The Wrong People Are in Jail

Over 750 people have been arrested for their involvement in the J6 riot and siege of the Capitol. If this storm of arrests was supposed to prevent a future coup from happening, I don’t see how. We still live on a timeline where a more sophisticated coup attempt is possible.

The J6 riot branded an exclamation point on what was already a plain fact: History isn’t over and anything is possible. It isn’t necessary that we have Presidential elections every four years. It does not fall into our lap as if directed by gravity. If you believed an election was stolen, you didn’t have to accept it just because all the courts did. You could try to overturn the election. A full year and hundreds of arrests later, that is still true.

The politicians and influencers who actually made the J6 riot happen, by way of bald lies, have not only evaded any personal consequence (lawsuits pending against Giuliani, et al.), but have been politically rewarded for doing so. In fact, it is far more likely that Republicans who voted to impeach or convict Trump for inciting the riot will face political consequences for that.

The literal truth, that Biden won both the electoral and popular vote, does not correspond to a “social truth” or “popular truth” of which there is none. A combined 71% of Republicans still believe that Biden’s election victory was probably or certainly illegitimate. A year after J6, we have perhaps nothing to show for all the reporting, research, and prosecutions. No “big people” have been held accountable, and public opinion on the election has not budged. If that wasn’t the point, then it should have been the point.

Starting approximately a year a half from now, two important processes will roughly coincide: a significant majority of arrested rioters will have been released from prison, and presidential hopefuls will be announcing their candidacies for the Republican nomination. At that point, we can then act as if nothing happened. Because nothing of substance will have happened.

Besides establishing that the crimes of the J6’ers were so petty that few can be held in prison past the next Presidential election, we also see that there is very little to prevent a repeat of J6. Trump never conceded. Hawley never took it back. Nobody changed their mind. The rioters themselves will be free soon, and many already are.

A federal judge quoted by Politico described the gap between the sentences of the J6'ers and the prosecution’s characterization of their actions as “almost schizophrenic”. It isn’t hard to reconcile the light sentences with the severity of the threat: the threat to democracy didn’t come from them, it came from the Republican politicians who lied about the election.

Whether Trump runs in 2024 or not, the Republican nominee will be an election skeptic or outright denier.

Why locking up the rioters isn’t even a band-aid

My recordings of the siege and melee at the entrance to the House of Representatives where I happened to find myself at were posted in a Twitter thread by videographer and reporter, Ford Fischer.

There isn’t much I can add in writing to what everyone has seen in video form. One detail I would add though, was that one really had to be there to appreciate the disillusionment of Trump supporters who believed the police were their friends. Their shock when they were pepper sprayed for trying to barge into the Capitol still resonates more in my memory than their physical pain, and I suspect it will for them too. My most vivid memory, unfortunately not filmed, was a female Trump supporter shouting “I am going to join Antifa!” after watching MPD riot police shove and tear gas the rioters off the Capitol grounds.

Many of these cop lovers were similarly shocked upon arriving at the DC Jail when they experienced their deplorable conditions, and careless use of solitary confinement. Like many inmates kept in solitary, their already dubious mental health will only get worse by the time they are released.

When I used to cover homicide cases in DC for DC Witness, a small online paper, I occasionally heard hearings on the use of solitary confinement.

The DC DOC prefers the phrase “segregated housing” or “protective housing”. They actually denied a records request I sent them in 2019 since I used the phrase “solitary confinement” in the request, a practice they maintain they do not use. I re-sent the same request with their preferred terminology and they processed it quickly.

A homicide attorney I interviewed at the time confirmed to me that “segregated housing” is just a euphemism for solitary confinement. There is no substantive difference between the two.

I still vividly remember a case in which a murder defendant was kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, every day, for over three years, pre-trial. He would eventually plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter and assault with a dangerous weapon in December of 2019, and received a 13.5 year sentence. I left that job around the same time, and for all I know he’s still in solitary.

Another case I covered involved three defendants kept in solitary confinement for disciplinary reasons. One was sentenced for contraband, another for fighting, and the 3rd for assaulting staff. The Judge in the case summoned the DOC General Counsel, Eric Glover, for clarification in a hearing in November 2019 in which I was physically present.

The first defendant’s attorney said their client had been found not-guilty of keeping contraband by a DOC panel. When the judge inquired about this, Glover and a representative of DOC admitted they didn’t even know what the alleged contraband was.

The second’s attorney said that their client was sentenced to 30 days in solitary for a fight in late August of 2019, and should have been released by the time of the hearing in November. The third’s attorney also told the court that their client was found not-guilty of assaulting staff. Both were still in solitary on the day of the hearing.

The judge asked Glover if their detention was indefinite. He responded there is “no set time frame”. He then told the court to respect the authority of the DOC. And that was that. Glover and the other DOC employee were completely unprepared for the hearing because they knew the Court couldn’t order them to remove inmates from solitary. The DC DOC has unlimited discretion to place inmates in solitary confinement.

Recent reporting by others has also uncovered conditions at the DC jail, which include broken water utilities and standing sewage, and withholding food to punish inmates.

My concern for tortured prisoners, whether convicted or not, goes beyond the J6’ers in other words. I don’t think anything the rioters themselves did at the Capitol calls for months in solitary, even in conditions better than the ones many find themselves in now. And that applies to other inmates as well.

The longest sentence so far for any J6’er is 63 months. All of these people will be released, in a worse mental state then when they went in, and into a political environment that has not clearly accepted Biden as the legitimate winner and that has only retreated on voting rights.

The little people of the Republican Party, the suckers who believed what Republican influencers told them, what the President told them, are rotting in prison for relatively minor crimes, such as trespassing and cop-punching. The elites who gave them the psychological basis for doing so have been promoted.

Many of the rioters of course intended to stop an election from being carried out. They bought the delusional claims of mass voter fraud and a stolen election. These delusions are borne of resentments of other Americans and their ability to vote. But I don’t see how they were actually in a position to prevent, or even delay Joe Biden’s inauguration.

If some of them had seized members of Congress, and maybe even murdered Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, then what? And so what? Joe Biden still becomes President. There was no path to actually reversing the election that the J6’ers were capable of pursuing on their own. They needed the cooperation of federal institutions, such as the military, law enforcement, the courts, etc.

Our country’s principal insurrection, the Confederacy, demonstrates that state power of some degree would likely be necessary to actually overthrow the government. A mob of passionate Newsmax watchers wasn’t going to be able to seize state power without the intervention of some government actors.

The acting Defense Secretary at the time, Christopher Miller, told the Department’s Inspector General that the reason he didn’t deploy troops to the Capitol was because he was afraid Trump would use them to hold onto to power.

What has been done in the meantime to make sure something like this doesn’t actually happen? As far as I know, nothing. This is still a significant risk. Note that he wasn’t afraid that Trump would deploy horned lunatics to the Capitol. He was afraid of deploying soldiers. Soldiers, like the military police who gleefully kicked the shit out of protestors and reporters during the George Floyd protests, an act far more disgusting and threatening to our democracy then smacking a cop with a fire extinguisher.

I understand that locking up the rioters has some force of deterrence, but the wrong people are being deterred (I’m not in favor of not-prosecuting the rioters, if I gave that impression). The success of any future coup does not hinge on hotel and Airbnb availability in the DC area, it depends on the willingness of those in government to effect a coup. Considering all the state actors who incited the siege are not only not in jail, but frontrunners for President, there is every reason to believe that another coup attempt might happen, except with more competence and less face paint.

If I believed that an election had truly been stolen, I might lay siege to the Capitol as well. Even though the J6’ers are zombie-brained fanatics, they did take an understandable course of action if you accept the premise that an election had been stolen. On a superficial level, I do admire their resolve if not their intelligence. They believed an election had been stolen and tried to stop it. The problem is that they believed it in the first place.

This is not to say that no attack on democratic norms took place, it just wasn’t done by anybody sentenced to 45 days in prison for a misdemeanor. It was done by state actors that haven’t spent 45 seconds in prison. And who likely never will.

Though rioting is a minor offense, it is a minor criminal offense. Lying flagrantly about an election is more “serious” but technically is not a criminal act.

No matter how many election deniers end up in prison for this, we will have close to nothing to show for it. And in a few years we may have less than nothing to show for it.

We have privileged short prison terms in inhumane conditions for petty criminals over the slightest consequences for politicians who knew they were lying. And why expect anything else?