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… 

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, please consider helping me out by sharing it, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even throwing me some money on GoFundMe HERE or via PayPal HERE so I can keep calling it like I see it.

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…

Cornering the Market

Hola Everybody,
In an intro to Metro Studies class, I had a wonderful professor, Robert Fitch. He authored The Assassination of New York, a cutting and searing indictment of the financial and real-estate elites who wrecked New York. Unfortunately, Mr. Fitch passed on several years ago. He was an inspiring and passionate teacher. Anyway… 

Cornering the Market

These ‘new’ whitemen were called scramblers because they would rush on board a Slaveship before it docks and brave the filthy stench...
 -- Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados

I bring up Robert Fitch because he spent at least one-third of that intro course expounding on capitalism and how it was such a great boon to Western civilization. Finally, unable to take it anymore, I raised my hand and asked, “But what would’ve capitalism have looked like without the slave trade?”

The man smiled so wide, I thought his face would crack and he said, “I thought you would never ask… ” and he began what was one of the more insightful take downs of capitalism I had ever heard. After class, he called me over and expressed that he thought no one would ever ask that question.

Why bring this up, you ask? Read on… 

First let me start in this way: not that long ago, I overheard two former colleagues describing a bigoted real estate player as a “cracker.” My colleagues were white, raised in the northeast, progressive-thinking, activists -- two people I hold in high esteem. Anybody that knows me even for a little while knows that I’m not exactly “politically correct.” I transgress at least once a day.

I am also a lover of words and love to explore word and phrase origins. Having lived in the deep South, I was aware of the word’s origin. Well, at least as it was explained to me by a genuine “cracker.” He said that the word cracker came from the sound of the whip used to beat slaves. When I informed my colleagues, they were horrified! They never used the word again. Of course, from that point on, I went out of of my way to say “cracker” in their presence at least once a month.

Language is a powerful thing and many of our everyday words and phrases come from ignoble origins. Take “handicap,” for example. Handicap comes from the phrase “hand in cap” used to describe the physically challenged who were forced to beg for money for their survival. Not a nice.

Which brings me to my point today. Let’s take the common phrase, “cornering the market.” To corner the market is a good thing, right? It means dominating and economically exploiting a market. It’s “winning.” Not bad, right? Well the phrase has its origin from the behavior of “scramblers.” Scramblers would rush on board a slave ship before it even docked. They would wade through the filth and death stench of these slave ships so they could get their pick of the healthiest looking captives. They would separate their picks from the rest and have them placed in a corner of the deck. Hence the origin of the capitalist term “to corner the market.”

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

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, please consider helping me out by sharing it, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or even throwing me some money on GoFundMe HERE or via PayPal HERE so I can keep calling it like I see it.

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…

Letter from a Free Man

Hola mi gente,
Today, we celebrate the founding of the United States of America. As a person of Puerto Rican descent, I find it difficult and hypocritical at the very least to witness all the bullshit jingoism about values such as freedom, democracy, and bravery as it cannibalizes its colony, Puerto Rico (see here and here).

I once took a speaker at a conference to task for claiming that the U.S. is oldest democracy. A democracy for whom? I asked. Was it a democracy for the First Nation people who were subjected to genocide and the Africans who were brought here against their will and enslaved? Was it a democracy for women? Is it a democracy for the millions languishing in our prisons and jails, the victims of a drug war intended to socially control black and brown people? Miss me with that bullshit

Reflecting on these essential contradictions in U.S. democracy, I remembered the following letter. In August of 1865, a Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee, wrote to his former slave, Jourdon Anderson, and requested that he come back to work on his farm. Jourdon -- who, since being emancipated, had moved to Ohio, found paid work, and was now supporting his family -- responded spectacularly by way of the letter (a letter which, according to newspapers at the time, he dictated). The letter can be found in the excellent book, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery.

 Cherished as a social document and praised as a masterpiece of satire, Anderson’s letter has been anthologized and published all over the world. Rather than summarize the highlights in this letter, I'll present here in its entirety for your edification (make sure you read to the end). For me the letter highlights how oppressed and marginalized people can use humor and satire to expose the brutality of systemic injustices. Click here for a brief update about the later years of Jourdon and his family.

Letter from a Free Man to his Former Master

Anderson wrote a satirical letter to his former master after he asked him to return to work for him

Dayton, Ohio,
August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, "Them colored people were slaves" down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams's Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,

Jourdon Anderson.

A group of escaped slaves in Virginia in 1862,  Library of Congress.

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