#carcerality

[rapeculturerealities]

Link to tweet

Link to article

[fursasaida]

Amid all the ridiculous handwringing over how the public reacted to the shooting of the UHC CEO, this is one of the only reasonably grounded things I've read:

It is a rare thing for an American CEO or other public figure to be targeted in this manner. But the structure of feeling it unleashed did not seem novel to me. Americans have a great deal of recent experience assessing the worthiness of strangers for execution. It’s one of the things we do together online: when someone is killed by a cop or vigilante; when a protester is mowed down by a car; when a Palestinian child is killed by an Israeli sniper or an Israeli civilian by Hamas. Arguing about whose lives are expendable is one of America’s favorite pastimes.

What about our bloodlust? Should we be concerned that Americans have betrayed an appetite for political violence? Perhaps. But the flip side of appetite is metabolism: not what we want, but how we bear what we are given. Americans, we might say, have a prodigious capacity for metabolizing brutality and death — we have been conditioned for it. As the writer and gun-violence expert Patrick Blanchfield put it to me, “This event gives us something fairly rare: a situation where a person victimized by a distinctively American system of normalized human liquidation — i.e., gun homicide — is also representative of that other distinctively American institution for disposing of human life, our for-profit health-care system, a key function of which is determining how much individual human lives are worth, and enforcing those assessments with ruthlessly incentivized efficiency.” For Blanchfield, Thompson’s murder, and the system of mechanized cruelty from which he profited, are part of the same regime of “human disposability” — a system in which human life, instead of being precious and priceless, is “a fungible commodity like anything else.”

[fatehbaz]

During the Florida Land Boom of the 1920s, entrepreneurs and real estate developers deployed creative tactics to woo potential clients [...] to invest in Florida land. [...] At Miami Beach, where Indianapolis-based entrepreneur Carl Fisher invested millions in resort development during the 1920s, tourists encountered a surprising attraction: elephants. Two elephants were brought to Miami Beach. They were named Carl II (named after Fisher himself) and Rosie [...]. Seeing the elephants’ work at Miami Beach positions these more-than-human actors in the histories of leisure in South Florida, as they signal the uncomfortable degree to which work and leisure were deeply entangled in this place. [...]

Carl II, came to Miami Beach from Peoria, Illinois, in February of 1921. According to the Miami Daily Metropolis, [E.B.], who owned several circuses in the Midwest, gifted the elephant to Carl Fisher [...]. “I am going to get a million dollars’ worth of advertising out of this elephant.” [...] Carl II also carried advertisements on boards hung over a saddle. [...] Infantilizing Carl II, as reporters often did in the Miami newspapers, seems to have [...] helped uphold his value as a toy of sorts, which supported the idea of Miami Beach as a “playground,” as it was called at the time. [...] [A]rticles stressed, however, that the elephant’s education would involve more than “play.” The Miami Daily Metropolis reported that “Carl, the elephant will be put to work.” This is coupled with language that strikes a disciplinary tone; the reporter stated that “he must earn his keep.” [...] Such work ranged from moving portable houses on the beach to pulling presses on the polo field. Carl also cleared mangrove swamps to make land suited for residential development [...].

Like other resorts that pandered to a growing middle-class market for leisure in the roaring 1920s, Fisher’s venture on Miami Beach was carefully curated as a “playground to the World.”

Just as Henry Flagler had separated “work” from “leisure” by building Palm Beach separate from West Palm Beach in the 1890s, Fisher kept his beach workers’ labor largely invisible - except when it enhanced the tourist experience of its middle- and upper-middle class clientele, as when the elephants caddied on the golf course or stomped divots on the polo field. Fisher’s plan was to attract visitors to Miami Beach to come back year after year [...] [and] to prompt permanent settlement in his island subdivisions. These subdivisions, like his hotels, were meant to be exclusive. [...]

And while this landscape depended on an African American workforce, the city enacted Ordinance 457 in 1936, requiring the more than 5,000 service workers at the time to “register.” In addition to being photographed and fingerprinted, Black workers had to carry identification with them. [...]

---

In March of 1921, Carl II lived at the local fairgrounds [...]. An article in the Miami Daily Metropolis that celebrated Carl II’s presence there also noted that “the fair doors are not open to the colored population this year.” [...] 

Part attraction and part workhorse, Carl II moved across spaces dividing work and leisure, non-human and human, and Black and white on which Miami Beach’s status as a “tropical paradise” for the white leisured classes depended. [...] Carl II was shipped off to the Circus in 1926, the same year that a devastating hurricane struck the beach and brought the “boom” years to an end. His companion, Rosie, eventually met the same fate. [...] While Miami Beach was developed as a playground for the white leisure class, its success was inextricably bound with the labor force that built and sustained it.

---

Images, captions, and all text above by: Anna Andrzejewski. “Work, Play, and Elephants in South Florida’s Leisure Landscape.” Edge Effects. 27 April 2023. Published at: edgeeffects.net/miami-beach-elephants/ [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[velvet-vox]

Is anyone interested in hearing me rant about indoctrination and how/why it ruins art in a pretty long post?

This message is referred to mostly my Murder Drones and Wakfu audience since those are my main demographic as it stands but realistically I won't put the tags associated to those shows in the description unless I directly name them in the actual post.

[hussyknee]

Us: Shaming, ostracization and other systems that use punishment as deterrent just leads to making unintended collateral of people who are themselves vulnerable and marginalized. Because abuse and systemic violence is rooted inequality, and you will never have more power to punish the privileged than you have to endanger the oppressed. This is why abolition exists. Protecting the victimized has little to do with punishing the guilty.

Some screaming wannabe cop in the notes: YOU'RE ON THE SIDE OF BIGOTS IS THAT IT??? YOU WANT BIGOTS TO NEVER HAVE TO FACE CONSEQUENCE???

Before you say ACAB you need to stop thinking like a cop: that society needs punitive justice and intimidation to maintain order. Otherwise your only problem with violence is that it's not you that's weilding it.

[hmantegazzi]

And that the treatment of prisoners is so catastrophically cruel that almost any intervention that isn't actively trying to torture them more has a significant chance of improving their lives, just because it's not what they live daily.

If anyone remembers the old story about how male prisoners were found to be calmed when their cells were painted pink; (oft cited to prove that the color pink has a calming effect on men) apparently this research was replicated with other paint colors and it was found that any color of paint has the same effect, including painting the walls the same color that they were before. As it turns out, you have to clean in order to paint, and people are happier when their environment has been recently cleaned. The obvious takeway is that correlation does not equal causation, but the even MORE obvious takeaway is the many times proved but seldom acknowledged law that one should never attempt to extrapolate general principles out of studies done in a prison

[queerpunktomatoes]

For non-USA-inauguration reasons (/sar) I'm just going to drop this list of anti-carceral mental health supports. (988 and other government-run resources are ultimately connected to the cops. This is a list of resources that will not report you /srs) Obviously, the bigger issues are things like housing, food, discrimination, etc, but if you need a life vest while we're still working on fixing the system, here they are.

~~~THRIVE Lifeline: text “THRIVE” to +1.313.662.8209 from anywhere, 24/7. Text-based support, by and for multiply marginalized people. ~~~Trans Lifeline: call 877.565.8860 in US or 877.330.6366 in Canada, Mon-Fri 10a-6p PT. Peer support and crisis hotline for trans people. ~~~BlackLine: call or text 1.800.604.5841 in US, Mon-Fri 6a-8p, Sat-Sun 5p-9p PT. Crisis support with a Black, LGBTQ+, and Black Femme lens, and a safe line to report police brutality. ~~~Wildflower Alliance Peer Support Line: call 888.407.4515 in the US, open 4-6p PT Mon-Thurs, and 4-7p PT Fri-Sun. Lived experience with psychiatric diagnosis, trauma, addiction, etc. ~~~Project LETS: text 401.400.2905, Mon-Sat 7a-1p PT for urgent support with psychiatric incarceration / involuntary hospitalization in the US. ~~~Don’t Call The Police: A database of local and national community-based alternatives to calling the police or 911 has been broken down by major US cities. https://thriv.life/DontCall

Please trust in the hundreds of thousands of people fighting for you right now. We love you. We are trying so hard to make a better world for you /gen

[luulapants]

We talk about prison "abolition" and not prison "reform" not because we believe it's possible to create a system where no incarceration is necessary. We say "abolition" because we want to create systems that allow the establishment of a new reparative justice structure, which uses incarceration as little as possible, and which is not a reform of the current incarceration structure, which does not repair or do justice. We do not believe the current structure can be reformed.

Reforming our current incarceration system into a justice system would be like reforming a dog fighting structure into a dog training structure. (And before anyone accuses me of comparing people in prison to dogs - no, I'm not, but I am saying that people who run prisons treat people like dogs.) Dog fighting structures were never designed to train dogs. The people that run them aren't qualified to train dogs for anything but violence (and are incentivized to continue training violence). The incarceration system creates violence and antisocial behavior. It is incentivized to continue doing so. It was never meant to repair social harm.

Prison abolition means, piece by piece, cutting off the supply of bodies to the incarceration structure.

When drug users get medical care instead of being criminalized, prisons are no longer needed to house drug users. When the mentally ill are given medical care instead of being criminalized, prisons are no longer needed to house the mentally ill. When homeless people are given housing instead of being criminalized, prisons are no longer needed to house the homeless. When impoverished people are given welfare and food benefits instead of being criminalized, prisons are no longer needed to house the poor. When youth are given opportunities outside of gangs, prisons have fewer gang members to house. We shrink the system, and we keep shrinking it. Next we create systems to reduce the population of domestic abusers. Next we tackle sexual assault. Every time it shrinks, we look at the remaining population and figure out what population we can tackle next.

That's how prison abolition works.

[rapeculturerealities]

Link to article

[fursasaida]

1. next time somebody wants to make fun of Foucault for saying schools are prisons just know this thread is full of teachers saying this sounds so great, they do the same kind of work and love it, or they "always wanted to work in a correctional facility" and will look into this line of work

2. slightly more sympathetically, this is a demonstration of the abolitionist argument that in a neoliberal carceral society, prisons become the only government institution that the state is willing to direct resources to, and so what should be generalized social service programs like mental health treatment or continuing education get hung on its framework like ornaments on a christmas tree. this is how you get proposals for new prisons that include things like community meeting rooms in the building, because no one will find a community center but they will fund "amenity designed to sell a prison to a community." that is 100% a big part of what these teachers are responding to: having actual resources and a system that doesn't expect them to be an entire family, community, supply closet, and institution in one human body. but like, how is your response "prison school rules!" rather than "hold the fuck up"

(of course there's some talk about learning about how the other half lives and not being so quick to judge etc etc but. come on)

[fatehbaz]

Y’know about notorious housing costs and homelessness situation in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, the Pacific coast of the US? In 2023, Portland and San Francisco are both moving forward with major multi-million-dollar projects to outlaw “street camping” while opening “city-run mass encampments.”

The mayor, 14 April 2023:

San Francisco is site of arguably one of worst situations in the US, where thousands units are completely inaccessible, and people pay over $2000 a month to live in closets or dorm-style high-density shared rooms, and upscale coffee shops and restaurants require phone apps or payment receipts for people to access restrooms. The W!!pedia page “Homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area” is over 120,000 bytes in size and 12,000 words in length.

In April 2023, the city announces its grand plan: A “five-year plan” costing $600 million to “cut the number of unsheltered homeless in halve” in five years. So not a plan to put people in homes, but just to get them off the street, qualifying them as part of the strange designation of “the sheltered homeless” (they will still be homeless, but they won’t be “on the streets,” and will be “sheltered” by a city shelter or camp).

Get them out of sight, put them out of the way on an island or something:

In 2022, the city estimated that over 20,000 people are homeless in a calendar year.

And that’s only within the formal city limits of San Francisco and doesn’t include the rest of the Bay Area (which contains millions more people in Oakland, San Jose, Richmond, etc.) 

The rest of the Pacific coast?

In late 2022, Portland, its mayor, and its city council announced a major initiative to ban and outlaw “street camping”. Portland will simultaneously by opening “city-run encampments” or  “sanctioned mass homeless camps.” In early 2023, Portland begins this project:

March 2023:

Hmm.

One of the most popular homeless related questions on Q/uora, as if were a “valid question” about how “you must earn your existence through work”, and not a sickening disregard for life:

Hmm.

Like:

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Prison-tech company bribed jails to ban in-person visits

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Beware of geeks bearing gifts. When prison-tech companies started offering "free" tablets to America's vast army of prisoners, it set off alarm-bells for prison reform advocates – but not for the law-enforcement agencies that manage the great American carceral enterprise.

The pitch from these prison-tech companies was that they could cut the costs of locking people up while making jails and prisons safer. Hell, they'd even make life better for prisoners. And they'd do it for free!

These prison tablets would give every prisoner their own phone and their own video-conferencing terminal. They'd supply email, of course, and all the world's books, music, movies and games. Prisoners could maintain connections with the outside world, from family to continuing education. Sounds too good to be true, huh?

Here's the catch: all of these services are blisteringly expensive. Prisoners are accustomed to being gouged on phone calls – for years, prisons have done deals with private telcos that charge a fortune for prisoners' calls and split the take with prison administrators – but even by those standards, the calls you make on a tablet are still a ripoff.

Sure, there are some prisoners for whom money is no object – wealthy people who screwed up so bad they can't get bail and are stewing in a county lockup, along with the odd rich murderer or scammer serving a long bid. But most prisoners are poor. They start poor – the cops are more likely to arrest poor people than rich people, even for the same crime, and the poorer you are, the more likely you are to get convicted or be suckered into a plea bargain with a long sentence. State legislatures are easy to whip up into a froth about minimum sentences for shoplifters who steal $7 deodorant sticks, but they are wildly indifferent to the store owner's rampant wage-theft. Wage theft is by far the most costly form of property crime in America and it is almost entirely ignored:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/15/wage-theft-us-workers-employees

So America's prisons are heaving with its poorest citizens, and they're certainly not getting any richer while they're inside. While many prisoners hold jobs – prisoners produce $2b/year in goods and $9b/year in services – the average prison wage is $0.52/hour:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

(In six states, prisoners get nothing; North Carolina law bans paying prisoners more than $1/day, the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution explicitly permits slavery – forced labor without pay – for prisoners.)

Likewise, prisoners' families are poor. They start poor – being poor is a strong correlate of being an American prisoner – and then one of their breadwinners is put behind bars, taking their income with them. The family savings go to paying a lawyer.

Prison-tech is a bet that these poor people, locked up and paid $1/day or less; or their families, deprived of an earner and in debt to a lawyer; will somehow come up with cash to pay $13 for a 20-minute phone call, $3 for an MP3, or double the Kindle price for an ebook.

How do you convince a prisoner earning $0.52/hour to spend $13 on a phone-call?

Well, for Securus and Viapath (AKA Global Tellink) – a pair of private equity backed prison monopolists who have swallowed nearly all their competitors – the answer was simple: they bribed prison officials to get rid of the prison phones.

Not just the phones, either: a pair of Michigan suits brought by the Civil Rights Corps accuse sheriffs and the state Department of Corrections of ending in-person visits in exchange for kickbacks from the money that prisoners' families would pay once the only way to reach their loved ones was over the "free" tablets:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/jails-banned-family-visits-to-make-more-money-on-video-calls-lawsuits-claim/

These two cases are just the tip of the iceberg; Civil Rights Corps says there are hundreds of jails and prisons where Securus and Viapath have struck similar corrupt bargains:

https://civilrightscorps.org/case/port-huron-michigan-right2hug/

And it's not just visits and calls. Prison-tech companies have convinced jails and prisons to eliminate mail and parcels. Letters to prisoners are scanned and delivered their tablets, at a price. Prisoners – and their loved ones – have to buy virtual "postage stamps" and pay one stamp per "page" of email. Scanned letters (say, hand-drawn birthday cards from your kids) cost several stamps:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Prisons and jails have also been convinced to eliminate their libraries and continuing education programs, and to get rid of TVs and recreational equipment. That way, prisoners will pay vastly inflated prices for streaming videos and DRM-locked music.

The icing on the cake? If the prison changes providers, all that data is wiped out – a prisoner serving decades of time will lose their music library, their kids' letters, the books they love. They can get some of that back – by working for $1/day – but the personal stuff? It's just gone.

Readers of my novels know all this. A prison-tech scam just like the one described in the Civil Rights Corps suits is at the center of my latest novel The Bezzle:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

Prison-tech has haunted me for years. At first, it was just the normal horror anyone with a shred of empathy would feel for prisoners and their families, captive customers for sadistic "businesses" that have figured out how to get the poorest, most desperate people in the country to make them billions. In the novel, I call prison-tech "a machine":

a million-­armed robot whose every limb was tipped with a needle that sank itself into a different place on prisoners and their families and drew out a few more cc’s of blood.

But over time, that furious empathy gave way to dread. Prisoners are at the bottom of the shitty technology adoption curve. They endure the technological torments that haven't yet been sanded down on their bodies, normalized enough to impose them on people with a little more privilege and agency. I'm a long way up the curve from prisoners, but while the shitty technology curve may grind slow, it grinds fine:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

The future isn't here, it's just not evenly distributed. Prisoners are the ultimate early adopters of the technology that the richest, most powerful, most sadistic people in the country's corporate board-rooms would like to force us all to use.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Flying Logos https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

--

KGBO https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Suncorp_Bank_ATM.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[hussyknee]

Link to thread.

Link to article.

Link to author's bio.

Alt text enabled on all images.

[reasonsforhope]

Legal protection against domestic violence has become widespread

"This chart shows the share of the global population living in countries that criminally sanction domestic violence or provide protection against it. The data comes from the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law project.

Throughout the decades, the legislation on domestic violence has increased markedly. Until the 1990s, less than 1% of the global population in countries was legally protected from it, with only Canada, Sweden, and Ireland providing such safeguards. And as recently as 20 years ago, 80% of people lived in countries without legal penalties for domestic violence.

But by 2023, this had more than reversed, and 9 in 10 people lived in countries with legal measures to combat domestic violence. This shift highlights an increased recognition around the world that domestic violence is common, especially against women."

-via Our World in Data, September 19, 2024

--

Note: This really puts in perspective just how much and how quickly attitudes on domestic and gendered violence are changing. Look at that graph! Look at it!!

Thirty years ago, there was only a single country in the entire world that thought hitting your spouse should be a crime, and had acted on that. (It was Ireland, go Ireland.) That is a world of difference from where we are now.

[kitty-pelosi]

Guys you need to understand that the intersection of citizenship, ICE detainment, and the prison industrial complex is not about deportation. It is about slavery and labor. When somebody is arrested by immigration agents they are not immediately put on a plane and sent home. They stay in an interment camp where they must wait for a hearing by an immigration judge. There are not many of these judges and so people WILL be waiting for months if not years in these facilities.

The government is, and has for the past quarter century, been constructing the framework it needs to enslave noncitizen residents in America and force them into the private prison industry where their labor can be sold to companies for base production tasks. The goal here is to provide a fallback for when American global trading hegemony ends (because it will) and we no longer have access to cheap foreign labor markets. We are manufacturing cheap labor markets domestically by arresting immigrants and toying with citizenship status.

What’s happening NOW and TODAY is just a piece in a process that has been ongoing for decades, under both Democrats and Republicans. This is not new, it’s just being marketed to the public differently now that an R is in charge so that the public can feel absolved of guilt.

The immediate goal of the Trump policies now are to overwhelm the immigration judiciary to accrue a stockpile of detained people lacking documentation. Once there are so many (we are here) the government will say “we can’t handle all of this! there aren’t enough judges!” But it will not supply more judges to actually deport these people. This stage is all about normalizing the presence of hundreds of thousands of detained immigrants under your nose.

The next step is allowing these facilities to more easily sell and exploit their labor. I forsee this administration using environmental crises to do so - look at the LA wildfires. They are often fought by incarcerated firefighters. We will see more of this as crises escalate - the government will begin using more carceral labor to deal with the aftermath of hurricanes, landslides, and wildfires. This will normalize carceral slavery in the eyes of the American public.

Once this step is accomplished it will be incredibly simple to further the normalization in moments where there is not an acute crises. Then, we will be having people in these camps making our textiles, picking and packaging our food, slaughtering cattle. After years of this you may even see carceral labor enter the service and entertainment industry. By 2035 you may even be able to call up CoreCivic and lease a cook or a maid! The hard working white woman needs household assistance, after all she is too busy girlbossing to do *those* things. Plus, it’s not her fault her slave decided to be a Criminal.

But it seems like most Americans are not conscious of this framework nor do they care. They engage with this from the perspective that “everyone is welcome here! don’t deport my friends!” hon your friends are not going to be deported, they are being enslaved. Begging you to use your fucking eyes. Your damn Senators are investing in GEO Group and CoreCivic for a reason! Because these companies have a great business plan! Enslaving immigrants already is a billion dollar industry and its potential for growth under post imperial late stage capitalism is mind-numbing!

[ultraviolet-divergence]

… in court papers responding to the ACLU’s lawsuit, the department’s lawyers argued that the new rules are “a carefully crafted policy that creates an individualized course of treatment for each inmate based on scientific evidence and clinical judgment.

I’m wishing for a hell for these practitioners to burn in