Yesterday, I spent the whole day in lobbying in Albany to essentially do away with the practice of torture often called solitary confinement. One of the consequences of politicians such as Hillary Clinton, who championed get tough on crime policies that have decimated Black and Latinx communities, is the increased practice of caging human beings in a cell not much bigger than a small closet, for 23 hours a day every day -- often for years.
I spent less than a month in an isolation unit and by the second week, I was prowling the small cell and talking to myself. One guard, who had something against me, hinted that he had pissed and put shit in my food, so I wasn’t eating. By the third week, I was having difficulty separating what was in my head from reality. The screams I heard throughout the day and night, screams from people with mental health needs, were horrifying and disorienting. Then there were the screams of people who were being beaten by the guards.
The UN considers anything more than 15 days of isolated confinement as cruel and unusual punishment. But in the United States, because we’re seen as animals -- super-predators -- we’re subjected to abuse that would make most people angry if the abuse were directed at a dog, let alone a human being.
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Formerly incarcerated people at the vanguard of criminal justice reform. |
Shame and Violence
Retribution as justice is the
disease of a society gone mad with the lust for vengeance.
-- Eddie
-- Eddie
Some of you know that I work in the area of
criminal justice. More specifically, for ten years, I helped create and
eventually became the director of a (now defunct) community-based re-entry
project called Developing
Justice that offered support to the many men and women returning to their
communities after incarceration. More recently, I have worked for an
organization, The
Correctional Association, where I was able to utilize a human rights
perspective as a way to advocate for policies that decreased our dependence on
incarceration and create more human conditions in prisons.
One of the things I like most about the work that I
do is being a part of network of formerly incarcerated men and women who are at
the vanguard of the push for criminal justice reform. As my friend, Glenn
Martin, of JustLeadership,
likes to say, those who are closest to the problem are often closest to the
solutions
One of my areas of interest is challenging what
many of us are calling the punishment paradigm -- the notion that
punishment, without regard to rehabilitation is an effective means of social
justice. Of course, it isn’t. In fact, there’s an empirically strong case for hyper-incarceration
as a factor in increases in violence and violent crime. I tend to agree
with this, generally speaking. I actually see it all the time. I will also
submit that there is very little difference in the lived of experiences of
people in prison and the people who live in communities that are the pipeline
to those prisons -- for the most part communities of color. In fact, Black and
Latinx communities often resemble open air prisons.
Psychiatrist James
Gilligan, who has worked in prisons for 35 years, describes an interesting
experience that I think is connected to all this. He was called in to resolve a
vicious cycle with a prisoner in which he would assault corrections officers
and they would in turn physically abuse him. The more they abused him the more
violent he became, and the more violent he became the more they abused him.
Nothing they did (at least legally) would stop this man from assaulting the
officers.
When Gilligan went to see this man he asked him
what he thought was an obvious question, “What do you want so badly that you
are willing to give up everything else in order to get it?” His answer
astonished the doctor. Usually inarticulate to the point that it was difficult
to get a clear answer to any question, he stood up, and with perfect clarity he
stated authoritatively: “Pride. Dignity. Self-esteem.” And then he added, “And
I’ll kill every motherfucker in that cell block if I have to in order to get
it.” He went on to describe how the officers were attempting to strip away his
last shred of dignity and self-esteem by disrespecting him, and said, “I still
have my pride and I won’t let them take that away from me. If you ain’t got
pride, you got nothin'.” He made it clear that he would die before he would
humble himself to the officers by submitting to their abuse.
According to Gilligan, this wasn’t uncommon. In
fact, several hundred violent criminals in this country provoke their own
deaths at the hands of the police in exactly that way every year. Indeed, this
phenomenon is so common that police forces (and this is not counting the clear
cases of police misconduct) around the country have given it a nickname:
“suicide by cop.” In World War II, Japan’s kamikaze pilots behaved in a way
that had much the same result, as do contemporary suicide bombers in the Middle
East and elsewhere.
Articulating a powerful insight, Gilligan adds, “In
the prisons and on the streets of the United States, such behavior appears to
be committed by people who are so tormented by feelings of being shamed and
disrespected by their enemies that they are willing to sacrifice their bodies
and their physical existence to replace those intolerable feelings with the
opposite feelings of pride and self-respect, and of being honored and admired
by their allies and at least respected by their enemies. Such people experience
the fear that they provoke in their victims as a kind of ersatz form of
respect, the only type they are capable of achieving.”
I certainly agree with Gilligan except that I see
his use of the label “enemies” as a product of his white privilege. What he
calls enemies are, in fact, the very social institutions that are meant to
protect and serve us.
Here’s the travesty: as a society we recreate
environments, at an enormous social and economic expense, that exacerbate these
feelings of impotent rage. Our prisons and communities are filled with people
who have become part of a long-standing human experiment in how to destroy a
whole group of people through racialized social control. In other words, we
address social issues such as addiction, lack of access to quality education,
poverty, structural racism, and domestic violence, for example, by punishing --
incarcerating -- the people most impacted by inequality. The icing on the cake
is that we do this at an enormous economic expense and that money gets taken
out of, yes, you guessed it, “luxuries” such as education, drug treatment,
economic investment in marginalized communities, and so on.
There has to be a better way. In fact,
there are better ways. Gilligan has run an extremely successful prison
restorative justice
program utilizing his insights, for example. I believe that at least
half (and maybe more) of the mostly Black and Latinx people in cages right now,
don’t belong there. It is common knowledge that education and supportive
services such as drug treatment, workforce development, educational
opportunities -- in essence a Marshall Plan for our own devastated communities
-- cost a fraction of the billions prisons cost us today and are much
more effective at reducing violence and crime.
Not too long ago, while reviewing some literature,
a colleague sent me the following snippet:
In the Babemba tribe of South Africa, when a
person acts irresponsibly or unjustly, he is placed at the center of the
village, alone and unfettered. All work ceases, and everyone in the village
gathers in a large circle around the accused. Then each person in the tribe
speaks to the accused, one at a time, recalling the good things the person has
done in his life. Every experience that can be recalled with detail and
accuracy is recounted. All his positive attributes, good deeds, strengths, and
kindnesses are recited carefully. This ceremony often lasts for several days.
At the end, a joyous celebration takes place, and the person is symbolically
and literally welcomed back into the tribe.”
I believe we need what my departed friend, Eddie
Ellis, called human justice.
Essentially, Eddie offered “an instructive vision for what 'justice' looks like
in the context of the needs, aspirations and well-being of ordinary people.”
Wow, justice for the 99% what a fuckin’ crazy idea,
huh?
My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from
civilization…
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