Mother Jones – July-August 2019

10 MOTHER JONES |^ JULY / AUGUST 2019

OUTFRONT

PETER RYAN

at Santa Rita. The jail gives those with

less than $7.05 in their pockets one or

two transit tickets. There are electri-

cal outlets in the lobby, but no phone

chargers or pay phones. (The infor-

mation desk officer will make phone

calls for people who ask.) Outside, taxis

circle the parking lot, charging $10 for

the two-mile ride to the train station.

Drivers have a reputation for offering

women rides in exchange for sex. Sev-

eral times a month, volunteers from

the Incarcerated Workers Organizing

Committee set up near the bus stop,

offering free pizza, carpools to the sta-

tion, and cigarettes until 1 a.m.

Kelly, the sheriff ’s spokesperson, tells

me it’s the role of such groups, not law

enforcement, to help inmates once

they hit the streets. “Where does our

responsibility stop and where does so-

ciety’s, the community’s, responsibility

start?” he asks. “Where does personal

responsibility start?”

“It is always the sheriff ’s responsibility

to think about community safety,” says

Susan Burton, the founder of A New

Way of Life, a nonprofit that provides

food, clothing, shelter, and legal sup-

port to women released in Los Angeles

County. “Anybody getting released—any

woman getting released in the middle

of the night—her safety is threatened.”

Burton has been through it herself. After

a police cruiser ran over and killed her

five-year-old son, she cycled in and out of

the LA jail system for two decades, deal-

ing with grief and addiction. Rather than

walk home alone when she was let out,

she’d call a pimp. “That was the option

I had,” she says. She recalls inmates tell-

ing stories about women getting killed

after late-night releases: “I remember

how scared we were.”

Similar tales now circulate at Santa

Rita: rumors that St. Louis was raped

and murdered, and that other women

have met the same fate. At the bus stop

on the night I meet Leah, a middle-aged

woman who has just been released

stares down the dark road in confusion.

She asks a young man who’s just been

released how to get to the station. He

points down the road, but then he tells

her about St. Louis: “They said she over-

dosed. You know that was a cover-up.”

The woman decides to walk anyway. n

if you’ve spent enough time on the in-

ternet over the last three years, you’ve

probably come across Scott Dworkin,

a.k.a. @funder. The 36-year-old is the

cofounder of a super-pac called the

Democratic Coalition Against Trump, a

podcast host, and an occasional guest on

msnbc who devotes much of his life to

tweeting about, and sometimes at, Pres-

ident Donald Trump. In Dworkin’s feed,

Republicans are guilty of “treason,” the

resistance is always winning, and the end

of the Trump presidency is imminent.

(August 20, 2017: “My guess: Trump will

resign in the next 2 weeks.”) When I told

him I was working on a story about his

group, he emailed back almost immedi-

ately with a link to a Medium post doc-

umenting its successes—including a list

of dozens of trending hashtags it started.

FLEECE DE RESISTANCE

PATRIOT GAMES

The anti-Trump resistance has spawned a crop of hucksters.