John Pfaff

But AFAIC recall, not one Dem POTUS candidate has said a word about the PLRA (it’s possible that Castro did back in 2020, but if he did he’s the only one).

It flies under the radar. And kill is literally lethal.

And on and on. Here, today: not letting poor inmates w no other options engage in common practices other plaintiffs are allowed to.

Plaintiffs who, thanks to the 13A loophole, are distinctly UNABLE to raise funds to otherwise pay.

Just brutality at every turn.

Or the misinterpretation of obscure, poorly-written funding provisions means, now, that lawyers in these cases only get a (low) fixed % of damages.

That’s bad enough.

But it gets worse, in ways that (again) don’t lead to easy stories.

Most big cases are for INJUNCTIONS, not damages.

So fee? $0.

When 9th Cir put entire CA prison system in receivership, they reported that overcrowding—enabled by PLRA limits on protesting bad conditions—was causing over 60 deaths deaths/yr via bad medical care.

Every death row in the US, combined? Executing fewer than that.

CA GenPop = biggest US death row.

The PLRA is so much harder to get excited abt (ask me how I know!).

It’s abt exhausting state admin options (yawn) before having standing (yawn) to sue in Fed court. It’s about fee structures (yawn), attorney compensation, and lawsuit bonds (yawn).

Legally technical. And deadly.

Now, in practice, once you look at the numbers, the states only took 30% of what was offered, most states took ~nothing, prison pops were already growing by 1995, and actual declined by 2001.

The bill didn’t do much.

But the STORY about it is easy, and gripping. Wrong. But compelling.

It’s a great example of how evil survives by being technocratic, and why it’s important to be passionate abt the boring stuff.

The 1994 Crime Bill gets attention bc the story it tells is easy to grasp and emotional: “Feds offered billions to build prisons, and we took the bribe!”

While advocates have spent YEARS screaming about the mostly-irrelevant 1994 Crime Bill, the Prison Litigation Reform Act (the law at issue here) quietly grinds away, shielding our brutal prison system from whole swathes of accountability, almost completely ignored.

Yet I also have been loyal to here, and this Food Coop crack (which has been proven valid by just how many ppl get the joke without needing an explanation) is spot on, so 🤷.

There are two moments in my past where early snap judgments proved so correct that I am proud of the foresight they reflected:

1. Thinking even during Occupy that Matt Taibbi was suss.

2. Checking out the Food Coop when I moved to Park Slope 20 yrs ago and instantly thinking “no, y’all are nuts.”

I just threw together a website visualizing this ICE contract data! You can browse through the companies and their contracts, and filter them by state micahflee.github.io/ice-contracts/

The GOP has already made it clear that they plan to use Trump's ill-conceived war of choice as a pretext to try to push through the DHS spending bill by stoking fears of a terrorism risk THEY caused.

In the best of times, FBI statements now would be suspect. But under Kash's FBI? All the more so.

Despite the Dragnet "just the facts, ma'am" view of police press releases that we tend to have (important side note: the LAPD was a major consultant for Dragnet, which they saw a great way to burnish policing's rep), police are political actors, and their press statements should be seen accordingly.

It sucks to have to think this way, but:

Just saw a headline saying the FBI is investigating the Austin mass shooting bc of what they claim are preliminary indicators of a "nexus" to terrorism.

I think papers should be VERY wary of reporting FBI claims along these lines early on, bc of this here.

Will and Graceless.

"Today I was being thankful, embracing how incredibly blessed I am to grow up here, to have this tremendous opportunity," said Ms. Tlaib, who usually attends prayers for holidays. "Sometimes I say, 'Thank her,' because my Allah is She."

I assume (American-born) Tlaib is a Sunni too, given ~all Palestinians are, and regardless this doesn't sound like someone who hews to a fundamentalist take on Islam would say.

Just so tired of this juvenile Republican social media accounts. Close to zero reps should use theirs. It's embarrassing.

I mean, Omar is a Sunni Muslim born Somalia (raised in a moderate anti-Wahhabi family, per Wikipedia).

Not that I'd expect Mace to understand any of the words, or to care even if she did, given I know this is just naked anti-Muslim rage-baiting.

I just can't help factchecking things sometimes.

We are trapped in a War on Terror time loop, except unlike how Bill Murray progressively improves in Groundhog Day, we keep getting worse.

We did the terror prediction market back in 2001, and Congress shut it down on bipartisan lines.

Now we just almost seem to shrug.

That’s great to hear, and congrats!

Same—both figuratively and, after track meets or (far worse) when he came back from week-long overnight cross-country camp, literally.

Any time I try to intercede in sibling disputes they briefly all ally themselves to point out as an only child I apparently have no standing to step in.

I try to point out that my lack of siblings does not blind me to general assholery.

Man, the teen years are … something.

Even on just a normal day, the emotions are bigger, the stakes higher, just everything is … more.

And when there are three teens under the same roof, it’s … it’s, well, something.

When I thought I was done with my sentencing casebook, I was doing one last read through of the 800 page draft and came across:

“In general, Foucault’s theory is [SUMMARIZE FOUCAULT HERE].”

I think I actually cried.

That recent study shows that a few weeks on X pushes ppl to the right.

What does 30 years of exposure to Fox News, etc., do to a polity?

And at mass-exposure levels that were simply never possible before?

Propaganda comes for us all, and we’ve faced a lot of it.

I get the impulse, esp among law types, to think abt the structural failures that have brought us now.

But I wonder, not glibly: how much is just Fox News?

Or Fox News + Sinclair + billionaires in general?

We have subjected to a far-right anti-American propaganda machine for a generation.

It’s the less-appreciated risk of electing DAs: they have less room to go after the powerful, who can and will litigate every step of the way aggressively, in the courts and the papers.

Drains resources, and gets politically messy. May also be risky for ambitious ADAs on the case too.

We talk a lot abt the political system that rewards DAs for being tough on the weak.

But it can also punish them for being tough on the strong.

In the aftermath of the DSK case, papers were openly musing that Vance ended his career barely before it began. They were wrong, but he surely felt that.

This politics part is important.

Years ago, I wrote that a likely, but underappreciated, reason why Manhattan DA Cy Vance went light on Harvey Weinstein the first time was bc that case hit his office right after he’d had been burned in the high-profile DSK World Bank rape case.

A modest proposal:

For the next decade, we replace the bald eagle as our national symbol with this instead. So much of this, at every level of elite institution:

I'm not a political scientist, but I feel like poll numbers tend to go down over time for wars, especially wars like this that are entirely voluntary?

So Trump is starting off in a bad place that will only get worse, right?

The admin is crazy, but the American ppl less so. That's important!