The lawsuit, filed by Pregnancy Justice on behalf of McElroy and her daughter, further claims that medical staff gave her only a diaper and Tylenol while she endured severe pain and worried about the safety of her baby.
According to the complaint, another inmate eventually assisted McElroy in delivering a baby girl who was not breathing when she was born on the prison floor, as prison guards watched. The filing says two women housed in the same pod attempted to revive the newborn by removing mucus from her mouth and rubbing her until she finally cried.
The complaint also alleges that, after the delivery, a guard told the women: “Y’all should’ve pushed that motherfucking baby back in” and punished the women on the cell block, prohibiting them from going outside and to religious services, and revoking phone privileges.
This is going to sound crazy but, we don’t. We create a global standard for education that all of humanity maintains for the betterment of the next generation and the MAGAs will naturally vanish.
That’s great for the future, but the past MAGAs who have done so much damage still need to be dealt with decisively. They don’t get to just walk away from the treason, corruption, and pedophilia.
Something that’s been made very clear from existing penal systems, both in America and elsewhere, is that incarceration doesn’t actually solve anything: it does give people the chance to reform, and whilst punitive justice may give some initial catharsis to people who have been victimised, restorative justice is a much better path for healing for all.
That doesn’t mean we should let them get away with the awful things they’ve done. The damage that has been wrought was done so largely by people who have power, and thus they should not be trusted with that kind of power again (tbf, that kind of power is stuff that no-one should have, but still). We don’t need to take away their basic rights in order to do that.
I know that there would be a heckton of people for whom figuring out a way forwards is far from simple, in terms of how to remedy past harms when the people responsible may have no inclination to try help with that. This would be such a radical departure from how justice has typically functioned that there would be a tremendous amount of learning to be done in terms of how to implement this, as well as difficult periods whilst the benefits of a more compassionate society would not yet be fully evident yet. However, I don’t think it’ll be possible to build something genuinely better if we give into our desire for punitive justice.
Because don’t get me wrong, I want to punish them. I want them to suffer for what they’ve done — I want to be one of the people hurting them, even. But I don’t want to be the kind of person who wants that kind of thing, because I don’t think it’s productive for society or for me. If we want to be better, we have to choose to be better