New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Charlotte/Mecklenburg votes against 287(g)

Yesterday was a big news day.  The biggest story was probably our Tinpot Dictator’s decision to unilaterally violate the Iranian nuclear deal.  In addition to alienating almost everyone not named Bibi Netanyahu or John Bolton, and making the world less safe, the main thing this proves is that Trump can’t see more than ten minutes into the future: very soon, he will supposedly be sitting down with North Korea’s Kim Kong Un to… negotiate a nuclear deal.  What a wonderful time to petulantly scream that the U.S. does not abide by its nuclear deals!  Back home, if you pay attention to local elections, you’ll have heard that in the Republican primary that includes a sizable part of Charlotte, U.S. House incumbent Robert Pittinger narrowly lost to Rev. Mark Harris, a far right preacher who led the state’s 2012 anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment.  Conventional wisdom is that Harris will be easier for Democratic nominee McReady to challenge in the fall.

The news that I suspect didn’t make it out of the local area is that Mecklenburg County’s Sheriff Irwin Carmichael just lost – badly – his re-election bid.  There were three candidates in the Democratic primary, and nobody on the Republican ticket, so the winner last night won the office.  Carmichael had defended the County’s use of 287(g) rules that allowed the ICE agents access to those detained in Mecklenburg County (which includes Charlotte; Charlotte police do not participate in  287(g)) jails.  His support for that program is, by all accounts, why he lost. Both of his opponents came out against it, and there was a strong grass-roots mobilization campaign.  The winner also plans to roll back two of Carmichael’s ending in-person visits with inmates and condoning the use of solitary confinement. 

That’s a good day for those of us who care about criminal justice reform and a reminder that local politics can matter.

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.

 

The Biopolitical Death Penalty at SCOTUS

An important and somewhat neglected topic is what happens when biopolitics intersects with juridical power in courts of law.  Today, we got a good example of one way it can happen.  Several years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that states could not execute the “intellectually disabled.”  They also let the states decide what that meant.  Today, they specified (5-4, with the usual lineup for a “liberal” Kennedy opinion) that, although using an IQ score of 70 or below as evidence of such disability is ok, it’s not ok to draw a bright line cutoff at a score of 70 because one had to take into account the 5 point margin of error in the test itself.  In so doing, the SCOTUS spared the life of a Florida inmate with a measured IQ of 71.

There is a lot to say here (and for me, quibbling about where the IQ cutoff should be distracts from the larger point, which is that we shouldn’t be executing people.  And, IQ testing is its own set of problems), but I do think it’s notable the extent to which the decision is expressly biopolitical, and not juridical.  Recall Foucault’s claim one symptom of the emergence of biopower is a decline in the death penalty (History of Sexuality 1, p. 138).  Here, we see how that decline can manifest itself even within the judicial system. 

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?

Radical Philosophy and the Free Alabama Movement

Last summer, thousands of prisoners in California launched a 60-day hunger strike to protest and transform oppressive policies in the California Department of Corrections.  One member of the organizing team called their strike action a “multi-racial, multi–regional Human Rights Movement to challenge torture.”

This weekend, another prisoner-led human rights movement is gaining momentum in Alabama.  The Free Alabama Movement (FAM) seeks to analyze, resist, and transform prison slavery from within the Prison Industrial Complex. 

Both of these movements challenge us, as philosophers and as people, to interrogate the meaning of slavery, torture, human rights, and political action.  What does it mean to struggle for one’s human rights as an “offender” in the world’s first prison society?  What can philosophers and political theorists learn from the example of incarcerated intellectuals and political actors whose everyday lives are situated at the dangerous intersection of racism, economic exploitation, sexual violence, and civil death?  What would it mean to respect the specificity of the Free Alabama Movement, and at the same time to recognize that even the freedom of non-incarcerated philosophers may be bound up with the freedom of Alabama?  What is freedom, after all?  What – and where – and who – is Alabama?

Is jury duty a trolley type problem? What should one do?

Once again I've been called in for Jury Duty.

It's nearly a priori that they won't impanel me for death penalty or war-on-drugs type cases, since I'm up front about exercising my right to jury nullify in the case of unjust laws or state sanctioned murder.*

But I have no idea what to do with respect to someone who has both broken a just law and who should not be on the streets.

How can anyone in good conscience send another human being to an American prison?

But as a juror the only choice they give you is sending the person to prison or releasing them. And many people are too predatory to be allowed to operate in normal society. 

I've got two weeks until I have to go in. Any advice about from people agree with me that this is a genuine dilemma** and/or have some experience negotiating the system would be greatly appreciated.

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.”

Executions, botched and proper

Last week's botched execution in Ohio has raised questions for many people about the ethics of experimenting with untested lethal injection protocols.  But it’s not clear that the standard drug protocol is any less cruel, even if it is less unusual. 

On Thursday, January 16, Dennis McGuire was injected with a combination of the sedative midazolam and painkiller hydromorphone.  Witnesses report that he gasped, snorted, and struggled for air for over ten minutes before being pronounced dead.  Why would Ohio turn to such a controversial and untested execution method? 

Since 2011, one of the drugs in the standardized lethal injection protocol has become unavailable thanks to a combination of global capitalism and European law. This protocol consists of three drugs: sodium thiopental (an anaesthetic), 2) pancuronium bromide (a paralytic), and 3) potassium chloride (an electrolyte which, administered in the right way, stops the heart).  Until recently, the only US manufacturer of the first drug, sodium thiopental, was Hospira. 

Tennessee Students and Educators for Social Justice: Open Letter to Stop Executions

Last week, I wrote about Tennessee's unprecedented push to execute 10 prisoners, beginning on January 15, 2014.

Today, I'm happy to report that the January 15 execution of Billy Ray Irick has been postponed to October 7, 2014.  Why?  Because of legal challenges to Tennessee's new lethal injection protocol.

Next week, I will fill in the context for this legal challenge, but this week, I want to bring your attention to an open letter by Tennessee Students and Educators for Social Justice, which calls on Governor Bill Haslam to suspend all scheduled executions immediately, and to commission a full and transparent review of capital punishment in Tennessee. 

The letter has been signed by almost 300 students and educators from colleges, universities, and high schools across Tennessee, and a companion petition has been signed by over 300 additional supporters. Everyone is encouraged to sign the petition!  If you study or teach in Tennessee, you are welcome to add your name to the open letter.

The letter is reproduced in full below.  Please share with your colleagues and students!

Tennessee Prepares to Commit Mass Murder

Today, The Tennessean newspaper reported that the state plans to execute 10 people beginning in the new year ("TN makes unprecedented push to execute 10 killers"). This is almost double the number of people executed in Tennessee over the past 40 years. 

While it may seem hyperbolic to describe these planned executions as a form of "mass murder," I believe that the hyperbolic nature of capital punishment warrants such a description.  And the state of Tennessee seems to agree, at least on some level.  The standard way of recording the "manner of death" on an executed prisoner's death certificate in Tennessee is as "homicide."  A homicide committed by the state, and by proxy by the people of Tennessee. 

Over the next few months, I will explore some of the issues raised by state homicide in a series of blog posts on New APPS.  I welcome your constructive and critical feedback.

“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.

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.

Gushing over Libertarians

As loyal readers of NewAPPS may recall, I warmly welcomed the founding of  Bleeding Heart Libertarians (BHL), which has been a wildly succesful blog. While I have followed BHL regularly (and sometimes blog about issues of shared interest [e.g., here, here, here, etc.), I had also grown a bit wary of the general fondness for expert-rule among some of the BHL crowd. (As always with a group blog, one is not allowed to make claims about the whole group.) But ever since Sarah Skwire started blogging at BHL my enthusiasm has been rekindled. (Take a look at, for example, this post--trigger warning it discusses rape.) She challenges Libertarians to live up to their own best principles and, in doing so, challenges us all to think through how fondness for state institutions (the military, prisons, etc.) facilitates a rape-culture.

'In the of challenging Libertarians to live up to their own best principles (and reminding us all of the vitality and the need of the tradition today) genre' is a another post by Roger Koppl, who does not blog at BHL (but is certainly a kind of fell0w-traveler), about the significance of income-inequality at Thinkmarkets.

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.”

Humanist Spinozism (Thomas More, Utopia)

Recently I posted about some fine 'law & economics'-style reasoning in Thomas More's Utopia. In the midst of a critical treatment of the practice of executing convicted thieves, a further argument is added (during an exchange between Raphael Hythloday and John Morton, Archbishop and Cardinal of Canterbury, and at that time also Lord Chancellor of England):

To be short, Moses' law, though it were ungentle and sharp, as a law that was given to bondmen; yea, and them very obstinate, stubborn, and stiff-necked; yet it punished theft by the purse, and not with death. And let us not think that God in the new law of clemency and mercy, under the which he ruleth us with fatherly gentleness, as his dear children, hath given us greater scope and license to execute cruelty, one upon another. Utopia

In context, Hythloday ("talker of nonsense") offers a battery of arguments against the severity of the criminal law of England. Now one of these arguments appeals to the authority of revelation to insist that much capital punishment may be immoral. As if Hythloday is a traditional natural law thinker, he claims that even a "law made by the consent of men" does not make it moral. (More is writing in a period in which the Tudor dynasty has just consolidated its rise to power by the force of arms.) After all, "why may it not likewise by man's constitutions be determined after what sort whoredom, fornication and perjury may be lawful?"

But Hythloday's appeal to revelation is also a bit unusual. For, in the passage quoted at the top of this post Hythloday relies on an explicit and a more daring implicit contrast. The official contrast (i) is between Moses's legal code and the more gentle rule of Christianity. But there is also an implied contrast (ii) between the way one rules a barbarous people (recently liberated from tyranny) and the way one rules a more civilized people. (The implied contrast between the barbarous and civilization, which is extremely popular in later early modern writing, would have been familiar to More from Aristotle's Politics.) The implied contrast (ii) effectively historicizes the Bible, whose commandments are now understood as fitted to a people at a particular time and place in need of strict rule. This strategy is pursued more relentlessly in Spinoza's Theologic0-Political Treatise (e.g., chapter 5; III/75).

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)

Brazilian music on Fridays: 'Diario de um detento'

Last week I had a post with a version of 'Umbabarauma' featuring Mano Brown, the emblematic rapper of the rap band Racionais MCs.  This week, I want to post a song by the Racionais MCs themselves, and not just any song: 'Diario de um detento', the diary of an inmate (the lyrics were written by a former inmate). It was ranked 52nd best Brazilian song of all times by the Brazilian Rolling Stone magazine in 2009.

The song is about the episode which became known as 'Carandiru massacre'. Carandiru was a penitentiary (demolished in 2002), one among many in the cruel Brazilian prison system. On October 2nd 1992, a prison revolt arose, and before attempting any kind of negotiations, the military police was sent in; 111 inmates were killed. The episode is now widely considered as one of the major human rights violations in the history of Brazil. (I remember it very well; I was in high school at the time and the massacre was one of the main topics of conversation even during classes for months.) Still now, it represents all that is (still) wrong with Brazilian prisons: overpopulation, police brutality, overrepresentation of Afro-Brazilians in the prison population. The song narrates the moments just before the revolt erupted (lyrics here in Portuguese, you can try your luck with Google translator); it was the first time ever that the life of inmates hit the music charts in Brazil.

It's been almost 20 years since the massacre, and it's good to be reminded from time to time that something as horrible as this could have taken place.

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.

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.