“My child is dead, and someone must pay.”
There are no words that make so much sense to me as these. People say “I can’t imagine what it would be like”—but I can. I do.
It’s bound up with my love for my daughters, my joy at their growth, and my hopes for their future. I can feel the rage. I can picture the acts of cruelty that I would enact to get revenge. I can countenance expending every resource, exercising every privilege, and leaning on every contact to bring those involved low.
We’re just not supposed to say it. We’re supposed to trust the process to give us attenuated, professionalized, and ultimately much crueler and more total retribution. The prison system is supposed to rob the perpetrators of their freedom, their dignity, their hopes for the future, their families and friends, their property, their capacity to earn an income or hold a job, their ability to qualify for honor and esteem, their ability to sleep soundly, even their sense of self and self-control.
The prison system promises us that. It also promises that we’ll be able to keep our hands clean, that the revenge will be ice cold and completely “fair.” And that’s why we’re willing to beat our sword into plowshares, to forgo private revenge, and trust the process. There’s no mercy in it—it’s a cold calculation.
But not with cops. Police officers in the United States have impunity. They are unpunishable. They can face a penalty, of course: they might lose their vacation days, or they jobs, or even their ability to work in public security. But the only way to truly punish a law enforcement officer is to strip them of their status, first, like we did with Daniel Holtzclaw, who sexually assaulted at least thirteen women using the shield of his badge and gun before he was caught and convicted. It’s to show that their actions were not consistent with the ordinary understanding of what police officers do. And that’s not possible for the officers who killed Breonna Taylor.
These officers didn’t do anything unusual, because no-knock warrants, paramilitary raids on peoples’ homes in the middle of the night, and shooting up houses full of innocent people are not (truly) unusual. Sure, we can demand trigger discipline and muzzle management: be certain to only spray one house at a time full of bullets. But we do not demand more than that. They were just doing their jobs, just following their training and the procedures that organize their professional lives. The system owes recompense, and it pays for the damages done with taxpayer funds… but no individual can be held responsible.
And that means that there’s no way to trust the process, when police officers abuse their power. And so you cannot blame people for beating their plowshares back into swords. When the social contract is so deeply broken, they demand blood and fire. Just as I would do, if you hurt my children. If the prison system will not deprive this class of wrongdoers of their freedom and their hopes for the future, then what are we to do with our rage?
If we’re ever going to end mass incarceration in this country, we’ll have to find something else. We have to have less rage, fewer opportunities for tragedy, and something productive to do with the trauma, sorrow, and desolation that remains.
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