Mass Incarceration is NOT the Problem

Hola mi gente,
Thought I’d wade in… LOL

A major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners… and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place of prison in our future?
 -- Angela Y. Davis

Yes you read that right: mass incarceration isn’t the problem. You could close all the prisons you want. You could end mass incarceration right now and it would accomplish very little. In fact, saying you’re for ending mass incarceration is a nice thing to say, but it doesn’t do squat if you’re not addressing the root causes at the core of our society’s way of interacting with Black and Latinx people.

In order to better understand the criminal justice system, one can no longer differentiate between prisons and jails and the communities that serve as feeders for that particular form of racialized social control. In fact, marginalized communities -- mostly Black and Latinx -- act as open-air detention centers that differ from institutions of incarceration only in the degree of freedom of movement. Much of what transpires inside “the walls” of prisons or jails occur in inside the walls of housing projects and surrounding ghettoes, for example. Housing projects very much resemble prisons in the way they are designed and policed -- isolated and rigidly controlled.

The social control of people of color has had several permutations. First there was chattel slavery, which morphed into Jim Crow apartheid, which mutated into the ghetto, and now we have mass incarceration. It’s the spiral dynamics of racialized social control. Mass incarceration is like a cough -- a symptom of a deeper disease. You can address the cough, but if you don’t address the root cause, the disease will continue to destroy the body. Do away with mass incarceration (which will not be happening any time soon, by the way), and you’re still left with the virus that sits at the core of this nation’s soul.

Mass incarceration is symptomatic of the social psychosis of institutional racism. I am asserting that slavery and mass imprisonment are intrinsically linked and that we cannot understand the latter -- its timing, composition, and inception as well as the acceptance of its harmful effects on those it impacts -- without returning to the former as a starting point. In other words, from a historical perspective, the mass incarceration of mostly people of color in the United States is a direct offshoot of the roots of the institution of racism.

Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on “normalization.” This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and even unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as “the way things are done.” There is usually a division of labor in committing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with direct brutalization and killing done by one set of individuals; and another section of society keeping the machinery (e.g., sanitation, food supply, correction officers, judges, lawyers, etc.) in order; still others producing the implements of brutalization, or working on improving the technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, a better prison or isolation cell). It is the function of intellectuals and other experts (many who call themselves social justice advocates), and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public.

This is why it is incorrect to say that our criminal justice system is broken. It isn’t. It has been working exactly as it was meant to work for centuries.

The lack of a shared basis for moral judgment in a multicultural, multiethnic, multi-religious nation dooms the justification of punishment. The economic cost of our system of punishment stands at about 100 billion dollars per year. It destroys families and communities, and it deprives those caught in its maws their most basic liberties, sometimes for a lifetime. Vacuous references to “ending mass incarceration” or vague phrases are woefully inadequate as resistance to a system of justice predicated solely on race and punishment and do not serve as a foundation with which to challenge the prevailing paradigm of justice as punishment.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

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Idiocracy and the Wall

Hola Everybody,

Yeah, it’s cold, but I love living in a temperate zone where the seasons change. Or at least they did before climate change J

Wall Street

Fact: Some young Black and Latino men are detained at Rikers Island -- New York City’s penal colony -- at the cost of upwards to $2000,000per human being annually.
Fact: Public officials resist increases in education spending. A fraction of what it costs to lock a child up.
Fact: Overwhelmingly, incarcerated children are people of color.

As a young man, one summer I managed to get a messenger job at a small brokerage house on Wall St. One of my best friends, a darker-skinned brother, had been working there before me and he put in the good word. By the end of the summer, I had moved up (again, with the help of my friend) and was now balancing the sheets. That was a promotion and a raise.

I was very young back then and not too motivated. I wasn’t very responsible: I would miss days and I wasn’t all that inspired. Yet, when another promotion came up later that year, my friend was passed up and the promotion was offered to me. This was bullshit, and everybody knew it. My friend had been there longer than I had, had more experience, and was there at work every day. We both know it was because I was light-skinned and he wasn’t. I was going to quit because I couldn’t bear it, but my friend insisted that I take the job. He said they would only give it to someone else.

We learned early on it paid to look or be white!

I mention this because I spent most of my young adulthood working at various places on Wall St. Let me tell you: Wall St. in the 1980s?! DAMN! It was crazy out there! The culture of Wall St. and my love for the party life took me down hard. By the end of the 80s, I was blackballed from working on the Street, spiraling deep into my addiction. I worked hard and I played harder. It wasn’t unusual to go on a business lunch and instead of it being a two-martini lunch, it was acceptable -- even expected -- to have a three-line lunch. Cocaine was king on the Street. I can’t say it was all regret. I fact, I had a lot of fun. I partied a lot, used a lot, spent a lot -- well, you get the idea.

I had two very close friends -- crib brothers as we used to say back in the day. Where you saw one, the others weren’t too far behind. We grew up together, became men together and we worked on the Street.

Anyway, we would always meet at this park -- Jeannette Park -- at lunch on Fridays to drink rum and coke, and smoke weed, plan our weekends. One day, there was this older black dude who always seemed to check us out. I mean, we were pretty much out there, always surrounded by women, and dressed to the nines -- young and cocksure muthafuckas. Anyway, this dude came up to us and shared some of this fierce weed he was smoking and he told us a story I never forgot. He asked if we knew the history of where we were standing and acting all cocksure and shit, and I told him, me always being the smartass, “Yeah! Fuckin' Wall St.!” He smiled... 

He said, Wall Street became the financial capitalist center because it was the first big slave trade center in the colonies, and, later, the new nation’s principal slave trading port, where the business of slavery was transacted (until 1862).

He continued, And as the business of slavery went, so did all other businesses. For about 125 years, there was a wall that separated the financiers, speculators and bankers from the stench, humiliation, and daily grime of young New York’s vibrant slave trade business and African and white working-class residential areas.

Hence the name, Wall St.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

Neo Slavery

Hola Everybody,
I keep coming back to this piece, which is an short version of a larger chapter in the book-I-will-ever-write. LOL My blog is sometimes an experiment where I continue to revisit some rants again and again.

The Psychological Plantation

We’re all doing time.
 -- Bo Lozoff

It is said that when slaves were “freed,” the chains were laid out before them and the doors to the plantation were opened wide. Most, however, chose to stay on plantation, not because they liked it but because they had been conditioned to believe that their very survival depended on their servitude. Sometimes it is the same with individuals who have experienced long periods of incarceration: they have become “institutionalized” -- conditioned to being told what to do and when. Even eating, shitting, sleeping, showering becomes difficult when you have been forced to accept servitude.

Today the average person accepts more hours at a lower wage, or fewer hours, which usually means the loss of health care and other benefits (how do you think Wal-Mart makes all that money?). All this is done in the name of profit. You can be assured that when a slave is freed it is because he or she will make more money for Boss Hawg as a free agent. When a worker is praised, you can be sure he is more than likely sweating gold.

Today we measure progress by increments in the margin of profit: how much you make off the sweat of others (whether the labor of your employee or the slave labor of some child in some far-off “developing market”). Your success is measured how much you make off your money in the bank, off the exchange of international currency -- and how much you stand to lose.

We are all governed by this margin. It is like a river we have come to depend on for our subsistence; a river that gives us life-giving water and news from upstream. It has been the major artery of human interaction for centuries, and most of us believe it is the only way that a nation can be great. If we fail at education, when our children cannot add or read, we can always import mathematicians from Russia or China, or engineers from India.

We can buy almost anything we want because almost everyone seems to want to live where he or she can be a millionaire from hard work or pure luck. Not even real profit, but just the illusion or dream of a profit holds millions of US citizens in thrall. It’s like an obsessive/ compulsive disorder -- like gambling or drugs. But this over preoccupation with profit is far more harmful than any drug. This obsession with the margin of profit grinds everything that is good and human about us into the unnamable globs of meat by-products squeezed into synthetic cases that are sold by the pound and then forgotten.

Our values are turd-like products pounded out with assembly line-like efficiency and sealed in plastic -- this is our identity. Truth here has no value. The cure for cancer is far less important than the commodified ideal of profit over people.

For profit we will overlook the needless deaths of tens of thousands of our fellow compatriots, we will ignore rape and genocide. For profit, we will accept and rationalize apartheid, slavery, and even lawlessness in isolated cases. For the margin of profit, we will enslave our own people. For even the hope of a profit, a worker will mangle mind, soul, and body doing the work of two women or three.

And here we are -- all of us. Profit is made on a grand scale in America, but not all of us share in it. Most of us work for currencies that fluctuate in value, workplaces that dehumanize us, where our hearts are destroyed. We -- all of us -- we live in the margin of profit. The money taken from labor is used to buy political power that does not represent us. Our taxes pay for federally licensed airwaves that we no longer control, for economic bailouts that are thinly disguised welfare handouts for the rich, for the trillions we waste on “national defense,” and for a criminal justice system that cannot keep heroin out our children’s hands but incarcerates them in numbers unprecedented in the history of humankind.

Broken roads and schools, children who are brutalized by state-sanctioned violence, and prisons that are traded on the Dow Jones -- these are also the margins of profit. The verb, then, is to marginalize. We are all marginalized by the dogma of Capitalism. We are mere entries in the ledgers of the banks that are too big to fail. We are the skin that defines the monster that tells us He is the only way. God, this monster tells us, can only be defined by the margin of profit. We pray to Him and even sacrifice our children to Him.

Let us be clear: the world of profit is a world of plunder. Progress is defined by this margin but it says nothing of the quality of life and of goodness. Fair, defined by the margin, is what you can get away with.

If profit is the only way, then we have truly never left the inner plantation of our collective psychological enslavement. Like those poor souls whose minds have been broken, we can no longer envision a world without a master... 

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

The Friday Sex Blog [White Feminists, Shackling, and the Carceral State]

Hola mi gente,
I am sick of white feminists¹ whose sense of privilege extends to thinking they can browbeat me, a Latino, and lecture me on oppression.

Real life example: One day, after being screamed at by a young white woman for walking too closely to her (I live in NYC, it’s fuckin crowded!) while ignoring the white man who was walking in closer proximity to her, and then being followed by security at a rare books store that I have shopped at countless times, a co-worker -- a white woman raised in the south -- thought it was appropriate to attempt to correct my language in front of two (white) female interns I was charged with supervising. The word she found offensive? “Guys.”

What her privileged white ass didn’t know was that the interns and I had been in conversation about language. In fact, I have been at the forefront of advocating against stigmatizing language for almost two decades. So, my using “guys” to refer to all of us, was part of an inside joke. If you know me, you know I didn’t stay shut on that and I gave her a piece of my mind. The irony was that, for the two interns, her behavior was a lesson in how not be a feminist.

So, yeah, if your feminist analysis doesn’t include intersectionality², you can kiss my Puerto Rican ass.

Shackling and the Carceral State

When I was the director of a Brooklyn-based reentry project, I made a concerted effort to use its resources to reach out to women. How it happened was that one day I was thinking out loud with some my women participant-leaders about why more women didn’t utilize our services. One of the women laughed and said, as if it was as plain as the nose on my face, “Because you’re thinking like a man, Eddie!” and they all started laughing.

When I thought about it, however, I realized, painful as it seemed, that she had a point. Just for the record, I identify as a feminist. I’m also aware that I do as a man in a patriarchal society, so I have blind spots. I see my role as an ally, as in, how can I help. I’m also a man of Puerto Rican descent, so it’s not like I’m clueless about the impact of white patriarchy.

In any case, I met with the few women of the project and we came up with a few ideas. That’s when it was decided that I would bring my leadership development workshop to women about to be released from jails/ prisons. That’s how I ended up at the Rikers Island detention center for women, Rose M. Singer, or Rosie’s, as people who worked there called it.

I am an experienced group facilitator, having run men’s and mixed groups for years, but I have to tell you, running women’s groups was one of the most challenging experiences in my career. Well, I shouldn’t say challenging. It was challenging in the sense that I learned so much, especially in the area of leadership development. It was also one of the most rewarding, and the women had as much of an impact on me as I hope I had on them. After more than ten years, I still see some of “my” women, some of whom have become activists and advocates in their own right.

At one point, I thought the women would be better served if I hired a woman to help run the groups, but they revolted! LOL They didn’t want me to leave. Sure, there was some transference going on, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. As one of the participants put it, “Most of the men we’ve known weren’t good to us, Mr. Eddie. Maybe doing this work with you, will help as a model so that in our future relationships we won’t make the same kind of choices.”

They taught me so much… 

One day, when I got to the workshop, the group was huddled together, whispering. In the middle there was this lovely young black woman, she was maybe nineteen years-old, if I remember correctly. Unsure of herself, the women encouraged her, saying, “You can tell him, he’s one of us. You can trust him. Go ahead, tell him.”

Then this young woman, barely out of her teens, proceeded to tell me a story that was so horrific, it traumatized me, and I hadn’t experienced it. She told of her experience of being shackled while in labor. In her retelling, she began to experience again the brutality of giving birth as a slave. Before she was finished, her tears were flowing and, breaking protocol, I took her in my arms and hugged her. Here was a young girl who could’ve been my daughter… man, I’m upset just thinking about it. 

Can you imagine that? Here are in the 21^st century and black and Latina women, and poor women are being forced to give birth while shackled. Giving birth while in captivity. Going into labor while shackled like an animal. This is as a form of state-sanctioned rape (which also happens a lot in women’s prisons). 

For that group’s graduation, I invited a state senator, Sen. Velmanette Montgomery, who was an ally, and I told her about this practice. The senator did not believe me. I didn’t blame her, because it was hard for me to believe. We spoke to several medical personnel and, though at first they wouldn’t say it on the record, they confirmed that it was true.

My god… 

The Senator Montgomery went on to make that issue her signature policy and working with a coalition of women’s groups, they were able to pass legislation to make the practice illegal. I went on work for an organization that played a pivotal role in helping to pass this piece of legislation. In fact, during a day of lobbying, I ran into one of the women who was part of that workshop cycle. However, that’s the bare minimum. There are loopholes in at least nine of the states with laws -- either no specific language about shackling women during their first, second, and third trimesters; when they’re being transported to the hospital; or postpartum. That means pregnant women are still being shackled in states where there are laws against shackling pregnant women. Luckily in New York, an additional law was passed that closed off the loopholes.

But this still happens across this nation. I believe there are 28 states that still practice this particular form of barbarism. We are savages.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Notes:

1. Briefly put, intersectionality is a theory of how different types of discrimination interact.
2. White feminism is a brand of feminism centered around the ideals and struggles of primarily white women. While not outright exclusive, its failure to consider other women and its preoccupation with Western standards and the problems faced by the "average woman" is often alienating to women of color, non-straight women, trans women, and women and men belonging to religious or cultural minorities.