New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Brian Leiter Behaving Badly, Part the Umpteenth

So Brian has decided, in his latest “issues in the profession” thread, to recognize the following question as worthy of note and discussion:

AnonUntenured said...

Can someone explain the Leigh Johnson mystery:  http://www.readmorewritemorethinkmorebemore.com/p/curriculum-vitae_16.html
How do you go from apparent tenure denial at one obscure college to a tenure-track job at another obscure college with almost no publications? (She seems to mostly blog and tweet.)

This is a moderated thread. So there can be no question that Leiter at least had to deliberately press ‘publish’ on this comment.  It is less clear, as his own comment further down indicates, that he had fully thought through the implications of doing so.   

Brian Leiter said...

Yes, I suppose I should not have approved #2, but I've been approving almost everything. On the other hand, Johnson is a very public and rather noxious presence in philosophy cyberspace, so I'm not surprised there is interest.

I’m sure we’re all glad to know that Brian has some standards (he didn’t approve everything, after all). Still, what he did approve seems to merit some comment. 

1. The speculation about the reasons for Leigh’s ability to secure a second job in professional philosophy is untoward, given that she is a) non-tenured, b) not in any way credibly accused or even suspected of professional misconduct, and c) the characterization of her current position is inaccurate. Publishing this comment and thereby generating a public sense that Leigh does not deserve her current employment is at very least an obvious instance of bullying on Brian’s part (and fits his by now well established pattern of directing this sort of attention toward junior, precariously employed members of the profession). 
2. In what has to be one of the great whoppers of his entire blogging career, Brian goes on to justify leaving such a comment up by validating a more general interest in the question of why someone who is, in his view, a "a very public and rather noxious presence in philosophy cyberspace” should have a job. 

To say that the implicit standard in 2) risks implicating Brian himself is rather obvious. More interestingly, it seems to be perhaps as candid an admission as we are likely to get from Brian that he sees nothing wrong with harassing people he doesn’t like if he can possibly pull it off.  And so we find him abusing the pretext of discussing ‘issues in the profession’ to pursue his own petty little vendetta.

 

Jeff Bell

Helen De Cruz

Lisa Guenther

Gordon Hull

Carolyn Jennings

Ed Kazarian

Eric Winsberg

Kelly Oliver on "A Brief History of the Electric Chair"

Tennessee Students and Educators for Social Justice has launched a blog series on issues raised by mass incarceration and the death penalty.  This week's post is by Kelly Oliver, W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University.  Oliver describes the "war of currents" between Edison and Westinhouse that led to the invention of the electric chair and the domination of the electricity market by a company backed by Edison:

Edison had invested himself in direct current electricity while Westinghouse had invested in alternating current, which could be more easily transmitted at higher voltages over cheaper wires. In a campaign to discredit alternating current, Edison tried to convince people that it wasn’t safe, first by using it to electrocute animals and eventually by endorsing it for use in executing humans. Edison reasoned that people would not want the same current flowing into their homes that was used in the electric chair.

In public demonstrations to discredit Westinghouse, Edison reportedly executed so many stray cats and dogs, often in circuslike spectacles involving first shocking the animals with direct current and then killing them instantly with alternating current, that the area near his lab in Menlo Park New Jersey was almost devoid of strays. In 1887, he held a public demonstration in West Orange New Jersey, where he used a Westinghouse generator to kill a dozen animals at once, which spurred the media to use a new term to describe death by electricity, “electrocution.”

Oliver's post, and her further work on the death penalty in The Southern Journal of Philosophy  and in her book, Technologies of Life and Death: From Cloning to Capital Punishment, offers a much-needed historical context for recent legislation allowing a return to electrocution in Tennessee, and for ongoing debates about capital punishment across the US.

Read the full post here.

 

Death and Taxes: The Real Story Behind Tennessee’s Electric Chair

Yesterday, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam signed a bill to bring back the electric chair as the default method of execution, should lethal injection drugs become unavailable or unconstitutional. While the first version of the bill restricted its application to death sentences issued after July 2014, a last-minute amendment lifted this restriction, making it applicable to those who are currently on death row. Theoretically, this means that we could be facing an execution by electrocution in Tennessee as early as Oct. 7, when Billy Irick is scheduled to be killed.

It is tempting to decry this return to the electric chair as a “barbaric” lapse into brutal forms of violence that do not befit a democratic nation such as the United States. It is also tempting to affirm this legislation as a more “truthful” display of what is really going on when the state kills, and to hope that the unconcealment of state violence will lead to more vigorous opposition. But it’s not at all clear that more truth leads to more activism, nor that brute violence is incompatible with US democracy.

In order to understand what’s happening in Tennessee – and in other states that are currently going out of their way to kill people, such as Oklahoma, Missouri, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Utah – we must move beyond moral discourses on the death penalty and trace the material, political connections between state violence, economic inequality, and white supremacy in the United States.

Botched or Normal? Pathologies of Violence in the Killing State

Tuesday’s execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma has many people wondering just how far the state is willing to go to kill its own citizens. 

I think @gideonstrumpet said it best:

It’s tempting to understand the torture of Clayton Lockett as a “botched” execution, an unfortunate exception to the rule.  But it's important to remember that, even before the shortage of standard lethal injection drugs, the appearance of a cruelty-free execution has always been just that: a carefully-crafted appearance.  The clean, quiet execution of a person who falls asleep under the supervision of trained professionals, never to wake again, has remained until quite recently a tightly-controlled performance of legitimate(d) state violence.

But the visibly gruesome execution of Clayton Lockett and, three months before him, of Dennis McGuire, should move us to reflect not only on the present and future of state killing in the US, but also on its past.  How many of the over 1300 apparently normal and legitimate executions in the post-Furman era might have counted as “botched” and torturous if not for the injection of a paralytic drug to prevent any visible signs of suffering?

SB 1391 and the Criminalization of Pregnancy in Tennessee

A petition is circulating online asking Gov. Bill Haslam to veto SB 1391.  The bill would modify the Tennessee criminal code to allow for criminal assault charges to be brought against women who use illegal narcotics while pregnant, should their drug use lead to harm or death for the fetus or child.  These charges carry a penalty of up to 15 years in prison.  But the bill is so badly written, it could affect all pregnant women in Tennessee, whether or not they use drugs, should something go wrong during their pregnancy.  In effect, SB 1391 threatens to criminalize pregnancy in Tennessee. 

Policy analysts and political commentators across the world have voiced their concerns with SB 1391, arguing that it could have far-reaching consequences (Reality Check, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, and NPR).  Even some pro-life groups recognize that SB 1391 could incentivize abortions for women who use drugs, since women risk up to 15 years in prison by continuing their pregnancy, especially if they are unable to access drug treatment programs (All Our Lives).  

If we really want to support the flourishing of children in Tennessee, then we need to move beyond the pro-life/pro-choice framework to seek reproductive justice for everyone, based on “the right to have children, not have children, and to parent the children we have in safe and healthy environments” (SisterSong).  For example, rather than punishing women who use illegal drugs while pregnant, we should be extending the Safe Harbor Act to support women who use either prescription drugs or non-prescription drugs to get the treatment they need, and to stay clean for the sake of their families and themselves. 

Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Lethal Injection

Last week, I suggested that there was no meaningful difference between a “botched” execution and a “proper” one.  Today, I will develop this claim and offer some phenomenological support for it.  The analysis that follows is rooted in my present geopolitical context – Tennessee – but the issues apply to the US death penalty as a whole.  Thank you to Geoff Adelsberg for his research assistance on the legal cases, and to Kelly Oliver for sharing this research with me.

The Supreme Court case Baze v Rees (2008) upheld the constitutionality of the standardized three drug protocol, which consists of 1) sodium thiopental (an anaesthetic), 2) pancuronium bromide (a paralytic), and 3) potassium chloride (an electrolyte which, administered in the right way, stops the heart).  Building on Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, the Court argued that an “isolated mishap alone” (say, a botched execution) does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment because “such an event, while regrettable, does not suggest cruelty or a “substantial risk of serious harm.””  Baze established a 3-part standard involving an assessment of “(a) the severity of pain risked, (b) the likelihood of that pain occurring, and (c) the extent to which alternative means are feasible.”

“Erring on the Side of Life”

Earlier this week, U.S. District Court Judge Thelton E. Henderson ruled that prisoners on hunger strike in California may be force-fed, even if they have signed an advance directive to refuse medical resuscitation.

Joyce Hayhoe, a spokesperson for California Correctional Health Care Services, commented on the decision: “It's better to err on the side of life.” 

She cited claims made by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) – and refuted by the Hunger Strike Mediation Team – that some prisoners have been coerced into signing Do Not Resuscitate orders by prison gang members. 

These claims form part of the CDCR’s broader public relations campaign to discredit the strike action by representing it as a “gang power play.”  I have critiqued this representation elsewhere, arguing that the term gang and the CDCR’s policies for gang validation and debriefing, function as a mechanisms of social and civil death, criminalizing both the collective resistance and the collective existence of people behind bars.

 

Law and Policy

Today was a big day for criminal justice in the US. 

Attorney General Eric Holder announced a ""Smart On Crime" plan which includes asking prosecutors to remain silent on the amount of drugs involved in non-violent, low-level drug offenses in order to avoid triggering mandatory minimum sentences: "For example, in the case of a defendant accused of conspiring to sell five kilograms of cocaine — an amount that would set off a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence — the prosecutor would write that “the defendant conspired to distribute cocaine” without saying how much. The quantity would still factor in when prosecutors and judges consult sentencing guidelines, but depending on the circumstances, the result could be a sentence of less than the 10 years called for by the mandatory minimum law, the official said." This is an interesting use of policy to trump law (which still remains in place, but is more selectively enforced -- which begs the question of why we should have mandatory minimum sentences in the first place, but anyway...). 

Meanwhile, New York's Stop and Frisk policy was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge.  Here was have a case of law supervening on policy, although it's not clear how effective the ruling will be in curbing the practise by which a disproportionate number of people of color are stopped and searched by police.  I blogged about this policy about a year and a half ago, in response to Adam Gopnik's endorsement of the policy.

Fast Food and Slow Starvation

What do fast food workers and prisoners at Pelican Bay share in common?

I don’t mean: How are they similar, or how can they be reduced to the same thing?  I mean: What are their common interests, common struggles, common insights, and common strategies?  And how does the sharing of something in common promise to renew a sense of the world, not just as a marketplace or security zone, but as a common ground for the possibility of a meaningful life?

Since July 8, prisoners at Pelican Bay and other California prisons have been on hunger strike to protest conditions of social deprivation and arbitrary punishment, including indefinite detention in the SHU (or Security Housing Unit, a euphemism for solitary confinement).  You can read their five core demands here. 

Meanwhile, across the US, workers at MacDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, and other fast food chains have been holding one-day strikes during peak business hours to protest their economic exploitation and to increase pressure for a living wage of $15/hour.

Both are struggling, in different ways, against a life reduced to the bare minimum required for survival.

Social Death and the Criminalization of Resistance in the California Prison Hunger Strikes

On July 8, over 30,000 prisoners across California launched the largest hunger strike in state history.  Now, three weeks later, over 600 prisoners continue to refuse meals, in spite of direct acts of retaliation by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). 

Hunger strikers report being locked in their cells 24 hours a day, blasted with extra-cold air conditioning, and denied medication on the grounds that it must be taken with food. At least 14 hunger strikers have been forcibly relocated from the SHU or Security Housing Unit (a prison within the prison) into an even more isolated Administrative Segregation Unit.  Others have had sandbags placed by their cell doors to prevent “fishing” or passing notes and other items between cells.

Now, as in the 2011 hunger strikes, participants have been issued disciplinary write-ups that exacerbate the very conditions that they are protesting.  Media access to hunger strikers has been denied, and some legal visits have been obstructed. 

California Prison Hunger Strikes and the Meaning of Solidarity

On July 8, 30,000 people joined together across racial lines to participate in the largest hunger strike in California history.  These people are prisoners at Pelican Bay, Corcoran, and other California prisons.  Their current strike action renews a two-year peaceful protest against conditions of extreme isolation, arbitrary punishment, Kafka-esque policies, and inhumane living conditions in California prisons, particularly in the SHU, or Security Housing Unit. The SHU is a euphemism for solitary confinement, which in turn is a euphemism for living death.  Prisoners are held for 22½ hours a day in an 8 ft. x 10 ft. windowless cell that looks something like this:

Postcards from Death Row

The art of letter-writing is dead – except in prison.  While people on the outside exchange staccato texts and tweets, people on the inside still compose long letters by hand or on typewriters.  They write with their whole hand, not just with their thumbs. 

We shouldn’t get too misty-eyed about this persistence of a lost art behind bars; after all, it’s a sign of deprivation.  If prisoners had access to cell phones and the internet, they would be tweeting, too – and perhaps their voices would be more difficult to silence. 

And yet, everyday practices such as letter-writing or texting cannot help but shape our Being-in-the-world.  A letter is a material thing: you can hold it in your hands, and you can lose it.  The temporality of letter-writing is much slower than texting; you can’t expect an immediate response, and so there’s more time to reflect on the impact your words might have on the receiver.  If you know that the mail is delivered at a certain time every day, then there’s no point in obsessively checking your inbox.  This might not help to decrease your anxiety, especially if you feel like your life depends upon the response; but it also doesn’t feed an addictive relation to delivery mechanism. 

Somewhere in between the letter and the text message is the humble postcard. 

Phenomenology as a Practice of Liberation

There’s a nice little experiment undertaken by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons at Harvard University in which subjects were asked to count the number of times a basketball was passed back and forth in a short video.  Half of the subjects tested were so absorbed in their assigned task that they did not even notice a person in a gorilla suit walking into the middle of the action, thumping its chest, and leaving.  This experience of missing what is right before your eyes because you are focused on something else has come to be known as inattentional blindness.

How does a person snap out of inattentional blindness?  You don’t need an argument to show you that a gorilla was in the scene, you just need someone to point it out to you.  Both the demonstration of your inattentional blindness and the “cure,” as it were, is a simple re-orientation of perspective.  Maybe you will need to watch the video again, or maybe the simple prompt, “Did you see the gorilla?” will be enough to make the missed phenomenon snap into place.

I want to suggest that there are forms of collective inattentional blindness, which are harder to discern and even harder to snap out of, but that a socially-engaged practice of phenomenology can help us with both.  My example will be – not surprisingly for those who have read any of my previous blog posts – the invisibility of mass incarceration in the US.

Every chance I get, I remind people that the US incarcerates more people than any other country in the world.  It can get pretty annoying, actually, both for me and for them.  But it’s a point that still seems to float, like a gorilla pounding its chest, into the middle of each and every scene of everyday life in the US, without being noticed.

Look at this image, for example.  It’s a planner’s sketch for proposed developments in a part of Nashville that they are trying to get people to call “SoBro.”  (You can click on the image to see more of the details.)

What would it take to see this sketch as a scene of mass incarceration? 

Decarceration as Post-Conflict Reconstruction for the US

So I’m sitting here in Berlin, thinking WTF?  25 years ago, this was a divided city.  70 years ago, it was part of the Third Reich.  Today, it is a place where art and culture flourish, where you can take public transit everywhere from the Wannsee to Potsdam (with your bike or your dog, for that matter), and where abandoned airports are turned into beautiful parks.  Babies splash naked in fountains, teenagers bring bottles of beer down to the canal and watch the sunset, women walk down Kottbusser Damm with cell phones tucked into their headscarves for hands-free networking. 

At all hours of the day and night, people are in the streets: walking, riding bicycles, waiting for 24 hour buses.  Fresh, healthy, and even affordable food is available on almost every block, and even on hiking trails.  No, not even the forest is a food desert in Berlin!  And if I fainted from too much beauty, as I very well might, I am confident that I would receive medical treatment without emptying my bank account.

Sure, there are problems.  Potsdamer Platz is a nightmare of capitalist realism.  The caravan parks and squats that flourished in the 90s are struggling to survive, and they want the Yuppies ‘Raus (although someone spray-painted a P over the Y, making it Puppies ‘Raus).  Turks, Eastern Europeans, and other immigrants face overt racism and systematic forms of social, political and economic exclusion.  

Berlin isn’t perfect.  And yet, it’s remarkable how this city has managed to come back to life from almost unimaginable conflict and terror, and from not one but two massive carceral systems, within the past century.

Contrast this with the wreckage and diaspora of the Ninth Ward, still evident seven years after Katrina.  With the ruins of Detroit.  With California’s Golden Gulag.  With the wall we are building in the US-Mexico borderlands.  Or even with my own suburban neighborhood in Nashville, where the only time people come out of their houses is to cut the lawn.

Making Visible America’s Disappeared

You know the facts: 2.3 million Americans in prison, 80,000 or more in solitary confinement for up to 23½ hours a day.  But it’s hard to understand the meaning of these facts without a more direct encounter with the prison system, and with the people who inhabit it.  Enter Herman’s House (2012, dir. Angad Bhalla).

For over forty years, Herman Wallace has lived in a 6x9 box at Angola Prison in Louisiana.  Since 2003, Herman has been collaborating with artist Jackie Sumell to design and build his dream home.  His vision is to run the house as a community center for at-risk youth.  The film documents this collaboration and follows Jackie from the gallery to the empty lots of New Orleans, where she hopes to build Herman’s house someday.

An Unteachable Moment

Last night, Michelle Obama presented the award for best picture at the Oscars.  She said all the usual inspirational stuff about movies making us laugh and cry and teaching us something important about the human spirit.  In Hollywood’s America, it doesn't matter what you look like (wink, wink - race), where you come from (wink, wink - immigration), or who you love (wink, wink - gay marriage), if you believe in yourself, you can make your dreams come true.  We all know it’s bullshit, and yet… hey, it’s Oscar night!

But wait a second!  Isn't Michelle Obama the First Lady of the United States?  The wife of the President?  And who are those smiling white people standing behind her in military pomp and little bow ties?  Is she actually speaking from the White House? Presenting an entertainment award?  I know that's kind of weird, and yet... she looks great!  Her bangs are a little heavy, but it works.

Newsflash: Mississippi Abolishes Slavery

On February 7, 2013, Mississippi officially ratified the 13th Amendment. That's right. Eleven days ago.

Apparently, they had voted to ratify the amendment in 1995, but someone forgot to file the paperwork.

It took Dr. Ranjan Batra, an associate professor of neurobiology and anatomical sciences at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, to set the wheels in motion for the state’s eventual ratification of the amendment to abolish slavery.

Dr. Batra saw the film, "Lincoln," and wondered about the rest of the story.  He did some googling and discovered that Mississippi had “ratified the amendment in 1995, but because the state never officially notified the US Archivist, the ratification is not official.”

Capital Punishment and the Specter of Reason

This post is a response to a comment by Jason Streitfeld on my recent post, Reading Plato on Death Row.   My response overflowed the word limit of the comment box, so I am posting it here as a separate entry.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this, Jason.  My response will be a bit long-winded, but I am thankful for the chance to think about these issues more systematically.

It's true that I did not intend to offer an argument against the death penalty, but rather to bring a different perspective to the discussion.  It's fair to ask for a defense of my claims, which I will try to offer here.  But I also want to make it clear that I do not intend these claims to add up to an argument in the *debate* about capital punishment, because I think the terms of this debate are already immoral.  I am absolutely against the death penalty.  To enter into a debate about when and whether capital punishment is warranted, when and whether it is properly, justifiably, or "reliably" applied to someone, is already to concede too much. (I put "reliably" in quotation marks in reference to Jennifer Culbert's excellent book, Dead Certainty, in which she analyzes the US Supreme Court's efforts to secure "fair, equitable, and reliable outcomes" in capital cases (Culbert 47).)

Reading Plato on Death Row

Every Wednesday, I go to Riverbend Maximum Security Prison in Nashville to facilitate a discussion group with prisoners on death row and philosophy graduate students. It’s a nice prison, as far as prisons go: clean, suburban-feeling, with a soapy smell that lingers on my hands and clothes after I leave.  The reception area is filled with motivational posters of determined mountain climbers and goal-oriented rowing teams.  Beyond the checkpoint, an ordinary sidewalk leads to death row.  The path is lined with beige wooden fences and topiary shaped like giant bathtub stoppers.  We pass through a series of grey doors and empty hallways until we reach the smiling faces of ten men who have been condemned to death by the state of Tennessee.

WUI Collective and REACH Coalition, Postcards from Death Row (2012)

#InvisibleNoMore

Why aren’t more people talking about #Idle No More in the United States?  Why isn’t there more (or any) formal media coverage of the movement?  Why did #OWS have that #INM does not?

#Idle No More and Settler Colonialism: We Are All Treaty People

A movement called #Idle No More is sweeping across Canada and into the United States.  First Nations from Haida Gwaii to Stephenville, Newfoundland, from Iqaluit to Windsor, Ontario – and Native Americans in New York, New Mexico, California, and many other states – have organized flash mobs in shopping malls and public squares to sing, drum, and perform traditional round dances.  Some First Nations have blockaded highways and railways.  Where did this movement come from, and where is it going?

The Living Death of Solitary Confinement

I published this article on solitary confinement in The Stone blog at the New York Times.  An earlier version of the article was rejected by the Times so, like a good recycler, I posted it here.  The two versions are completely different; the first is about slavery, racism, and the politics of social death, and the second is about the lived experience of solitary confinement as a form of living death.  One passed, the other didn't.  I would like them to be read together.

Senate Committee Invites Written Testimony on Solitary Confinement

This announcement was recently posted on Solitary Watch:

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the Senate’s Assistant Majority Leader, will chair a hearing on the   human rights, fiscal, and public safety consequences of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, jails, and detention centers.  This is the first-ever Congressional hearing on solitary confinement.  Over the last several decades, the United States has witnessed an explosion in the use of solitary confinement for federal, state, and local prisoners and detainees.  The hearing will explore the psychological and    psychiatric impact on inmates during and after their imprisonment, the higher costs of running solitary housing units, the human rights issues surrounding the use of isolation, and successful state reforms in this area.

This hearing is open to the public.  The list of witnesses will be announced on a future date.

Chairman Durbin invites interested advocates and experts to submit written testimony to be included in the hearing record.  Statements should be less than 10 pages, and should be emailed to Nicholas Deml at [email protected] as early as possible, but no later than Friday, June 15, 2012 at    5:00 PM.

Below is my draft for a letter to the committee.  If you have any constructive feedback, please post a comment here before the deadline of June 15.  I have tried to write from a philosophical perspective that is accessible to non-philosophers.

iPads and the Toddler's Brain

Just now on NPR, there was a discussion about toddlers and iPads that could have really used a Heideggerian intervention.  The issue was, more or less, what is happening when you give a 2 year old an iPad and they get completely absorbed for 5 hours straight?  Is this good for them or not?  And does it help them to learn what they need to learn in order to mature into smart, productive kids and adults?  NPR seems to love this stuff; there’s a shorter article on the same topic here. 

A range of experts was consulted, most of whom said that we don’t have enough (empirical) research to answer these questions yet, but that we shouldn’t panic – we just need to make sure that kids get a balance of screen time and face-to-face interaction with other people.  But the question that started the whole discussion was a father’s question about what is going on for his son when he “zones out” in front of the iPad.  This question remained unaddressed, as far as I could tell from my own zoning in and out of the radio discussion.  But isn’t this basically a matter of Benommenheit, or captivation, literally “being taken,” being absorbed in an object to the point where everything else fades away. 

Fanon’s Brain

My friend Barbara said the other day, “There are so many books I would like to have on my shelf.  But no one has written them yet!”  One of the books I would like to have on my shelf is about Frantz Fanon, activist models of decentralized political organization, and 4E cognitive science models of the brain as a distributed network.  If you want to write this book, here are a few quotes from The Wretched of the Earth to get you started.  If it’s already been written and I just haven’t found it yet, please post the title, and I will fill that spot on my shelf.

“The meeting of the local cell or the committee meeting is a liturgical act.  It is a privileged opportunity for the individual to listen and speak.  At every meeting the brain multiplies the association of ideas and the eye discovers a wider human panorama” (136).

“Let us reexamine the question of cerebral reality, the brain mass of humanity in its entirety whose affinities must be increased, whose connections must be diversified and whose communications must be humanized again” (237-8).

“No, it is not a question of back to nature.  It is the very basic question of not dragging man in directions which mutilate him, of not imposing on his brain tempos that rapidly obliterate and unhinge it.  The notion of catching up must not be used as a pretext to brutalize man, to tear him from himself and his inner consciousness, to break him, to kill him” (238).

Why listen to the condemned?

Some comments from an anonymous reader have made me realize that my project in the last few blog posts may be misconstrued, and since I plan to continue this series of posts, I want to clarify the philosophical and political motivations behind the project.

First, I do not intend to weigh in on “the debate” about capital punishment.  Rather, I wish to put in question the whole framework of death penalty discourse in the US, which has been structured as a debate between two sides, pro and con, since at least Furman v Georgia (1972).  The content of these debates tends to be moral rather than political: Is it right or wrong, in principle, for a state to execute one of its citizens?  What are the utilitarian, deontological, and other standard arguments for or against the death penalty?  Do you agree or disagree?

This discourse is impoverished for two main reasons: 1) It neglects the social, historical, and political context within which executions actually happen, and 2) The debate can go on interminably without ever having to address or listen to those who are condemned to death.

These may seem like extrinsic factors to the debate – and they are.  This is why the debate is insufficient.  But philosophy is not just a debating club.  There are good philosophical reasons to insist on the importance of engaging with the concrete situation of executions and the voices of the condemned.  I will focus on the latter, since it is my project in these posts to make some of the voices of the condemned audible beyond the prison walls.

Why listen to the condemned?  What could convicted murderers add to the discussion of capital punishment that trained philosophers have not already run circles around?  What the condemned bring to the conversation may or may not yield new content to feed into the debating machine.  That is not the point!  What they bring is the singularity of their existence and the particularity of their situation.  What do I mean by this? 

Is There Anything New To Say About the Death Penalty? – Part 2

Last week, I shared a glimpse of Willie Francis’ 1947 account of his own botched execution.  I argued that anyone who wants to understand the death penalty must engage with the testimony of people who are facing state execution. 

 Today, I will share a glimpse of another text in Katy Ryan’s important new book, Demands of the Dead: Executions, Storytelling, and Activism in the United States.   

 Steve Champion, now Adisa Akanni Kamara, is an inmate on death row at San Quentin.  He has been in prison for 30 years, since he was 18 years old.  His essay, “The Sword into a Pen,” narrates his transformation from a gangbanger into an intellectual, poet, storyteller, and activist.

Together with Anthony Ross, now Ajani Addae Kamara, and Stanley “Tookie” Williams, he read and studied work by Plato and Fanon, Heidegger and Che Guevara, Marx and Machiavelli.  “We had gone from thugs to bookworms,” he writes (65).  How did this transformation happen? 

Is There Anything New to Say About the Death Penalty?

Yes.  And it is said by those who have the most intimate grasp of the issues, and the least authorized voices to speak: the condemned.

Katy Ryan's new book, Demands of the Dead: Executions, Storytelling, and Activism in the United States, brings some of these voices closer to those of us who share the ambivalent fortune of having a life that the state aims to protect rather than to destroy.

The book opens with the testimony of Willie Francis, a 16-year-old black man who was condemned to death in 1947, in Louisiana, by a jury of 12 white men, solely on the basis of a written confession produced after Francis had been picked up for another, unrelated crime.  Francis survived not one, but two massive electric shocks.  His lawyer appealed, arguing that to attempt another execution would count as "cruel and unusual punishment," thus violating the Eighth Amendment.  The case went to the Supreme Court, but ultimately, Francis lost, and he was executed by electrocution in 1947.

There are so many things wrong with this story, it's hard to know where to begin.  What did Francis have to say about the experience of surviving his own execution - twice - only to be held in prison until a third and final death?

"I sure know how it feels to sit in that chair and have them strap me in and put a mask on my eyes.  I know how it feels to have the shock go through me and think I am dead but find out I am not.  I do not like to talk about it at all, but if it will help other people to understand each other, I want to tell everything" (33).

Connecticut Abolishes the Death Penalty -- But Have They Replaced it with a Living Death Penalty?

Yesterday, Connecticut became the 17th state in the US to abolish the death penalty.  It joins New Jersey, New Mexico, New York and Illinois as what we might call "new abolitionist" states.  California may be soon to follow, and even Kentucky is making cautious moves towards abolition.

As we celebrate this victory and work towards abolition in other states, we need to remember that state execution is not the only ethically and politically questionable part of the US prison system, even if it is the most hotly debated. 

It is arguably not even the only form of "death penalty," if by death we mean not only the cessation of biological life but also the destruction of psychic and social personhood. 

Stuart Grassian, Craig Haney, Terry Kupers and others have shown that prolonged solitary confinement produces intense anxiety, paranoia, cognitive difficulties, perceptual distortions such as hallucinations, and physical illness in many prisoners.  Charles Dickens called it "secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay." Atul Gawande calls it torture.

A lifetime of solitary confinement without the chance of release amounts to a death-in-life sentence. 

And yet, this is precisely what Connecticut has substituted as an alternative to capital punishment!  Solitary Watch reports (quoting from The Day):

Under the bill, those convicted [of Class A felony murder, which would have otherwise been treated as a capital offense] must be housed separately from other inmates, subjected to twice-weekly cell searches and must change their cells every three months. They would get no more than two hours a day outside their cells and would be allowed only “non-contact” visitation privileges.

Is this any better than a death sentence?

I will pose this question to the eight inmates on Tennessee's death row with whom I meet every two weeks, along with five other "outsiders," for a reading and discussion group.  I will report back to you next Thursday.

40 Years of Solitary Confinement: Resisting Social Death at Angola Prison, Louisiana

Forty years ago today, three black men, Robert King, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox were accused of a murder they did not commit.  They were thrown into solitary confinement.  Twenty-nine years later, King was released and his initial conviction overturned, but Wallace and Woodfox remain in punitive isolation, despite a 2006 recommendation from the State Judicial Commissioner to overturn Wallace’s conviction, and a 2008 court decision overturning Woodfox’s conviction (later reversed by the 5^th Appellate Court).  The case against them is riddled with inconsistencies and evidence of bribery and corruption, detailed by Amnesty International and other organizations.

Together, King, Wallace and Woodfox are known as the Angola 3.  Their struggle for justice is not set in a repressive dictatorship on the other side of the world.  It is not a horror story from the U.S. War on Terror.  It is happening in our own backyard, at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, otherwise known as Angola Prison. 

Angola Prison is named after the slave plantation upon which it was built, which in turn was named after the Portuguese colony where the first slaves on this land were transported.  Even today, the forced labor of black prisoners working in the cotton fields of Angola Prison conjures up images of slavery.