Prisons - Censorship and Criminal Justice Reform

One lesson I got from prison is one I keep wanting to share: they exist to infantilize inmates.

Infantilize meaning:

treat (someone) as a child or in a way which denies their maturity in age or experience.

 This is not the means to reforming people to return to civil society; this is the means of creating people incapable of functioning in civil society. In turn, this does mean full employment for the prison-industrial complex. Whether that result is what the public wants is beyond my knowledge.

Fort Dix's leisure library had its censorship. Understand that the library was stocked by prisoner donations. Manga comics went. Then regular comics. I could not get Alasdair Gray's End of Tethers through the interlibrary loan program because the woman running the program did not like the cover. Those are the items I knew about.

Public Books recently published An Open Letter to Prison Officials on the Censorship of “Tip of the Spear” by Orisanmi Burton. Although addressed to state prison systems, I suspect it applies to the federal system also. Freedom of thought that calls into question a system of subservience is not welcome by those running those systems.

What disturbs you is not the book’s alleged advocacy of violence as such, but how it explicates the primary source from which the vast majority of prison-based violence flows: the state. The prisoner-led rebellions of the 1970s that you interpret as “violence” erupted within a pervasive atmosphere of racist and political repression, systematic dehumanization, psychological warfare, sexualized terror, and medicalized torture carried out by a broad network of state actors who were operating with near total impunity. This is attested to by copious and well-cited evidence. I invite you to engage my sources, and as you do, to think about why only certain forms of harm are coded as violence.

While it does not advocate rebellion, Tip of the Spear refuses to denounce, condemn, and pathologize the imprisoned Black militants of the 1970s, many of whom at various moments not only advocated but actively engaged in “lawlessness,” “violence,” “anarchy,” and “rebellion against governmental authority.” This too is the source of your dismay. Against the tendency to flatten and pathologize prison rebels as manic “extremists,” I narrate them as highly intelligent and rational beings who were thinking strategically about the role of violence, not only in the maintenance of their subjugation, but also in their collective political struggle within and against one of the most repressive institutions of the racist capitalist state.

What you call “violence,” I call “counterviolence”: a countervailing force exerted by people whose only other option was to allow themselves to be abused and destroyed with little to no opposition from communities beyond the walls. As jailhouse lawyer Martin Sostre wrote in a law review article from 1972, “The Attica Rebellion was the result of recognition, after decades of painful exhaustion of all peaceful means of obtaining redress, of the impossibility of obtaining justice within the ‘legal’ framework of an oppressive racist society which was founded on the most heinous injustices: murder, robbery, slavery.”4

Look, the popular idea is to get tough on crime. Politicians fuel the flames - it is simple, it keeps donations coming from prison guard unions and the builders of prisons. Yet, there seems little that getting tough accomplishes if the toughness begins and ends with imposing more stringent terms of imprisonment. Longer sentences in prisons operating as human warehouses only increase the potency of prisons as institutions for inculcating criminal behavior.

Also from Public Books came The Fight for Justice Starts with Blocking Judges Who Are “Tough on Crime” by Robert L. Tsai.

In the long run, meaningful criminal justice reform is not just about changing the minds of existing officials but also about laying the groundwork for civic leaders with a fresh mindset: a new crop of elected officials interested in not only limiting the number of overzealous prosecutors who become judges but also revisiting the criminal laws and anticrime programs that incentivize overpolicing

 Back in the day, one of our judges in Madison County ran under the slogan of "A Tough Judge for Tough Times." Another used the sound of jail doors closing in a radio commercial. I do not know if they actually made life better for the citizens of Madison County, Indiana.

There will always be crime of some sort. Pathological psychological conditions cause some; poverty underlies others; a sense of entitlement leads to others. Getting tougher on crime does not help the first two categories. The latter might, although Donald J. Trump seems to indicate that is unlikely.

What I do know is that so long as citizens still fall for the tough-on-crime palaver, we will keep those who most benefit from such a policy in power: the politicians and the prison-industrial complex.

sch 11/20