Why is Milwaukee Burning?

Hola mi gente,
I ran across the following research done by a 17-year-old young man named Lew Blank. People see riots and, having little knowledge of history or human behavior, attempt to ascribe it to one incident. In actuality, as history shows, it’s never one incident. Resistance comes about as a response to a culmination of events… The following article was originally posted at The Atlantic CityLab.

Half of Wisconsin's Black Neighborhoods Are Jails

Wisconsin has the highest incarceration rate of African Americans in United States

17-year-old Lew Blank was fiddling around with the Weldon Cooper Center’s Racial Dot Map when he discovered something disturbing about where he lives in Wisconsin: More than half of the African-American neighborhoods in the state are actually jails. Not only that, but the rest of the black neighborhoods across the state are either apartment complexes (projects), Section 8 housing, or homeless shelters -- the sole exception being a working-middle class section of Milwaukee.

Posting his findings on the Young, Gifted, and Black Coalition’s blog, Blank explained that he used the Racial Dot Map to identify where predominantly black neighborhoods -- defined as an “… area where the majority of residents are African Americans” -- are located throughout the state. There are 56 of them, 31 of which are either jails or prisons. There are 15 cities where the only black neighborhood is a jail. The city of Winnebago claims it has an African-American population of more than 19 percent, but most, if not all, of that black population is located among one of four correctional facilities there. It’s perhaps no wonder that Wisconsin perennially comes up as the worst place for African Americans to live in the country. Continue reading here.

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All I can say is fuck you and your respectability politics if that’s how you roll. That some Black and brown people will look for any excuse to blame our own people for the brutal consequences of racism and neo-slavery makes me sick. 

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

The Banality of Evil in the Era of Mass Incarceration

Hola mi gente,

Almost didn’t make it today! This one is an evolving piece.

Normalizing Evil

One of the interesting ways of settling the race problem comes... in this period of unemployment among the poor. In Waterloo, Kentucky, the enterprising chief of police is arresting all unemployed Negroes and putting them in jail, thus securing their labor for the state at the cheapest possible figure. This bright idea... is used through the South and strong sermons and editorials are written against “lazy” Negroes. Despite this there are people in this country who wonder at the increase in “crime” among colored people.

-- W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis, unsigned editorial (1915)

In order to better understand criminal justice systemically, 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 Latino/a -- act as open-air detention centers that differ from jails and prisons only in the degree of freedom of movement. Much of what transpires inside “the walls” of detention centers 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.

Hannah Arendt (2006) proposed the thesis that people who carry out unspeakable crimes, like Eichmann, a top administrator in the machinery of the Nazi death camps, may not be crazy fanatics at all, but rather ordinary individuals who simply accept the premises of their state and participate in any ongoing enterprise with the energy of good bureaucrats.

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 the direct brutalization and killing done by one set of individuals; and another section of society keeping the machinery (sanitation, food supply, etc.) in order; still others producing the implements of brutalization, or working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, a better prison or isolation cell). It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public. Arendt’s “banality of evil” lends an important dimension to the question of the racialized social control that we call mass incarceration.

In a relatively short period of time, we have moved from a nation that dared to envision a Great Society to a nation that now incarcerates more people than any other. While the United States contains five percent of the world’s population, it accounts for twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population (most of those in US prisons are people of color). At the same time, The U.S. remains one of the most violent and crime-ridden of all economically advanced democracies. How did we get here? Well, it was not by accident and it did not happen overnight. In order to understand how we became a nation of prisons we first have to look at crime and punishment from a historical context. While this would be impossible to fully explore in a few pages, I would like to try to give a brief overview. Lastly, I would like to use this perspective as a point of origin with which to critique criminal justice in the United States.

Sociologist Loic Wacquant (2002) maintains that historically not one but several institutions have been implemented to define, confine, and control African-Americans and other people of color in the United States. The first was chattel slavery which made possible the plantation economy and the caste of racial division from colonial times to the Civil War. The second was the Jim Crow system of legally imposed discrimination and segregation that served as the foundation for the agricultural society of the South from the close of Reconstruction to the Civil Rights revolution which toppled it a full century after the abolition of de jure slavery. The United States’ third mechanism for controlling the descendants of slaves in the Northern industrial metropolis was the ghetto. It corresponded with the Great Migration of African-American from 1914–30 to the 1960s, when it was rendered partly obsolete by the mounting protest of blacks against persistent racism, culminating with the urban riots of the 1960s. The fourth, Wacquant contends, is the institutional complex formed by the leftovers of the black ghetto and the prison/ industrial complex with which it has become joined by a linked relationship with institutional racism.

What this suggests is that slavery and mass imprisonment are intrinsically linked and that we cannot understand one -- 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 from the roots of the institution of racism.

Many African-Americans and other people of color are skeptical about justice in the U.S. and alarmed by our criminal justice system. There is an understandably strong sense in communities of color that racial bias in our criminal justice system undermines the notion of equal protection under the law. Many from these communities openly question whether the historically unprecedented massive effort to incarcerate mostly young black and Latino men serves the purpose of public safety. For people living in largely segregated urban centers, the notion of the public good and retribution appears as a facade for an unjust form of social control that helps maintain a system of privilege for whites.

Residents of communities of color experience social justice in a manner that often serves to strip away the veneer of justice from a system that unfairly targets them. The popular and dominant idea of retribution as a legally sanctioned form of punishment is based on the assumption that criminal acts call for punishment separate from the consequences of punishment, such as permanent disenfranchisement and the enduring collateral consequences of imprisonment (i.e., impediments to employment, education, and housing). From this viewpoint, the ends (retribution) justify the means at whatever societal cost. The point being that justice is served only when wrongdoers suffer. In a lawless context, the line between retribution and self-defense is not so clear, but advocates of retribution (“retributivists”) are not interested in retaliation as a reaction to a perceived threat. They advocate retaliation for wrongdoing as a matter of justice.

This led one of the most famous retributivists, Immanuel Kant, to stress the difference between vengeance and retribution (a persistent theme in U.S. popular culture such as the western and noir film genres, by the way). In Kant’s view, vengeance is emotional and personal, reckless and often disproportionate to the crime (Kant, 1996). A civilized society, Kant argued, would replace vengeance with its dispassionate and more rational cousin, retribution. Yet the ideal of retribution carries more than a trace of vengeance, as the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, emphasized (1995). Contemporary retributivists, such as Jeffrie Murphy (2003), for example, urge us to embrace the emotional and the personal value of punishment as retribution. These philosophers accept the connection between vengeance and the justification of punishment. They offer us four conditions that vengeance must meet in order to be considered justice:

1. Communication. The penalty must communicate what the offender did wrong.

2. Desert. The punishment must be deserved.

3. Proportionality. The punishment must fit the crime.

4. Authority. A legitimate authority must administer the punishment.

When these conditions are met, retributivists claim, vengeance leads us to justice.

However, the experience of people of color tells a cautionary tale: the retributivist’s conditions are not met. Advocates and activists from communities of color often assert that the authority of a government that does not care about some of its people cannot claim legitimacy. A legitimate government should serve the interests of all its people, regardless of social status. A government that fails to provide equal protection for all manages only to exercise power, not legitimate authority. To state in the vernacular, might does not make right.

The most basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution associated with our criminal justice system are the following: people should not be subjected to unreasonable searches and seizures (Fourth Amendment); people are innocent until proven guilty through due process of the law (Fifth Amendment); people should not be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment (Eighth Amendment); people should be equally protected by the law (Fourteenth Amendment). Many from communities most negatively impacted by criminal justice policies correctly point out violations of these basic constitutional rights. Police and prosecutorial misconduct, lack of access to legal counsel, unfair and racist sentencing policies, and inhumane prison conditions are all examples of these violations. These are well documented and clearly disproportionately affect African Americans and other people of color.

Consider racial profiling, a policing strategy that is strongly correlated with excessive force (sometimes leading to state-sanctioned murder) and the disproportionate incarceration of minorities (Amnesty International, 2004). Such violations undermine not just rights in the U.S., but international rights as well. In addition, they call into question whether many punishments have been fairly implemented.

Grounds for doubt regarding justice as retribution extend beyond racial bias in its application. Important questions include how could it be known whether the desert condition or the proportionality condition for justice has been justified? Consider the following articulation from a leading retributivist (French, 2001) on fitting the punishment to the crime:

Tailoring the fit appears to depend on the moral sensitivity or intuitions of the punishers. When is the fit right? When does a suit of clothes fit? When it feels right? Yes, but also when it looks right to the wearers and others... Morality is an art, not a science.” [emphasis added]

Such Statements should give us cause for alarm. 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 80 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. Biblical references to the scales of justice, “an eye for an eye,” or vague phrases such as “the art of morality” are woefully inadequate as a justification for a system of justice predicated solely on punishment and serve as a basis with which to challenge the prevailing paradigm of justice as punishment.

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References

Amnesty International. (2004). Threat and humiliation: Racial profiling, domestic security, and human rights in the United States. New York: Amnesty International, USA.

Arendt, H. (2006). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York: Penguin

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1915). Logic. The Crisis, 9, 132.

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans. 2nd ed.). New York: Vintage Books.

French, P. A. (2001). The virtues of vengeance. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

Kant, I. (1996). A definition of justice (from The Metaphysical elements of justice). In J. Westphal (Ed.), Justice (pp. 149-156). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.

Murphy, J. G. (2003). Getting even: Forgiveness and its limits. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wacquant, L. (2002). From slavery to mass incarceration: Rethinking the race question in the US. New Left Review, 13(January-February), 41-60.

i Unless otherwise indicated, all statistics are from the Bureau of justice Statistics

Shame and Violence

Hola mi Gente,
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

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…

Sunday Sermon [Apartheid]

¡Hola! Everybody...
I recently posted a summary of a pair of peer-reviewed studies finding that at the core of political conservatism is resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include: Fear and aggression; Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity; Uncertainty avoidance; Need for cognitive closure; Terror management.
Never the party to disappoint our worst expectations, the ultra-conservative Arizona GOP-dominated legislature unleashed a law so reprehensible, so anti-American in nature, that it could justifiably be compared to the pogroms of Nazi Germany and South African apartheid. It prompted an online participant to joke that a new sign has appeared when you cross the border into Arizona reading, “Welcome to Arizona where being a prejudiced, racist imbecile isn't just a way of life. It's the law!”

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-=[ Arizona Apartheid ]=-

E. A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER, WITHOUT A WARRANT, MAY ARREST A PERSON
IF THE OFFICER HAS PROBABLE CAUSE TO BELIEVE THAT THE PERSON HAS COMMITTED ANY PUBLIC OFFENSE THAT MAKES THE PERSON REMOVABLE FROM THE UNITED STATES.
-- Provision in Arizona Immigration Law, SB 1070

I have heard all kinds of justifications for this law, all coming mostly from whites who just don’t give a fuck because they don’t see how this will affect their rights. Most supporters of the law, in fact, are basing their justifications on immigration myths. The usual, knee-jerk (bigoted), justifications range from the mild (“immigrants don’t bother to learn the language”). To the disgusting (“immigrants are raping babies”). More insidiously, these defenders of racism frame immigration in terms of “illegal,” “drug cartels,” and “gangs.” Set aside the facts that immigrants learn the language, work hard under often deplorable conditions, commit crime at lesser rates than native borns (even whites), and actually contribute positively to the U.S. economy. The rednecks in Arizona spat on the facts and snuggled comfortably with what is the worst of our shared American tradition: bigotry.

The law’s intended consequences (to target people based on the color of their skin or assumed ethnicity) are easy enough to predict, but the new law will also have unintended detrimental effects on Arizona’s economy.

First, the law essentially legalizes racial profiling, an enforcement policy that has been shown to be ineffective. It specifically targets communities of color by requiring state and local government workers to determine if a person is illegally in the United States based on a “reasonable suspicion.”

Arizona governor Brewer’s “sartorial profiling” remarks notwithstanding (in which she suggested identifying illegal immigrants by their shoes -- I am not making this up), the law will result in racial profiling, as it does not prohibit police officers from relying on race or ethnicity in deciding who to investigate. Of course, not all Latino/as look alike. I am of Puerto Rican descent and I have light skin and blue eyes. Similarly, Mexico’s population has the full range of human phenotypic expression. If you don’t believe me, just watch Telemundo for a hot fuckin second. Moreover, what if I am in Arizona and I’m dating a white woman (as I have been known to do)?

What these goobers fail to understand is that the law undermines the Constitution and empowers local police with federal authority. This isn’t an immigrant issue, you blockheads -- it is a civil rights issue! Your civil rights. The measure does not require the local police to have a search warrant or even suspect that some illegal action has occurred.

What really takes the cake is that these bigots don’t even understand they’re shooting themselves in the foot. One of the unintended consequences of the law is that it will devastate state and local economies. The National Employment Law Project, for example, pointed out that smaller-scale anti-immigrant laws have cost individual localities millions of dollars. The Texas-based Perryman Group calculated that if all unauthorized immigrants were removed from Arizona, the state would lose $26.4 billion in economic activity, $11.7 billion in gross state product, and approximately 140,324 jobs. The Immigration Policy Center noted that, “with Arizona facing a budget deficit of more than $3 billion, the new law will “further imperil the state’s economic future.”

Observed Phoenix Vice Mayor Michael Nowakowski, “We’re the laughing stock of the country because of these crazy laws.” Duh... You think?

Ironically, the law hasn’t been well received by the law enforcement community. The costs of arresting, detaining, processing, and transporting undocumented human beings out of Arizona will drain local government treasuries, prompting the Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police to oppose the law. There were an estimated 460,000 undocumented immigrants in Arizona as of January 2009, making up 4 percent of the state’s population. If the federal government were to handle the entire undocumented population, the cost would be approximately $23,482 per person, based on a recent study by the Center for American Progress.

But let’s be sure here: this law isn't about reason or good social policy. Many of the defenders of this law and those reporting on it note that immigration is an "emotional" issue. Let's stop and reflect on these emotions for a moment, the heart of this law: pure, naked, fear and hatred. Fear of an America whose face is changing and race/ ethnicity-based hatred.

Love,

Eddie