The book "A Really Good Day" is a personal report of an American woman narrating her experience with LSD microdosing in order to control her severe mood problems. However, it contains two extremely telling examples of the prisonal-industrial complex in the USA, which turned societal decay and removal of liberties into both a profitable and an effective social control mechanism.

The result is nothing short of hellish. The USA presently has a higher incarceration rate than the average of Stalin's reign and his infamous Gulag system. And this is what Sérgio Moro wants to start implementing in Brazil, by adding plea bargain, a fundamental part of the prisonal-industrial complex, to the Brazilian legal system. It cannot be overemphasized how monstrous this legal device is.

In simplified terms:
a) This satisfies a sinister mentality which says that the more people convicted the better, so that politicians can say they're "tough on crime" and prosecutors can climb their career ladders. Notice that whether a crime is committed in the first place is purely incidental.
b) All choices offered via plea bargain to the accused presume his guilt, with no exceptions. This plays into the aforementioned use of amount of convictions as a political weapon. Prosecutors don't care whether a crime actually happened at all, all they have in mind is convicting people. Fighting to demonstrate the innocence of a wrongfully arrested person is simply not part of their job at all.
c) This coaxes wrongfully accused people into accepting the "bargain", in order to avoid the risk of going to trial declaring themselves innocent and losing, and thus getting the full brunt of the sentence. This is a win-win situation for the prosecution, which secures a conviction. Thus it has an incentive to use plea bargains more and more often.
d) Since the plea bargain always entails a guilty verdict, there's just plain no trial whatsoever in case the accused accepts it. This, in itself, is already anathema to a putatively democratic State: punishment for supposed crimes which foregoes the judicial process entirely, completely avoiding due process, and sidestepping the presumption of innocence in a clever, Machiavellian manner. And this isn't the exception, mind you. Not at all. More than 90% of all convictions in "the land of the free" come from plea bargains, without a hint of a trial. This state of emergency situation becomes the norm.
e) The "benevolent" decrease in sentence offered in a plea deal, inevitably, creates a pressure for legislative bodies to increase sentence severity accross the board, in order to offset those plea bargain decreases. The result is a net increase in both prisonal population and their respective sentences, or, in other words, a "net decrease of freedom".
f) The disturbing increase of private companies for managing public correctional facilities, or even operating their own privately-owned ones, also creates a direct profit motive for the upper classes to lock people away, regardless of guilt. And of course, the targeted population will always be the lower classes and "undesirable elements".
g) The USA has a unique factors which further reinforces this Dantesque scheme. The 13th amendment to the constitution, which purportedly abolishes slavery, leaves a very clear exception for criminal convicts. In other words, convicts can, and are, used as slave labor, adding to the aforementioned profit motive.
h) These collected factors resulted in making the USA a bizarre sort of democratic police State, where citizens are notionally free, yet are at a permanent risk of being locked away for violation of an ever-increasing number of criminalized activities. And unsurprisingly, the risk is absurdly higher the lower the class or social stratus of a given citizen. The lower classes and minorities are, as always, the biggest victims, in this case, by becomining fuel for the prisonal-industrial complex. Removing people's freedoms is literally a profitable business. One of many ways in which capitalism demonstrates its anti-human nature.

In Brazil, the stepping stones leading to this abyss have already begun being laid, informally, by Moro and his liberal usage of coercitive methods, both to humiliate the accused, appear tough on crime, disguise the grossly anti-democratic character of the whole process, and, more importantly, intimidating the person into accepting a plea bargain. And now, as minister of justice, he's formally enacting it.

So there you have it. The biggest, most inhuman punitive system in the modern age is the model which Bolsonaro and his rabidly reactionary cohorts actually want to implement in Brazil. And make no mistake, they're not doing this out of any misguided good intentions. They're not failing to see the mistake they're making. Just the opposite. A massive engine of repression is their very goal. This affront to humanity, to a reactionary mind, is actually a positive good. And that's why it's ultimately impossible to build a humanist, free society with the help of reactionaries, as their most fundamental ethics are, inherently, anti-humanist, serving instead either a Stirnerian spook such as religion, or just plain their material self-interest. Reactionaries cannot be counted upon creating a better world because they don't want a better world.

Regardless, here are the two events narrated in the book cited at the beginning of this text. Read and commit to memory, because you or someone you know will live through situations like these in the future. And never forget, it wasn't for lack of warning.

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When I was a federal defender, I had a client, a Mexican woman in her forties, a mother of five, who'd been abandoned by her husband. On a rare night out, she met a man in a bar. He was from Puerto Rico, and she found his accent beguiling. They exchanged phone numbers, and he began calling her, telling her how beautiful she was, how he couldn't get her out of his mind. My client was a frumpy little woman, with feet swollen from a lifetime of menial labor and thinning strawlike hair dyed the color of raw beef. She said the last time a man had called her beautiful was on her wedding day, when she was sixteen years old.

The couple didn't meet in person again; all their conversations happened over the phone. For days he flirted with her, describing the life they'd have together, how he'd be the father her children needed. Then he asked her if she could help him. He wasn't a drug dealer, he assured her. But he had an opportunity to make a single score, one that would set them up for their life together. Did she know anyone who had access to methamphetamine?

My client laughed. She was a domestic worker, a mother. She didn't know anyone who dealt drugs. But surely she knew some who used drugs, he persisted. She lived in East L.A., a center of drug activity. Wasn't there someone from the neighborhood who could point her in the right direction?

Day after day the couple would speak on the phone, and he'd beg her to help him find the methamphetamine. He was curiously specific about the quantity of drugs he desired. At least fifty grams, he said. She told him she had no access to drugs, she wouldn't know whom to ask. Ask your son! he suggested. Tell him to ask around his high school. Surely, he'd be willing to do this small thing for the sake of his mother and his soon-to-be stepfather's happiness, for the sake of his own future. Tell him to think of the house the family would move into with the money his new stepfather made from the score.

My client was torn. Not about whether she'd ask her child to search for drugs—that was out of the question. She was a fond and worried mother who hovered over her children, pushing them to complete homework she couldn't understand so they would get good grades, go to college, and have the kind of life she could not have imagined for herself when she was their age. But she had fallen hard for the lover from Puerto Rico. She wanted him to love her, and she worried that if she didn't help him he'd stop calling. She would find some, she told him. She would find methamphetamine.

Weeks passed, and they spoke every day. The calls were always the same. They began with talks of her beauty and his passion, and moved quickly to the drug deal, with the quantity of methamphetamine the man sought always carefully specified. No fewer than fifty grams, my client's telephone lover would remind her. She would reassure him that she was looking for the methamphetamine. Someday soon she would find a source.

Meanwhile, she begged her boyfriend to take their relationship to the next level, to meet her in person. He would promise to meet, but not until she had the drugs. Finally, he agreed to take her to dinner, even though she'd as yet been unsuccessful in finding the methamphetamine. The truth, which he didn't know, was that she had not even bothered to look. She knew no one who had access to drugs, nor did she want to know anyone who did.

On the evening of their first real date, she opened her door not to her lover, but to a phalanx of DEA agents. The man from Puerto Rico was not her boyfriend; he was an informant. Over the course of many weeks and long conversations about how beautiful she was and how he planned to spend the rest of his life with her, he'd set her up.

She was arrested and charged with conspiracy to deliver methamphetamine, specifically fifty grams, precisely the amount that would trigger a ten-year mandatory minimum prison sentence.

In the Criminal Code, the crime of conspiracy does not have as one of its elements the actual commission of the underlying felony; the agreement itself constitutes the crime. It was irrelevant to my client's case that no actual drugs had been exchanged. By promising to find methamphetamine, she had conspired to traffic. Her sentence would be determined by the quantity of drugs she had agreed to provide.

The only question that remained for the jury was whether she was entrapped, tricked into conspiring to commit the crime. Central to that question was whether or not my client was predisposed to deal drugs. If she was, then the informant's trickery was absolutely legal—no harm done. If she wasn't, then she must be acquitted.

I had, as you can imagine, a pretty good case, made all the better by what I discovered about the informant's long and colorful personal and professional history. After being found not guilty by reason of insanity of the attempted murder of his wife, the informant had escaped from a secure psychiatric facility and made his way to Central America, where he ended up in the employ of the CIA. His job with the CIA involved transporting cocaine. The CIA referred him to the DEA, who were even more generous than the spy agency had been. Over the years, the informant, a legally insane attempted murderer, earned hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars. He focused on first-time offenders, setting up one after another. These people inevitably went to jail, most of them for at least ten years. Then, in one of his cases, a large quantity of cash disappeared. The informant denied knowing anything about the lost money, but when his handlers hooked him up to a lie detector, he failed unambiguously. Their response? Not to charge him with a crime, but to move him to a different jurisdiction, where the defense attorneys would have no information about his nefarious past.

I would have found out nothing about this history but for a mistake in the discovery file the U.S. attorney was required to turn over to me. Though the documents were aggressively redacted, on one page the black pen had slipped, leaving part of a case number visible. It didn't take me long to tease out the jurisdiction. Half a dozen phone calls later, I had everything I needed to eviscerate the informant on the witness stand. I knew I could convince a jury that his testimony was at best unreliable, at worst criminal perjury.

When I confronted the assistant U.S. attorney about the man, he just shrugged. Your client is guilty, he said. We have her on tape.

But the informant! I insisted. He's a murderer! A perjurer!

The assistant U.S. attorney was unmoved.

Furious, I began spreading the word to the community. There's a man on the street in East L.A. soliciting drugs, I told people. He's not a buyer or a dealer, but a DEA informant. He's also easy to recognize amidst the various Latino communities of Los Angeles; he's got a Puerto Rican accent. Tell everyone you know.

Week after week, as I prepared for trial, my client was held in the Metropolitan Detention Center, while her kids struggled to care for themselves, to make it to school on time, the older ones taking responsibility for feeding the younger, working after school to earn money to pay the bills so they wouldn't be evicted or have the power cut off. And then, one day, I got a phone call from my client's sister, who lived in San Diego.

"Your secretary called me," the sister said.

"My secretary?"

"Your secretary says that you're a government agent. That you don't really work for my sister, but for the prosecution."

"I'm a government employee, true, but I represent your sister. I'm a federal public defender. She's my client. I do what's best for her, not for the government."

"Your secretary says to fire you. He says he can help me find a better lawyer."

My secretary was busily preparing for an elaborate wedding and had no time to talk with my clients' families about their cases. Moreover, my secretary was a woman.

"The man who said he was my secretary," I asked, "did he have a Puerto Rican accent?"

"Yes."

I don't remember if I said "Fuck" out loud, but chances are good.

Then my client's sister said, "I recorded his call on my answering machine. Do you want to hear the tape?"

What I wanted was for her to get in her car and drive it to me. "Do not speed," I said. "Do not get in an accident. Do not give the tape to anyone but me. I will be waiting in the street in front of the federal building." Hoping I don't get shot by that fucking madman, I thought to myself.

Two and a half hours later, a battered minivan pulled up to the curb. A sweet-faced young woman, short like my client but not carrying the weight of five pregnancies, peered at me from behind the steering wheel. Wisely, she insisted on seeing my picture ID before she handed me the tape. I ran with it up to the U.S. attorney's office.

As he listened to the tape, the AUSA's sneer curdled.

"Well?" I said.

"How did you get this?" he asked me.

I held his gaze. "Well?" I repeated.

He threw up his hands. "We'll dismiss."

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As Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, told me, "The war on drugs and the war on crime are the most recent manifestation of an impulse to punish, control, and exploit poor people of color which will surface repeatedly in our country until we are willing to face our racial history." Our interminable drug war has from its inception set its sights firmly on the poor and the brown. The first drug laws, the anti-opium laws of the 1870s, were directed at Chinese immigrants, never mind that the country was full of white middle-class laudanum addicts, tippling from their dropper bottles all day long. Early in the next century, support for the laws criminalizing cocaine was ginned up by claims that "drug-crazed Negroes" were destroying white society and murdering white women. Southern senators, unperturbed by their wives' opioid addictions, believed that cocaine made black men superhuman, even that it made them immune to bullets. When the first drug czar, a man named Harry Anslinger, wanted to criminalize marijuana, he appealed to people's biases against immigrants from Mexico, claiming that the drug made Mexicans sexually violent. William Randolph Hearst jumped on this bandwagon, warning again and again in the pages of his newspapers about the dangers of the Mexican "Marihuana-Crazed Madman." This demonization continues today. White people are five times as likely to use drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses at ten times the rate of whites. The racism of the drug war has been the single most important driving factor in the ever-escalating incarceration of people of color in the United States.

When I was an attorney, I experienced this arbitrary and unjust system firsthand. Though I practiced in the federal courts and should have been dealing only with large-scale drug conspiracies and offenses, I represented many defendants, most of them people of color, who faced draconian sentences for relatively minor offenses. One in particular stood out from the rest. My client, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, was charged with the distribution of methamphetamine. A man of compromised intellect, he had been hired by a local drug dealer to schlep a box of methamphetamine from one place to another. The dealer, however, turned out to be a DEA confidential informant. My client was looking at a sentence of more than fifteen years, with a ten-year mandatory minimum. In the federal system, sentences are not left to the discretion of judges. They are calculated in accordance with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, promulgated by the United States Sentencing Commission. Before the Sentencing Guidelines, a defendant's sentence depended in large part on the judge to whom his case was assigned. End up in the court of a judge with a capacity for empathy and you might walk away with probation. Be assigned a hard-ass and you might spend the rest of your life in jail. And guess whom the hard-asses were most likely to punish? Race and class bias were rampant under that system. By removing judicial discretion, the Sentencing Guidelines and the mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes passed by Congress were intended to rid the system of sentencing disparities. Instead of a judge's individual assessment of a case, a crime, or a defendant, the Sentencing Guidelines and mandatory minimums require that charges and sentences be determined primarily by a single factor: the quantity of drugs bought or sold.

Back when I was a young federal defender, I carried with me a thick book, the Federal Sentencing Guidelines Manual, in which every federal crime was assigned a point value. (It was around six hundred pages and weighed about as much as a brick of cocaine with a street value of twenty-seven grand.) The point value for drug crimes was determined by consulting the "Drug Quantity Table." The box of methamphetamine carried by my client weighed at least three kilograms, which carried a "Base Offense Level" of 36. The back half of the book contained adjustments for things like "Role in the Offense" and "Acceptance of Responsibility" (pleading guilty). The chapter on criminal history added points for every prior offense. Among the first things I did with every client was to add up the points of his crime and his criminal history, and then flip to the back page of the book, to a table that calculated exactly what sentence he could expect to receive. My client in the methamphetamine case had no criminal history at all, so his Base Offense Level was not adjusted higher for that. Still, because of the sheer quantity of the drugs in the box he had carried, he was subject to a sentence of between 188 and 235 months.

This systematized approach to sentencing is certainly rational. There should be consistency in sentencing; a defendant's future should not depend on how the judicial assignment wheel is spun. However, the idea that nothing about my client's personal situation could make an impact on his sentence was infuriating. Here was a man who was of such limited intelligence that years ago he would have been called mentally retarded. He was set up by a wily, sophisticated informant who had purposely packed the box with enough drugs to trigger the massive penalty. What justice would be served by sentencing my client, who was a danger to no one other than himself, to more than fifteen years in jail?

Moreover, the Sentencing Guidelines and mandatory minimums have failed to accomplish their stated goals. True, they removed judicial discretion from the federal system, but there has been no reduction in bias. All that's happened is that the bias of jurists with sufficient experience and, at least theoretically, wisdom to be appointed to the bench, has been replaced with that of prosecutors, who now determine, via their charging documents, what sentence a defendant faces. We have saved the system from the perils of the personalities of individuals appointed by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate and turned it over to the personalities of ambitious young lawyers, many of them right out of law school, and many of them perfectly incubated examples of wealth and privilege. Things have improved somewhat since I was in practice. In 2005, the Supreme Court, in a case called United States v. Booker, ruled that the guidelines were not mandatory but advisory, and that judges can depart from the calculations if they so choose, though these departures still have to be "reasonable." The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 made changes to the mandatory minimum laws that might have allowed the judge in my client's case to consider factors that could have mitigated his sentence, though the bulk of that law applies to crack cocaine, not methamphetamine. But back when I was taking my client's case to trial, the judge had no discretion at all. Her sole job after the determination of guilt or innocence was to do some arithmetic and apply the sentence required by the answer.

We had had an excellent entrapment defense. I had assembled a mountain of evidence against the informant, a vicious and loathsome man with a history of entrapping first-time offenders, none of whom had ever committed crimes before he encouraged them to do so. My client had no criminal record, and was found by the government's own expert witness to have an IQ of approximately 85, significantly below average. I was confident that I was going to win, so confident that when the assistant U.S. attorney called me the afternoon before trial, and asked me what I would have settled the case for had he initially offered a plea different from the Sentencing Guidelines range, I said, "Nothing more than two phone counts." A phone count is courthouse jargon for the offense of using a communications device in the commission of a crime. The maximum statutory penalty is four years. My client spoke to the informant a number of times over the phone. Those calls were recorded. If he were charged with communication crimes rather than with drug distribution, though the Sentencing Guidelines sentence would still be determined by the quantity of the drugs at issue in the case, the sentence would be capped at four years for each phone count. If my client pled guilty to those two counts, the judge would have no choice but to sentence him to a maximum of eight years instead of the fifteen to nearly twenty he was looking at.

The AUSA said, "Plead now, tonight, and you can have your two phone counts."

I said, "Did I say two? I meant one."

"I'll give you two. Take it or leave it."

I faced a terrible dilemma. If I won at trial, my client would not go to prison. If I lost, he'd spend at least fifteen years in jail, and perhaps closer to twenty. Moreover, even if I won, he would still be facing detention and deportation for entering the country illegally. He could even have been prosecuted for that offense. The AUSA was offering my client eight years. After eight years, you have something of a life left to you. Your children are still children. After fifteen or twenty years? What and who remains?

Today, with the benefit of age and experience, I wish I had refused the deal. But I was young, I was scared, this was Orange County, and my client was an undocumented Mexican immigrant. Juries from notoriously conservative Orange County were not sympathetic to the people they called "illegals." It was, of course, my client's decision, but his intellectual capacity was profoundly diminished. He would do whatever I told him to do. It was evening by the time I made my decision. The judge had stayed at work late to hear the plea. We stood in the temporary quarters of the Federal District Court, a grim, windowless, modular portable. The judge began the plea colloquy. She asked me if I had represented my client to the best of my ability, if I supported his decision to take the plea, if the law supported the plea. My voice shook as I affirmed each element, and I started to cry. By the end I could barely speak. My client put his arm around my shoulders. Facing eight years in prison, he comforted me.

Afterward, as I walked through the dark night to the parking lot, a car pulled up next to me. The window glided down. From inside, the judge called my name.

"There's something I want you to know," she said.

Having just been yelled at by my boss for breaking down in court, I braced myself for more criticism.

"There are some things," she said, "that are worth crying about."

Her window slid up and she rolled away.