In writing about the aftermath of the Tuscon shooting rampage, Henry Giroux posits that “the general responses to this violent act are symptomatic of a society that separates private injuries from public considerations, refusing to connect individual acts to broader social considerations.” I could not agree more with Giroux on this matter. In fact, I have recently written about the American tendency to at best minimize or at worst ignore the structural underpinnings of violence. It’s a topic that I return to often.

Giroux makes the case that a ‘culture of cruelty’ permeates American society:

I want to suggest that underlying the Arizona shootings is a culture of cruelty that has become so widespread in American society that the violence it produces is largely taken for granted, often dismissed in terms that cut it off from any larger systemic forces at work in the society.

The culture of cruelty is important for thinking through how entertainment and politics now converge in ways that fundamentally transform how we understand and imagine politics in the current historical moment — a moment when the central issue of getting by is no longer about working to get ahead but struggling simply to survive. And many groups, which are considered marginal because they are poor, unemployed, people of colour, elderly or young, have not just been excluded from “the American dream,” but have become utterly redundant and disposable, waste products of a society that not longer considers them of any value.

How else to explain the zealousness in which social safety nets have been dismantled, the transition from welfare to workfare (offering little job training programs and no child care), and recent acrimony over health care reform’s public option? What accounts for the passage of laws that criminalize the behaviour of the 1.2 million homeless in the United States, often defining sleeping, sitting, soliciting, lying down or loitering in public places as a criminal offence rather than a behaviour in need of compassionate goodwill and public assistance? Or for that matter, the expulsions, suspensions, segregation, class discrimination and racism in the public schools as well as the more severe beatings, broken bones and damaged lives endured by young people in the juvenile justice system?

Giroux contends that since the mid-70’s the “social state” has been transformed into a “punishing” one. 9/11 and the subsequent “war on terror” has according to Giroux (2009) “both militarized public life and refashioned the criminal justice system, prisons, and even the schools, as preeminent spaces of racialized violence (p.71).” Giroux’s concept of the “culture of cruelty” becomes instructive to understanding the hyper/mass incarceration system that has emerged over the past 35 years in the U.S. A desensitized, fearful, and cowed populace that marinates in this culture of cruelty finds it difficult or perhaps impossible to see itself as complicit in the caging of millions of its fellow citizens. This same population easily accepts neoliberal policies that disenfranchise everyone except for the corporatists and their rich accomplices. In such a climate, mass incarceration becomes tolerable and even necessary as a mechanism for managing the labor supply.

Cruel culture lets us off the hook. We don’t have to understand the people who we lock up or those who work with them. Our society has come to view imprisonment as the “first resort” to addressing a host of social issues (which may or may not actually be criminal). In the U.S., the culture of cruelty it turns out is practiced and played with all of the time.

I’ll end with these words by Giroux that should give all of us great pause and cause us to mobilize to transform our culture:

The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current, sapping the strength of social relations and individual character, moral compassion and collective action, offering up crimes against humanity that become fodder for video games and spectacularized media infotainment, and constructing a culture of cruelty that promotes a spectacle of suffering and spectacle. While much of this violence is passed off as entertainment, it should not be surprising when it travels from the major cultural apparatuses of our time to real life, exploding in front of us, refusing to be seen as just another entertaining spectacle.

Human Rights Watch has released its 2011 World Annual Report. The report underscores some important facts and statistics about racial disparities in the U.S. mass incarceration system:

As of June 2009, the U.S. continued to have both the largest incarcerated population (2,297,400, a decrease of 0.5 percent since December 2008) and the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world (748 inmates per 100,000 residents).

The burden of incarceration falls disproportionately on members of racial and ethnic minorities, a disparity which cannot be accounted for solely by differences in criminal conduct: black non-Hispanic males are incarcerated at a rate more than six times that of white non-Hispanic males and 2.6 times that of Hispanic males.

One in 10 black males aged 25-29 were in prison or jail in 2009; for Hispanic males the figure was 1 in 25; for white males only 1 in 64.

Blacks constitute 33.6 percent of drug arrests, 44 percent of persons convicted of drug felonies in state court, and 37 percent of people sent to state prison on drug charges, even though they constitute only 13 percent of the U.S. population and blacks and whites engage in drug offenses at equivalent rates.

Other Facts:

In 2009, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained between 380,000 and 442,000 non-citizens in some 300 detention facilities, at an annual cost of U.S. $1.7 billion.

Human Rights Watch’s own analysis of government data showed that three-quarters of non-citizens deported between 1997 and 2007 were nonviolent or low-level offenders.

There are 2,574 youth offenders (persons under the age of 18 at the time they committed their offense) serving life without parole in U.S. prisons. There are no known youth offenders serving the sentence anywhere else in the world.

As of August 2010, 88,500 prison and jail inmates had experienced some form of sexual victimization between October 2008 and December 2009.

I have not written about the Kelley Williams-Bolar case previously because I did not have the words to describe how I felt about it. When I first read about the case, I immediately started to tear up and my emotions were in turmoil. I didn’t understand the strong feelings and then I realized that the case recalled ancestral memories of slavery for me. Kelley Williams-Bolar was being accused of “stealing an education” for her children.

Here is some brief background on this case…
Prosecutors in Ohio brought criminal charges against Kelly Williams-Bolar of Akron and her father. The state accused the pair of “allegedly falsifying residency records of two of the woman’s children formerly enrolled in the Copley-Fairlawn City Schools.” The most serious of the charges brought against Ms. Williams was tampering with records which is a “third-degree felony carrying potential penalties of one to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.” Her 64-year old father was charged with “one count of grand theft for aiding and abetting his daughter in her alleged deception to obtain educational services from Copley-Fairlawn schools.”

Bolar-Williams said her two girls were enrolled in the Copley-Fairlawn school system four years ago — in August 2006, according to court records — over ”safety issues.”

During the trial, several pieces of evidence were presented supporting Ms. Williams’ claims that she was in fact living with her father when she enrolled her children in the suburban school district. However what was also made clear was the lengths to which the school district went to “prove” that she was in fact not a resident in their catchment area:

School officials, according to trial testimony, hired a private investigator in an attempt to document the activities of Williams-Bolar on more than a dozen school mornings.

In several hours of the videotaped surveillance — much of which was shot under cover through a wrought-iron fence — the jury saw Williams-Bolar dropping off her children at a school bus stop within a short walk of her father’s home on Black Pond.

However, when Williams-Bolar took the stand in her own defense on Friday, O’Brien introduced evidence showing that she had 2008 and 2009 W-2 statements from her employer, Akron Public Schools, sent in her name to the address of her father in Copley Township.

Williams-Bolar works as a teaching assistant with special-needs children at Buchtel High School.

The defense also produced 2005 mailed correspondence to Williams-Bolar — more than a year before her children were enrolled in the schools — from the Copley-Fairlawn district. It, too, was sent to her father’s home.

More specific details about the trial can be found here. On January 15th, Ms. Williams was convicted by a jury after 7 hours of deliberation. She was sentenced by the judge to 10 days in jail, three years of probation and community service for falsifying residency records. As if this were not enough, here is more from the judge in this case:

Cosgrove noted Williams-Bolar faces another form of punishment.

Williams-Bolar, a single mother, works as a teaching assistant with children with special needs at Buchtel High School. At the trial, she testified that she wanted to become a teacher and is a senior at the University of Akron, only a few credit hours short of a teaching degree.

That won’t happen now, Cosgrove said.

”Because of the felony conviction, you will not be allowed to get your teaching degree under Ohio law as it stands today,” the judge said. ”The court’s taking into consideration that is also a punishment that you will have to serve.”

Williams-Bolar addressed Cosgrove briefly before being sentenced, saying ”there was no intention at all” to deceive school officials.

She pleaded with Cosgrove not to put her behind bars.

”My girls need me,” she said. ”I’ve never, ever gone a day without seeing them off. Never. My oldest daughter is 16.

”I need to be there to support them.”

Williams-Bolar’s two girls, now 16 and 12, are attending schools elsewhere. They left the Copley-Fairlawn district before the 2009 school term.

Ms. Williams-Bolar was interviewed later and expressed stunned disbelief that she would be jailed for this offense. She believed that if she were convicted she would be sentenced to probation at most.

Kelley Williams-Bolar took an extended pause, pondering as she sat in jail Thursday.

Tears came to her eyes as seconds ticked away. She’s a single mother of two daughters in the middle of a 10-day jail term — a convicted felon — all because of the school the girls attended.

Years ago, she said she took her daughters from Akron’s public housing after their home was burglarized and placed them with their grandfather in Copley Township.

Take a step back to consider everything that is at play in the story of Ms. Bolar-Williams. Here you have a black single mother who was living in public housing with her two daughters. After a traumatic incident of their home being burglarized, she moved her daughters to their grandfather’s home so that they could be safe and attend a good school. A school district spent thousands of dollars to hire a PI to investigate this black woman and her children. Why exactly was this? Are public schools in Ohio so flush with extra cash that they can afford such luxuries? If Ms. Williams and her children had been white would the school have gone to this trouble to expose them as supposed ‘criminals?’ I think that any fair-minded observer would have to say ‘no’. Now we have a tragedy on our hands with lives being destroyed. A 40 year old woman who was putting herself through college to become a teacher is having that dream dashed. What lesson do you suppose her daughters are learning in all of this? Are they learning that America is a just society? Are they learning that they can ‘be anything that they want to be’ when they become adults?

I would say that they have learned a bitter lesson about American INjustice and oppression. This is a form of state violence that the Williams family has been subjected to. Ms. Williams has been accused of defrauding the district for over $30,000 in educational costs because her daughters did not meet the residency requirement. At least four lives have been destroyed over $30,000? Surely that cannot be just!

Apparently this case is causing a lot of controversy in Ohio as well it should. Reporter David Scott writes about some of the reaction. However, I want to point to the words of commentator Boyce Watkins who wrote this:

This case is a textbook example of everything that remains racially wrong with America’s educational, economic and criminal justice systems. Let’s start from the top: Had Ms. Williams-Bolar been white, she likely would never have been prosecuted for this crime in the first place (I’d love for them to show me a white woman in that area who’s gone to jail for the same crime). She also is statistically not as likely to be living in a housing project with the need to break an unjust law in order to create a better life for her daughters. Being black is also correlated with the fact that Williams-Bolar likely didn’t have the resources to hire the kinds of attorneys who could get her out of this mess (since the average black family’s wealth is roughly 1/10 that of white families). Finally, economic inequality is impactful here because that’s the reason that Williams-Bolar’s school district likely has fewer resources than the school she chose for her kids. In other words, black people have been historically robbed of our economic opportunities, leading to a two-tiered reality that we are then imprisoned for attempting to alleviate. That, my friends, is American Racism 101.

This case is a textbook example of how racial-inequality created during slavery and Jim Crow continues to cripple our nation to this day. There is no logical reason on earth why this mother of two should be dehumanized by going to jail and be left permanently marginalized from future economic and educational opportunities. Even if you believe in the laws that keep poor kids trapped in underperforming schools, the idea that this woman should be sent to jail for demanding educational access is simply ridiculous.

In her own words, Ms. Williams said from jail:

”If I had the opportunity, if I had to do it all over again, would I have done it? . . . ,” she said. After almost a half-minute of silence, she answered her own question.

”I would have done it again,” she said. ”But I would have been more detailed. . . . I think they wanted to make an example of me.”

Yes indeed, the state of Ohio wanted to make an example of a black single mother trying to find a way to ensure a successful future for her children by giving them a chance to have a good education… Welcome to America in the 21st century, still racist and unjust!

Update: Here is a petition to sign regarding this case.

Update #2: Here’s an interview with Ms. White:

Update #3: Looks like some elected officials are getting involved in this case and looking into making sure that she can in fact become a teacher. This would be good news.

Update #4: Here is a report from Good Morning America

Folks after several hours fiddling with the layout of this blog yesterday, I have settled on this template. I had decided on another layout until I got several e-mails from friends who told me that they were unhappy with the colors and that the posts were “smushed” on their browsers. For God’s sake people….

So I went with my second choice (well actually my third) which you see here. I changed the layout in response to e-mails that I have been steadily receiving from people informing me that they were unable to post comments on the blog.

I liked the original layout of the blog and HATE change but alas.. I could not solve the mystery of the ‘submit comment’ button. Now that I have changed the design, those of you who have e-mailed (and you know who you are) better start posting comments… Just kidding, well maybe not.

Anyway, feel free to let me know what you think of the change. I have a feeling that this current layout may only be temporary as I have become obsessed with WordPress Themes now. I was supposed to be writing grant proposals and finishing work on a report but instead I found myself fiddling with this blog for hours yesterday. C’est la vie!

On Saturday, I received an e-mail from a former prisoner who apparently reads this blog. He had a lot of lovely things to say about it and I am grateful for the kind words. He also wanted to let me know that because I had never been incarcerated I was naive about prison abolition. I asked for permission to quote a couple of sentences from his e-mail to me and he agreed:

“I have read some of the essays that you write about prison abolition. I was locked up for 11 years and there are some monsters in prison. They definitely should not be roaming the streets…There really are some bad people there. The majority are not bad people but there are some monsters on the inside. We are always going to need prisons.”

If any of you have worked inside prisons or with former prisoners on the outside, I am sure that you will not be surprised by the sentiments expressed by this gentleman. My friend Jessi Lee Jackson who is an abolitionist writes about her experience with this issue brilliantly in an article co-authored with Erica Meiners titled “Feeling Like a Failure: Teaching/Learning Abolition Through the Good the Bad and the Innocent” which appeared in Radical Teacher last year.

It is the 8th week of English class in our adult high school completion program, and we have just read a short excerpt from Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? As a class, we review vocabulary words, and then, piece by piece, work to understand Davis’s argument for prison abolition. All of the students have firsthand experience of the system, and they agree that the prison system is clearly racist in its impact. But when we get to the point of discussing abolition — of shutting down prisons — the class quiets. The disagreements start. “I agree with abolishing the death penalty, but…” “But some people need to get locked up.” “I agree we need to change the system, but getting rid of prisons entirely,,,” “It’s too much…” “I don’t think we need to go that far…”

I find myself in the awkward position of being the only person without direct experience of being locked up, and the only vocal abolitionist. By the end of our conversation, I perceive that students have made up their minds and are united in their analysis: the prison system is messed up, but abolition is “going too far.” I wonder to myself what went wrong in our conversation. Why was I not able to present abolition in a way that challenged people to go further or question their assumptions about the necessity of prisons?

So many of us have been exactly where Jessi was in discussing prison abolition be it with family & friends or in a classroom setting. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what I mean when I talk about prison abolition so I won’t go back over that old ground again. I do however want to share an excerpt of what I wrote to the gentleman who reached out to me on Saturday. These passages most directly address themselves to the issue of how we should deal with people who do bad things.

Thank you for sharing your story with me. In particular, I want to thank you for your honesty in letting me know that you felt that you “did a bad thing” that landed you in prison. Rather than focusing on the “bad act” that you committed, I want you to know that what I appreciated most was that you acknowledged the hurt that you had caused to so many. So I have a question for you? Do you consider yourself to be a bad person? Or do you believe that you did a bad thing? I am asking because so often when people reach out to me or talk to me about “bad people” I want to understand their definition of the term. You see just because I want to see an end to prisons does not mean that I do not know that crimes are committed and that violence is prevalent in our culture. I just do not believe that prisons are an adequate response to both of these issues.

Let’s say that I agree with your premise that some “bad people need to be in prison.” I am curious about whether you think that 50% of the people you served time with are “bad people” or is the number closer to 30%? Is it 10% or maybe 5%? I really am interested in your thoughts on the matter. If as I suspect, you tell me that the number is closer to 10 or 20%, then I would ask you to consider how inefficient and immoral it is for us to be locking up the other 70 or 80%. What might your thoughts be about that?

Let’s say that we found another way besides prison to address the various problems that the majority (70-80%) have, how would you propose that we handle the remaining 10 to 20 percent of people who you contend “need to be locked up?” The minority should not dictate how we handle the majority.

You wrote eloquently and movingly about your incarceration experience. You wrote about the brutality, loneliness, and inhumanity of the experience. You told me that it “didn’t make [you] better.” If this is true, then what will happen to positively impact the so-called “bad people” who remain behind bars? Are we just expected to lock them up and throw away the key?

An aging prison population is already putting major strains on states because of the costs associated with their healthcare. As you also know, most prisoners are released eventually. So the majority of the so-called “bad people” that you speak of will eventually be let out of prison one day in the future. Based on your own assessment, prison will not have made them “better.”

If you agree with the points that I have made, then it is incumbent for you to consider abolition as one of the options for addressing the problem of mass incarceration. As my friends Erica and Jessi have written, “[w]orking toward abolition means transforming our communities and creating structures that reduce the demand and need for prisons.” We can begin there. It is important sometimes to push ourselves to imagine ‘a world without prisons.’ What would we do? How would we solve problems without disappearing people?

My response was much longer than what is quoted and have already received another e-mail in response to mine. Suffice it to say that I was right in estimating that he believes that 10 to 15% of prisoners that he served time with should stay locked up. I look forward to continuing the exchange. I don’t have definitive answers to all of the questions that are asked about prison abolition, I only know that it is important that abolition be on the table as one of the options for how to dismantle the prison industrial complex. One’s orientation to the problem of incarceration is different if approached from an abolition lens. The landscape of possibilities is more expansive and it pushes beyond bandaid reforms to a focus on uprooting oppression and transforming society. So I welcome the dialogue about what to do with the so-called ‘bad people’ as long the person that I am engaging is willing to consider that the “bad people” are not the end all and be all in discussions about prisons. In fact, for me, they should not even be the starting point. How about we begin with the majority (90%) of people who are currently locked up and shouldn’t be?

I love Kassav… Nothing better than their signature “Oh Madiana!”

Chicago artist Chris Drew, in order to protest a permit requirement, deliberately violated a city ordinance by selling handmade patches. He captured his arrest on a digital voice recorder, only to be charged with a felony for recording the event.

I have previously written about the fact that videotaping the police is a crime that carries with it potentially long prison sentences.

In the past couple of days, Chris’s case is getting more national attention. Don Terry writes about the case in the New York Times:

Christopher Drew is a 60-year-old artist and teacher who wears a gray ponytail and lives on the North Side. Tiawanda Moore, 20, a former stripper, lives on the South Side and dreams of going back to school and starting a new life.

About the only thing these strangers have in common is the prospect that by spring, they could each be sent to prison for up to 15 years.

“That’s one step below attempted murder,” Mr. Drew said of their potential sentences.

The crime they are accused of is eavesdropping.

The authorities say that Mr. Drew and Ms. Moore audio-recorded their separate nonviolent encounters with Chicago police officers without the officers’ permission, a Class 1 felony in Illinois, which, along with Massachusetts and Oregon, has one of the country’s toughest, if rarely prosecuted, eavesdropping laws.

“Before they arrested me for it,” Ms. Moore said, “I didn’t even know there was a law about eavesdropping. I wasn’t trying to sue anybody. I just wanted somebody to know what had happened to me.”

Ms. Moore, whose trial is scheduled for Feb. 7 in Cook County Criminal Court, is accused of using her Blackberry to record two Internal Affairs investigators who spoke to her inside Police Headquarters while she filed a sexual harassment complaint last August against another police officer. Mr. Drew was charged with using a digital recorder to capture his Dec. 2, 2009, arrest for selling art without a permit on North State Street in the Loop. Mr. Drew said his trial date was April 4.

I want everyone to know how UNJUST these arrests really are. It is another example of unchecked police power in Illinois. The Huffington Post just recently published a story about Chris and his case if you want to learn more. Finally, if you would like to keep up with the details of this case, feel free to e-mail Chris at [email protected] to get on his electronic newsletter list.

Note: My sincerest apologies to CHRIS. For some reason, I decided to call him Charles in my earlier post. I can only say that I thought I was typing CHRIS…

Based on the popularity of my recent post that featured a preview of some of the images that will be included in a juvenile justice zine project that I am involved with, I thought that folks might want to see a couple of other images. These images are from teaching artist Rachel Williams in collaboration with several young people who participated in a comic zine workshop co-sponsored by my organization.

By Rachel Williams

I am in a terrible mood today. I had what turned out to be a very short meeting at my local precinct this afternoon. I asked for the meeting to look for ways to forge a more cooperative relationship with local law enforcement. I want to stipulate up front that I have had and continue to have some cordial encounters with local police. On an individual basis, some officers have been helpful in NOT arresting youth that we work with. Those individual police officers have grasped the idea that ANY contact with the criminal legal system is a bad thing for young people. The police are the gateway to prison for many young people of color. Today’s meeting at the precinct did not go well and I won’t go into the details because I am still trying to process my anger.

As part of the reading that I have been doing for a curriculum on police violence that I am developing, I have come across a number of personal testimonials about the impact of police violence on young people’s lives and well-being. Instead of engaging in an all out rant today, here is an excerpt by Travis Dixon reflecting on his encounters with the police as a young man:

While growing up, even though I was a hardly imposing “geek,” I was often harassed by police officers who assumed that I was up to no good simply because of my race and my neighborhood. On one occasion I was attending a church barbecue. When it was time to head home, I borrowed my grandfather’s truck (with his permission, of course). I was soon pulled over and confronted by two white police officers with their guns drawn; although I was a good kid returning home from a church function, they thought I was a violent predator. It turns out that I was dropping off a friend who lived near a store that had been burglarized earlier that day, and so the Los Angeles police were on a manhunt, looking for a black man, any black man. One inappropriate move, including any verbal protest against my mistreatment, and I might have been beaten, arrested, or even shot. And so my childhood unfolded in South Central, where, on more than a dozen occasions, I faced profiling behavior, was handcuffed, or was pulled over for no reason other than the color of my skin. I thus learned to be careful around the police, to know when to shut up, and both to recognize and fear the inarticulate fury of those who had been trained to see the world through the lens of mass-mediated racial stereotypes. (Dixon 2010, pp.106-107 in Challenging the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Stephen John Hartnett)

This is violence and it is traumatizing. I know that many individual police officers want to do the right thing. But the overall system of policing is corrupt and badly in need of revolutionary transformation. Katheryn K. Russell (2000) cautions us against “the dismissal of police violence as a Black thing.” But we are lacking example of the White Oscar Grant or the White Sean Bell or the White Rodney King.

Police officers need to understand that this is the context that they are operating in when they approach young people of color on urban streets. They will not be given the benefit of the doubt. It is assumed by most youth of color that officer friendly is a myth. They are not wrong. For most youth of color, officer friendly does not exist…

Here is a new video by the ACLU and Elon James White about what to do when one is arrested. They inject needed levity in a deadly serious topic. I am grateful to them for that.

I have written a couple of times already about a new documentary called the Interrupters by Steve James (who directed Hoop Dreams) and Alex Kotlowitz (who wrote ‘There Are No Children Here’) that will premiere later this month at Sundance.

Ninety-five percent or more of prisoners will be released at some point in the future. So prisoners get out eventually. Here is a clip from the Interrupters that I wanted to share specifically because it illustrates in under 2 minutes the inter-generational cycle of incarceration in the black community and the deep love that exists for many prisoners from their families. That abiding love is a part of the story about imprisonment that is too often unexamined and overlooked.

This clip highlights the hidden collateral costs of incarceration.