New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

40 Years of Solitary Confinement for the Angola 2

On April 17, 2012, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox will enter their 40th year of solitary confinement in Louisiana.  Wallace and Woodfox are members of the Angola 3.  Along with Robert King, they were accused of murdering a white prison guard in 1972, and they have been in solitary confinement ever since.  All three maintain their innocence.  The case against them is riddled with inconsistencies.     Amnesty International has launched a petition calling for their immediate release from solitary confinement.  

King was released in 2001, and he has been campaigning ever since for the release of the others, and against the widespread use of solitary confinement in the US.  He has described his 29 years in isolation as "an anguish that is hard to put into words."

Herman Wallace has been collaborating with artist Jackie Sumell to imagine his ideal dwelling space.  A film about their collaboration, called Herman's House, will have its world premiere later this month. 

Apart from excellent reporting by the BBC and Mother Jones, and a British film, In the Land of the Free, there has been astonishingly little coverage of this case. 

You can help to raise awareness by hosting a free screening of In the Land of the Free on your campus or in your community group.  The ideal date for this event would be April 17, to mark their 40th year in isolation, but any event, any time, would help to put pressure Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal to release Herman and Albert from solitary confinement.

To arrange for your free screening and to receive a copy of the DVD, just fill out the Contact Us form at the Angola 3.org site and express your interest in hoting an event: http://www.angola3.org/Contactus.aspx.
 
Along with the Trayvon Martin case, the case of the Angola 3 has the potential to expose the racial bias of the US criminal justice system to a wider public, beyond those who are immediately affected by it. 

What Would Justice Look Like For Trayvon Martin?

I wanted to pick up on Mark Lance's rant with a rant of my own, and to invite further rants from readers.  I kep thinking about the horrible shooting death of Trayvon Martin, and about the calls for justice in the wake of his murder.  There is no doubt in my mind that, if Trayvon had pulled the trigger, he would have been arrested immediately, and the full force of the law would have been brought down upon him. And I agree that Zimmerman should be arrested, and the whole situation should be investigated.  But at the same time, I keep thinking: What would justice look like for Trayvon?  Would a murder charge for Zimmerman amount to justice? 

A lot more would have to happen, and some of it is starting to happen.  We would need a nation-wide recognition of the degree to which young black men are perceived as predators and as "out of place," even in their own neighborhoods.  We would need to wake up to the fact that black men are so often victims of violence and not just perpetrators of violence.  We would need to recognize all the work that black men do to set the rest of us at ease in social situations, in order to convince us that we have nothing to fear from them.  We would need to confront our complicity as a nation with the over-incarceration of black and Latino men -- and with the over-incarceration of Americans more generally.  We would need to repeal laws like Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law and others that enshrine the right to self-defense, even to the point of using lethal force, if you feel like your life or the life of others are threatened.  We would need to pass laws restricting the use and availability of handguns.  We would need to recognize structural racism at work, whether or not any "racist slurs" are uttered.

What else would we have to do to find justice for Trayvon Martin?

Prison Reform I Can Believe In

I highly recommend today's New York Times article, "Life, With Dementia," to everyone who is interested in prison reform, care ethics, social change, community-building, mental illness... Well, really, I recommend this article to everyone.  A brief highlight:

"“A year ago,” Mr. Baxter said, “I couldn’t have said, ‘You know what man, I’m going to go help this grown man get in the shower,’ ” and “get in there and help these guys wash theirself off.”

"Gold Coats say they are moved by the work. “I’m a person who was broken,” said Mr. Burdick, who during 35 years in prison lost a wife to AIDS and a 16-year-old daughter to suicide. Dementia patients often “don’t even say thank you,” he said, but “they just pat me like that and I know what that means.”

"Mr. Cañas said: “I didn’t have any feelings about other people. I mean, in that way, I was a predator.” Now, he said, “I’m a protector.”"

This is the kind of reform we need in prisons: Empowering prisoners to help each other, and themselves, rather than feeding the cycle of violence that spins out of control when people have no real stake in their own future, or in the well-being of others.

Biting the Bullet on Prison Abolition

In a recent article in n+1 called "Raise the Crime Rate," Christopher Glazek poses an uncommon question: Where have all the violent criminals gone?  Homicides in New York have fallen from 2,245 in 1990 to 536 in 2010.  The number of sexual assaults across the US has fallen by 85% from 1980 to 2005.  Has the US suddenly become a kinder, gentler nation?  Or have "stop and frisk" policing strategies succeeded in preventing violent crime by separating the "sharks" from the "dolphins," as Adam Gopnik recently argued in "The Caging of America"? 

Yes and no -- or rather, no and yes.  Glazek argues that violent crime has not, in fact, fallen across the country; rather, the burden of violence has shifted from the street to the prison, where it has become largely invisible to the public.  In the same time period that street violence declined, the US prison population quadrupled, reaching 2.3 million prisoners in 2008.  The US now has the largest prison population in the world, second only to Stalin's USSR in the history of the world.  The streets may be safer then they were 20 years ago, but in the meantime, we have become a prison state.  We tolerate the arrest, incarceration and solitary confinement of a full 2% of our fellow citizens, and so we tolerate the conditions under which hundreds of thousands of prisoners are raped every year -- to the point where the United States may now be "the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women."

Gopnik and Glazek agree that the mass incarceration of Americans has reached epidemic proportions.  But while Gopnik's liberal solution only compounds the problem, as I have argued elsewhere, Glazek challenges us to find a radical solution to a radical problem:

The US prison system doesn’t need reform—it needs to be abolished. Like slavery in the 19th century, and civil rights in the 20th century, prison abolition in the 21st century can only be accomplished by a popular movement as radical and uncompromising as the movement that set up the prison regime in the first place.

Privilege and "Common Sense"

In a recent article in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik provides a useful example of how class and racial privilege can function as epistemic barriers, preventing otherwise intelligent people from understanding a situation in which they are keenly interested.

Gopnik begins his article, “The Caging of America,” with an admirably concise account of the current US prison epidemic and its historical roots in two approaches to incarceration: the Northern penitentiary system, dedicated to reform and rehabilitation, and the Southern legacy of plantation slavery, which continues to shape carceral policies focused on punishment and retribution.

But Gopnik’s argument takes a curious turn when he begins to reflect on the “real background to the prison boom,” which he identifies as “the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it.”  Gopnik does not cite sources or statistics to support this “reality”; rather, he appeals to his own traumatic recollection of the sixties and seventies, which “those too young to recall” may be tempted to dismiss as “mere bogeyman history.”  But there is a palpable difference between the mean streets of New York in 1980 and the relative safety of New York in 2012; Gopnik can feel it.  What could explain this change for the better?

Slavery by Another Name? (Or is it by the same name?)

The New York Times reports that an Alabama inmate, Mark Melvin, is suing prison officials at the Kilby Correctional Facility in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Alabama Commissioner of Corrections for the right to read a book.  According to prison officials, this book is "too incendiary" and "too provocative" to be allowed within prison walls.  It might incite "violence based on race, religion, sex, creed, or nationality, or disobedience toward law enforcement officials or correctional staff."  What is this incendiary book, and why is it so dangerous?

The book is called Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, by Douglas A. Blackmon, a senior correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.  It documents the history of the Convict Lease System, which sprang up across the South after the formal abolition of slavery in 1865.  Through this system, thousands of inmates were leased to private and public corporations.  They built railroads; they worked in coal mines; they even worked on plantations planting and picking cotton, sometimes for the same planters who used to own them as slaves. When their bodies were spent, they were sold to medical schools for dissection; their urine was collected and sold to tanneries.

Historian David Oshinsky has called the convict lease system “worse than slavery” because it granted white property owners access to a ceaselessly-renewed source of labor while removing the incentive to provide even a minimal degree of care for the workers.  The inmates were not paid for their labor; they were leased at a flat rate from the prison.  Often, inmates were not even fed but rather left to scrounge in the woods for food after a full day of heavy labor.  Mortality rates were extremely high, with many prisoners dying before they could serve out their full sentence.

Convict lease systems sprang up in every former slave state; they operated between 1868 (with Georgia as the first state to institute such a system) and 1928 (with Alabama as the last state to outlaw it).  During its period of operation, incarceration rates in those states skyrocketed, with a 10-fold increase in the prison population in Georgia from 1868–1908, more than a 10-fold increase in North Carolina from 1870-1890, an 8.5-fold increase in Florida from 1881-1904, a 4-fold increase in Mississippi from 1871-1879, and a 6.5-fold increase in Alabama from 1869-1919 (see Sheldon 2005).  A vastly disproportionate number of these inmates were black, charged under the new Black Codes and later under Jim Crow laws.

How could such a thing happen after the abolition of slavery?  To this day, the Thirteenth Amendment continues to this day to hold open an exception for prison inmates: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction" (emphasis added).  By leaving open the possibility of treating convicted criminals as slaves, the Thirteenth Amendment did not simply abolish slavery, it relocated and reinscribed slavery within the prison system, and within the legal limits of the constitution.

Slavery by Another Name is indeed an incendiary book; it takes as its very subject-matter a "violence based on race, religion, sex, creed, or nationality."  But this violence is only compounded by the censorship of reading material available to prisoners who remain caught in the space of exception held open by the Thirteenth Amendment.

Joy James has argued that, by leaving open a loophole for the enslavement of convicted criminals, the 13^th amendment did not abolish slavery, but rather "resurrected social death as a permanent legal category in U.S. life, yet no longer registered death within the traditional racial markings.  Breaking with a two hundred-year-old tradition, the government ostensibly permitted the enslavement of nonblacks.  Now not the ontological status of “nigger” but the ontological status of “criminal” renders one a slave" (James 2005, xxix).

Mark Melvin is white; he has been in prison for almost twenty years, since he was convicted at the age of fourteen for helping his older brother commit two murders.  What does it mean to deny him access to this book?  What would it mean to let him read it?