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Black Tar Water, a song by Bent Knee, live in Atlanta for Apartment Sessions

Millionaire by David Olney for Apartment Sessions

This video was recorded in October 2019 in front of the Atlanta Penitentiary, a notoriously corrupt federal prison which houses almost 2,000 inmates and detainees.

“Millionaire” speaks hauntingly to the state of rampant inequity that has been endemic to our modern world and our country since their inceptions.

The glorification and celebrity of the ultra-wealthy (see: number-based epithets like “millionaire” and “billionaire” that inherently deify) leads many to simultaneously revile and chase this kind of inflated influence.

This interwoven web of big (often inherited) money, a profit-over-people mindset, and the criminalization of poverty has led to a for-profit carceral system that is extractive, punitive, and particularly harmful to black and brown lives.

An insidious cash bail system further centralizes the issue of wealth, allowing white collar criminals to pay their way out of jail and leaves those who have committed nonviolent survivalist offenses to sit in jail for exorbitant amounts of time awaiting trial.

Prisons as they exist in the U.S. today (and perhaps in all forms) are actively harmful facilitators of recidivism, racism, corruption, and the legacy of slave labor. A massive overhaul of the rehabilitative paradigm is the only way forward.