#carcerality

[rapeculturerealities]

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[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)

[ultraviolet-divergence]

The report highlights a significant discrepancy between the 2020 campaign promise of U.S. President Joseph Biden to end solitary confinement and the ongoing practices observed in ICE detention. Over the last decade, the use of solitary confinement has persisted, and worse, the recent trend under the current administration reflects an increase in frequency and duration. Data from solitary confinement use in 2023 – though likely an underestimation as this report explains – demonstrates a marked increase in the instances of solitary confinement. This report exposes a continuing trend of ICE using solitary confinement for punitive purposes rather than as a last resort – in violation of its own directives. In the last five years alone, ICE has placed people in solitary confinement over 14,000 times, with an average duration of 27 days, well exceeding the 15-day threshold that United Nations (UN) human rights experts have found constitutes torture Some solitary confinement placements lasted significantly longer, with 682 lasting at least 90 days and 42 lasting over one year.

"Endless Nightmare": Torture and Inhuman Treatment in Solitary Confinement in US Immigration Detention

[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. [...]

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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.

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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.

[queenofzan]

Like, what is so scary about rapists and murderers voting? I don't think there are enough of them to form any sort of threat to democracy. Are murderers more of the country than non-murderers? I don't think so.

And let's face it, we know from experience that many people will do things personally they don't endorse other people doing. Murder is wrong, except when I do it, because my murder is totally justified. Presumably most murderers would not vote for something wild like "legalize murder" on the grounds that those other murderers are the real danger.

Most votes are about really tedious stuff where, to be frank, a murderer or rapist's vote is just as valid as mine or yours. Should criminals forfeit all right to representation? Should they have no say in anything because they broke a law?

[slayercain]

Not all free persons are white (nor are they equal or equally free), but slaves are paradigmatically black. And because blackness serves as the basis of enslavement in the logic of a transnational political and legal culture, it permanently destabilizes the position of any nominally free black population. Stuart Hall might call this the articulation of elements of a discourse, the production of a “non-necessary correspondence” between the signifiers of racial blackness and slavery. But it is the historical materialization of the logic of a transnational political and legal culture such that the contingency of its articulation is generally lost to the infrastructure of the Atlantic world that provides Frank Wilderson a basis for the concept of a “political ontology of race.” The United States provides the point of focus here, but the dynamics under examination are not restricted to its bounds. Political ontology is not a metaphysical notion, because it is the explicit outcome of a politics and thereby available to historic challenge through collective struggle. But it is not simply a description of a political status either, even an oppressed political status, because it functions as if it were a metaphysical property across the longue durée of the premodern, modern, and now postmodern eras. That is to say, the application of the law of racial slavery is pervasive, regardless of variance or permutation in its operation across the better part of a millennium. In Wilderson’s terms, the libidinal economy of antiblackness is pervasive, regardless of variance or permutation in its political economy. In fact, the application of slave law among the free (that is, the disposition that “with respect to the African shows no internal recognition of the libidinal costs of turning human bodies into sentient flesh”) has outlived in the postemancipation world a certain form of its prior operation—the property relations specific to the institution of chattel and the plantation-based agrarian economy in which it was sustained. [Saidiya] Hartman describes this in her 2007 memoir, Lose Your Mother, as the afterlife of slavery: “a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone . . . a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.” On that note, it is not inappropriate to say that the continuing application of slave law facilitated the reconfiguration of its operation with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, rather than its abolition (in the conventional reading) or even its circumscription “as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” (on the progressive reading of contemporary critics of the prison-industrial complex). It is the paramount value of Loïc Wacquant’s historical sociology, especially in Wilderson’s hands, that it provides a schema for tracking such reconfigurations of anti-blackness “from slavery to mass imprisonment” without losing track of its structural dimensions, its political ontology.

Jared Sexton, People-of-Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery

[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.

[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

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[newtsoftheworldunite]

Abolish Prisons. Free Them All.

Muppet Fact #856

Murray Monster's uncle was incarcerated.

Source:

Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration. 2013.

[rapeculturerealities]

Link to article

[fursasaida]

as previously established, I am not a particularly devout acolyte of Foucault and I am all for critiquing his stuff. howevwr. some people like to make fun of Foucault/his readers by caricaturing discipline & punish, usually in the form of flippantly saying that he just says everything is like prisons. this (in certain niche circles) became enough of a meme that just deadpanning a sentiment such as "did you know schools are like prisons" invoked the whole thing.

but the thing is that schools are. like prisons? like, any prison abolitionist would tell you so. I stumbled into this reddit thread [content note: child death mentioned at the top] where everyone is comparing notes about their experiences as kids or now as parents with navigating school rules that prohibit students carrying their own medications (Advil, inhalers, epipens) and literally. if you are hiding your painkillers inside an M&Ms container with a loose tampon on top so when teachers search you they'll get embarrassed and give it back without looking further. if you have to sit and aggressively bleed on your desk because your teacher won't let you leave class to handle your nosebleed. if you are not to carry playing cards or any kind because the assumption is you would be gambling if you had them. like, it's not subtle.

anyway if I were a more organized person I'd save the link to this thread to use the next time I see "sChOoLs ArE lIkE pRiSoNs 🤪" because like. 🎶have you ever thought about/taping your big mouth shut cause I have many times🎶 and so on and so forth.

[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

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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.

[amst248carcerality]

Jim Crow Remixed

The United States is nothing but a chain 

Shackled to my legs,

Requiring me to sell my labor for pennies 

Be more productive 

You must work to live, the US says

You must work to be a member of society 

You must work like a slave for us

The US says with liberity and justice for all 

But black men and women die at the hands of the police

Trans people die from violence in the street 

Students get shot in the very place they are supposed to learn 

How is this justice? 

Where is the liberty for all of the POCs in prison? 

Treated less than human

Beaten and abused 

Forced to work, 

Forced to be productive 

You must work here to be a productive member of society later, The US says 

But thats not truth 

Because after prison its 

No welfare

No Jobs

No help 

Soon it’s 

Nowhere to stay 

No one understands me 

I can’t live this way 

Then it’s

Doing the best I can but it’s not enough 

The only thing I can do is illegal 

12 has been watching me from afar

The police are out to get me 

UNTIL

I’m back in prison again

The United States is nothing but a chain 

Shackled to my legs, 

There is no real progress 

There is no Justice 

There is no liberty

Only a new manifestation 

Of the same corruption

Just Jim Crow, remixed

-Shawn

[hussyknee]

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