Speaking of the US’s love affair with long prison sentences – what should the penalty be for stealing hedge clippers?

A black man in Louisiana will continue to serve a life sentence in prison for trying to steal hedge clippers after the state supreme court denied a request to review his sentence.

Fair Wayne Bryant was convicted in 1997 of attempted simple burglary.

So he’s already been locked up for 23 years for trying to steal hedge clippers.

This really is a terrible country in a lot of ways.

The five justices who rejected his appeal – all white men – did not explain the reasoning for their decision, which was first reported by the Lens, a non-profit news site in New Orleans.

Maybe there was no reasoning? Maybe it was just “Nah, let the nigger rot”?

The supreme court’s lone dissent came from the only black or female member of the court, Chief Justice Bernette Johnson. She wrote the sentencing was a “modern manifestation” of the extreme punishments meted out to newly emancipated black men in the post-civil war era.

Exactly. Those extreme punishments weren’t random or just a matter of local bad moods. They were a replacement for slavery. Former slave states sold the labor of those newly emancipated black men locked up for things like “vagrancy” and asking for higher wages. None of this shit is random.

Before Bryant’s 1997 arrest, he was convicted for attempted armed robbery in 1979, his only violent conviction. He was sentenced to 10 years hard labor for the crime. His other previous charges were for possession of stolen things in 1987, attempted check forgery in 1989 and simple burglary in 1992.

…

In Johnson’s dissent, the justice wrote that all of Bryant’s crimes were for stealing something. “It is cruel and unusual to impose a sentence of life in prison at hard labor for the criminal behavior which is most often caused by poverty or addiction,” she wrote.

…

Her dissent then explained that after the era of Reconstruction, which followed the civil war, southern states implemented laws which gave newly emancipated African American citizens extreme punishment for petty crimes. In some places, these were known as “pig laws”, and they were “largely designed to re-enslave African Americans”, Johnson wrote.

And here we still are.