Sunday Sermon [Human Dignity]

Hola mi gente,
As if you needed more proof that the war on drugs was just another way to lock up Blacks and Latinx and radicals, more and more key players at the center of the CIA-crack cocaine scandal continue to come forward. While things did not turn out well for Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb, who stunned the world with his “Dark Alliance” newspaper series (Webb’s top editor abandoned him, he was drummed out of journalism by the Times and Washington Post and other leading newspapers, and eventually committed “suicide”), it seems he will have the last word.

A documentary, Freeway: Crack in the System, by Marc Levin (released at the same time Hollywood version of Webb’s life, Kill the Messenger, was released)... 

“…  not only explores the corrupt foundations of the drug war itself, but also calls into question the draconian jail sentences the U.S. justice system meted out to a mostly minority population, while the country’s own foreign policy abetted the drug trade.”

Today's image is courtesy of the upcoming film, The Birth of a Nation. As one critic put it, it's like a “... punch to the gut.”

Seeing the Human

Not too long ago, a high ranking correctional officer admonished me for missing a workshop at this facility. It seems that my workshop participants, thinking I had been replaced, expressed their disapproval so vehemently, they had to call in reinforcements. I run workshops in Rikers Island, one of the most infamous penal colonies in the world at one of their most problematic facilities, Anne M Kross (“AMKC”). The captain asked me what was I did that created such loyalty. I just shrugged and said, “I treat them like with respect.”

Saying shit like that always gets me in trouble. 

I considered it a compliment, especially considering that the NYC Dept. of Corrections (DOC) bureaucrats who run these programs have huge problems with how I facilitate my workshops. The greatest compliment, however, is whenever I run into a brother or sister on the outside and they come up to me to hug me. I remember being in an isolation ward and telling one the brothers there, “You don’t belong here.” He said he would come see me when he got released and he did. He’s now involved in a campaign to do away with the torture of solitary confinement. 

Still, as I further reflected about my workshop participants’ “mutiny” I was reminded of the the thing I do that perhaps others don’t: I refuse to see them as criminals. I see them as human beings. I believe that all people, regardless of their criminal justice status, have the right, as we all do, to live with dignity and their humanity respected and valued. 

I have seen and worked with many people who had committed murder, but I have never seen a murderer. I have seen many people who had stolen from others, but I have never seen a thief. And here’s the hardest one for me. I have even seen and worked with people who had committed terrible sex crimes, but I have never seen a sex offender. Throughout the years, I have evolved enough to realize than any person is more than a crime. 

It is irrational to define people by their worst act or acts. It denies the existence of all the other deeds they have committed, the many good or even noble, acts. I recognize those other deeds, the other, good aspects of their personalities. I see people who had done a crime, not criminals, or inmates, detainees, or cons, or animals.

When I began to see the people instead of just the crimes, they also saw the good parts of themselves. In giving respect, they respected me, and as a consequence, respected themselves. They began to have self-respect without denying their crime

Unless you have been living under a rock, you most know by now that as a nation, The United States incarcerates more people than any other nation on the planet. We’re in the midst of a brutal social experiment in which we have enslaved black and brown people and poor people. We’re so hell-bent on retribution and punishment that we have lost sight of the humanity of our brothers and sisters and in the process, we have lost our souls.

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

Sunday Sermon [Karma]

Hola mi Gente,

Recently, I’ve been seriously thinking about doing overseas humanitarian work. It’s something I have always wanted to do and perhaps this moment of transition in my life is the right time. Hmm…

On another completely unrelated note, feminist icon, Gloria Steinem, recently made some disparaging comments regarding young women Bernie Sanders supporters. Those who know and have worked with me know that I identify as a feminist. I also realize that my feminist identification is colored by the reality that I am a Latino cis man in a sexist society. I also have problems with what some call “white feminism: a feminism that is blind (consciously or otherwise) to issues of race and ethnicity (see here).

Having heard Steinem speak on a number of occasions, the racial component of her feminist analysis seemed to me an “added on” or artificial component-- something wedged on after the fact. That she would be so condescending to young women as to say that they’re only for Sanders because that’s where the boys are, as she did on television this past Friday, perhaps demonstrates that a form of thinking that has ossified (I won’t even mention another scold, Madeline Albright, who said the death of 500,000 innocent Iraqi women and children was “worth it”). I most certainly will not be voting for Hillary because of her ties to Wall St. and her warmongering and I don’t think it takes away from my commitment to feminism any more than the fact that my decision not to vote for any of the two Latinos, Rubio and Cruz, lessens my commitment to equality for my people.

Fuck you, Gloria, maybe it’s time you took a seat -- make that two seats!

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Karma

Contrary to popular misconception, karma has nothing to do with punishment and reward. It exists as part of our holographic universe’s binary or dualistic operating system only to teach us responsibility for our creations -- and all things we experience are our creations.

-- Sol Luckman

In the allegorical novella, The Mountain, a man climbing a mountain kills a diseased old rat thinking he’s done something beneficial. What he didn’t realize was that the old rat, because it was too old and toothless, fed exclusively on certain insects. Once the rat was gone, these insects, who borrowed into the soil, multiplied causing soil erosion which eventually led to landslides and the destruction of an ecology.

Take a spiritual concept developed in one culture and transplant it to another and it will often be mangled beyond recognition. Nowhere is this truer than in Eastern spiritual practices adopted by Westerners raised mostly in Old Testament, Christian/ Judeo ideology. And nowhere is this truer than the law of karma.

Karma (kamma in Pali), in its simplest form, means action. But karma is more than cause and effect. It’s not merely “reaping what you sow.” In fact, the historical Buddha called the workings of karma one of the “four unconjecturables.” We could drive ourselves crazy speculating on how it will play out, he said (Anguttara Nikaya 4.77).

Most questions and difficulties regarding karma and rebirth come from an understanding of karma in which people who suffer in this life probably caused some wrong in a previous life. Yet I cannot imagine that the millions of victims of slavery, for example, that occurred throughout history suffer because of karmic law. Or, for another example, the case of a little girl was brutalized by her stepfather. She suffered in ways most adults will never understand and died sitting in cat litter, punishment for daring to eat some yogurt. I have a huge problem justifying that as “karma.”

In the earliest Buddhist writings, including the Pali Canon, it is clear that while karma has a significant bearing on the course of one’s life, other factors also influence one’s situation (see, for instance, Samyutta Nikaya, 36.21); not least of these is the karma of other people, which we cannot control. However, some Buddhist traditions emphasize individual karma as the sole cause of one’s happiness/sorrow. The implication of this is troubling: that those who suffered in Rwanda, for example, were reaping the consequences of karma sown in previous lives. 

I view the popular understanding of karma in the West as flawed and not very convincing, nor even helpful. It is ridiculous to look at the suffering of others and speculate that their predicament must result from their karma from former lives, especially when we cannot know the connections between their present condition and their former conduct. The factors that create the circumstances of an individual’s life are many and complex. Viewing the misfortunes of others purely in terms of their previous karma may encourage us to think that they must deserve them, which is not a skillful attitude.

On the other hand, it may be helpful for us to reflect that when misfortune befalls us we may have contributed to the situation; not so that we indulge in self-loathing and blame (which are forms of attachments and thus lead to more suffering), but because it may encourage us to be more vigilant regarding our patterns of behavior. I can tell you without qualification that in terms of Buddhism, the appropriate response to the sufferings of others is compassion.

Finally, there is the seemingly widespread belief (or, more correctly, desire) that those who put us down or gloat over our misfortunes, or do things to us that hurt us, and are unjustified receive some form of karmic payback. I see the status updates on Facebook and other social media and this is usually framed as the desire to remove “negative people” from our lives, or people who we need to get rid of and who will suffer greatly because of karma. 

Frankly put, this is immaturity. To me this is a childish notion, grounded in unskillful reactions that do not come from other so-called “negative” people, but from our own hurt and insecurity. This has nothing to do with karma. Believe me, I understand that there are painful experiences and that maybe you would feel justified knowing that the perpetrators of this pain will suffer as a consequence. But is this at best a hypocritical wish? After all, which is worse: gloating over the misfortunes of others or enjoying the hoped for humiliation of the one who gloats? Wishing suffering on others is not a virtue. Perhaps rather than thinking of what punishment those who harm us will receive, you could instead consider how unsatisfying their life must be for them to act in such a petty way. In terms of “punishment” for their conduct, well, at the very least, they would seem to have lost the benefit of your friendship.

Wishing or desiring suffering for others, even those who have harmed us, is bad karma.

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

Retribution as Justice

¡Hola! Everybody...

The most challenging aspect of blogging is the art of adequately articulating complex issues in everyday language in a short amount of space. I often miss the mark in this regard. Some of the following will serve as the basis of my discussion at Columbia University this morning.

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From the Plantation to the Bing: Retribution

You ain’t gotta be locked up to be in prison / Look how we livin’ / 30,000 niggas a day up in the bing, standin routine / They put us in a box, just like our life on the block.

-- Dead Prez, Behind Enemy Lines

            Some of the poorest Brooklyn city blocks are also some of the priciest. You couldn’t tell by the surroundings or by the people who live there -- mostly people of color most of whom live below the poverty line. They are called million dollarblocks by criminal-justice experts who study this phenomenon: In Brooklyn at one point, there were 35 blocks that fit this category -- city blocks where so many residents were sent to state prison that the total cost of their incarceration exceeded more than $1 million.

            At the same time, a quick look at the surrounding schools and other social institutions in these areas would bring shame to any right-thinking American, regardless of color. The following is an attempt to articulate a problem from a civil rights perspective with a street-smart sensibility.

            In a relatively short period of time, we have moved from a nation that had the audacity to envision a Great Society to a nation that now incarcerates more people than any other. While the U.S. has 5% of the world’s population, it accounts for 25% of the world’s prison population (most of those in US prisons are people of color). At the same time, we remain the most violent and crime-ridden of all advanced democracies

            How did we get here? Well, it wasn’t by accident and it didn’t happen overnight. In order to understand how we became a nation of prisons we have to look at crime and punishment from a historical context. A task I couldn’t possibly hope to do in a one or two-page Word document. Still, before I move on, I have to at least try.

            Sociologist Loic Wacquant (2002) maintains that historically not one but several institutions have been implemented to define, confine, and control African-Americans 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 abolition. America’s third mechanism for containing the descendants of slaves in the Northern industrial metropolis was the ghetto. It happen along with the African-American Great Migration of 1914–30 to the 1960s, when it was rendered partly obsolete by the mounting protest of blacks against continued 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 silent ignorance and acceptance of its harmful effects on those it affects -- without returning to the former as a starting point. In other words, from a historical viewpoint, the mass incarceration of mostly people of color in the United States is a direct offshoot from the roots of the institution of racism.

            Now, you might be wondering what I mean by a “street-smart sensibility,” and if you bear with me, I’ll try to explain. I cannot, in all good conscience, profess to know much about present-day urban street culture. As a Nuyorican born and raised in the ghettos of New York City, however, I was raised during hip hop’s inception (an articulation of the street if there ever was one) long before MTV got hip to it, and long before hip-hop culture became mainstream. I will be honest and say I stopped listening to hip hop before it made its way to the mainstream of U.S. popular culture (via Yo! MTV Raps or BET). However, through the years I have maintained an interest in some groups that I felt offered a powerful social message -- groups such as Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, and some others, but I don’t know jack about contemporary hip-hop, nor do I like much of it. For me, hip-hop was more than a musical genre; it was a ghetto scream calling out for recognition, combining several elements of modern and traditional culture, not the least of which was technology. Hip-hop was an urban folklore expressing the gritty reality of life in the mostly black and Puerto Rican ghettos of New York City.

            I think hip-hop is relevant to a discussion of mass incarceration because its attitude and moral stance is often called into question and vilified by both black and white conservatives. I contend that hip-hop, as the main vehicle for a philosophy of the street, informs this discussion and has the potential to give it a proper philosophical framework.

            Hip-hop as the dominant chosen form of entertainment and instruction of gifted young people, has both good and bad effects. If we look beyond the polemics, hip-hop also serves to resist (and sometimes reinforce) the effects of a postmodern world steeped in free-market fundamentalism, aggressive macho militarianism, and increasing privatization of the social sphere. The racial dimension of hip-hop is unavoidable, and it is here where hip-hop, if looked at as more than mere cultural expression, can inform and illuminate the present dialog.

If we view criminal justice as retribution, then we have to acknowledge that justice as retribution mirrors the sentiment that vengeance is sweet, redeeming those who have been wronged at the hands of others. It is a desire often expressed by rappers themselves. Yet their desire for retribution isn’t proposed as part of a legitimate system of punishment. For one, the situations they portray are oftentimes way outside the law. However, lurking under rappers’ desire to settle scores lies a steadfast belief that the law does not (and never did) protect them. If the law doesn’t protect you and won’t guarantee justice, then it follows that you may have to protect yourself from your enemies.

            Many rappers are skeptical about justice in America and alarmed by our criminal justice system. Hip-hop lyrics strongly suggest that racial bias in our criminal justice system undermines the notion of equal protection under the law. They also strenuously question whether the historically unprecedented massive effort to incarcerate black men serves the purpose of public safety. For them, 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. Rap music often aims to strip away the veneer of justice from a system that unfairly targets youth of color.

Circle the block where the beef’s at / and park in front of my enemy’s eyes/ They see that it’s war we life-stealers, hollow-tip busters.

-- Nas, Every Ghetto

            The popular 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. From this perspective, the ends (in this case, 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 the western and film noir genres, by the way). In Kant’s view, vengeance is emotional and personal, reckless and often disproportionate to the crime.

            A civilized society, Kant argued, would replace vengeance with retribution. Yet the ideal of retribution carries more than a trace of vengeance, as the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, emphasized in Discipline and Punish: The Birthof the Prison (1995). Some recent retributivists, as in Jeffrie Murphy’s Getting Even, 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:

• Communication. The penalty must communicate what the offender did wrong.
• Desert. The punishment must be deserved.
• Proportionality. The punishment must fit the crime.
• Authority. A legitimate authority must administer the punishment.

            When these conditions are met, it is claimed, vengeance leads us to justice. However, rappers and street poets tell us a cautionary tale -- the retributivist’s conditions aren’t met. For many people living in marginalized communities, the overriding sentiment is that the authority of a government that doesn’t care about some of its people can’t claim legitimacy. A legitimate government serves the interests of all its people, including minority groups. A government that fails to provide equal protection for all manages only to exercise power, not legitimate authority. In other words, might does not make right.

            The most basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution and 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 (Eight Amendment); people should be equally protected by the law (Fourteenth Amendment).

            Many street artists and activists correctly point out violations of these basic constitutional rights -- police and prosecutorial misconduct, lack of access to legal counsel, unfair sentencing policies, and inhumane prison conditions. These are well documented and disproportionately affect African Americans and Latino/as.

Consider the ongong trail regarding the racially inspired stop and frisk policies of the NYPD. Racial profiling is a policing strategy that is strongly correlated with excessive force and the disproportionate incarceration of minorities (Amnesty International, 2004). Problems such as these 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 about punishment as retribution extend beyond racial bias in its application. How could we know whether the desert condition or the proportionality condition for justice as retribution has been justified? Consider the following articulation from a leading retributivist 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.

            Statements such as this should give us cause for alarm. The lack of a shared basis for moral judgment in a multicultural, multiethnic, multi-religious America dooms the justification of punishment. In the U.S. the system of punishment costs about 60 billion dollars per year. It destroys families and communities, and it deprives those caught in its maws their most basic liberties, often for a lifetime. Biblical references to the scales of justice, “an eye for an eye,” or the art of morality are woefully inadequate as a justification for a system of punishment.

            The main justification or rationale for punishment is in actuality about social control, not desert. Many artists, activists and just plain people from besieged communities know this all too well through often humiliating personal experience. The philosophical roots of punishment as social control come from what is known as the “consequentialist” school who argued that punishment can only be justified when it has good consequences for society. Particularly, punishment is rationalized by considerations of deterrence, rehabilitation, or incapacitation.

Deterrence is achieved when, through punishment, people who commit crimes or might potentially commit crimes are discouraged from doing so. Rehabilitation is achieved when a person who has committed a crime no longer has the desire to commit crimes and that desire is replaced by a respect for the social contract. Incapacitation is achieved when those who have committed crimes can no longer do so because they are incarcerated. Artists, activists, and people from the streets rightfully express skepticism about whether anything but incapacitation is achieved by punishment.

            I have shown that the moral standing of a criminal justice system becomes precarious when the rights of members of groups that are considered outsiders are not protected. This makes it difficult to secure respect for the law, which lessens the prospects for rehabilitation. Deterrence is similarly undermined when the conditions outside of prisons resemble a jungle. When people are poor, unemployed, without hope, locked out of educational and economic opportunities, and subjected to the trauma of violence and police abuse, prison becomes something less foreboding. I would submit that the separation between prisons and the largely black and brown communities that feed them is a delusion. People move from medium and maximum-security communities to medium and maximum-security prisons and back again. And we call this “reentry (another fallacy).

            Of course, prison is in many ways worse than life on the streets, but the point here is that people in difficult social circumstances are more willing to take risks, especially when, to paraphrase Langston Hughes, the “dream explodes.” This fact, which is part of the trauma of living in the ghetto, weakens the effectiveness of punishment as a deterrent.

            What we’re left with here is incapacitation and it is the wholesale incapacitation of mostly black and brown men…

Notes:

“The Bing” is slang for prison and/ or solitary confinement

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

Resources

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

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

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