Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke’s sadist mission to expedite detention at Cook County Jail and swell the mass incarceration machine
On August 4th, the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice released a report stating that the number of incarcerated persons at Cook County Jail (CCJ) “rose above 6,000 for the first time since March 2022.” Responsible for this uptick in incarceration is what we can aptly describe as State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke’s personal war on guns.
To wage her war, Burke is empowering her office to seek detention for any individual caught possessing an unregistered or banned firearm, irrespective of the circumstances of an individual case (being at the wrong place at the wrong time, or even if a gun was never even fired). Burke has entrusted the pigs to carry out her mandate, giving CPD districts in the majority Black neighborhoods of Englewood and Calumet the green light to stalk its residents and issue felony gun charges at their discretion.
By seeking detention for gun possession, Burke’s policies hide the circumstances that lead to gun possession in the first place. Talking with guys at CCJ, we’ve heard the same story about guys getting caught with guns: they live in a bad neighborhood, don’t trust the cops, have a record, but have to arm themselves, they get caught with a gun and because of their record, end up at CCJ. These guns are rarely tied to a shooting or murder but they were still locked up.
More powers to the pigs also comes despite CPD’s long history of using such discretionary powers to abuse and even torture individuals into false confessions, fabricate charges, and lock up hundreds of people for crimes they didn’t do (just google three of CPD’s finest Jon Burge, Ronald Watts, and Reynaldo Guevara).
But for Burke neither of these glaring issues mattered. If anything, they are beneficial to her sadist agenda to increase detention at CCJ.
Yet, missing from Burke’s lock-em-up mentality is police brutality. In the first five months of this year, CPD pigs have already shot and killed six people, the equivalent of the number of people they shot and killed last year. Included among the dead are 57-year old Timothy Glaze, a terminally ill man experiencing a mental health crisis who was shot 16 times by CPD in the doorframe of his partner’s apartment, and 19-year old Nathaniel Fejerang, chased into his neighbor’s backyard by tactical team officers for no proven reason before he was pinned facedown and shot three times at point-blank range. While Burke promised that she would “make sure that people who are a danger to the public” are detained, we wonder why killer cops Alejandro Urbano Mateo, Salah Saleh, and Oscar Asilis, are not among the swelling numbers of people locked up in Cook County. The same can be said for 26 year-old Dexter Reed. On August 13th, Burke announced that her office “could not meet their burden” to secure convictions against the tactical team officers that murdered Reed in March of last year. Reed was in his car when the tactical team pulled up him over for a traffic stop and in seconds unleashed 96 rounds at Reed’s car, shooting him 13 times. As people sworn in to “protect & serve,” cops ought to be held to a higher standard, especially if they fail to fulfill this promise. So if Burke is so “tough on crime,” why has she refused to press charges and pursue the detention of these killer cops?
This question gets at a key contradiction of Burke’s war on guns and the mass incarceration machine as a whole: killer pigs get a free pass to shoot, kill, and still walk the streets, while those outside law enforcement, some with potentially lesser offenses (like gun possession), are locked up in droves. While Burke’s office has failed to seek charges against killer cops, CPD continues to exceed their allotted misconduct budget, with police costing Chicagoans $164 million dollars in police misconduct settlements, double the allotted $82 million dollars budgeted for police misconduct and a number expected to grow (1). And while Chicagoans foot the bill of the pigs’ dirty work, CCJ makes an average of $52,000 off of each inmate per year (2). Burke would have us believe that her war on guns will put and end to gun violence, but by letting killer cops roam the streets freely, Burke shines light on the real function of jails and prisons under capitalism: to lock up the oppressed.
In the aftermath of the revolutionary 60s decade, jail and prisons became a key means of social control for the Black proletarians, who chose to push back against the joblessness of deindustrialization and the unlivable conditions they were subjected to by the ruling class. In an effort to condemn these groups and justify their incarceration, the ruling class introduced guns and drugs into Black and Latino neighborhoods in the 70s and 80s, replacing the revolutionary culture of the sixties with a corporate-hustle culture and “get mine” mentality that soon expressed itself in violence. And so began the crime fighting and incarceration crusade of politicians like Burke. From Reagan’s “war on drugs,” to the Clinton era Black “super predator” and “three strikes” system, these “tough on crime” policies have led to incarceration of millions of predominantly Black and Latino people in jails and prisons across the U.S.
This is why we at Dare to Struggle are calling bullshit on Burke’s push for further incarceration.
The history of jails and prisons in this country show that the only true resolution to crime is to overthrow this capitalist and with it the damaging social relations that manifest themselves in proletarian neighborhoods. That means working directly within these neighborhoods and among inmates and their families to organize them to fight back against the system determined to criminalize and keep them locked up!
If you’re outraged by the jail population hikes and fuck with our message, join us. We’re Dare to Struggle and we got a message for SA Burke:
Down with the Mass Incarceration Machine!
Sources:
1 – https://www.chicagoreporter.com/settlement-tsunami-chicago-spending-more-than-double-city-budget-on-police-misconduct-settlements/#:~:text=The%20Mendez%20family%20was%20seeking,double%20its%20%2482%20million%20budget
2 – Sheriff’s Office of Cook County, Illinois Department of Fiscal Administration – Request for Information from FY2021 Mid-Year Budget Hearing, August 4, 2021
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