolitan โ Corene Kendrick and Jennifer Turner, both with the American Civil Liberties Union โ could cite no other instance of a state corrections department detaining people on-site at a U.S. corporation for the corporationโs express use.
Within days of the planโs approval, a roughly 6,000-square-foot metal-sided warehouse on the Hickmanโs lot at 6515 S Jackrabbit Trail in Buckeye, Arizona, had been repurposed from an apparent vehicle hangar into a bare-bones โdormitory.โ It sat in plain sight, about 200 feet back from the road, near the Hickmanโs corporate headquarters and retail store, where an electric signboard and giant 3D chicken beckon customers in for โlocal & freshโ eggs. Over the next 14 and a half months, some 300 women total would cycle through this prison outpost, their waking lives largely devoted to maintaining the farmโs operations while the pandemic raged.
Eleven of these women โ all incarcerated for nonviolent offenses, which one could argue is beside the point โ shared their firsthand accounts withย Cosmopolitan. Our nearly yearlong investigation also turned up thousands of pages of internal ADCRR emails, incident reports, and other documents exposing a hastily launched labor experiment for which women were explicitly chosen. Housed in conditions described by many as hideous, the women performed dangerous work at base hourly wages as low as $4.25, working on skeleton crews decimated in part by COVID. At least one suffered an injury that left her permanently disfigured. These are their stories.
Itโs devilishly difficult to pick apart the tangled knot of policing, gentrification, and economics that besieged so many Black communities โ but Justin A. Davis does so with agility and insight in this analysis of the deeply flawed criminal investigation against rapper Young Thug unfolding in Georgia.
In a city thatโs been shaped by redlining, white flight, and crisscrossing transportation lines, Atlantaโs Black neighborhoods form a complex network of cultural transmission. This cultural network has led to the huge aesthetic diversity thatโs defined Atlanta hip-hop, especially in the past decade. And itโs a huge contrast to the way these same neighborhoods are often politically isolated: deprived of city funding, resources, and infrastructure. Beneath these two trendsโcultural diffusion and political isolationโthereโs YSLโs Atlanta, a place built by the Black working class and urban poor in the shadow of state abandonment. This is a place built on the sensibilities of contemporary trap, where the everyday war stories of Bush-era Jeezy and T.I. have mixed with more than a decadeโs worth of experiments in production and vocal style.ย
In the final six months of the Trump presidency, the federal government executed 13 people. In January 2021, the same month he incited an insurrection at the Capitol, Trump oversaw three executions in just four days. Thereโs really no other way to put it: Trump was eager for the state to kill people on his watch. Two Rolling Stone reporters detail the unprecedented stretch of executions:
It was Sessionsโ successor, Barr, who took the concrete step in July 2019 of ordering the Federal Bureau of Prisons to resume executions.ย
Barr wrote proudly of the decision in his bookย One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, published about a year after the Trump presidency ended, devoting a whole chapter โ โBringing Justice to Violent Predatorsโ โ to the blitz of federal executions. Not a shocking move from a man who, while George H.W. Bushโs attorney general in the early 1990s, praised the death penalty in a series of official recommendations, claiming that it works as a deterrent, โpermanently incapacitate[s] extremely violent offenders,โ and โserves the important societal goal of just retribution.โ (Without a hint of irony, he added, โIt reaffirms societyโs moral outrage at the wanton destruction of innocent human life.โ)
Trump, of course, was not so keen to engage with the subject intellectually.ย The sum total of his discussions of the death penalty with his top law-enforcement officer, Barr says, was a single, offhand conversation. After an unrelated White House meeting, Barr was preparing to leave the Oval Office when, he says, he gave Trump a โheads-upโ that โwe would be resuming the death penalty.โ Trump โ apparently unaware of his own AGโs longstanding philosophy on capital punishment โ asked Barr if he personally supported the death penalty and why.
Trumpโs lack of interest in the details had grave repercussions for the people whose fates were in his hands. According to multiple sources inside the administration, Trump completely disregarded the advice of the Office of the Pardon Attorney, an administrative body designed to administer impartial pleas for clemency in death-penalty cases and other, lower-level offenses. And Barr says he does not recall discussing any of the 13 inmates who were eventually killed with the president who sent them to the death chamber.ย
That means Trump never talked with Barr about Lisa Montgomery, a deeply mentally ill and traumatized person who became theย first woman executed by the federal government since 1953. Or Wesley Ira Purkey, whose execution was delayed a day by a judge who ruled that his advancing Alzheimerโs disease had left Purkey unaware of why he was being executed. (The Supreme Court reversed that ruling the next day.) Or Daniel Lewis Lee, Dustin Lee Honken, Lezmond Charles Mitchell, Keith Dwayne Nelson, William Emmett LeCroy Jr., Christopher Andre Vialva, Orlando Cordia Hall, Alfred Bourgeois, Corey Johnson, and Dustin John Higgs.
And it means Trump never spoke with Barr about Brandon Bernard.