Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has become an advocate for prison reform the way many advocates for prison reform do: She became familiar with the conditions under which many prisoners are commonly held.
In the months since, Greene has repeatedly cast those rioters as “political prisoners,” implying that their arrests and incarcerations are a function not of their actions but of their politics. Their politics, of course, align with hers: fervent and unwavering support for former president Donald Trump. So Greene, along with a number of other Republicans and voices from right-wing media, have seized upon the treatment of those who are incarcerated (which is a small minority of those arrested) to argue that they face dire situations because of their views.
At a news conference Tuesday, Greene and several of her colleagues presented a report documenting a visit they made to the detention facility last month. Titled “Unusually Cruel,” it walks through what the lawmakers experienced in their three-hour tour of D.C.'s detention facilities. What’s depicted is certainly dire. It might also be familiar to readers of The Washington Post, which has covered the situation in the jail in news coverage and opinion pieces. The circumstances detailed by Greene and her colleagues, in other words, are not specific to the several dozen prisoners from the Capitol riot but, instead, are systemic.
So, during the news conference, Greene went further, alleging that the Jan. 6 prisoners were not only subject to horrible living conditions but also left-wing propagandizing — some of which, she claimed, was imposed by the lawyers sent in to defend them.
“They’re being represented by public defenders,” Greene claimed, “that call them white supremacists, tell them they have to denounce President Trump, tell them they have to denounce their political views, want them to watch videos and read books that basically is critical-race-theory training, in order for them to have this public defender represent them.”
Now this claim is unusual, if not a depiction of unusual cruelty. D.C. public defenders are encouraging their clients to read books promoting critical race theory? It seems a bit strange that an unquestionably overworked group of attorneys would take the additional workload of left-wing indoctrination onto their plates.
Curious, I looked at the report itself. Its claims of critical race theory center not on public defenders but, instead, on the reading material available to prisoners in the jail’s Central Detention Facility (CDF) and Central Treatment Facility (CTF).
“Multiple common areas of the CDF contained distributional reading materials which promoted the Nation of Islam and Critical Race Theory,” the report claims. That Nation of Islam material was pointed out by Greene previously on Twitter. She praised the virulently toxic newspaper she picked up as representing “common ground” between her views and theirs. After all, the Nation of Islam’s over-the-top rhetoric against vaccination even outpaced her own.
“Additionally,” the report continues, “members of the Young Men Emerging cohort of inmates (within CTF) revealed that they are reading books which emphasize the unusual cruelty of the American justice system and intend to study materials which promote the view that the United States perpetuates a racial caste system.”
A footnote identifies those books. One is the award-winning “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” by Michelle Alexander. Another is by Marc Morjé Howard, bearing the familiar-sounding title “Unusually Cruel: Prisons, Punishment, and the Real American Exceptionalism.”
Howard’s point should be a familiar one to Greene, in case its title didn’t give things away. “The U.S. is particularly harsh … in terms of how severely it punishes crime and how ruthlessly and unforgivingly it treats those who are (or have been) incarcerated,” he writes in the preface. In other words, he’s challenging the systemic problems of how prisoners are treated, problems such as the ones that Greene’s report is ostensibly focused on.
But, again, his book and Alexander’s are cast as being negative by Greene’s report. Because they look at systemic issues, they are apparently analogous to critical race theory, which similarly argues that racism is embedded in systems. Since they are perceived to raise questions about the system, including through the lens of race, they get moved over into the category of “bad.”
“It remains difficult to resist the conclusion that [Department of Corrections] staff support the dissemination of racist and anti-American propaganda to inmates,” Greene’s report says in its conclusion, “whether in the form of Nation of Islam newspapers, Critical Race Theory articles, or academic studies teaching young inmates that the United States perpetuates a racial caste system” — a reference to the aforementioned books.
It’s obvious why Greene doesn’t see the irony here. She looks at the conditions in the jail solely through the lens of the treatment of the prisoners she cares about, so she doesn’t see an endemic problem. And since she doesn’t see an endemic problem, she doesn’t recognize the systemic challenge. It’s a microcosm of what she and many of her allies fail to grasp about the discussion of how racism manifests in the United States.
She’s very close to getting a key point at the heart of critical race theory, and then decides not to. She views her report, “Unusually Cruel,” as an important exposé on the treatment of Jan. 6 prisoners and is therefore good. Howard’s book, “Unusually Cruel,” is an exposé of how America mistreats its prisoners broadly and is therefore bad.
It’s almost elegant in its precision.
