The Antisocial Socialist

Today marks the 45th anniversary of the Attica uprising, and the beginning of a prisoners' strike across the US.

A what?

See, what a lot of people don't seem to know is that slavery never ended in the States. Oh, sure, there was that bit with the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement and post-racial Obama, but slavery is still perfectly legal. You just need to be in prison. If you're in prison, the 14th Amendment makes an exception for you. You're also stripped of voting rights and you're likely to be subjected to what we would consider cruel and unusual punishment if, say, a communist country did it. The very fact that prison rape jokes can be a thing tells you how barbaric the attitude of most North Americans is when it comes to those behind bars.

"But wait," you cry—well, not you, you know better—"aren't these rapists and murderers paying for their crimes against society?"

Not most of them. A system exists in the US where simple lawbreaking that most of us do—say, getting a traffic ticket, or having a small amount of drugs*—can compound and compound until it lands you somewhere incredibly unpleasant. Needless to say, this does not tend to happen to white people and it frequently happens to racialized people, especially black people—you know, the ones who were historically enslaved. "I'd never break the law," someone not-you might say. Chances are you have and it just wasn't caught and enforced. But when a population is as much under scrutiny as Black and Latinx Americans, if they wanna find something on you, they'll find it.

And then it's legal to make them work for free for hugely profitable corporations like Victoria's Secret, Whole Foods**, Wal-Mart, McDonald's, and AT&T. (Here's a campaign dedicated to identifying and boycotting which companies employ slaves.) You maybe saw something about that on Orange Is the New Black, but it's way worse in real life. So much so, even, that I'd wager a lot of the American economy is dependent on slave labour, the way it's dependent on under-the-table labour from non-status immigrants.†

If you're interested in learning more about why the prison strike, and why today, here's a great cartoon from the Nib that breaks down the issues and context.

And if you, like me, are interested in knowing how it's going, what's happening right now, whether there's repression or progress and whether there's anything you can do to help—well, good luck. The news is crickets. Even Twitter is crickets. If someone has any info, please share it

* Not me, CSIS. I'm clean as a whistle.
** Fuck those smug libertarian crunchy shitbags with a rusty spork.
† Canada's not any better, particularly when it comes to dependency on exploited immigrant labour, but this is specifically a post about American prisons.

Fuck the death penalty.

It's racist and classist and in a case where there's no doubt that the killer in question is a bad man who murdered innocents, it's actually more satisfying to watch him rot in jail.

It's not like I don't read the newspaper every day, but if I didn't read LJ/my feeds, I wouldn't know about...

The Georgia Prisoners' Strike.

On Thursday morning, December 9, 2010, thousands of Georgia prisoners refused to work, stopped all other activities and locked down in their cells in a peaceful protest for their human rights.
...
· A LIVING WAGE FOR WORK
· EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES
· DECENT HEALTH CARE
· AN END TO CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENTS
· DECENT LIVING CONDITIONS
· NUTRITIONAL MEALS
· VOCATIONAL AND SELF-IMPROVEMENT OPPORTUNITIES
· ACCESS TO FAMILIES
· JUST PAROLE DECISIONS
...
The Georgia Department of Corrections is at http://www.dcor.state.ga.us and their phone number is 478-992-5246

Or about Jody McIntyre, a student protester who was dragged from his wheelchair by police during the London protests. China Miéville is at his scathing best on the way the media covered it.

Or this story, brought to my attention by springheel_jack:

"One individual had two boxes attached, one box taped to his leg and one box seemingly taped to his forehead," he said.

"There were what seemed to be wires attached to them," he added.

Go on, guess what it was.

ETA: All this is SRS BUSINESS, so here's one that radiumhead found.

( Wil Wheaton playing D&D with the Golden Girls, framed by bacon )

Omar Khadr is in "legal limbo." As far as I can tell, this means that while someone's finally acknowledged that holding a 15-year-old Canadian child in an American gulag as a war criminal was kind of a bad move, they still don't exactly know what to do with him.

For a brief refresher, Khadr is a Canadian who allegedly lived in bin Laden's compound, attended a military training camp, and killed an American soldier with a grenade in Afghanistan. At the time, he was 15. Under both Canadian and American law, a 15-year-old is ineligible to vote (and thus participate in the making of foreign policy), attend a school field trip without a note from his parents, or drive a car. He was, however, apparently old enough to be shot, arrested, shipped to Guantanamo Bay, tortured, charged, denied an independent medical examination, and held for five years. For those of you keeping track, that's a fourth of his life.

There's a consistency issue here, and it's not just in terms of how we define "terrorist" or "war crimes" or "enemy combatant" but in terms of how we define adulthood and enfranchisement. Allow me to advance the possibly unpopular proposal that, if we hold that a 15-year-old is too young to cast a ballot, he's too young to be charged in an adult court.

Of course, Khadr is no longer 15. He's 20, and he has yet to be convicted of any crime. Still, it's unlikely, after all this, that even if he's released, he will ever be a functional member of society. Guantanamo has nothing to do with protecting anyone from terrorists, and everything to do with breaking minds and spirits, sowing fear, creating the illusion that you're safe from terror just as long as you don't step out of line. As Amnesty International's Jumana Musa points out:

At this point more people have died of apparent suicides (at Guantanamo) than have faced trial before a military commission. I think that's a pretty ringing endorsement as to why these commissions need to go.

I'm not arguing that he didn't do it, by the way; I'm arguing that he can't be held legally responsible. Not unless we're willing to take on the considerably larger task of redefining what constitutes citizenship.

ETA: A decent Star editorial on the subject.

Prison riot!

sabotabby Talking Point #1: What do we know about the GEO Group Inc.? They seem exceptionally creepy.



sabotabby Talking Point #2: What is the point of imprisoning 1,630 people who have "no predisposition to violence"?

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Also, I generally frown on re-posting IM conversations, but this involves Daleks, so ( cut for CUTE photos )

Previous posts about Hutto:
• It starts like this.
• Concentration camp.
• Hutto (on gaybortion).

P.S. Don't read the comments in the Globe & Mail article unless you want to throw up.

I finished watching Road To Guantanamo last night. I want to comment intelligently on it, but I'm still kind of reeling. I've watched a lot of movies lately that were upsetting for one reason or another, but not like this.

If you haven't seen it, it's about three young men from Tipton who end up in Afghanistan in September/October 2001, get captured by the Northern Alliance, and eventually imprisoned in Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta. While it's never made clear why they decide to go visit a war zone and then try to leave almost immediately (they come off as a bit naïve more than anything else), it is immediately obvious that the Americans intend to treat them as terrorists, despite the lack of any evidence. In fact, it's their tormentors' zeal that eventually frees them—the CIA insists that the fuzzy faces in a videotape of a bin Laden rally belong to them, but the video is clearly dated; at the time, one of the men was working in British shop at the time, and the other two were doing community service and regularly reporting to parole officers. Even with the most obvious alibis ever, the men are still held in Gitmo for three months and the Americans try to get them to sign papers admitting that they're linked to al Qaeda and the Taliban.

( thoughts )

New Gaybortion!: Hutto.

Then go read sadie_sabot's last few entries: 1 | 2 | 3.

Yesterday, zingerella drew my attention to the story of Carol Ikkusek, a Labrador woman who was held naked in a cell for two days. zingerella was, understandably, quite horrified. Unfortunately, the only thing that surprised me about the story was that the RCMP later apologized.

There are many reasons why I'm not shocked by these stories. The most obvious is that the woman in question is, judging by her name, indigenous, and First Nations people have long known that they can't take for granted the sorts of rights, privileges, and protection that settlers enjoy. But beyond that, abuse of people within the criminal justice system is inevitable. We, after all, belong to a culture that by and large considers cutting off a thief's hand to be barbaric but is quite at ease with rape as a punishment for, say, non-violent drug offenses.

(Pause. What did she just say?)

There would, understandably, be some outcry if a judge handed down a sentence of "six months in prison, plus sodomy" in for a drug trafficking offense. But we know that prison rape is widespread. (And if we don't know that, we have pop culture to remind us.) So, just as the Canadian government is responsible for torturing suspects whom it deports to Syria, the criminal justice system is responsible for the rape that is pretty much inevitable in prison. In the business world, they call it outsourcing.

So we know that most people in jail aren't there for violent crimes* and we think that approximately one in five male prisoners is the victim of some form of sexual assault. (The frequency for women is difficult to pin down, and seems to be more common at the hands of guards than at the hands of other inmates.) We're okay with this, by and large, because we know at some level that prisons have to be utterly horrific places (i.e., worse than homeless shelters, sleeping under bridges, and working dangerous, low-paying jobs) in order to perform their social function, and because we're conditioned to think of all criminals as violent. And also, I suppose, because most of us don't think of prisons very much.

Something to keep in mind when we claim that our country is better than other countries because it acknowledges human rights and doesn't torture people. Not that many people make that claim anymore.

* American stats. If anyone can dig up Canadian stats, I'd be interested.

P.S. I need my paid account back so that I can use an Oz icon for this post. Oy. You guys, that wasn't a hint! But all three of you—you know who you are, and I at least know who two of your are—rock my world.