Let’s start off easy, with a recent story about a guy I’ve come to think of as “Grandpa Pickleball.” On March 14, a 71-year-old retired civil engineer named Arslan Guney used a marker to delineate pickleball boundaries on the floor of a public court in Denver, Colorado. Guney, an avid pickleball player who came to the public center to play, and stayed before and after to help set up and break down the court, was reinforcing marks on the floor that had been put there by staff earlier and were fading. The Denver Parks and Recreation subsequently decided that this was damage to public property, charged him with a felony, and demanded $9,344 to refinish the floor (even though your mee maw or bubbe will tell you, you can remove marker from wood with a bit of rubbing alcohol) and demanded that he turn himself in. They tossed him in jail for a day, and are still deciding whether to prosecute. If they do, and they find him guilty, he could serve up to three years in jail.

This is absurd, of course, and has nothing to do with pursuit of justice. It’s all the more infuriating when you consider that things like this happen every day, overwhelmingly and disproportionally to Black people, and that it is also happening in within a justice system that, so far, has failed to hold Donald Trump accountable for financial fraud as a private citizen, or orchestrating a coup as president. Within criminal justice reform circles, this is referred to as a two-tiered justice system: One system for the poor, who are subjected to incarceration before they ever go to trial because they can’t meet cash bail requirements, and are often defended by overworked underresourced public defenders; and one for the wealthy and powerful, who can pay bail, sit comfortably in their homes awaiting trial, while their armies of lawyers defend them, and who often have powerful allies who can intervene on their behalf. (It needs to be said that Arslan Guney is a white retired civil engineer, and part of the reason why his story is getting national attention is that he is a white retired civil engineer.)

This is also happening against a backdrop of discussions about bail reform that have been covered terribly by the national news media. There is no evidence that bail reform (in the very few jurisdictions where it’s actually been implemented) has increased crime. That hasn’t stopped national news outlets from suggesting that it has or repeating conservative talking points to that effect, or running fact-free op-eds from former police commissioners asserting, with zero evidence, that it is. It has not stopped former police officer and mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, from parroting the same line of argument.

The reality of bail reform is that where it has actually been studied, in 13 jurisdictions where it has been implemented, all but one of those jurisdictions have seen decreases or statistically negligible increases in crime. This should be the headline, but it’s not. It should be intuitive to people that when you put fewer people in jail before they’ve been found guilty of a crime, that they are less likely to experience the spiraling effect of having been incarcerated once. (Those that have been incarcerated even just once are overwhelmingly more likely to suffer ill effects — job loss, family disruptions, etc. — and more likely to commit a crime when they leave.) And that’s on top of the fact that there’s nothing just about incarcerating people for misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies in the first place. It’s cruel, expensive, and ineffective when you consider that almost no one skips trial when they’re not detained. It criminalizes poverty, not crime.

People who have no experience with our criminal justice system often cannot fathom how much damage it does to people who have done little or nothing to warrant it. You can be tossed into pretrial incarceration in New York City for jumping a subway turnstile, which “robs” the city of $2.75, or for stealing a sandwich or diapers , all usually “crimes” of desperation.

Or you can be tossed into Rikers Island Correctional Facility in New York City, as Kalief Browder was, because someone accuses you of stealing a backpack, and you can stay there for three years awaiting trail, simply because you can’t afford bail. You can spend 17 months in solitary confinement, a practice that is literal torture and causes permanent psychological damage long after it’s over, and then be found innocent, which is what happened to Browder. He died by suicide two years after his release. He was 22.

There are countless Kalief Browders in the system right now, many of whom have not been found guilty of a crime, and their lives are being destroyed by the detention process itself. This is regarded as normal in our criminal justice system.

In 2015, one of my younger brothers died at the age of 36. He was a Navy veteran who received a Section 8 discharge. As you may know, probably from watching too much TV, a Section 8 discharge is a mental illness discharge. In his early twenties, my brother began exhibiting symptoms of schizophrenia and he spent the better part of his adult life, in and out of treatment at VA centers and went through periods where he would disappear and we’d eventually find him homeless, hundreds or thousands of miles away. He was also incarcerated off and on for much of the time after he was discharged.

In the beginning, when we were still unaccustomed to the process you go through for prison visitation (if you’re a woman, no sleeveless shirts, skirts, shorts; no books for the inmates unless they’re “Christian books”; no physical contact), I was sitting in the waiting area with my mom, and she said something to the effect of, “We don’t belong here.”

And in one sense it was true: My brother should have been in a mental health facility, not prison. He was judged mentally competent at trial, but he also heard voices and was convinced he could tell you when you were going to die. But I think she meant it in the way that a lot of other mothers do when they find the children they worked so hard to raise well on the receiving end of the carceral system: My child is not one of “those” people. He is not a bad person; why are we here?

Prisons are full of people who don’t belong there — because they’re mentally ill, because they’re innocent, because incarceration is a wildly disproportionate punishment for the crime they’ve committed. And visitation rooms are full of good parents who did everything right in addition to parents who made mistakes. There is no one who inherently belongs in prison.

But the carceral state makes some people , overwhelmingly white middle class people, feel safe. It makes people in San Francisco, who hate Chesa Boudin and think the solution to homelessness is to throw homeless people in prison, feel safe. It makes New Yorkers who willfully misunderstand crime stats get touchy about shutting down Rikers, a dangerously mismanaged prison that even insiders think is not rehab-able. There are a lot of people in this country who are very invested in the idea that imprisoning people who make them feel uncomfortable is just.

And very often it produces its own injustice. Incarceration, even once, for a short period of time, can destroy lives, communities, and families, permanently. If you want to turn someone into a criminal, toss them into jail for a month and see what happens when they get out; what they resort to when they can’t get a job, have been isolated from their families and communities, have experienced physical and psychological trauma. This happens all the time, to people who did nothing wrong, or minor things, like stealing diapers, often out of desperation. How many people are sitting in prison for marijuana possession while the world’s richest man smokes up on Joe Rogan’s podcast with no consequences?

In 2017, my business partner Peter (who is a pollster) and I started working with New York State Assemblyman Dan Quart, in part because Dan was working on criminal justice reform issues. Dan is a lawyer who also defends indigent clients, part-time, in criminal cases and is directly aware of how broken the system is. As a result, he was and still is an advocate for bail reform, and other criminal justice reform measures that Peter and I felt strongly about, including the decriminalization of sex work, and reforming sentencing laws. One of his victories during the time we worked with him was a repeal of New York state’s gravity knives ban, which had been used to arrest close to 60,000 New Yorkers, for possessing any kind of knife that can be flicked open with one hand. This includes any number of utility knives used in construction, and for outdoor activities. You can buy a gravity knife at any REI, but until this statute was repealed (for the third time, after two vetoes by former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo), it was illegal to own one in your home. The people who were arrested most frequently for owning a gravity knife were not hobbyist mountain climbers, though; they were Black and Brown people who worked in construction.

We also knew Dan had ambitions of running for Manhattan DA, eventually. Progressive prosecutors are instrumental to criminal justice reform, so that was appealing, too, particularly since he would be running against Cyrus Vance, the sitting Manhattan DA, who had continued to prosecute low level crimes while letting rich and powerful people off the hook. In fact, the people Vance had declined to prosecute were a murderer’s row, so to speak, of famous names. He declined to prosecute Donald Jr. and Ivanka Trump, over the objections of his own prosecutors, after a Trump lawyer donated $50,000 to his reelection campaign. He let Harvey Weinstein off the hook, initially, until public pressure and mounting evidence forced him to do otherwise. His office argued for the lightest possible consequences for Jeffrey Epstein. He let Dominque Strauss-Kahn walk. This is on top of the many sex crimes he declined to prosecute because, like nearly all sexual assault and rape cases, they were not slam dunk wins.

There are probably some personal qualities about Vance that led him to these decisions, but there’s also a structural incentive. DAs are obsessed with win ratios. It’s much harder to win a case against a defendant who has an army of high paid lawyers, and in cases where there are no eyewitnesses, that is, nearly every rape case.

But the district attorney’s mandate is not to win cases for the sake of wins; it is to pursue justice. The DA can’t prosecute every case, but it has an obligation to prosecute cases that present reasonable evidence, regardless of whether those cases are going to have obviously successful outcomes.

By the time Dan announced that he was officially running for DA a couple of years later, we were no longer working together, except in a volunteer capacity. (Peter and I co-hosted a couple of fundraisers for Dan, and we still talked regularly.) Several months after Dan announced, Alvin Bragg entered the race. Bragg had similar values, was a progressive, was very vocal about criminal justice reform and ending the two-tiered justice system.

Vance, perhaps in an effort to salvage his own legacy, had not punted on the Trumps a second time, and was pursuing a criminal case against Donald Trump. He had hired, arguably, the best white collar fraud prosecutors in the country — Mark Pomerantz, who came out of retirement to work on the case because he thought it was important — and brought in specialists who were accustomed to prosecuting organized crime. Bragg, who was familiar with the contours of the case, promised to continue Vance’s work.

I am a Brooklyn resident and could not vote for the Manhattan DA, but when Dan lost the primary, I was relieved that Bragg had won it. His priorities were very close to Dan’s and, except for my loyalty to Dan, he would have been my second choice. A Harlem native and Harvard Law grad, Bragg is accomplished, smart, and experienced. As deputy attorney general, he ran the criminal justice division and oversaw lawsuits against Trump and Weinstein.

He is also the first Black DA in Manhattan’s history, the importance of which cannot be understated. Black people are disproportionately affected by the criminal justice system, which is structurally racist.** Representation matters, and Bragg had been stopped at gunpoint three times by the NYPD. No one else who was running had that experience. No one else had been on the receiving end of a system that is deeply and profoundly broken.

So while I was disappointed for Dan, I was excited about Bragg, and hopeful. But Bragg had a bumpy start. Because he was serious about reform, he was criticized (largely by the right, it must be said) as being soft on crime, when he began declining to seek prison time for things like illegal gun possession, where the guns are not used in any sort of crime. This happened concurrently with a nationwide spike in crime, partly a result of the pandemic, but which has been nonetheless portrayed as a function of progressive politics and bail reform, despite the fact that the biggest crime increases nationwide are in cities that have enacted no bail reform at all. (In terms of violent crimes, shootings are up across the board, which you’d think would point to a need for gun control, and not locking up more poor people before they’ve been found guilty of anything, but no.)

None of this is Bragg’s fault, but it seems to have rattled him. He has already walked back some of those policies, and it’s only been three months.

Which brings us to the biggest walk-back of all: Bragg’s office is effectively declining to prosecute Donald Trump for criminal financial fraud. His two top white collar prosecutors have resigned as a result, and his office has reportedly begun sending files back to Trump Org, which is a process that happens in the course of wrapping up a case. By all indications, Bragg has decided not to pursue a case against Trump.

Bragg’s office has not been forthcoming about why this is happening, or even whether it’s happening. Pomerantz’s resignation letter, which was recently published in the New York Times, indicates that Bragg abruptly stopped pursuing the case, despite the fact that Vance had already directed prosecutors to seek indictment and believed there was more than enough evidence to pursue it. Pomerantz, for his part, was unequivocal about the quality of evidence: “The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes — he did.”

“I believe that your decision not to prosecute Donald Trump now, and on the existing record, is misguided and completely contrary to the public interest,” he continued, in his resignation letter, “I therefore cannot continue in my current position.”

This raises many questions. Defenders of Bragg, none of whom are party to the evidence Pomerantz is talking about, have suggested that Bragg’s decision not to pursue the case is a function of not having enough in terms of witness testimony. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, has a history of lying. The CFO of Trump Org is not cooperating as far as we know (though his son’s ex-wife is).

But these are not sufficient explanations. First, Vance, and the specialist prosecutors he hired, all thought otherwise. What does Bragg know that they didn’t? Bragg has experience prosecuting white collar fraud, and is by no means inexpert on the topic, but his depth of expertise with regard to this kind of financial fraud is not as deep as Pomerantz’s nor his colleague Carey Dunne, who also resigned. They are not junior prosecutors; they are the elite special forces of white collar fraud prosecution.

The potential unreliability of Cohen’s verbal testimony is also not sufficient, because even unreliable witnesses can produce reliable documents and other types of evidence. (This is sometimes true in journalism of sources who lie. Even liars have incentives to tell the truth sometimes.)

What’s more, the prosecutors and Vance believed not only that the case was solid enough to proceed, but if Pomerantz’s letter is any indication, that it was winnable. “No doubt about whether he committed crimes” is not ambiguous, and it’s certainly not hard to believe, given Trump’s history of financial shenanigans which have been heavily documented in the press for decades.

One of the best early pieces about Trump’s failed casino operations and the shell games he played to finance them was written by John Connolly for SPY magazine in 1991. Reading its exhaustive account of how Trump misrepresented his financial condition to lenders, the media, and virtually anyone he interacted with, you can only marvel that Trump wasn’t indicted long before he ran for president. Notably, the piece begins with an anonymous quote from a person described as a “mobster friend of Trump’s”: “He’d lie to you about what time of day it was, just for the practice.”

I do not believe that Trump has reformed himself since the 1990s, and given that he had no problem attempting to break the law as president — repeatedly, openly, and not in any sophisticated way — I would imagine that there is no shortage of evidence that he committed fraud in the instances that the DA’s office was examining. He does not exactly have a penchant for crossing his Ts and dotting his Is, and cannot keep his lies straight because he lies so compulsively. So I find it hard to believe that for the specific period the DA’s office was investigating that Trump did nothing wrong, and I find it hard to believe that there’s not enough evidence that he did to proceed with a case. It would run counter to everything we know about Trump.

Here, I want to go back to a systemic problem I mentioned earlier about DAs and win ratios. Another defense I’ve seen of Bragg’s decision not to pursue the case is that if he can’t win it definitively, if it isn’t a slam dunk case, that he should not pursue it because it would “embolden Donald Trump.”

This is a corrupt argument, on two fronts. First, it presumes that justice should only be pursued in cases where wins are guaranteed, which would preclude pursuit of justice in nearly any case of real importance. Because DAs are elected officials, they have an incentive to only pursue cases that are obvious wins, sometimes at the overt expense of justice. They can campaign on a high win ratio, which voters conflate with capability and competence. In practice, this means that there are types of cases that do not get prosecuted when they should be prosecuted. (Sexual assault and rape cases in particular. When there are only two parties involved and no eyewitnesses, those cases are harder to win.) And winning should not be the paramount consideration; it should be pursuit of justice. DAs have to use discretion in deciding what to pursue because they can’t pursue everything, but the “winnability” of a case should not the bar for proceeding; the preponderance of evidence should be. That is how the system works in theory; and how most Americans think it works.

Secondly, how a loss might affect Trump is utterly irrelevant. Our judiciary system should be free of political considerations. (I also find the idea that he would be more emboldened by a lost prosecution than a failure to prosecute in the first place backwards and dumb. He is already emboldened because he has faced no real consequences for anything he’s done.) A decision to decline prosecution because of how it might play out in the next election cycle is a corrupt decision. I do not believe that this is what Bragg is doing, but all of the galaxy-brain, armchair strategists on Twitter who think this should be a consideration need to revisit their basic civics classes so they can better understand why we have three separate branches of government and what checks and balances mean.

The Trump case is particularly important because it’s a big public test of who is and isn’t above the law. If you believe we shouldn’t have a two-tiered justice system, it is deeply important that the (formerly) most powerful man in government be held accountable the same way people without power and money are. This is particularly true in a system where people without power and money are often victimized by a carceral state that punishes them before they are ever found guilty of a crime.

The Bronx DA’s office indicted Kalief Browder because he had allegedly stolen a backpack. Trump has left a trail of incriminating activity and documentation so messy his lawyers and accounting firms are now disavowing that they had any idea what was in them, and the DA is arguing, against the advice of his expert prosecutors, that there’s not enough to proceed. In what alternate universe are these just outcomes?

Of course, the law is not and has never been, value neutral.*** And politics corrupt the judiciary on a regular basis, but that’s not an argument for knowingly allowing it.

More importantly, political interest should not be conflated with public interest, and in the case of Trump, it is absolutely in the public interest to prosecute Trump if there is reasonable evidence that he committed a crime. Rule of law only matters inasmuch as it is enforced.

The DA’s office was investigating Trump for fraud he potentially committed in the private sector, and not in his capacity as president, which is, perversely, a more thorny problem where accountability is harder to achieve. The impeachment process is inherently political, and the only real accountability mechanism that could result in removal of a sitting president. Trump did get impeached twice, though not convicted and removed, but there was a hesitancy to do it, especially the first time. I wrote about the dangers of failure to impeach when it looked like Democrats were going to great lengths to avoid it, for political reasons:

Here’s the real risk, both morally and politically: If Pelosi treats Trump as an aberration and continues to be passive in the hopes that we can all power through until next November, there’s no accountability mechanism built into our system of democracy that has any real credibility. There’s no crime so severe that Trump can’t get away with it — not intentionally neglecting Brown children until they die in cages, not being openly racist, not raping women, not helping hostile foreign powers and covering up for dictatorial regimes that torture American journalists to death, not putting American lives at risk in imperialistic and prosecutorial wars. That’s especially true for the offense that should be the most straightforward impeachment charge in this case — obstructing justice when our system of government works by design to prevent the president from abusing his power for personal gain. If nothing Trump does matters during this administration, nothing our system of democracy has in place to prevent descent into autocracy and tyranny matters, either…

The long-run cost here is that leadership that does nothing turns us all into nihilists, whether we like it or not… In this scheme of things, norms and laws are perfunctory theater, at best. Anyone who’s savvy enough and has enough resources can do exactly what Trump has done, and do it with impunity, and in a more damaging way, because there’s now a road map for doing it. And under such conditions, the only way to survive in a system governed entirely by nihilism is to become a nihilist yourself — even for self-styled members of a resistance.

I think the same applies here, both because he is a former president, and because as a private citizen, too many people get away with exactly the kind of white collar fraud it appears that Trump has committed. (I’m quite sure there are many commercial real estate executives in Manhattan who are relieved that Bragg is dropping the case.)

I don’t know Bragg personally and have no particular unique insight to his personal motives here. Some people who are frustrated at his decision have suggested that maybe he has been threatened by Trump aligned interests. While I certainly wouldn’t put it past Trump (he’s done plenty of monstrous things in public; there’s no reason to believe he doesn’t do them in private), I doubt that’s what’s happening. That said, I do believe that Bragg is under more scrutiny than he was prepared for, and am quite sure he’s gotten a number of threats from right wingers generally, because I get them for far less. But as a prosecutor, he should be used to threats from criminal interests and people who just oppose what he’s doing.

I think the more likely explanation is that he’s so wrapped up in the bubble of New York City politics, and the DA’s role historically, that he views this case as ordinary, and highly risky — not because there are flaws with the case, but because it is so high profile, and because a win is not guaranteed. (To repeat myself: This is almost always the case.) He believes that a loss would be a devastating mark on his career, and since it would be the most high profile case he’s prosecuted, it would eclipse anything good that he wants to do.

I sincerely hope that’s not the case, because if it is, that rationale is cowardly, selfish, and, I agree with Pomerantz, runs counter to public interest. There is more at stake here than Bragg’s career, and he ran for office on promises to hold Trump, and people like Trump, accountable. He was familiar with much of the evidence of the case then, and gave no indication that he thought it was insufficient for an indictment. In fact, he expressed confidence that the opposite was true. If he declines to prosecute, and that appears to be what he is doing, he is breaking those promises, even though he knew what he was signing up for when he ran for office. If his start out of the gate has been shakier than anticipated, it’s unfortunate, but should have no bearing on his decision making here.

At the very least, he owes the public an explanation. If there is some compelling reason why he believes his predecessor and his expert prosecutors are not only wrong, but aggressively overconfident in their assessment, he should be able to convey that to everyone who is watching Trump walk away from potential criminal charges, yet again. I want to give Bragg the benefit of the doubt, but am finding it very hard to imagine any scenario where his decision makes sense.

Back to my younger brother. It’s reasonable if you’re wondering what he did that led to his incarceration, especially if you have no personal experience with the criminal justice system. I will tell you, even though I don’t like to talk about it. No one in my family does. But it’s a material part of what happened subsequently.

One day, at the nadir of his mental illness and addiction problems, he got up one morning and drove to various stores in the county where he lived, and, there’s no other way to put this, grabbed multiple women (three, I think) by the ass. He laughed when he did it. To put it bluntly, he sexually assaulted them. We don’t know why. He didn’t know why, really. He barely remembered it later.

I don’t blame these women one bit for pressing charges. I would have, too.

The end result, however, was that after they reported it, the local police went looking for my brother, which was not unexpected by itself. My parents lived in a part of Alabama that is fairly rural and very conservative and not much exciting happens to the local police so this very quickly turned into, as it was cast in local news, a “manhunt for a sexual predator.” The police raided his apartment expecting to find evidence of all sorts of sexual deviance and found nothing. Philip didn’t even own a computer. Nonetheless, he was marched into court, on the local NBC affiliate, in an orange jumpsuit — the dangerous predator had been caught. My parents found out about it from a family friend, just before they watched it happen on the local news.

The upshot of this is that his first stint in prison was for sexual assault, and his subsequent stints were probation violations: public drunkenness, a DUI, and so on. When he died, he had no job and was forbidden from living or working within a certain distance of any school. This is because our legal system conflates all sex crimes with pedophilia, and permanently puts people into sex crimes registries that prevent them having anything resembling a normal life, ever again, no matter how much time they serve. Something, incidentally, we don’t do to people who are accused and found guilty of murder.

All of this devastated my parents and contributed heavily to the end of their marriage. There were people they considered friends who disappeared, as if what had happened to them was contagious.

When people are incarcerated, it’s not just the incarcerated who suffer. Their families are punished as well, even if that’s not the intended effect. The carceral system orphans children all the time, and drives people into poverty. It victimizes innocent people in this way. (This is part of the reason why the knock-on effects of even a short pretrial detention are so insidious; among other things, many people are at risk of losing jobs if they unexpectedly miss even a day of work.)

My family was better equipped to handle it than many, at least materially, but my family is not wealthy. My dad is a retired local lineman, which means he has a decent pension thanks to the union, but is by no means well-off. If my family was rich, and could have afforded an army of expensive private lawyers, there’s a possibility Philip would have never gone to jail at all; instead he’d be in a mental health facility full of helpful, competent professionals. Before his conviction, he had been getting counseling services from the severely and perpetually underfunded VA, and it wasn’t enough. In jail, he had no meaningful mental health services at all.

I’m also aware if Philip had not been white, everything he experienced would have been 10 times worse, in a variety of ways. There are countless people in prison right now who are being treated worse for far less.

On Monday, a federal judge ruled that Donald Trump likely committed multiple felonies, including obstructing a Congressional investigation and “conspiring to defraud the United States” in connection with the January 6 insurrection and his apparent attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The January 6 committee can choose to refer him for criminal prosecution to the Department of Justice, and may choose to do so.

New York Attorney General Letitia James is pursuing Trump on a civil basis, and there are numerous other lawsuits outstanding. So Bragg is not the only person who can hold Trump accountable, but so far, Trump has eluded anything remotely resembling accountability for the entirety of his career, and despite mountains of evidence. By contrast, Browder was accused of stealing a backpack by one person, using notoriously unreliable eyewitness identification, two weeks after the incident happened.

But there’s a parallel that particularly grates for me. Trump has been credibly accused of sexually assaulting 19 women, and I’m quite sure that’s not including the number of asses he’s probably grabbed over the course of many parties and episodes out with Jeffrey Epstein. There’s no reason to believe that a guy who bragged about “grabbing ’em by the pussy” would for some reason restrain himself on the ass-grabbing front. By the standards to which my mentally ill brother was held, Trump should probably be incarcerated for 50 lifetimes for sexual assault alone. But he is not my brother; he has money and power, and that renders him immune to consequences. He also, as far as we know, has no issues with mental illness, and was perfectly cognizant of his actions. He did these things with no regard for the people he harmed.

My brother died in February of 2015, when I was five months pregnant with my son. He lived in a trailer not too far from my dad, in central Alabama, and my parents hadn’t heard from him in a couple of days. My dad went to check on him and found his truck parked in the driveway but the front door was locked.

When my dad called to tell me, I was coming out of a dermatologist appointment. A lifelong situational hypochondriac, I was convinced that a mole I had was cancerous, in part, because I was pregnant and could not stop catastrophizing about things that could go wrong. I had just been told that the mole was fine. I wasn’t going to die pregnant or leave an infant stranded without a mother, and I was feeling relieved, if not elated.

Dad sounded strange when I answered the phone, and he explained that he had broken into the trailer and found Philip on the floor, where he had collapsed. He began crying, and I did, too. Neither of us said anything for a minute. It was mutually understood that what had likely happened was probably related to his addiction problems. But my parents didn’t really want to know. It didn’t matter, at that point. The mental illness, his incarceration, his addiction — they were all related.

It was very important to my parents that Philip be given a military burial because they were proud of his service. My dad was also a veteran and so were other people in my family. It’s a refrain among people in the criminal justice community that people are always more than the worst thing they’ve ever done. For my parents, this was a way of remembering an aspect of my brother’s life that highlighted his better self and reminded them of the child and young adult they knew before his mental health issues proceeded to dismantle him.

In high school, he had been charismatic, passionate about people and things he loved, beloved by his friends and family. He was popular, because he was funny and charming, a natural leader, and a talented athlete who later breezed through boot camp. I was adopted and Philip wasn’t, but we were only 20 months apart and when we were toddlers, people sometimes thought we were twins. When we were older, he was cool and I was not, and I was happy to hang out quietly in the halo of whatever he had that made everyone love him, with my books and nerd accoutrements. We bickered a lot as kids but became closer as we got older, confided in each other about our parents and our futures. And then I went off to college.

One night, when I was a sophomore, in school in North Carolina, he called me at four in the morning to ask me what I thought of God, which is the kind of thing you might do at that age after a party and one too many drinks, but he was stone cold sober. He rambled for a while about things that made no sense, and I think that was the first time I realized something was off.

Later, he was withdrawn, sullen, missed social cues, and developed a sense that everyone, including sometimes his own family, were people who were out to get him. He alternately told my parents he loved them and threatened them for fantastical imagined transgressions. He also had good days, particularly in the last couple of years of his life, when he was back home, where he was obviously not his former self, but seemed content, happy even. Sometimes his medication worked well enough that he had some sense of normalcy. When he found out I was pregnant, he was excited about his new nephew. He wanted to teach him to play the guitar.

For our sake and his, we choose to remember those days and the before; the times he was generous, inspiring, went out of his way to make people laugh, when he was more fully and wholly himself.

Philip is my six-year-old son’s middle name. He was born four months after Philip died. When he is old enough to understand what happened, I will tell him that those are the qualities my brother had that I value and remember. When he is old enough to understand what justice means in this country, that conversation will be more complicated. If I ever have to go into detail, I will have to explain why his mentally ill uncle spent much of his adult life in and out of prison for a fraction of what a former president repeatedly got away with, and whose transgressions were dismissed as locker room behavior. He may one day have questions about why his uncle was ostracized by society, often by people who support the former president, and claim to be followers of Christianity, a religion that in theory preaches mercy and forgiveness, and also advocates for real justice — the same people, who when confronted with the poor and vulnerable, are more likely to incarcerate them than help them.

Incarceration serves another function for a lot of these people: It renders real material problems and the people who have them invisible. Out of sight, out of mind.

Here in the present, at the rate we’re going, Trump will never be held accountable for anything, no matter how monstrous. We have a carceral system that does not rehabilitate anyone, definitely leads to more crime and incarceration, and is completely avoidable if you have enough power and money, regardless of the crimes you commit, no matter how many, or how severe.

When Trump said he could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue, he was probably correct. (Meanwhile, other people get tossed into jail for jaywalking.)

There are people who can change this, and Bragg is not the only one, by any stretch. He is just the most recent person to make a conscious decision not to. I hope my analysis is wrong. I hope he has a good reason that I don’t understand or can’t fathom. I find it hard to believe that the best white collar prosecutors in the country can’t build a case against someone as sloppy and openly corrupt as Trump, especially given Pomerantz’s statements that they did exactly that.

And if Bragg doesn’t have a good reason, I hope he changes his mind, which I assume there is still time to do.

In the meantime, I find it hard not to be angry and upset. I expect and want more from my country. I want a justice system that actually works and doesn’t ruin people’s lives for the sake of safety theater while enabling people like Trump who view right and wrong as a matter of letter of the law legality and morality as a disposable construct designed only to constrain the behavior of people who lack means. I don’t want a system that is inhumanely punitive to people whose violations of laws and norms come from a place of economic desperation or mental illness, and not punitive at all to people who are willfully malicious because they’re corrupt and rich and they know they can get away with it and harm others with impunity. In some sense, this anger is a gift. I worry that if I wake up one day without it, it won’t be gone because everything is better; it’ll be gone because I’ve resigned myself to the sorry state we find ourselves in now.

And I don’t want that to happen. I don’t ever want to be okay with it. I want more for all of us.

** If for whatever reason, you do not believe this, I suggest you volunteer for a criminal justice reform organization or legal aid for a month, and get back to me. I will even suggest specific organizations for you.

*** This is the primary argument of critical race theory. It is so self-evident, it shouldn’t be controversial, which is why right wingers have to completely redefine it as any discussion of race that makes white people uncomfortable in order to impugn it. CRT makes eminently reasonable arguments, so conservatives have to distort them entirely to arrive at a conclusion that CRT is bad, and they rely on the public’s ignorance of what CRT actually is to do this. They know the average person isn’t going to read Derrick Bell to find out.