Pain, Frances Burney, Philisophical About Prisons

Pain sitracts. It has kept me from getting to sleep tonight. It has done the same since Friday. Before that, it was one good day, two bad days. That is what it has been like the past two weeks.

I am supposed to be keeping a journal for my Friday class when I indulge in cognive disorders. Well, hard to do much of that when your thinking is how to stop this insistent, tiresome pain. It is challenging to make judgments when one is more worried about the operation of their bowels. 

I did not go to the writer's meeting last Wednesday. That disappointed me. I did not go to church on Sunday - not been there since Vespers on Friday. That is even more disappointing. I try telling me this is a lesson about Lent, but the pain distracts me even from that. It feels that the body overrules the spirit. 

An outline for a play was written. Emails have been kept manageable. Videos have been watched when I could not sleep. That does not seem like many accomplishments. 

 Natasha Joukovsky's On the Genius of Frances Burney, Jane Austen’s Most Important Literary Predecessor (Literary Hub) discusses the influence of Frances Burney on Austen and her own qualities. I took it also as another example of my ignorance, the wide expanses of books unread, and the precarity of reputation, regardless of skill, talent, and merits.

 Spencer J. Weinreich's review essay There Are More Prisons in Heaven & Earth… (Public Books) touches on a subject that came to interest me in 2011. He makes several interesting points, which will be ignored by our politicians, and omits education as the best means of avoiding prison (well,e cluding people like me), but provokes me with the idea of a philosophy of prison in a democratic society. The interesting ideas:

The prison we know today does not really promise reform (and would not be believed if it did) and works to fragment any sense of political community. Abolafia conjectures that prison abolition has such potency as an idea in the realm of the scholar and the activist precisely because the ideological foundations of the prison have rotted away. “Neither of the intellectual resources on which the modern theory of the prison initially relied—the idea of reform and the value of incarceration for popular self-rule—can be plausibly endorsed in the United States in the age of mass incarceration.” Reform through punishment seems to be well and truly dead. Not only because every technique yet developed to reform prisoners has failed, Abolafia explains, but also because any successful method would prove incompatible with contemporary norms around autonomy, equality, and liberty.

But perhaps there’s life in the popular authorization tradition yet. Abolafia concludes with the possibility of a prison for “the preservation of political principles like equal voice, equal respect, and people power,” through the punishment of the violent and the anti-democratic. A realigning of carceral priorities from drug dealers and petty thieves to insider traders and would-be tyrants. The book’s last line—a provocation both exasperating and stimulating—invites the reader “to imagine a future of thinking about incarceration that rises to the moral challenges set by the past.”

The instinctual reaction of a prison abolitionist such as myself is to recoil. A democracy that relies upon the prison is not the democracy we ought to want. Engaging more seriously, I see a loophole of some breadth: to take a single example, if you asked the late Alexei Navalny’s jailers, they would tell you that he was imprisoned for massive corruption and for anti-democratic political activity. As a matter of history, the road to American mass incarceration was paved with democratic intentions, from the 18th-century penitentiaries that promised a suitably republican form of punishment to the shibboleth of citizenship that justifies the detention of undocumented immigrants.

Even supposing we sought a democratic prison, could we get there from here? Abolafia acknowledges that contemporary mass incarceration is “antithetical” to those democratic values. The implication is that that antithesis is incidental, rather than inherent (or so ingrained as to become inherent). Out of the crooked timber of mass incarceration, how are we to make something straight?

We might find our prison systems where the first place America expressed its contempt for democracy. 

 Happy St. Patrick's Day!

sch 3/17