Have you ever watched an episode of “Law & Order”? The creators do an amazing job of dramatizing the court process. The characters playing the prosecutors are always eloquent and passionate as they go toe-to-toe with an indignant defense attorney who is quick to counter every point. We see this version of the trial process all the time in mainstream media. The real life, everyday version is much different. My real-life experience was much different.

Like millions of others in this country, my experience didn’t involve expensive defense lawyers, just overworked and underpaid public defenders. There were no passionate arguments from the prosecutors because over 90 percent of all cases end in a plea agreement, as mine did. I was convicted in 2015 for two felonies and a few subsequent misdemeanors. My felonies were fraud-based charges for cashing checks that weren’t mine. My misdemeanors included things like attempted retail theft, trespassing, and a couple other minor things.

I did not walk into that courtroom a hardened criminal, and I had never been to jail. My real crime was addiction. Like many others, I was a heroin addict and committed these low-level crimes to support my daily use. My addiction, as that of many women, spurred from serious trauma, including sexual and domestic violence.

The agreement between my public defender and the prosecutor was to be a one- to three-year sentence. My time before the judge came, and the prosecutor informed him that we did not have an agreement: They were asking for a two- to six-year sentence. The emotions I felt in that chair, shackled by the waist and ankles, are difficult to put into words. I was at the complete mercy of that prosecutor. Luckily for me, the judge thought the plea agreement was unreasonable. My final plea: 14 months to four years.

The word “agreement” makes it sound like you agree to a plea deal, but that is not exactly the case. While I was informed I had the right to a trial, I was strongly dissuaded from exercising that right. While I could have waited to bring my case before a judge and jury, I would have faced the maximum sentence available, which would have been 10 years in prison. In my case, the plea deal was presented as my only hope of seeing my children, getting treatment for my addiction, and moving forward. This is the weight of the prosecutors’ power that I experienced first-hand — the leveraging of my life, my children, and loved ones against me.

The prosecutor is the most powerful person in the world of anyone facing criminal proceedings. They have the power to impose a wide array of sentences on individuals facing conviction, and those sentences are often just the start of a life-long navigation of collateral consequences, not just for the person who is convicted, but for anyone connected to them.

I have served my sentence and become a responsible, tax-paying, and positive member of my community. I returned to college to pursue a degree in behavioral science. I volunteer with a transitional housing program, and I have become an advocate for criminal justice reform. I am an active mom and partner.

But regardless of any achievement or level of recognition I acquire, I am a convicted felon. When I apply for jobs, I am flagged as a “high-risk” employee due to my theft convictions and have had difficulty finding even minimum-wage employment. When my own children have school field trips, I am barred from being a chaperone.

Those are just a couple examples of the long-lasting collateral damage caused by incarceration, and things could have gone differently. The prosecutor in charge of my case could have used a diversion option, like treatment court, or a different form of supervision that would have allowed me to address my addiction, options which would have minimized the impacts I still feel on my life today. I have since been told my sentence was extreme and that the prosecutor could have easily diverted me to a treatment court program or community supervision to address the underlying reasons for my addiction and subsequent crimes.

Around the country, voters are beginning to realize that the old “tough on crime” model does not promote safer or healthier communities. My own life has proven this. Prison should not be the automatic answer. The community is not “safer” today because I went to jail. I’m successful today because of support, treatment, and opportunity — none of which I found in jail.           

Prosecutors have immense power and use that power, with little public accountability, to make choices that change the lives of real people, like me. This is why it is so important for voters to know who their local prosecutor is and where they stand on criminal justice reform issues. The ACLU’s Smart Justice Campaign is putting a focus on prosecutors. You have the power to change our culture of mass incarceration by electing prosecutors that care more about people than conviction rates.

Mark Zuckerberg made several newsworthy choices this week. One — to invoke Holocaust denial as an example of content that Facebook should keep up because “there are different things that different people get wrong” and “it’s hard to impugn [their] intent” — was ill-advised. 

But another — to keep Facebook from diving deeper into the business of censorship — was the right call. On Wednesday, Facebook announced a policy it put in place last month to remove misinformation that contributes to violence, following criticism that content published on the platform has led to attacks against minorities overseas. When pushed to go further and censor all offensive speech, Facebook refused. 

While many commentators are focusing legitimate criticism on Zuckerberg’s poor choice of words about Holocaust denial, others are calling for Facebook to adopt a more aggressive takedown policy. What‘s at stake here is the ability of one platform that serves as a forum for the speech of billions of people to use its enormous power to censor speech on the basis of its own determinations of what is true, what is hateful, and what is offensive. 

Given Facebook’s nearly unparalleled status as a forum for political speech and debate, it should not take down anything but unlawful speech, like incitement to violence. Otherwise, in attempting to apply more amorphous concepts not already defined in law, Facebook will often get it wrong. Given the enormous amount of speech uploaded every day to Facebook’s platform, attempting to filter out “bad” speech is a nearly impossible task. The use of algorithms and other artificial intelligence to try to deal with the volume is only likely to exacerbate the problem. 

If Facebook gives itself broader censorship powers, it will inevitably take down important speech and silence already marginalized voices. We’ve seen this before. Last year, when activists of color and white people posted the exact same content, Facebook moderators censored only the activists of color. When Black women posted screenshots and descriptions of racist abuse, Facebook moderators suspended their accounts or deleted their posts. And when people used Facebook as a tool to document their experiences of police violence, Facebook chose to shut down their livestreams. The ACLU’s own Facebook post about censorship of a public statue was also inappropriately censored by Facebook. 

Facebook has shown us that it does a bad job of moderating “hateful” or “offensive” posts, even when its intentions are good. Facebook will do no better at serving as the arbiter of truth versus misinformation, and we should remain wary of its power to deprioritize certain posts or to moderate content in other ways that fall short of censorship. 

There is no question that giving the government the power to separate truth from fiction and to censor speech on that basis would be dangerous. If you need confirmation, look no further than President Trump’s preposterous co-optation of the term “fake news.” A private company may not do much better, even if it’s not technically bound by the First Amendment to refrain from censorship. 

As odious as certain viewpoints are, Facebook is right to resist calls for further outright censorship. When it comes to gatekeepers of the modern-day public square, we should hope for commitment to free speech principles. 

On April 6, 2018, President Trump issued an official memorandum with the following subject line: Ending “Catch and Release” at the Border of the United States and Directing Other Enhancements to Immigration Enforcement.

If the subject didn’t have the word immigration in the second clause, it might have seemed as if the president was talking about fish. “Catch and release” is a recreational sports fishing term referring to the conservation practice of catching a fish and returning it to the water.

But people are not fish, and using a phrase, even one with the valence of a humane practice, serves to dehumanize the human beings being led away in handcuffs. The phrase actually describes allowing people who are seeking asylum to wait for their hearing in the community, rather than in custody. They are not freed, but tethered, always by law, often by more: Sometimes the asylum-seeker must wear an ankle monitor. Sometimes she must pay a bond. Sometimes the tether is administrative: checking in regularly with immigration officials.  

It’s a lot easier to just say “catch and release,” but it’s inaccurate because it obscures all of those important points.

The phrase has been used by the government in the immigration context since at least as far back as the George W. Bush administration, but it did not become part of the popular lexicon until Donald Trump ran for president. According to an analysis by the GDELT Project, a global database that monitors the world’s broadcast, print, and web outlets, the media’s use of the phrase began to increase toward the end of 2016, which is when then-candidate Trump was campaigning on his hardline immigration policies. It spiked dramatically once he was elected, hitting an all-time high in June when the administration implemented its “zero tolerance” policy to prosecute every person who crossed the border illegally.

Trump is a master with catch phrases: “Drain the swamp” (put an end to government corruption), “little rocket man” (North Korea’s leader, Kim Jung Un), “fake news” (any reporting he disagrees with). But the media did not use those phrases, unless they were quoting Trump.

“Catch and release,” by contrast, is readily used by most media organizations. It even has its own Wikipedia entry. It likely caught on because it conveys a lot of information succinctly, which is the useful thing about metaphors. But it does not convey the actual policy — the image it summons is of migrants being released with no tether, which is not the issue at all. And, of course, likening human beings to fish is inherently degrading.

On July 11, The New York Times published an article saying that after several readers expressed their concern with the newspaper’s use of the phrase, the Times would use it “only in reference to the administration’s use of the phrase.” The paper’s deputy editor, Kim Murphy, said that she hadn’t thought of the phrase as dehumanizing. “I personally would never have thought of it as a way of equating human beings to a fish. Yet of course by adopting a fishing metaphor, it does precisely that,” she said.

In their seminal book, “Metaphors We Live By,” University of California, Berkeley, cognitive linguist George Lakoff and University of Oregon philosophy professor Mark Johnson argued that metaphors invade our neural pathways and shape our thinking about an issue without our realizing it. Subsequent scientific and social research has shown this to be true.

“We know from neuroscience that most thought is unconscious, carried out by neural circuitry,” Lakoff wrote in a recent blogpost. “Much of that unconscious thought is metaphorical.”

The problem with dehumanizing metaphors, according to Caroline Tipler, a research social scientist at the American Bar Foundation who wrote her PhD dissertation on dehumanizing rhetoric in the immigration context, is that they seep into your brain and unconsciously frame the way you start to think about immigrants over time.

“When you hear an animal metaphor, you assimilate the information into that frame,” Tipler said in an interview. “Semantic labels are activated in the mind and that label activates another label downstream. If you use the term ‘rounding up’ you may not immediately think of cattle, but downstream, you may associate the rounding up of immigrants with animals. You don’t notice it, but the metaphors affect the way you process information further downstream."

In the case of immigration, the metaphor can influence how you think the issue should be addressed. As Tipler noted, previous administrations have used flood metaphors. Accordingly, when immigrants “flood” across the border, the solution becomes to build barriers or dams. But with animal metaphors, the solution points to detention, at the least.

“Animal metaphors clearly fit into how Trump has tried to frame the issue,” Tipler said. “When you have bestial metaphors, the solution focuses more on safety issues. Trump has framed immigration around law enforcement and crime, the need to lock them up.”

“Catch and release” likens immigrants to a fish. The point of catching a fish is either to kill it or for the thrill of the catch. Neither is appropriate for what the government is supposed to be doing with people seeking asylum, which is not to punish, imprison, or even deport them, but rather initiate immigration proceedings and take appropriate measures to make sure they up for the proceedings.

Trump is by no means the first leader to deploy dehumanizing metaphors to achieve his nefarious goals. The Nazis labeled Jews “rats,” “parasites,” and “vermin,” in their quest to exterminate them. Hutu extremists who carried out genocide against the Tutsi minority in Rwanda referred to their victims as “cockroaches.” Trump has warned that immigrants “infest” the U.S.

Popularization of a fishing metaphor is gentle by comparison. But as metaphors go, it’s precisely that subtlety that is so dangerous. The Trump administration is using the term to make the case for detention. The rest of us, and certainly the media, should not take the bait.