In June 2018, 65-year-old Larry Earvin was pronounced dead. But it wasn’t of natural causes – one month before, multiple officers kicked, stomped, and punched him to create the kind of horrifying injuries medical professionals say you’d get in a high-speed car crash.
But why did it take so long for the world to know?
Earvin was incarcerated at an Illinois prison, where the prison officers who beat him to his eventual death made sure to do so in an area with no security cameras. And they did it while he was handcuffed! Then, they covered it up.
One guard convinced a friend to delete evidence admitting he beat Earvin off his phone. Up to six witnesses lied to the police and FBI. Unfortunately, this isn’t a singular issue.
The year Earvin was killed, 1,352 African-Americans died in state prisons. And prison deaths have skyrocketed in general for the last two decades.
Like others, Earvin was set to be released only months after he was killed.
In 2003, Angela Davis wrote, “Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings.” Today, that still rings true. Police hunt us, the prison system tortures us to our deaths, and those of us behind bars are meant to be abandoned while alive. But as a community, we simply cannot accept that.