"They'd arrest you for - that's way more horrifying than we anticipated, what the - okay -"

"Yeah. We're trying to get them to stop but it's slow going." And he leads them back outside and up the street to a strip mall.

It's ugly. They are kind of uncomfortable.

He notices and suggests that they can stay with the truck if they want.

Doesn't especially help. If people get arrested for disapproving of people being locked in cages then that sort of changes their mission here from 'be helpful' to 'dismantle the government', see.

...they really need to not talk about that here. They should wait by the truck and he'll be back in a minute.

He's back in a minute, alarmed wife and unhappy children in tow.

They won't bother any of them any further! Clearly they can't do this with any local allies. That's okay.

Uh. No, they should definitely work with the people who're already working on this, they'll more than likely mess everything up if they don't. It's all right, they're probably not in any danger yet - it's not like he gave the clerk his name or anything.

...okay, who should they talk to.

That's one of the things he's going to work out once they get back home.

Do they want to come to Valinor instead of going home. In Valinor they definitely won't get locked up for anything.

...

He would need to know more about it to make that call, and it's also much safer to talk about it at home than in this parking lot.

What sorts of dangers are there?

...well, for one, the longer they stay around the more likely someone is to get his license plate number - he gestures indicatively - and look up who he is and where he lives...

Because you can get thrown in a cage for discussing whether people should be thrown in cages. Yes, okay, let's go to the house.

Oh good. Back to the house they go; the traffic is a little heavier but they make pretty good time anyway.

Shaney leads them in and sends the kids off to watch a movie while Sam puts the truck away, and gets started on Race 101: Black people used to be slaves; there was a war and that stopped being legal but they still couldn't vote or live near white people or go to the same schools or anything; the civil rights movement happened, about fifty years ago, and discriminatory laws mostly stopped but discriminatory practices didn't; there's a new movement to get the discriminatory practices stopped, too, especially police violence but also things like laws being enforced unequally; the Elves look more or less white, but if they talk about wanting to shut down prisons while standing next to a black person, that's what people are going to think they're talking about, and that's a radical stance even for the modern movement, they're looking for prison reform, not abolishment.

Yes, yes, all of that's fine, the objectionable bit is the bit where you can get thrown in a cage for saying that you think there shouldn't be cages. Like, the cages were a problem, but they very much intended to work within the government, but if a government will cage you for suggesting it do different things then it just has to cease existing.

...they probably won't get sent to prison for that; they look white. But if they say it while they're standing next to a black person the black person might be, depending on who hears about it - that's that 'discriminatory practice' thing she was talking about.

Sam has been back for a little while and is curious what they want to see done about murderers and rapists and such.

Uh, make them not want to do that anymore, probably, or keep them in Lórien if they don't consent to not wanting to do that anymore.

Uh-huh. Mind alteration as a condition of parole is pretty consistently illegal, that's way too easy to abuse. But they should talk to a lawyer or something about that; Sam goes to get started on finding people for them to talk to.

It seems obviously less inhumane than cages? Maybe humans are different.

It might depend on what the alteration can do, but it mostly seems like that'd make them want to come up with more excuses to send people to jail in the first place, if they could then do that. Especially for things like disagreeing with the government.

...this planet is really fucked up.

...yes? They're working on it, but it's hard. Like, most of the reason Sam was so skeptical about them just emptying the prisons is that a lot of states have deals with their prison companies that they'll always have at least a certain number of people in prison, which makes it really hard to get a lot of the other reforms they want since they'd mean less prisoners overall... just getting everybody out might make the whole thing collapse, but then again it might not...

Well, those deals are stupid and it's really sounding like they do need to dismantle the government.