Messenger: Should QAnon Shaman get organic food? Why not, but what about others?

When you write about people stuck behind bars often, as I do, other detainees pay attention. They have stories to tell and time on their hands. So they write.

Over the years, the most common complaint I receive in such letters is about conditions, especially bad food. It’s easy for some folks to brush off such complaints. Consider St. Francois County Sheriff Daniel Bullock’s statement a few years back, when the federal government stopped placing detainees in Bullock’s notoriously bad jail.

“I’m not running a Hilton Hotel here,” Bullock said.

A lot of people share Bullock’s point of view. They don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who end up in cages, for one reason or another. I’m not one of them. So when Jacob Chansley — better known as the “QAnon Shaman” — filed a motion in federal court requesting organic food, I was on his side. Chansley, of Arizona, is in federal prison in the nation’s capital facing six federal charges including violent entry into the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection. Chansley is the man who is omnipresent in many videos that day wearing horns and fur. I doubt prosecutors will have a difficult time convicting him. I hope he serves an appropriate sentence and comes to realize the error of his ways.

St. Louis has become wrapped up in Chansley’s story because he is now represented by Clayton attorney Al Watkins, who is almost as colorful as his client, and is easily as adept at gaining media attention. A judge this week ordered the jail to provide organic food to Chansley.

This is a good thing, not because Chansley or his fellow alleged insurrectionists are sympathetic characters — they are not — but because this unique moment in history might draw attention to the realities of the American criminal justice system.

That system often has two standards: One for people with money; and another for those without, who are, often, people of color. All over the country — including in Missouri — white people charged with crimes related to the insurrection are being walked to the FBI offices by their attorneys, where they turn themselves in without incident, and often are home in their beds that night.

So it was for Emily Hernandez of Sullivan. As I watched the video of her “arrest” I also watched Black friends of mine on Twitter reference it as the very definition of “white privilege,” and, indeed, it was. But the issue here isn’t that Hernandez, or Chansley, or Paul Scott Westover of Lake Saint Louis, or any of the alleged insurrectionists, should necessarily be treated differently, it’s that the approach taken by law enforcement to their arrests should be applied equally in other cases.

Tory Sanders, a Black man who in 2017 had been driving through Mississippi County in southeast Missouri ended up dead in jail and he hadn’t even been arrested, but placed in a “protective hold” after being picked up on the side of the road by sheriff’s deputies.

Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old Black woman, died two years earlier in a Texas jail cell, three days after a specious traffic arrest.

Sullivan traverses two counties — Franklin and Crawford — both of which have long records of putting poor people in jail who end up staying there mostly because they can’t buy their way to freedom. They can’t afford bail. Their public defenders, with too many cases to handle, take too long to see them. They end up back in jail because they can’t afford the bills they get for their first time in jail, or because of heavy-handed probation violations reported by the for-profit company that supervises them.

These are the folks who often write me letters from behind bars. They don’t get organic food. They can’t afford the sorts of lawyers who go on CNN to talk about their cases or can make a phone call to walk them into and out of the FBI office without anybody seeing them in handcuffs.

They are the people who fill our municipal and county jails every day, arrested on charges significantly less serious than insurrection, and they are far too often treated as though they are second class citizens. These folks don’t want the local jail to treat them like they are at the Hilton. They just want and deserve the same protection of their civil rights provided to the people accused of attacking the bedrock of democracy.