Justice & Law Quote by John Blair

Carceral power rarely announces itself as cruelty; it dresses up as procedure. John Blair’s account is built to rip that costume off. The opening clause - “Initially charged with assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest” - is doing strategic work: it names the stock charges that conveniently justify almost anything that follows, then pivots to a catalogue of bodily control. “Held for 36 hours” sounds administrative; “beaten by cops” punctures the pretense; “made to stand spread eagled... for 12 hours” turns punishment into choreography. The specificity of durations is the rhetorical engine here. Numbers don’t just add credibility; they dramatize how violence can be metered out and logged, transformed into time served.

Blair, a politician, is also signalling audience awareness. He’s not narrating to win sympathy alone, but to establish a record that can survive skeptical listeners. The phrase “until I collapsed” is blunt, almost clinically final, as if the body becomes the only available affidavit when institutions refuse to testify against themselves. Then he widens the lens: “Everyone was strip searched on the way in.” That last sentence shifts the grievance from personal injury to systemic humiliation. It’s the move from “what they did to me” to “what they do,” framing the jail not as a site of isolated misconduct but as a machine that standardizes degradation.

The subtext is a warning about how quickly the state’s monopoly on force becomes a monopoly on narrative. If “resisting” can be presumed, then punishment can be presented as containment. Blair’s intent is to make the hidden ritual of custody legible - and, by naming it plainly, politically flammable.