I watched the Twitter Feed minutes after the life-sentencing of Allen Ray Andrade, the murderer of Angie Zapata. A ruthless, hateful killer had been convicted. Many were elated. I felt sick to my stomach at many folks’ enthusiasm over “justice.” I struggle to understand the “debt of gratitude” people felt towards the State of Colorado and the system as a whole. This state, this system of “justice” perpetrates uncountable acts of violence against transgender people regularly.

As I watched the scrolling chatter of enthusiasts proclaiming the idea that hate crimes had been adequately punished, I worried that we’d missed the point. Though the state justifies its own egregious acts of violence by occasionally “doing the right thing,” legal, psychiatric, religious, and educational institutions laid the groundwork for Allen Ray Andrade’s murder of Angie Zapata. Andrade’s sentence hasn’t stopped the system from ongoing violence.   Andrade’s crimes pale in comparison to the legal violence of the media, the medical establishment, schools, churches, police, and the prison industrial complex.

Do acts of state violence and rape, well documented at Abu Ghraib, in Supermax Prisons, and in the streets of our cities indicate “Justice for Angie?” Sadly, no. The violence of our white supremacist, homophobic, patriarchal system continues and another man of color gets caged for life. His sentence is a media stunt the state is using to justify its own perpetual, genocidal, colonial, patriarchal, transphobic matrix of power.

Waste deep in blood, our courts should never be perceived as sites of “justice,” no matter how happy people are that one man will spend his life in a cage. Prisons are violent—they are homophobic, racist, transphobic, and genocidal. In good conscience, I cannot celebrate any person’s captivity within them, even a man as vile as Andrade, because prisons exemplify injustice and lay the groundwork for future individual hate crimes.

How can Andrade spend his life in prison and the very system that created him continue to perpetrate hate crimes at the institutional, spiritual, psychological, and medical level entirely unchecked?  Why do mainstream LGBTQ organizations collaborate with a genocidal, mass-murdering system to halt individual acts of violence ignoring the death of queer and trans people murdered in Afghanistan, Iraq, and at home by the state.

I wonder if our love, desire, violence and rage will ever be turned against the systems that created Allen, that killed Angie, and that continues to cage millions of people suffering from the pain of state-mandated oppression boiling within us all.

I wonder if we will ever experience peace, satisfaction, and victory.

I believe we can.