The problem with blatant, overt discrimination is that
people are usually too smart to admit to it. Well, most people. This week, Dan
Baum wrote a piece for Harper’s Magazine, found here, in which he quotes from his interview with John Ehrlichman,
one of Richard Nixon’s key aides and nominee for best leading actor in the
Watergate saga. In his interview, Ehrlichman said that Nixon wanted to use
something called the “war on drugs” to go after his biggest enemies – at the
time, so-called anti-war hippies and African Americans. Ehrlichman said:
“We
knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by
getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with
heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those
communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their
meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we
were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
And it was
pretty big lie, huh? The war on drugs bedevils us even today. For some reason,
doing horrible things to people and lying about it while its happening can keep
a thing rolling for a long time. Right before he died, I asked my dad what he
and others were thinking when they nominated Richard Nixon in 1968 (dad was a
delegate). His response? “We didn’t really know he was a criminal back then.”
And that’s the problem, isn’t it? We’d like to think that our leaders won’t lie
to us, because if they’re lying, then they’re lying about really important
things, and we know that those sorts of lies can tear our whole society apart.
So we have a
rare admission to blatant, overt discrimination using the war on drugs to go
after hippies and blacks. What does that tell us about bail?
First, it tells
us that we may have to wait decades before someone opens up and says that they
were fighting for money bail because it kept the poor and minorities in their
place – disrupted their communities, vilified them. How else can we really
explain a practice that is so monumentally unfair and that simply doesn’t work
to do whatever lawful thing it’s supposed to do? Well, besides making a profit,
that is. But we can’t wait decades.
Second, even if
we wait, we may never even have an admission.
A few months
ago I was in a place where a judge admitted to setting a high money bond to
detain someone, and where a prosecutor admitted to asking for a high money bond
to “start the punishment.” Both of these things are clearly unconstitutional,
and yet the judge and the prosecutor actually admitted to doing them. How far
away can we really be, then, to even more contemptible reasons for setting an
unattainable money bond if we just dig a bit deeper?
