Jahziel Phillips-Ray was born on January 20, 1999. He turned 23 years old this year. On May 20, 2014, when he was 15 years old, he was charged with one count of burglary in the first degree and three counts of larceny in the third degree. He entered guilty pleas on January 5, 2015, and went on probation — a probation that would last the rest of his life.
Jahziel’s probation was violated once on January 10 of 2020. He admitted his violation and was put back on probation. Sometimes, violators are re-sentenced, extending already onerous probations to last even longer as a punishment. It was violated again on May 10 of 2021; that violation has been pending since. This week, after eight years of suffering under court scrutiny, of the involvement of law officers in every aspect of his life, knowing that he was facing another four years in prison for the second violation of probation, he was shot to death in Hartford, Connecticut.
The police claim Jahziel died when he and his brother tried to carjack someone in a parking lot. The driver was armed. He opened his door and shot Jahziel in the midsection, severing his spine. Jahziel’s case, that probation he was put on when he was fifteen, was still pending on the day he was slain.
Prosecutors had already told Jahziel they wanted him to serve four years in prison for the violation, which would have made him 27 at the age of his release. In the state of Connecticut, a larceny in the third degree is an allegation that someone has stolen between $2,000 and $10,000, or a car of a value less than $10,000. The state tried to extract twelve years of Jahziel’s life over three somethings — the exact somethings are buried in Jahziel’s record — worth a total of $6,000 to $30,000 dollars. They only failed to get this from him because he was murdered over another piece of property — a car.
The capitalist state, over a property theft that occurred 8 years ago, wanted Jahziel locked up. Their intention was to put him in a prison for his probation violations. The state’s attorneys wanted to ensure that a young Black boy of 15 was kept under the thumb of the white-supremacist institutions of “law and order” — the court and its agencies — from the day of his arrest in 2014 until 2026. This is the value the capitalist state places on private property; this is what the ruling class is willing to do to protect it.
The Hartford police department has not charged the driver that killed Jahziel. In fact, they released a statement that they had no intention of arresting him, and this despite the fact that they themselves say he slew Jahziel, and despite the fact, too, that Jahziel’s brother may also die. The police rely on the “self-help” of the white population to help control the nationally oppressed masses. This is part and parcel of the legal regime that protects white property — and subjects Black property to legalized theft by the government, by the courts, and by banks. (The state still relies on the deputization of individuals to enforce its settler-colonial property relations.)
The court system of the capitalist countries serves to protect the interests of the propertied classes. Both civil and criminal courts are instruments of class control. The poor have little recourse to the court. Court procedures are arcane and hard to follow, and they aren’t free. Indeed, access to court costs far more money than most people can afford. This is no accident. Dating back to the foundation of the country, the landowners have always tried to exclude the landless, the wealthy have always tried to exclude the poor, the owners have always tried to exclude the owned. The court is merely another institution designed by the ruling class, for its own purposes.
The story of Jahziel Phillips is the story of millions of children of oppressed nationalities living in the United States Empire. “Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act.” So wrote George Jackson in 1971. “Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”
Jahziel is one of the children forced to live a butchered half-life at the mercy of U.S. capital and its machinery. Fascism is already here. It comes in the black robes of the judge and the smart suit of the prosecutor. It is adorned with the flashing lights of the squadcar, and you can hear it in the mantis-click of the handcuff ratchet. Every day, the nationally oppressed are dragged, screaming, into custody in the courtrooms of this country. Every day, U.S. capital advances its grim agenda through the bench. This inhuman and brutal system justifies itself to itself; many of the agents that carry it out have no wider conception of their role in this machine. Liberal-indidivudalism, the dominant philosophy of the bourgeois, capitalist class, is instilled in us from a young age. Judges and prosecutors, by and large, don’t see themselves as complicit in *anything.* They tell themselves that such-and-such is the law, and such-and-such is the person, and their narrow duty is to apply the law to the person in each individual case, without ever thinking about whether the law itself is just.
But the courts are not only an instrument of class-rule, they are also an instrument of white supremacy. U.S. capitalism cannot be disentangled from its white supremacist roots. It is, in essence, racial capitalism. It creates the races (in social relation and economic relation) through a process called racialization, and then enforces property rights along those racial lines. The court system, as all other arms of the U.S. state, works to reinforce the property divisions of race.
Misconceptions
The general public is largely ignorant of the legal system, is ignorant of what happens behind the closed doors of courthouses across the country. We are bombarded with television shows and books about the police and the courts, about the heroic battle of the police and the prosecutors against the morass of crime that plagues our upstanding citizens. Law & Order, for instance, is one of the longest running shows in U.S. television history. We are constantly encouraged to look to these authority figures as our protectors, as watching out for the rights of the “little guy.” In fact, we’re told the courts are the place to “vindicate our rights,” to make a stand, to fight for the truth. In reality, the courts are designed almost purely for the benefit of the landed and the wealthy.
On television and in movies, the real procedures of court are edited down and streamlined so we can have a compelling drama. Attorneys are always cutting and brilliant; they pull out arguments that win the day at the last minute. Trials are plentiful and exciting, with defendants either proving themselves innocent against incredible evidence marshaled by hard-working prosecutors, or with sleazy defense attorneys outmaneuvered by upright DA’s and evil men and women sent to jail. In reality, less than 1% of all cases go to trial. The vast majority of criminal cases resolve in a plea — whether the defendant is guilty or not.
In reality, the state has an overwhelming amount of power over the lowly defendant. Defendants are routinely incarcerated for years while awaiting trial. They are held in prisons across the country well before any legal authority says they’re guilty. The Prison Policy Initiative reports that 67% of people held in the city and county jails of the United States haven’t been convicted of anything. Fully 43% of that group is Black. In 1980, well before the “law and order” crackdown of the 1980s and 90s, the average pretrial detention period was 135 days. Now, with the COVID delays, many are held for years.
Defendants seeking trial will routinely wait upwards of a year or more to have their case called. In that time, they can be held (and thus lose their jobs, their housing, fail out of school, and so forth) or be at liberty – depending upon how much money they have, what kind of personal network of wealth they can draw on, and so forth. When someone is held in a prison for a year or two years, they will often be glad to plead guilty even to something they haven’t done, just so long as a guilty plea also results in their release.
It’s not only incarceration; like Jahziel, defendants can be placed on probation for decades, during which time, even doing things that would otherwise be legal can land them back in jail. Getting drunk, smoking marijuana, whatever conditions the probation officer (a kind of cop) decide to set can be added as conditions of probation.
In civil cases, the plaintiffs are often up against insurmountable odds if they are facing anyone outside their class. Corporations maintain armies of lawyers that respond by burying the small resources of opposing counsel in paperwork. Even before cases get to court, corporations are known to send snow-drifts of spurious cease-and-desist notifications and other threatening legal mail to those who threaten their mercantile dominance, particularly if they know the threat is a lone person or small independent company that will not be able to raise the funds to fight the legal battle.
If the courts do not exist to vindicate our rights, to make sure we are not abused by the state, to protect the upright and punish the guilty, then what is their purpose? If our courts do not exist to protect children – children like Jahziel Phillips-Ray – from the mutilation of their psyches, their emotions, and their ego, such that they openly despair of any future, that they surrender themselves to death – then what purpose do they serve?
Disputes Between the Wealthy
The courts in the Anglo-American legal system were originally constituted to resolve disputes between people of the same class. We see this still in the guarantee of a “jury of your peers.” The original meaning of that phrase in English law was that the noble would be judged by the noble and the common by the common. The court is still structured this way today, although it’s no longer out in the open. The wealthy do battle with squadrons of high-paid lawyers, they post bail and remain out of prison, they take care of minor infractions without ever appearing in court. Working people, on the other hand, take days off work they can’t afford to wait in court, they are forced to defend themselves or hire lawyers they can’t pay for, and they are ground down by long continuances and delays in their cases.
Access to the courts is controlled by the guild of lawyers that calls itself “the Bar” in U.S. law. Those who seek to call upon the powers of the court system must know the secret language of the court; judges are instructed not to guide self-represented parties (on the reasonable-sounding basis that it wouldn’t be fair for a judge to give advice). Although U.S. law is “Anglo-American,” the language it uses isn’t English. The legalese spoken in court is a melange of special technical jargon with clearly-defined meanings (that lawyers spend years learning), old Norman French (different in meaning and spelling than, say, modern French), Latin, and bastardized Latin. The ability to read is no guarantor of the ability to understand a law or a court proceeding. Beyond the secret language, there is another special language of procedure and rules: what you do when, how you act in court, what motions can be filed when. You cannot act in a courtroom without knowing these secrets.
There are many reasons for this, first among them that the lawyers guild protects its own position. Should any lay person be able to walk into a court and understand the law, defend themselves, etc., there would be no need for the lawyers who charge exorbitant fees. The second reason is to restrict access to the court system to those who can afford to pay. There should be no doubt that the courts are an elite institution. Only lastly is the purpose of this specialized language to address complex and specialized issues that require technical terms to discuss — that is, only as an afterthought does the use of these technical terms embody an actual communication need.
What kinds of disputes are the courts of the United States Empire designed to settle? In order to get into court, a minimum amount of money has to be in dispute. In civil cases, courts generally charge upwards of $200 to file a case; people have to take time out of their days to appear in court when they have cases scheduled. No attorney will take a case, even if they normally take their fee out of the portion of recovery (meaning: even if they get paid not by a client, but by the settlement or award after a lawsuit when they win) unless the amount they stand to make is at least $2,000. Since fees are capped at 1/3rd of awards, that means it’s hard to get a lawyer for disputes worth less than $6,000.
Civil court is most often used to settle money disputes between private citizens. The average cost of litigation per respondent (that’s one of those legalese words that means “person who is either plaintiff or defendant”) for U.S. corporations was $115 million in 2008. The group of people who can match that rate is vanishingly small. Corporations, of course, are legally recognized as “private individuals” these days thanks to the rulings of the Supreme Court over the last century.
The court exists to enforce class-rule. Capitalists and their corporations need a way to resolve their disputes short of open violence. If they were permitted to wage war on one another like medieval lords over perceived losses, the unity between them that allows them to suppress and govern the rest of us would fall apart. They have an interest, that means, in agreeing to abide by the rules of the court system, because they know they gain more from it than they lose. The biggest thing they gain is the perceived legitimacy of the U.S. imperialist state and the protection of that state (which is, of course, their creature) from the working masses.
Class Oppression and Private Property
The criminal courts are the primary method of enforcing the ownership of private property in the United States. By private property here, we don’t mean “things you own,” although those are protected by the court too, but rather productive property: tools, machinery, land, housing, etc. The capitalist state doesn’t distinguish between these and, say, the clothes on your back, except by the degree of crime. The more the property is worth, the more time of your life the state is empowered to seek in recompense.
First and foremost, the court is a site of transfer of money from the poor to the wealthy simply through its various fees for filing, fees for being found guilty, attorneys fees, and so on. The legislated fees — the ones you’re forced to pay to the court when you’re found guilty, when you file documents, etc. — are supposed to offset the state’s cost of running the court. In actuality, of course, because they aren’t set to a sliding income scale, the fees are meaningless to big capitalists and corporations, but can be annihilating to members of the working class. An NPR expose from 2014 demonstrated that cities like Ferguson, Missouri, collect millions in court fees from the poor. Who pays most of these fees? Working class proletarians and members of the middle and lower petit-bourgeoisie. Who do these fees benefit? Primarily government workers — labor aristocrats, middle- and upper- petit-bourgeois lawyers, bourgeois judges, cops.
By far the most common crimes being prosecuted by U.S. courts are “property” crimes. In 2020, the number of reported property crimes was 6.45 million according to the FBI. By the same lights, the FBI “violent crimes” statistics for 2019 show 1.2 million prosecutions. Despite the fact that property crimes account for nearly six times the prosecutions than so-called “violent crimes,” these numbers don’t show the full picture – because property crimes committed by the rich, like wage theft, securities fraud, and so forth, are not counted in those numbers. If the wealthy weren’t immune to certain prosecutions (they’re considered “civil” or “administrative” matters), the ratio would be even more heavily tilted in the favor of property.
Various forms of trespass and squatting aren’t considered “property” crimes, but are cut from the same cloth. These are the crimes levied against people making use of productive property (in this case, housing) that aren’t paying for the privilege. These are the crimes the unhoused are charged with so they can be thrown out of abandoned buildings and empty businesses to die on the streets in the winter. This type of social murder numbers, according to the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, somewhere between 17,000 and 40,000 every year. The courts must enforce these property laws. If they didn’t, the landlords who own the entire stock of the United States housing supply wouldn’t be able to charge rent. (Eviction, too, is another function of the courts.)
Poor neighborhoods are overpoliced. The imperial police arrest someone every three seconds, according to Vera News. Most arrests are made for nonserious, nonviolent charges. When the courts set bail, they consider how many arrests someone has had in the past. Just having contact with the police nearly guarantees, further, continued contact with the court system. Every brush with the criminal legal system, even incidental, exacts a heavy toll.
It’s easy to look at the mess and tangle of the U.S. court system and conclude that it’s simply broken. “Too much cludge, built up over the last two hundred years,” legal scholars sometimes argue. “It needs a good overhaul.” But these legal scholars, and they are almost invariably trained lawyers themselves, see a confusing nightmare that’s hard to navigate and find it incomprehensible. The problem is, they lack the point of view necessary to understand it. When you stop assuming that the court system should be designed for the efficient functioning of society and the just apportioning of blame, and instead view it as the product of inevitable pressures coming from the needs and desires of the ruling class, it no longer appears to be “broken.” In fact, all the pieces move into crystal clarity. The cases of extreme injustice that the news and even the left-liberal Democrats portray as extreme outliers become the point of the court system. We cannot explain these injustices as momentary lapses; no, they represent the purpose of the court system, and lay bare its entire mechanism of control.
To put it simply: the court system inhibits upward movement between classes, except for the handful of individuals who, whether by invitation or luck, manage to better their class position. Even so, in its day-to-day operation, the U.S. court system isn’t needed or noticed by the bourgeoisie for this purpose; its fiercest partisans are actually the petit-bourgeois property owners who feel the dual threat from above, as the big bourgeoisie push down on them, and from below, as they fight with their own workers over hours, just compensation, and every other workplace battle. It is small business owners and suburban labor aristocrats who show up to court and complain about vagrancy, about property crime, about theft from their bodegas and restaurants, and who generally push the state toward the most extreme positions.
It’s through the courts that unconstitutional vagrancy laws — like city ordinances barring panhandling, which is protected under the 1st Amendment to the U.S. constitution — are enforced to drive that deadly threat to business out of town. It’s by establishing monitoring systems in the form of probation or parole early and often that working class people can be forced to “contribute” to society. A frequent requirement of both probation and parole is that the probationer or parolee “maintain full-time employment.”
Instrument of National Oppression
Class oppression manifests along racialized lines in the United States Empire. This is more than a mere historical accident. The social category of race was created by Europeans during the colonization of North America and rose alongside the trans-Atlantic slave trade, while at the same time the old European practice of stealing from other faiths (Protestants of various denominations stealing from Catholics and each other, and vice-versa) began, as a result, to wane.
The groundwork for the national oppression suffered by the laboring Black toilers of the United States Empire was put in place in the 1700s when indentured servitude was being replaced by African slaves. Increases in the life-expectancy of workers in the American Colonies of England meant that slaves became more cost-effective; it was cheaper to buy someone outright and work them to death, because they were no longer expected to live a mere four to seven years (the time paid for under the old contracts of indenture).
The U.S. legal system was built on the economic bedrock of Black African chattel slavery. Through a combination of measures, including the explicit plans of the Federal Housing Administration (which purposefully refused to grant mortgages to houses in “mixed” neighborhoods after the Civil War), redlining, restrictive covenants on land (agreements that said no later property owner could sell their property to Black people, which ran with the land), and outright lynch-terror, even after the Civil War and the Great Migration, Black communities remained segregated. These communities were then subject to the same over policing noted above.
The class-oppression function of the courts is dependent on exploitation — the forced establishment of wage labor and continuous barriers to allowing wage workers to escape that labor. The national-oppression function of the courts operates differently: it allows direct expropriation from the nationally oppressed. What do we mean by this? It creates a fund of wealth (anything owned by Black, Chicanx, Latinx, and other non-white nationals) from which the ruling classes can seize money and property when they need it.
“Native dispossession occurs through the expropriation of land, while Black dispossession is characterized by enslavement and bodily dispossession,” writes Iyko Day. “[T]he racial content of Indigenous peoples is the mirror opposite of Blackness. From the beginning, an eliminatory project was drive to reduce Native populations through genocidal wars and later through statistical elimination through blood quantum and assimilationist policies. For slaves, and opposite logic of exclusion was driven to increase, not eliminate, the population of slaves.” Both of these projects required legal sanction and an administrative apparatus: the U.S. settler-republic’s courts. (Division of labor between “women” and “men” also falls in this category of expropriation, with the socio-medical category of womanhood reproduced through the unwaged theft of various types of labor, but that lies beyond the scope of this article and relies less and less on the power of the courts.)
Jackie Wang writes in her seminal Carceral Capitalism, “Black racialization, then, is the mark that renders subjects as suitable for — on the one hand — hyper-exploitation and expropriation, and, on the other hand, annihilation…. racial legacies that have marked Black residents as lootable are intimately tied to the police officers’ treatment of Black people as killable. The two logics reinforce and are bound up with one another.”
Even when Black and nationally oppressed communities don’t actually have anything for the police and courts to plunder through court fees, penalties, fines, and jail fees, the continued levying of these fees and the continued presence of the criminal legal system through its police and its judges means that these communities will sink into debt. Restitution paid over five years of probation, like the restitution Jahziel may have been ordered to pay for his supposed burglary, is a constant debt-pressure. This is, in essence, debt peonage: the continuous trickle of money from the Black and nationally oppressed to finance their own oppression.
A Harvard Law Review article, “Policing and Profits,” describes this process. Tom Barrett, a man from Augusta, Georgia, was arrested in 2012 for stealing a can of beer.
When Barrett appeared in court, he was offered the services of a court-appointed attorney for an $80 fee. Barrett refused to pay and pled [sic] “no contest” to a shoplifting charge. The court sentenced Barrett to a $200 fine plus a year of probation. Barrett’s probation terms required him to wear an alcohol-monitoring bracelet. Even though Barrett’s sentence did not require him to stop drinking alcohol (and the bracelet would thus detect all alcohol Barrett chose to drink with no consequences), he was ordered to either rent this bracelet or go to jail. The bracelet cost Barrett a $50 startup fee, a $39 monthly service fee, and a $12 daily usage fee. Though Barrett’s $200 fine went to the city, these other fees (totaling over $400 a month) all went to Sentinel Offender Services, a private company.
In the State of Connecticut, scores of private contractors make their money through the Court Support Services Division (CSSD, the division of the judicial branch that monitors probationers) or the Department of Correction. The prisons contract a private phone service company, which exacts a toll on every phone call made in or out. Defendants found guilty of impaired driving are required to pay for, install, and maintain a subscription to an “ignition interlock device” — a tube you blow in to prove you aren’t drunk before your car will start — even if the conviction isn’t for drunk driving. That is, even if you’re convicted of impaired driving because you accidentally took too many sleeping pills or because you were driving under the influence of heroin, you’ll still be paying a monthly fee to make sure your car has this interlock — or else you’ll go to jail.
The Social Murder of Jahziel Phillips
Jahziel had no future. From the age of 15 until the day he died, he was reduced to a subject of the state. He was monitored, watched, prodded, expropriated; he was told he had to work, be useful, contribute to society. He was told he had to make up for the harm he, a fifteen-year-old boy, had caused and made to plead guilty to a charge and a sentence that even many adult men wouldn’t have taken. He was transformed from a living, breathing child into a commodity bartered for and traded, and in that transformation his entire future was stolen from him.
We must be clear, and emphatic: whatever Jahziel was doing when he was killed — even if he was carjacking his killer — the pathless, destroyed future that drove him to this end is the fault of the U.S. settler-state. He was hounded every day of his life, his future was robbed from him. Is it any wonder he saw no hope in the days to come?
This is murder by any other name. Yes, the driver of the car Jahziel held up murdered him, but so too did the court system and the police. They killed him long before the day he was shot. They told him his life was forfeit to them, that he would never be in control of his own destiny. They told him that in addition to the eight years of probation he’d already served, he’d have to go into a prison and serve half a decade more. Every day, the courts of the U.S. settler-empire condemn the poor, the nationally oppressed, the proletarians, the Black, Chincanx, Latinx, and Indigenous to these stolen lives, these empty futures.
The fact is that capital, U.S. monopoly capital, requires the sacrifice of blood and lives so it can, itself, continue to live. Long ago, the founders of this settler-empire set out the rules by which those sacrifices would be chosen. Every few decades, the rules are slightly updated for the times, but they remain today, as they were in 1776, the rules of the counter-revolutionary enemy. Then they were the white, English, Protestant slave masters; today, whiteness need not encompass Englishness, nor Protestantism, but it is still the color of the ruling class and the ruling class makes use of the full panoply of its tools to enforce its rule.
Only with the full repudiation, the ultimate deconstruction, of the system at its very root can we save those who follow in Jahziel’s footsteps. And make no mistake: even now, there is a child who is being sent down the path of annihilation, of social murder, by the U.S. settler courts. We haven’t a moment to lose.
