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I would love to see Paris Hilton leave this experience transformed into a prison abolitionist. Everyone locked up in cages in L.A. is suffering from inhumane conditions. It doesn't have to be that way. What's most disappointing to me about the Paris saga is not that she is in the news again or even that she's getting preferential treatment at the hands of the justice system. What's new about that? It's the way her trip to jail is allowing the rest of 'us' (whoever we are; I'm apparently too humorless to be among us) to snicker and laugh at prison conditions in the U.S., conditions that include scratchy sheets and bad food but also epidemic rates of rape, staph infections, TB, etc. None of this is funny at all.
