How Brittney Griner’s Plight Exposes the Hypocrisy of America’s Carceral State
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On Thursday morning, from the White House lawn, President Joe Biden announced Brittney Griner would be coming home, proclaiming “I’m proud that today we have made one more family whole again.” But among the millions of families made incomplete by the American carceral state, many won’t share his pride in the United States.
Griner’s release was garnered through a “prisoner swap” in which Biden freed and sent convicted arms Viktor Bout dealer to Russia. Her arrival back to her home country ends a nine-month-long ordeal that began when the basketball star, in Russia to play in one of the country’s basketball leagues, was detained at a Russian airport for having cartridges containing hashish oil. Throughout 2022, her arrest, and subsequent nine-year sentence, were publicly condemned by public officials, activists, fellow athletes, entertainers, and Biden, who in August called her sentence “unacceptable” and demanded her “immediate release.”
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He speaks for millions of American citizens who agree that Griner’s release is a positive development. It’s easy for him, and other Americans to point the finger at Putin, but we’re not doing enough about the failings of our own criminal justice system.
Americans gasped at Griner’s plight in a remote Russian penal colony, where no one knew her whereabouts and she was subject to a facility defined by what Reuters describes as “tedious manual work, poor hygiene and lack of access to medical care.” But similar human rights abuses exist in the American prison system. Brittney Griner’s incarceration was national news — even though it would have been even more amplified if she wasn’t a Black queer woman — but the American criminal justice system’s failings are often seen as an ancillary issue compared to world affairs, mass shootings, and Oscar slaps. Few currently incarcerated people have Griner’s mesh of notoriety and mass advocacy, but their families love them just the same. Of course, even other celebrities are subject to mistreatment, as rapper YNW Melly recently revealed that he’s facing “mistreatment, discrimination and misuse of authority” as well as “mental and emotional abuse” at Florida’s Broward County Jail.
On September 26th, thousands of incarcerated people in Alabama state prisons went on strike because of what incarcerated activist Kinetik Justice deemed a “humanitarian crisis.”
“Our lives don’t mean anything. Our lives don’t have any value. So, nobody cares that 100 people have overdosed,” Justice told criminal justice publication Vera. The organizers, who paused the strike in October, are seeking massive decarceration because of malnutrition, dilapidated facilities, overcrowding, and other abuses.
Griner was rightfully labeled a Russian political prisoner, but the U.S. Government has numerous people in the carceral state who are also deemed as political prisoners. In 1981, Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal was sentenced to death (since scaled back to a life sentence) in Philadelphia for murder in a case in which witnesses were bribed, Black jurors were excluded, and Judge Albert Sabo, according to a court stenographer. said he was “going to help them fry the n—–.” (Sabo, who died in 2002, denied he made the remark). Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier was sentenced to life for allegedly killing two FBI agents, through there’s little evidence that he committed the crimes and multiple witnesses have said their since-recanted statements were made under FBI duress. Joy Powell is a Rochester, New York-based activist who challenged police brutality and was then convicted of burglary and assault with no evidence or witnesses. While serving her 16-year sentence for the assault, she was given another 25-year sentence for a cold case murder which she says she was falsely convicted of. Incarcerating people for political purposes is no anomaly in America. The plight of currently incarcerated Ferguson activist Joshua Williams, sentenced to eight years for stealing chips and lighting a trash can on fire during a 2014 Mike Brown protest, indicates that it’s a reliable part of the state’s toolkit to suppress freedom fighters.
New York’s ABC 7 reports that 18 people have died at New York City’s Rikers Island since January, including at least five overdoses and five suicides. The jail is scheduled to close in 2027 because of a history of corruption and the mistreatment of incarcerated people. But closing Rikers alone won’t stop the issues plaguing the justice system, on a state or federal level. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have pushed back against activists’ demands to defund the police. In August, Biden told participants at a mid-term election rally that “when it comes to public safety, the answer is not to ‘defund the police,’ it’s to fund the police.”
Abolitionists and criminal justice reform advocates have proven that inflating police budgets does not lower crime, and that the mitigating factors that spur criminality would be alleviated by offering those funds to communities through programs and other means of aid. In reality, the reticence to defund the police by Biden and other state politicians with the meanest to do so isn’t just about placating police unions, but continuing the low-cost prison labor that states rely on. Prison is big business, which necessitates warehousing people in often dehumanizing, abusive environments. So it’s easy to villainize Russia for their treatment of Brittney Griner, but we should all realize that what happened to her overseas is not so foreign.
On a federal level, Biden announced mass clemency for people convicted of marijuana possession, but the decision hasn’t actually freed anyone. The pardon excludes people who were simultaneously charged with possession of another drug, and “non-citizens not lawfully present in the United States at the time of their offense,” according to Biden. The Marshall Project reported that as of October 15th, 2022 there was no one in federal prison for simple possession of marijuana anyway. Biden’s decriminalization of simple marijuana possession is a toothless gesture that doesn’t go far enough as his 2020 campaign promise to “decriminalize cannabis use and automatically expunge prior convictions.” And that speaks nothing to what The Last Prisoner project estimates are roughly 30,000 people incarcerated in state prisons for marijuana-related offenses.
Biden made a slew of criminal justice reform promises during his campaign, and a notable amount of them haven’t come to pass. He promised to end the death penalty in the federal system, but in September the Southern District Attorney’s office of New York announced their intention to seek the death penalty against Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, who killed eight people in 2017. Biden also said that he would end solitary confinement, but MSNBC reported in September that the use of restrictive housing increased 11 percent since spring 2021. A 2021 federal oversight report revealed that the 2018 First Step Act, ratified by former President Trump to potentially reduce federal sentences, was faltering from racial disparities in the risk assessment tool used to gauge worthiness for sentence reduction. A Forbes report revealed that at least one incarcerated woman participated in programs that should have given her First Step Act time credits, but never received them. Newly elected Bureau of Prisons director Colette Peters has said that she plans to address the flaws with the First Step Act, but in general, it’s hard to see how she can turn an inherently violative environment into a humane one.
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