Will Uygur and Kasparian Cover ACLU Lawsuit Detailing “Barbaric” L.A. Jails Young Turks Is Lobbying More People Go Into?

Violating Betteridge’s Law of Headlines to update on an important topic.

The backlash against so-called bail reform stopped being about balance, data, or sober moral calculus and tradeoffs years ago. As I’ve noted in these pages and elsewhere, it’s fundamentally a movement of images, videos, racism, visceral reaction, and emotions. The fact that a recent exhaustive study from Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania clearly shows bail reform actually reduces crime, at the end of the day, won’t matter all. It’s about fear and vibes.

In a recent piece for The Real News, I focused specifically on the grim adoption of this reactionary posture against bail reform from nominally progressive media outlet The Young Turks. As I detail in my column, the two biggest media personalities there, co-anchors Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, have used their massive and influential platforms to mislead about the nature of bail reform, call on more people to be put in county jail (despite mealy mouthed qualifiers about how this isn’t their goal, but more on that later), and attacked reform DAs Chesa Boudin of San Francisco (who has since been recalled), and George Gascón of Los Angeles (whose recall failed to get enough signatures to move to a vote).

I won’t rehash all the arguments here, but suffice to say the end result of the chorus of cynical demagoguery around this issue—the removal of DA Gascón, a repeal of already-modest state bail reform, and other reform measures—is going to, in concert with dozens of right-wing media outlets echoing the same arguments, end up putting more people in county jails, namely L.A. county jails in the city these high-profile hosts of The Young Turks reside and host their show in. 

It is thus important they give their large audience a sense of the moral stakes of this policy advocacy. 

Since The Young Turks, namely Kasparian, has been pushing for the criminalization of the unhoused, tacked on prison sentences for “illegal guns,” and the removal of Gascón, I’m curious if she will be covering a recent lawsuit filed by the ACLU, highlighting the “barbaric” conditions of this jail she’s lobbying to put more people into.

A lawsuit filed last week by the ACLU found that, via the LA Times:

Filth and degradation in the overcrowded Los Angeles County jail system has turned “barbaric” for a growing number of mentally ill inmates who are chained to chairs for days or left to sleep on a concrete floor without bedding, a civil rights group alleged Thursday. Most of the inmates are recently arrested suspects who have not been convicted, and they are routinely denied clean water, functioning toilets, a shower, adequate food, or medication they need to treat schizophrenia and other serious conditions, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU asked U.S. District Judge Dean D. Pregerson for an emergency order to force Sheriff Alex Villanueva and the Board of Supervisors to clean up the “medieval” conditions of the jail system’s inmate reception center in downtown L.A…

Inmate attorneys who visited the center cited “cuts, swelling, and bruising, consistent with prolonged handcuffing, on the wrists of a man” stuck on a bench for 99 hours. They saw one inmate chained to a bench urinating on the floor and another lying in a puddle of urine. An inmate recalled seeing a man defecate in a trash can, they said. “When I was on the front bench the man chained to the chair next to me pulled his pants down and pooped on the floor,” inmate Tony Jones said in a sworn court statement filed by the ACLU. “The feces stayed on the floor for two days. No one comes to clean the front bench area. I saw people pee into orange juice boxes. The area stank from the feces and pee.”

When confronted with the reality of the horrific, torture-like conditions endured by those subject to pre-trail detention (read: incarceration before they’ve stood trial, much less been convicted of anything), both Uygur and Kasparian insist they don’t support this either, but simply want “violent criminals” “removed off the streets.” It’s an anodyne narrative and an attractive one for many. Let the guy who was arrested for two joints out of jail, but keep ‘violent criminals’ behind bars. For the most part, it’s worth stressing, “violent criminals” are rotting away in America’s jails and prisons for years on end—more than any other country on earth, and it’s not even close. Uygur and Kasparian will point to anecdotes here and there, but this is all they have—because the data still shows the U.S. cages more people per capita than comparable “developed” countries by a factor of 5X. 

What Kasparian is talking about—as she details in one particularly misleading segment—is the “violent crime” of mere gun possession. She lambasts Gascón for not jailing people pre-trail for mere gun possession. But wait a second. I thought Kasparian and her defenders insisted she only wanted to cage people in L.A. county jail for “violent crime,” and the mere possession of a gun is not, of course, a violent crime. If it were, 32 percent of the population would be locked up tomorrow. This is the contortion required to pose as a progressive sympathetic to reform while spouting right-wing talking points: The reality is the bulk of Total Incarceration Years bloating our mass incarceration machine aren’t coming from low-level drug offenses—they’re coming from things like DAs tacking on years for the mere possession of illegal guns, even when no shots were ever fired or a gun was never used to menace or threaten anyone. 

So the question remains: Will Kasparian and The Young Turks use their large platform to discuss and detail the ACLU lawsuit showing the dehumanizing and violent conditions of the county jail they want to send more people into? If they’re going to cynically accuse bail reform advocates of loving murderers and wanting to see violent people run free and being indifferent to crime victims, will they hold themselves to the same standard and accuse themselves of loving torture behind bars in America’s jails and not caring about the tens of thousands of faceless black and brown people being disappeared by our carceral machine?

Again, a copout response is their go-to: We want to reform prisons in some ideological or abstract sense, but we just don’t support anyone trying to reduce the population of these barbaric torture systems—that we also acknowledge are substandard and abusive and racist. But we can’t wait until they meet baseline human rights conditions until we stop advocating sending more people there because something something “the reality of crime,” but in theory we are sympathetic. 

But the reality is, these are the conditions that exist today right now. Reality is what it is, whether we can point to some squishy ideological nirvana that we, in theory, support. 

Let us then propose a thought experiment to tease out the logic at work: If the L.A. county jail randomly executed 1 percent of its inmates every day, would this be a good enough reason for Kasparian to demand we reduce population significantly and with urgency? To stop arresting people until the random executions ended? The racist torture chamber part, where people live in fecal matter and blood and urine and are sexually assaulted and dehumanized and removed from family and employment and education is the thing happening in reality every day, it’s the reality of Uygur and Kasparian’s preferred policy outcomes, it’s the reality whether it comports to their progressive branding or not. They should show it, confront it, and defend it as such. Not act as if by arresting more unhoused people and “gun possession” criminals and “drug dealers” these arrestees simply exist in suspended animation, like someone stuck in a transporter pattern buffer in Star Trek. The people they want “removed from the streets” are humans who actually go into cages and have lives and humanity that are stripped from them—before, again, they've even been found guilty of a crime. They should show this side of the moral equation and be honest about what they’re lobbying for.