New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

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?

Time to take a walk on the real side; admit the bastards beat us?

Thanks to our "liberal Democrat" president, revocation of the Magna Carta is now permanent.  Would it be too much to ask that people wake the hell up and take this seriously?
Details here

Sadly, I think the answer to that question is "yes".  And so I'm allowing myself a day of wallowing - exemplified by my title, which refers to this bit of brilliant despair - I'll no doubt come around to something more positive in a bit.  

(I also know that "Political Music Friday" has begun to function like "Holy Roman Empire" but it is not dead, just resting.)

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?

 

Friday political music selection - prison

In light of the latest fight over judicial murder - at the moment a contest focused on whether to murder now, murder later, or merely continue to kidnap an innocent man while a cop killer goes free - it seemed like the right theme.  

This isn't particularly politically sophisticated, but gee, had to start here

And this just needed to be included as well.

As usual, Phil focuses on what matters.  In a similar vein here is Lou and spearhead

And to end on a lighter note, 'cause otherwise I'm so extraordinarily disillusioned with this country and where it is headed, well, who knows.  Todd

Loïc Wacquant: The punitive regulation of poverty in the neoliberal age

Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His work includes the trilogy Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (2008); Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (2009); and, Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of the Penal State (2011). (Click here to buy those books; an excellent overview of his life and work is here.) In the column, the title of which is the title of the post, he asks: 

How and why has the prison returned to the institutional forefront of the advanced societies, when four decades ago analysts of the penal scene were convinced it was on the decline, if not on the path toward extinction? In my book Punishing the Poor, I make three arguments to resolve this historical conundrum. First, the expansion and glorification of the police, the courts and the penitentiary are a response not to criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity caused by the casualisation of wage labor and the disruption of ethno-racial hierarchy. Second, we need to reconnect social and penal policies and treat them as two variants of poverty policy to grasp the new punitive politics of marginality. Third, the simultaneous and converging deployment of restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prison fare” partake of the forging of the neoliberal state.

 

A modest alternative to the prison-industrial-complex, partly but definitely not fully tongue-in-cheek

Wasting time on fb, I came across a posting with this story of vigilante justice (Go read it. Seriously.)

I imagine that very many philosophers will have two near-instantaneous reactions to this: 

"Fuck Yeah!" 

and "But of course I don't condone such actions, or call for their implementation in place of courts, laws, etc."

But here's what I would love: for someone to make a serious argument or, better, do a serious empirical analysis, of the relative merits of two such systems. 

System A - the current judicial-prison system that we have in a country of your choice.

System B - a system in which the mothers of everyone affected by a crime get to decide what to do with the person they identify as the criminal, no questions asked.  

I'm prepared to  grant that there would be some avoidable viciousness in System B, as well as some innocent people who would be punished.  This is obvious, but unlike serious philosophers, I don't think that observation settles the question.  As an unserious philosopher - in the Chomskyan sense - I want that to be stacked up against the millions of African Americans caught up in the prison system for using drugs, the crimes that are committed precisely because the criminal was brutalized by the prison system for a prior vastly less serious "crime," the massive costs of various sorts implicit in the current system, the systematic inequalities based on wealth in a system in which the quality of one's lawyer is crucial.  That is the "serious" way to approach the problem is to note the potential problems with the vigilante-mom solution and simply disqualify it from further discussion, while noting that the real massive problems with the current system are in principle contingent features, so that we need think only about some idealized version of it.

My "unserious" suggestion is that we actually do some empirical work to see which would in fact do more harm.  And if, as I suspect, the moms win - by a lot, even under the most negative of empirically plausible assumptions - then why not change, and then gradually work to improve the function of mom-tribunals, rather than not change and gradually work to improve the PIC?

Because no matter how corrupt this makes me look, if I'm honest, I'm still not feeling bad about the above-linked retribution. 

Annals of privatization, vol 4752

"Woo hoo!" is the only appropriate reaction to this news of the conviction of one of the "Kids for Cash" judges for funneling kids appearing in his court to privately-run juvenile detention centers:

SCRANTON, Pa. — A longtime northeastern Pennsylvania judge was ordered to spend nearly three decades in prison for his role in a massive juvenile justice bribery scandal that prompted the state's high court to toss thousands of convictions.

Former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. was sentenced Thursday to 28 years in federal prison for taking $1 million in bribes from the builder of a pair of juvenile detention centers in a case that became known as "kids for cash."

Ciavarella was motionless when the decision was announced and had no reaction. From behind him, where family members of some of the children he sentenced sat, someone cried out "Woo hoo!"

No one could have predicted this shocking perversion of justice from a simple little injection of the profit motive into the criminal justice system. Thomas Frank gets to the heart of the matter in this Wall Street Journal column: 

Schools vs prisons

An excellent post at the University of Minnesota Press blog, entitled "Schools vs. Prisons: How zero-tolerance and other punitive disciplinary policies are hurting students."

As zero-tolerance discipline policies have been instituted at high schools across the country, police officers are employed with increasing frequency to enforce behavior codes and maintain order, primarily at poorly performing, racially segregated urban schools. Actions that may once have sent students to the detention hall or resulted in their suspension may now introduce them to the criminal justice system. For today's post, UMP has interviewed Kathleen Nolan, author of Police in the Hallways, who explores the impact of punitive disciplinary policies on students and on their educational experiences.

One response in particular caught my eye. 

Q. What inspired the study you undertook when you started working on this book?

Before going back to school for my Ph.D., I was a high school teacher in the South Bronx. It was around the late 1990s, at the dawn of the move toward high-stakes testing and zero-tolerance school discipline. I, along with most of my colleagues, was very frustrated. Our school was terribly under-resourced. We needed so much—updated books, basic literacy support, working computers, even windows that opened properly and desks that weren’t 30 years old. It was a disgrace. And I thought, you can’t be serious! These are the reforms you’re giving us—culturally irrelevant, test-driven curriculum and police officers? Why aren’t we trying to provide the real social and educational supports that students need? Circumstances in the school certainly inspired the direction of my research, but there was something else outside the school—the view I had from the broken windows of my classroom on the third floor. Just beyond the vacant lot on the other side of the road there was a large, new, shiny white building. It was impressive and imposing in the midst of urban decay. 

It was a youth prison. 

I left teaching and entered grad school with the image of that prison ingrained in my mind. I wanted to learn more about how we got to a point where we, as a society, were more willing to invest in policing and jailing poor youth than we were to invest in their education.

Foucault famously ends a chapter in Discipline and Punish with "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" But here the schools don't resemble prisons, because the prisons are involved in some other social machine than that of a "carceral society" in the sense intended in DP.

The point is that we can't simply apply Foucault's analysis in DP to the US prison-industrial complex; we can't take his concepts as ready-made and look for instances of them ("aha, there it is: that's a Panopticon!"); we can only do our own analysis, perhaps using Foucault's methods in our toolkit. 

To put it in a quick-and-dirty fashion: warehousing one segment of the population of a de-industrialized system (plus providing jobs for another segment) is not the same as disciplining the population of an industrializing system, even if the de-politicization function might be analogous. 

ALEC and prison labor

An article in The Nation reports on the connection between ALEC and prison labor. (For background, follow this link for the "ALEC Exposed" project of the Center for Media and Democracy.)

Excerpts of the Nation article: 

At the Union Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Florida, inmates from a nearby lower-security prison manufacture tons of processed beef, chicken and pork for Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE), a privately held non-profit corporation that operates the state’s forty-one work programs. In addition to processed food, PRIDE’s website reveals an array of products for sale through contracts with private companies, from eyeglasses to office furniture, to be shipped from a distribution center in Florida to businesses across the US...

Although a wide variety of goods have long been produced by state and federal prisoners for the US government—license plates are the classic example, with more recent contracts including everything from guided missile parts to the solar panels powering government buildings—prison labor for the private sector was legally barred for years, to avoid unfair competition with private companies.

But this has changed thanks to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), its Prison Industries Act, and a little-known federal program known as PIE (the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program). While much has been written about prison labor in the past several years, these forces, which have driven its expansion, remain largely unknown.

Force-feeding of prisoners in California hunger strike protest

The article is here, and the following highlights are essential to understanding the story. Readers familiar with Foucault's work will recognize the toxic combination produced by prison discipline and "biopower" in which the management of life steps to the fore as a target of power-knowledge dispositifs.

[Force-feeding] has been prohibited since 1975 by the Declaration of Tokyo of the World Medical Association provided the prisoner is "capable of forming an unimpaired and rational judgment....

[The hunger strike by prisoners at California's Pelican Bay institution is in protest of practices whereby] prisoners in Security Housing Units ("the SHUs") spend 23 hours a day confined in isolation in 6-by-10-foot concrete, windowless, soundproof, cells with artificial lighting and one hour in a concrete exercise yard, ruled by judges to be a form of torture...

[Prisoners have signed DNR orders, which is] a legal order written so that people respect wishes to not undergo CPR or advanced cardiac life support if their heart were to stop or they were to stop breathing. This request is usually made by the patient or health care power of attorney and allows medical teams taking care of them to respect their wishes. 

California Department of Corrections secretary, Matthew Cate, has reported  that he will intervene "to save those inmates’ lives."...

[Responding to the use force-feeding to break a hunger strike at Guantanamo] In March 2006, 250 doctors from seven Western countries published their open letter in the medical journal, The Lancet, warning that participation of any doctor in force-feeding is contrary to World Medical Association rules.

See here for "ten ways to support the Pelican Bay prisoner hunger strike."