For the first time of the night, I was alone. Nobody was around to harass me, to shout at me, and to move me from one place to another.
The cell where they had put me had a smell of shit: the flush was not working. There was a water tap, with a very thin string of water coming from it: it was quite hard to drink from it (remember, this happened in the torrid days of early August). Some insects were crawling around... Else, a mattress, a pillow, and a bedsheet. The cell had a window to the “street”, inside the police headquarters. Actually, there were not one, but two layers of bars. I couldn't see the outside world. The cell was under the level of the street. The light came from up the cell. It was gloomy. As if you were in a dungeon. The air was heavy to breathe. Else, I was alone. No cellmate.
Nobody came to give me food. Worse, all night long, the lights were on, which made it difficult to sleep. I called a guard and asked him to turn off the lights. He told me he would do it, but he didn't.
I was free to relax a little bit and think. On one side, I was confident nothing special would happen.. I knew that their main goal was just to tame me, by making me spend a rough night. I was quite confident that I would be sent free after one or two days, or after seeing a magistrate (after all, I had not killed anybody, I had just staged a protest).
On the other side, I knew that I was dealing with sick and dangerous people (cops, jail guards, judges). There are a lot of things this kind of people can do to you if they want to screw you:
1 - Jail guards are sick. They tend to be sadistic, because the people they deal with are completely at their mercy, far from any witness from the outside world. In fact, jail guards don't even respect themselves: when they are working, they are themselves prisoners.
2 – They can put you in the cell of some violent criminal, so that you will get beaten, raped, or killed. You will get a mortal disease.
3 – They can plant drugs on you, and say you are a drug dealer. You will get a long sentence, because the judge won't believe you, but the cops.
4 – They can enter in your cell in the middle of the night, at 4 or 5, beat you and rape you. You may end up in a wheelchair for the rest of your life.
5 – They may charge you with something you didn't do, even if they know a judge will dismiss the case in the end. With the backlog there is in the criminal justice system, you will spend months or years in preventive detention, before you get judged.
6 – They can “bombard” you with a roll of silly charges. Since there are so many laws and regulations, that nobody knows, you always have the possibility of having violated some bureaucratic edict. They will charge you, so that you have to spend loads of time and money defending yourself. You may get ruined, because they have the huge means of the state at their disposal, but for them the important is to screw you on at least one count.
7 – The judge that will see you in the morning after you have been detained is just a bureaucrat like any other. He follows laws and rules blindly, and never asks himself if they are just or fair, or if the charges have ulterior motives. HE IS AN IMMORAL MAN. As someone used to crush human beings, he tends to be very authoritarian, and won't even allow you to present your case. You will not have a fair hearing, contrary to what you may think if you have never been in a court of law. Specially if he had a bad night of sleep! Judges are petty tyrants. They don't deserve the respect the population gives them.
8 – There is no such thing as an “independent judiciary”. Judges are paid by politicians, apply rules made by politicians, and depend on the cops who work for these same politicians. Those cops hunt for the taxes on which these judges depend for their very good living. These cops apply the decisions of these judges. And those same judges need the protection of these cops from the people (real criminals or not) that they punish in their daily activities. So there isn't enmity between judges and cops: they are friends. They need each other.
There only is some rivalry between them. Judges despise cops because they have more intellect than them. And cops despise judges because they have more physical force than them. Judges need the brute force of cops. Cops need the pseudo-legitimacy that judges give to their barbarism.
But they work in tandem against the population, applying the countless liberty-killing laws that exist in every modern society. This means that when there is some conflict between the population and the cops/the State, the judges are not impartial, nor independent. They are dependent on one of the parties they are judging. They have a built-in tendency to take sides with the cops. That is why, for example, a sentence for an action against a cop is always harsher than the same action taken by a cop against a “simple” citizen. Cops are treated as untouchables, who can do pretty much whatever they want.
So knowing all this, and coming back to my personal case, I was afraid the judge I would see in the morning if they decided to charge me (when it was my dishonest employer who should be spending a night in jail) would be a dick, biased and unfair, like most of the people I had seen that night.
For all these reasons, that night, I prayed. I put myself in the loving care of God, asking him, as Jesus Christ taught us, “Thy will be done”, “but deliver us from Evil”. And I slept for two or three hours, calm and without fear.
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