by Alessandro De Giorgi*

Image by Jenna Pope (@JennaBPope). Original tweet here.

According to a recent FBI report on cases of “justifiable homicide” annually reported by a sample of police departments across the nation, between 2008 and 2012 law enforcement officers have “justifiably” killed an average of 400 civilians each year. An analysis of the racial composition of these “incidents” reveals that an average of two African Americans have lost their life each week at the hand of white police officers. The victims are mostly youngsters and adolescents: according to the report, 18 percent of black men killed during encounters with the police were less than 21 years old (versus 8.7 percent among white victims). Oscar Grant, who was executed by a white police officer who shot him in the back on New Year’s Day in 2009 after he had been handcuffed in a BART station in Oakland’s Fruitvale district, was 22 years old. Sean Bell, who was riddled with more than 50 bullets by NYPD officers on the night of November 25, 2006, after celebrating his bachelor party at a night club in New York, was 23.

Thus, the case of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old unarmed young African American who was shot and killed on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, a segregated suburb at the northern edge of St. Louis, Missouri, is not exceptional or unusual. It isn’t, because most encounters with the police experienced by young blacks in the streets of American urban and suburban ghettos happen in the form—although fortunately not always with the same outcome—observed in Ferguson, Oakland, and New York. Those encounters are feared because the burden of proof is in fact on the suspect. It is not on the police, because the expectation of being verbally or physically abused is constant and because of the inclination of the police to arrest young African American (and Latino) men on any pretext. Moreover, the planting of evidence and other similar abuses is well documented. Despite three decades of rhetoric about community policing in academia, the media, and political debates, inside poor and segregated neighborhoods the police act (and are perceived) as an occupying force, as a high-tech army that intervenes sporadically and unpredictably to enforce—always with the threat, sometimes with the actual use of force—an arbitrary and unjust order.

However, an explanation of what happened in Ferguson (and occurs daily in hundreds of locales across the United States) must look beyond the (mal)functioning of law enforcement agencies. The police are simply the first cog in a much broader and more complex penal machinery that has gradually colonized the US public space—from schools to university campuses, from urban centers to gated communities, from shopping malls to public transportation systems. This trend has been gaining ground for more than 40 years, first through the rhetoric of the war on crime and drugs, and later through the war on terror. The police have been deeply affected by this state of permanent war, which started in the early 1970s and is largely still in place. From the war on crime of the 1980s, police departments have gained significant injections of officers and federal funding; from the war on drugs they obtained important financial benefits, given that a 1984 federal law allows state and local police agencies to retain up to 80 percent of the proceeds from drug-related asset forfeitures; finally, under the rationale of the wars on drugs and terrorism (and specifically after the partial withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan), police departments have received a variety of high-tech equipment—from night vision devices to the drones now increasingly deployed for the surveillance of urban areas, from armored vehicles to assault weapons. The result has been a process of militarization of law enforcement, with police departments now routinely (but selectively) deploying SWAT teams even to perform arrests, drug searches, and visits to “high-risk” parolees.

This dangerous trend becomes even more problematic in light of two circumstances, both particularly acute in the United States. The first is the vertical increase in police discretion, partly as a result of the growing popularity of the “New York model” of policing, and specifically of the stop-and-frisk tactics employed by the New York Police Department to racially profile young African Americans and Latinos under the mantle of criminological legitimacy. The second is the deeply segregated structure of the US urban landscape, which is reflected in the radical divergence in methods, behaviors, and perceptions of the police between middle-class neighborhoods and urban ghettos. The police are clearly one of the main enforcers of this racially and economically segregated order, the boundaries of which become immediately visible whenever the police intervene on either side of the boundary.

But the death of Michael Brown and of hundreds of other citizens, mostly African Americans and Latinos, who are “justifiably” killed every year on the streets, cannot be grasped just by focusing on the transformations of policing. The police are only one component (albeit essential) of the huge social control machinery that US political and economic elites have built. This apparatus is supported by sensationalist media and by a public opinion numbed by the cyclical moral panics about crime and drugs that have followed the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. It has been a largely successful attempt to enforce the existing structures of class and racial inequality through the punitive containment of the urban poor.

At eighteen years of age, Michael Brown had managed to get his diploma from Normandy High School in St. Louis—a 98 percent black school, where 27 percent of students in 2012 were suspended for ten days or more, and 22 percent dropped out by the end of the school year. Indeed, in ever closer collaboration with the police, the public schools have functioned as a second essential component—or perhaps one should speak of “transmission belt”—of the penal machinery that has killed Michael Brown and many others. As segregated as the poor neighborhoods they serve, urban public schools have often become a kind of pre-carceral reception center, people-sorting hubs whose main mission is to maintain a semblance of order through the early detection and punishment of “at risk” subjects—increasingly with the direct involvement of police agencies, as Kathleen Nolan has shown in her recent ethnographic work. The growing elective affinity between ghetto schools and prisons for ghetto residents emerges from their architectural and organizational resemblance: from school uniforms to the constant presence of police patrols at entry and exit times, to the ever-present metal detectors.

Then, there is prison proper, a gigantic warehouse for stocking and recycling the surplus humanity that struggles to survive as it can in areas of urban relegation like Ferguson, Missouri. The US carceral archipelago, whose size increased fivefold between 1970 and 2010, has become a statistically predictable fact of life for one-third of African American men aged 20 to 40—the same age group as Michael Brown, Oscar Grant, and Sean Bell. Inside this huge penal colony of two million people, over 60 percent of whom are people of color, prisoners experience further segregation, violence, and abuse; they accumulate further disadvantage in the labor market, due to the lack of any real educational opportunity in prison; they see their physical and psychological afflictions deteriorate, given that close to one-third of inmates suffer from mental illnesses, and another third is affected by chronic pathologies like hypertension, diabetes, or AIDS. But the hold of the prison on the urban ghetto does not end here: every day in the United States, close to 1,600 inmates leave the gates of the prison with a few dollars in their pocket (if they’re lucky) and a bus ticket. In most cases, they will be dumped back into the same segregated and dilapidated neighborhoods where they had lived and were arrested. Here their prospects are bleak: they can either fill the ranks of the working poor by scrambling to find low-wage work in a fast food or some other low-skill service job; they can end up in extreme poverty and homelessness, in the absence of any structure of welfare assistance; or they can venture once again into the illegal economy and thus increase their chances of returning to prison upon the next “encounter” with police or other social control agencies. In this context, rather than death from old-age or natural causes, their lot will more likely be premature death at the hand of an abusive police officer or as a consequence of street crime (given the relative indifference of the same police), the violence of other inmates or prison guards (for the many who experience prison life), or the worsening of untreated diseases (due to the lack of a real public health services for the poor).

In an important recent book, African American scholar-activist Ruth Gilmore defined racism as “state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” In this respect, the US penal machinery—seen here as a broad complex of institutions, practices, and strategies, not necessarily of a strictly penal nature, in charge of the punitive regulation of marginal classes—is an essential catalyst for structural, colorblind racism. With his “premature death,” Michael Brown is a victim of this machine, not simply of a racist white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The demonstrations in Ferguson, as in other parts of the country, are having a significant effect: they have forced US public opinion to reflect for a moment on the state of policing in America. The timid Obama administration has ordered a federal investigation of the incident, and the Department of Justice has started its process. An independent autopsy has revealed that Michael Brown was shot six times, two times in the head, and that he was not involved in a fight before that. It was indeed an execution. After the investigation, federal authorities will probably impose some degree of racial integration on the hyper-segregated Ferguson police department, which is 94 percent white in a city that is 67 percent black. However, the semantic slippage of these days, which has gradually shifted the focus of the debate from the racial violence of the police to its excesses against protesters, signals a dangerous attempt to domesticate the revolt and water down its critique. President Obama’s public statements on the issue, which many have welcomed as a healthy censure of police brutality, were essentially a perfunctory reaffirmation of the uncontroversial First Amendment right to free speech—rather than a denunciation of the structural violence experienced daily by the Michaels, the Seans, the Oscars, and all the other marginalized youth whom the US penal machinery exposes to a premature death sanctioned or tolerated by the state.

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Alessandro De Giorgi is Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator at the Department of Justice Studies, San José State University, and a member of the Social Justice Editorial Board. This post was also published in Italian by Commonware.

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Alessandro De Giorgi, “Ferguson and Beyond: ‘Justifiable Homicides’ and Premature Death in the Urban Ghetto.” Social Justice blog, 8/21/2014. © Social Justice 2014.

by Alessandro De Giorgi*

You know, being in prison and not actually knowing how hard it is out here on the streets…. I remember when I got out. I kicked it with my wife for a few hours before I made it to the halfway house. So she took me through my neighborhood, and I said, god damn! Fuck this stuff. Because I didn’t see nobody out there, wasn’t nobody out there, wasn’t nothin’ man. In my corner, it’s called Ghost Town. But it ain’t never been a ghost town. [Now] it was empty! The feeling wasn’t there, the peoples wasn’t there. You know, it was just … empty, man! When I came back, it wasn’t nothing there, wasn’t no foundation, no structure there or nothin’ for me to say, okay, I can pick up right here and build something. It wasn’t nothin’. It was flatland.
– Spike, 10/14/11

At yearend 2012, 1.6 million people were incarcerated in US prisons and jails. If the population on parole and probation is included, some 6.9 million people—roughly 3 percent of the US population—are currently under some form of correctional supervision (Glaze and Herberman 2013). In California, there has been a sustained decline in the prison population in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Plata (2011). The decision mandated a reduction in the state prison population to 137.5 percent of design capacity to lessen the dramatic overcrowding of state prisons. Nonetheless, over 134,000 people are serving time in state prisons and local jails—a 500 percent increase since 1980—while 45,000 are on parole (CDCR 2014).

Over the last decade, the unprecedented growth in the population under penal control has inspired a significant body of criminological literature on “mass incarceration” in the United States (see for example Garland 2001; Clear and Frost 2013). The disproportionate concentration of imprisonment among poor urban communities of color has led critical scholars to describe the penal experiment of the last few decades as an emerging model of punitive regulation of the poor in a neoliberal society increasingly divided along lines of race and class inequality (Wacquant 2009; Alexander 2010; Tonry 2011).

However, the mass confinement of poor minority men and women from America’s inner cities only illustrates one side of the current penal crisis; the other side is the emerging issue of prisoner reentry. As prison expansion proceeded swiftly between the mid-1970s and the early 2000s, mainstream criminologists and “tough on crime” politicians alike tended to overlook the unavoidable fact that over 95 percent of US prisoners would eventually be released from penal institutions, thus facing the difficult challenge of “reintegrating” into society (Travis 2005).

In 2012 alone, 637,400 prisoners were discharged from US prisons—an average of 1,714 per day (Carson and Golinelli 2013). Statistics show that upon leaving prison, most inmates return to the same poor, segregated inner-city neighborhoods where they resided at the time of their arrest (Clear 2007; Hallett 2012). As research on prisoner reentry reveals, returning prisoners are even less employable than they were before entering prison (Pager 2003); their annual income is 30 to 40 percent lower than the average income of their non-incarcerated peers (Western 2006); and the few among them who are able to find employment are relegated to the secondary labor market of low-income and insecure jobs, where they fill the swelling ranks of the “working poor” (Crutchfield 2014). In addition, nearly 75 percent of ex-prisoners will have a history of untreated substance abuse, chronic illness, or mental health condition at the time of their release (Lurigio 2001).

Before implementation of the “Public Safety Realignment” legislation in October 2011, over 65 percent of prisoners released in California were rearrested within three years, either for a new criminal charge or for a technical violation of their parole (Petersilia 2003; CDCR 2011). It remains to be seen whether the long-term impact of realignment will bring about real decarceration or a simple transfer of bodies (and the responsibility to warehouse them) from state institutions to local jails, but the cycle of incarceration and reentry has become a “modal life event” in the lives of the urban poor, specifically of disadvantaged African American and Latino males (Western 2006). In conjunction with the de facto elimination of welfare and the neoliberal restructuring of the labor market, the prison has thus become a pivotal device for the governing of rampant racial and socioeconomic inequalities in a neoliberal late-capitalist society like the US.

Ethnographic methodology requires a direct involvement of the researcher in the daily lives of the people under study (Emerson et al. 1995). When applied to the study of a particular social problem (e.g., homelessness, poverty, drug addiction, etc.), it is premised upon the notion that a deep immersion in the field will allow the researcher to gather information about the problem as it is experienced, perceived, defined, and acted upon by the social groups most directly affected by it (Becker 1963). Therefore, ethnographic methodology generally involves participant observation, interviews, life histories, and visual documentation (see for example Anderson 2000; Bourgois 2003; Bourgois and Schonberg 2009).

The research material presented here draws from an ethnographic study of the personal narratives and lived experiences of a group of recently released prisoners who face the challenge of “reintegrating” in Oakland, California. Oakland is a formerly industrial city in California that has witnessed, in the relatively short span of four decades: a huge influx of African Americans from the South during the Great Migration (1930s­–1950s); the emergence of one of the most radical and powerful expressions of the black power movement, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (1960s–1970s); and, finally, the deindustrialization of the 1980s and 1990s, which has transformed its once vibrant African American and Latino neighborhoods (West and East Oakland) into a desolated urban wasteland.

The fieldwork for this research was conducted in an area of West Oakland plagued by chronically high levels of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, drug abuse, prostitution, and street crime – i.e., what may be defined as a postindustrial ghetto or a “hyper-ghetto,” to borrow Wacquant’s (2009) definition.

Socioeconomic data for the neighborhood where I conducted most of the fieldwork indicates that 50.4 percent of the population is African American, 20 percent is Latino, and 12.5 percent is Asian; 50.3 percent of the residents are currently unemployed or out of the labor force, i.e., they have stopped searching for work altogether; the median household income is $27,034 per year (compared to the average of $40,055 for the city of Oakland), and close to 38 percent of families live below the poverty line (69.4 percent among female-headed households with children under 18 years of age) (US Census Bureau 2014).

Given the racial and class composition of the area, it comes as no surprise that the neighborhood has been gradually transformed into a “service ghetto” characterized by a high concentration of nonprofit associations and community organizations that provide basic services—from preventative health care and drug rehabilitation programs to free meals and shelter—to the large population of poor and marginalized people, including former inmates and their families, who reside in the area. Several of these community organizations are staffed by ex-prisoners who volunteer for them as part of their reentry process.

The main hypothesis of the study is that the reintegration of ex-prisoners is hindered by two mutually reinforcing processes: first, the extreme concentration of imprisonment in poor, urban neighborhoods erodes the social fabric of these communities, disrupts informal networks of support, reduces economic opportunities, and destabilizes already fragile family structures (see Braman 2004; Clear 2007; Comfort 2008). Second, the growing influx of returning prisoners—most of them unskilled, undereducated, politically disenfranchised, and already unemployed or underemployed at the time of their arrest—further intensifies the spatial concentration of urban marginality, exposing former inmates and their families to high levels of social disorganization, economic instability, and existential insecurity (see also Hallett 2012).

In the virtual absence of any form of welfare support for former inmates and their families, and in the wake of broad cost-reduction strategies affecting community supervision programs such as parole and probation, the experiences of the returning prisoners I have followed seem to suggest the emergence of a low-intensity/low-cost model of segregated urban containment that devolves largely to market forces and private actors (nonprofit organizations, low-wage employers, shopkeepers, and slumlords) and is aimed at the variously disenfranchised populations inhabiting the contemporary urban ghetto: ex-prisoners, parolees, homeless persons, individuals suffering from mental illness or substance addiction, chronically unemployed men and women, and undocumented migrants. This barely regulated collection of private forces, backed by the ever-present threat of prison or jail, is all that is left in a postindustrial “ghost town” stripped bare of the community networks and welfare services that populated the neighborhoods before the penal experiment of the 1980s and 1990s.

In this series, I will present raw materials from the field in an attempt to illuminate some of the survival strategies adopted by ex-prisoners and their families as they return to their dilapidated communities and join once again the swelling ranks of the urban poor.

• • •

Episodes in this series:
#1 – Get a Job, Any Job 
#2 – The Working Poor
#3 – Home, Sweet Home
#4 – In the Shadow of the Jailhouse

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References
Alexander, M. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The Free Press.
Anderson, E. 2000. Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. New York: Norton.
Becker, H.S. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: The Free Press.
Bourgois, P. 2003. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bourgois, P. and Schonberg, J. 2009. Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Braman, D. 2004. Doing Time on the Outside. Incarceration and Family Life in Urban America. Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press.
Carson, E.A. and D. Golinelli 2013. Prisoners in 2012: Trends in Admissions and Releases, 1991–2012. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.
CDCR 2011. 2011 Adult Institutions Outcome Evaluation Report. Sacramento: CDCR Office of Research.
CDCR 2014. Monthly Report of Population, May  2014. Available at http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/Reports_Research/Offender_Information_Services_Branch/Population_Reports.html.
Clear, T. 2007. Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clear, T. and N. Frost 2012. The Punishment Imperative: The Raise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America. New York: New York University Press.
Comfort, M. 2008. Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Crutchfield, D. 2014. Get a Job: Labor Markets, Economic Opportunity, and Crime. New York: New York University Press.
Emerson, R., R. Fretz, and L. Shaw. 1995. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Garland, D. 2001. Mass Imprisonment. London: Sage.
Glaze, L.E. and E.J. Herberman 2013. Correctional Populations in the United States, 2012. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Hallett, M. 2012. “Reentry to what? Theorizing prisoner reentry in the jobless future.” Critical Criminology 20: 213–28.
Lurigio, A.J. 2001. “Effective services for parolees with mental illnesses.” Crime & Delinquency, 47(3): 446–61.
Pager, D. 2003. Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Petersilia, J. 2003. When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry. New York: Oxford University Press.
Tonry, M. 2011. Punishing Race: A Continuing American Dilemma. New York: Oxford University Press.
Travis, J. 2005. But They All Come Back: Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry. New York: Urban Institute.
US Census Bureau 2014. 2008–2012 American Community Survey. Available at http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_12_5YR_DP03&prodType=table.
Wacquant, L. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Western, B. 2006. Punishment and Inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

* Alessandro De Giorgi is Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator at the Department of Justice Studies, San José State University, and a member of the Social Justice Editorial Board. He wishes to thank research assistants Carla Schultz, Eric Griffin, Hilary Jackl, Maria Martinez, Samantha Sinwald, Sarah Matthews, and Sarah Rae-Kerr for their invaluable contribution.

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Alessandro De Giorgi, “Reentry to Nothing: Urban Survival after Mass Incarceration.” Social Justice blog, 5/28/2014. © Social Justice 2014.

by John Raines*

On March 8, 1971, a group calling itself the “Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI” broke into the FBI agency in Media, Pennsylvania, and removed all the files. I was part of that group. We sorted the cases into criminal (40 percent) and political (60 percent) and, a few weeks later, we mailed copies of the political files to selected newspapers and progressive politicians. Only the Washington Post decided to make public what we discovered.

What we documented was that Hoover’s FBI was engaging in a massive program of surveillance and infiltration. It used informers to infiltrate organizations as diverse as racial justice activists, Vietnam War resisters, a Boy Scout troop in Idaho, and women’s liberation groups. The purpose was, as boldly stated in one file, “to increase paranoia” and persuade dissidents that “there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”

Such indiscriminate surveillance and its intended intimidation constituted a massive violation of civil liberties protected by the First and Fourth Amendments. It was also revealed that the top-secret counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO had actively attacked, and in fact destroyed, groups like the Black Panthers. The publication of the Media files and the release of other information about government violations of civil rights resulted in congressional hearings in 1975, and ultimately in legislation to regulate the activities of the FBI and CIA and to protect the civil liberties of American citizens.

After 9/11, those regulations were severely undermined. As we now know, thanks to the whistleblower Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency began using sophisticated and powerful surveillance technology to vacuum up millions of phone calls, e-mails, and Internet communications, store them, and subject our everyday actions and conversations to government monitoring.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, and once again today, fear has ruled our nation’s political discourse and enforced silence where there should have been supervision. The fear of the 1950s and 1960s was called “the international communist conspiracy.” Back then, Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover and the powerful institutions they controlled were revered and feared because they had successfully marketed themselves as our nation’s experts on subversion. And for McCarthy and Hoover, subversion was whatever they disapproved of. They were also the experts on patriotism, so it was un-American to criticize them. Both men were driven by profound needs for secrecy within the institutions they controlled. They struck back viciously at anybody—politicians, Hollywood stars, pundits, or academics—who dared to criticize the FBI or the Un-American Activities Committee. Even presidents feared them and the charge of being labeled “soft on communism.”

Today we are once again a nation ruled by fear. And our politicians are ruled by the fear that rules us. It is called terrorism. After 9/11, all the restraints imposed on intelligence operations following the publication of the Media files were removed. Politicians in Washington became too timid to strongly supervising the NSA, CIA, and the FBI lest there be another attack. Now it was the label “soft on terrorism” that could end a political career. For intelligence agencies it was back to the 1950s all over again—“anything goes” became the common practice. Once again there was a vast expansion of so-called anti-terrorists groups inside the NSA, the CIA, the FBI; but there was also a vast expansion of private security firms across the country, to say nothing of the special investigation units inside every police force of any major city.

In this context, Edward Snowden has been the catalyst of a new public discussion on the extent and uses of surveillance, infiltrators, informants, and agents provocateurs. These are powerful tools that remain beyond the control of vigorous public accountability. We needed and still need whistleblowers because it is the nature of power to hide itself behind a veil of secrecy. And we also need whistleblowers because those we elect to supervise and hold powerful investigative agencies accountable are sometimes too afraid to do that. Once again, we are a nation ruled by fear, and the price we all pay for that is a vast invasion of our civil liberties.

* John Raines has taught in the Religion Department of Temple University for fifty years. He has authored many books and won repeated Fulbright awards to help establish a comparative religious studies program in Indonesia. Raines is an ordained minister of The United Methodist Church.

John and Bonnie Raines were part of the “Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI” that planned and broke into the FBI office in Media, PA, on March 8, 1971. Forty-three years later, some members of the group have come forward to tell their story. In the picture, Bonnie Raines is holding an FBI drawing of her.

Mathilde Mukantabana, interviewed by Tony Platt*

To commemorate the 20^th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda on April 7th, a survivor, activist, and now diplomat discusses its personal and political legacies. The following interview took place at Mathilde Mukantabana’s home in Sacramento on May 30, 2013.
It has been edited and abbreviated for clarity.

• • •

“I lost my father, I lost my mother, I lost two brothers, I lost three sisters. Also, six aunts, four uncles, all my nieces and nephews. From my father’s side alone, seventy relatives were killed.”

TP: Tell me about your background.

MM: I was born in Butare, Rwanda, and lived there until I was a teenager. All my family and extended family lived there. We were known as part of the Bajiji clan. My father was principal of a primary school and our family also owned a large coffee plantation.

TP: How long did your family live in this region?

MM: Forever. I can trace my ancestors to at least the 16^th century. All the people I knew and all the people I didn’t know are buried there. The land itself, like the country, has powerful associations for me, even though now it looks nothing like the way that I remembered it as a child. I can still see my footsteps in that particular place. Of course it’s painful to visit there now, given the genocide, but I still find it comforting. I can imagine my mother there in the house, calling out to us. I hear her voice, I feel the connection. For me this land is not about what it produced, but about the people, where I was born and raised.

TP: Did you grow up with any religious beliefs?

MM: I grew up Catholic. My mother was a practicing Catholic. My father’s parents had resisted Christianity, but he had to convert as a condition of marrying my mother. “We don’t intend,” said my maternal grandparents, “to give our daughter to a pagan.” As a child my Catholic beliefs were strong, in part because I was close to my maternal grandfather. He was a very kind and much loved person who taught in the Church. Our family gave land to the priests. Until I left Rwanda I was a strong believer in the precepts of Catholicism and some of the beliefs I acquired through religion later enabled me to survive. I think it helps to believe in the idea that someone out there is looking out for you and is protecting you. Later, my views about religion changed when I learned about the relationship between colonialism and the Church. I’m no longer a believer in a traditional sense, but I am still influenced and inspired by the teachings of Christianity I acquired in my formative years. I also believe in an omnipotent God that transcends the confines of established religions. And I also believe that people are connected across generations and time.

TP: How and why did you leave Rwanda?

MM: I was fifteen years old in 1973 when I and other Tutsi students were kicked out of schools for political reasons. It wasn’t because I was an activist. I was in the Xaveri group, an association similar to the Girl Scouts, and I volunteered in the community, nothing political. I and others were exiled because of who we were, not for what we did. I was in a boarding school at the time, in the western part of the country called Kibuye next to lake Kivu. I remember it clearly: it was raining, it was at night. Government officials came to the school and told a group of us, “Get out. Get out. Get out. Now.” Hutu students arrived in big trucks, rounded us up, and told us to leave the school immediately. They had a list of all the Tutsi students who attended the school. It was at night and we left in our pajamas. We were not allowed to take anything. We walked through the steep hills of  one of the highest mountain ranges in the eastern part of Africa called Crete Congo Nil. Our parents didn’t know for quite a while what had happened to us. I went to Burundi, where many Rwandan refugees had fled, and lived there for seven years, completing my high school education and then going to the university.

TP: You came to Sacramento in California in 1980. Why did you come here from Burundi?

MM: I came here to be with Kimenyi Alexandre, my future husband, who sponsored my graduate studies. I knew Kimenyi from my childhood in Rwanda; our families knew each other. He left Rwanda in 1972 to come to university in the United States on a Fulbright. By the time I arrived in California, he was a linguistics professor at Sacramento State.

TP: How did your life change in Sacramento?

MM: We got married and had three children. Because I was raising a family, including a disabled daughter, it was difficult to go to school full time, but in 1986 I got my master’s degree in history, with a focus on African-American history.

TP: Why did you decide to do a second master’s degree?

MM: When I entered a social work program in 1990, Rwanda was at war at the time and I was thinking about what would be needed during reconstruction. I was also working with Rwandan refugees in the diaspora. I thought a social work degree would be useful. I wanted to learn organizing skills, as I did from your class [Tony Platt was a professor of social work at Sacramento State University at the time]. I wasn’t interested in the mental health focus that dominated the social work curriculum. I wanted to learn how to create effective organizations and change social systems.

TP: So, it’s 1994, now you have a family and a master’s degree in social work, and then the genocide occurs. Between April and July, some 800,000 people lost their lives. What happened to your family in Rwanda?

MM: I lost my father, I lost my mother, I lost two brothers, I lost three sisters. Also, six aunts, four uncles, all my nieces and nephews. From my father’s side alone, seventy relatives were killed. My husband’s family was also murdered. All the family members who were  in Rwanda were killed. Very few survived, by a miracle. Every Tutsi was targeted.

TP: The same year as the genocide you started a new job?

MM: Yes, I became a history professor at Cosumnes River College in Sacramento. In terms of financial stability, I needed a job and I was lucky to get this one.

TP: Yes, I remember you at that time. You were very active politically after the genocide, bringing people together and organizing them. But you seemed closed down emotionally.

MM: It was my protection. If I allowed myself to feel anything emotionally, I was not going to be able to do anything. I knew that if I talked about my parents, I wouldn’t be able to keep talking. Kimenyi couldn’t do what I did. The genocide broke him. He couldn’t speak about it without breaking down. For a long time I never expressed my feelings in public. I only broke down in private and with close friends. I even tried not to cry in front of my children. I wanted to be strong for other people, for my kids. Other people would come to us to cry and be comforted in their devastation. I internalized all the pain. Now I can talk about my family in public, but it’s still not easy.

TP: I remember that your two boys, Gitego and Ndahiro, at one time were rejecting everything associated with Rwanda and that you were concerned about this.

MM: Yes, one of them even wanted to change his Rwandan name. We were so wrapped up in our narcissistic suffering that we didn’t pay attention to the effects of genocide on our children. For two years our family was emotionally disconnected to other realties and were consumed by our loss.

TP: You and they changed eventually?

MM: Yes, Kimenyi and I talked to them about Rwanda as more than a place associated with machetes and death. We integrated Rwandan customs and rituals into our everyday life, talked to them about our resilience and our ability to rebuild the country. Gradually and slowly a positive attitude to Rwanda grew on them. Before Kimenyi died [in June 2010]  — and he knew he was dying — he spoke with our boys about their responsibility to Rwanda. At his memorial in Rwanda, they both spoke about his legacies. It was a very moving experience for them. They were able to meet cousins they didn’t know existed and talk to people who looked like them. It made them feel more connected to Rwanda than they have ever felt in their lives.

TP: What about your personal connection with your homeland? How do you deal with remembrance of your family’s tragedy?

MM: The land in front of the school where my father taught is now a a burial ground for about 126 young people. In the chapel we built for my family are 75 close relatives. We still have our land, looked after by a caretaker who has a few cows and grows tomatoes, potatoes, beans, bananas, and oranges.

TP: Did you ever find your parents’ remains?

MM: We thought we knew where they were buried: on my family property where we built a small chapel on top of their mass grave. However, in 2009 a man revealed in a legal case that my parents had been thrown in a latrine and were not in the place we thought they were until then. He had killed many people during the genocide, and was sent to prison after being convicted under the Gacaca system of local, popular justice. After he was released, he was told to particpate in a reconcilitory project to demonstrate his ability to be reintegrated into society. He was expected to testify, “This is what happened, this how I killed them, this is where they are buried.”

TP: What happened?

MM: All our relatives and many friends gathered near our family’s property with the man who said he knew where my parents were buried. We had built a special tomb for them. We had shovels and started digging. There is nothing more disturbing for me than digging. I was scared that I might step on or cut into a bone that belonged to my father or somebody I knew. We dug the whole hill and no remains were found. The man had lied, God only knows why. He said that he didn’t know where my parents were buried. So, there was no ceremony, no reburial of the remains. We gave the new grave to somebody else.

TP: How did you deal with this experience?

MM: I was angry with the whole situation for a long time. I told my family not to call me for another digging. I told them that should anybody call us again saying that they had found our parents, I would say, “Let them be where they are. They’re at peace, part of the land, their land. Don’t call me again.” That’s how I felt at that particular moment.

TP: With the 20th anniversary of the genocide coming up on April 7th, what’s your assessment of how Rwanda has commemorated the murdered dead?

MM: The national and regional commemorations have allowed people to express their sorrow collectively and I think this has helped tremendously in the healing process. Genocide created alienation and loneliness. The natural mourning process was rendered impossible by the mere fact that people who could provide solace and comfort in times of grief were dead. Without intentional commemorative events, people would be left to their own plight without family or community as their anchor.

TP: What about the memorials that display human remains?

Stained glass at the Kigali Memorial Centre, Rwanda

MM: These are places where people died in very large numbers, especially churches or schools. It’s impossible to identify the victims individually. They were left at the site of their murder as their final resting place. It’s also a way to remind the world that a genocide took place, to make sure it can’t be denied. But as you probably know, even with irrefutable evidence, some people still deny that there was a genocide.

TP: Can there be reconciliation between survivors and descendants of the dead, and between perpetrators and children of perpetrators?

MM: The genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda almost destroyed the fabric of our society. Even the people who killed Tutsi didn’t really benefit from their evil deeds. There is no group that suffered more than the survivors who saw their world collapse around them. However, the children of perpetrators are also innocent casualties of their fathers’ misdeeds. I think reconciliation is possible. There is a shared sense of purpose that is rallying people together. Rwandans have engaged in a heart-to-heart conversation to strenghten the bonds of what make them to be truly one people. They have collectively rejected factionalism and divisionism of all kinds and have embraced the ideology of Ndi Umunyarwanda: I am Rwanda.

* In the summer 2013, Mathilde Mukantabana was appointed Rwanda’s Ambassador to the USA and nonresident Ambassador to Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. Prior to her appointment, from 1994 to 2013 she was professor of history at Cosumnes River College in Sacramento, California, and co-founder and president of Friends of Rwanda Association. Ambassador Mukantabana created a program in Social Work at the National University of Rwanda in 1999 and taught in their summer program until recently. She holds a bachelor’s degree in History and Geography from the University of Burundi, and master’s degrees in History and Social Work from California State University, Sacramento. Her family home is in Sacramento, California. Tony Platt is a founding member of the editorial board of Social Justice and a Visiting Professor in Justice Studies at San Jose State University, California. He blogs on history and memory at http://GoodToGo.typepad.com.

by Bill Rolston*

INLA mural, depicting Celtic warrior Cuchullain

With state prisoners in California and detained immigrants in Seattle using the hunger strike as a form of protest, what can we learn from prisoners in Northern Ireland who used hunger and art as weapons of resistance during “The Troubles”?

Resistance to colonial rule in the 18th and 19th centuries ensured that generations of Irish political leaders ended up in prison. As a result, prisons inevitably became key sites for further resistance. On one side were the prisoners who saw themselves as legitimate political activists. On the other was the British state. After the partition of the country, the two Irish states normally viewed them as criminals or felons or, latterly, terrorists.

The clearest example of this confrontation was during the most recent period of conflict in Northern Ireland. Between 1971 and 1976, hundreds of prisoners from republican (pro-united Ireland) and loyalist (pro-British) backgrounds were incarcerated in compounds where they wore their own clothes, had free association, and maintained their military structures; they were recognized as political inmates.

In 1976, the British government announced that politically motivated sentenced prisoners were henceforth to be treated as regular criminals. Republican prisoners in particular rejected this change of policy and set the pace in terms of resistance, refusing to wear the prison uniform and being clothed solely in towels and blankets; they became known as “blanket men.” Eventually the protest escalated into a no-wash protest and then in 1981, a hunger strike in which 10 republican prisoners starved to death. The hunger strike ended inconclusively, but within a few years political status was eventually returned in all but name and the organization of each of the prison blocks came under the control of an OC (officer commanding) of the military group concerned.

The prisoners in effect ran the wings of the prison as quasi-liberated zones. Republican prisoners in particular refused to see imprisonment as a hiatus in political struggle and instead viewed their resistance as an attempt to appropriate power and thereby to prepare for power after prison. Loyalist prisoners also saw themselves as prisoners of war, but as pro-state militants who identified with the greater system of power in the society; although disagreeing with their imprisonment, prison resistance came less easily to them. However, the benefits that the republicans gained through their resistance came to be enjoyed by loyalist prisoners as well.

Throughout these twists and turns, education, broadly defined, in the prison went through a number of phases. In the early 1970s, there was no formal education available. Inmates engaged in leather and woodwork, producing belts, wallets, and miniature harps decorated with Celtic imagery. In addition, both loyalist and republican prisoners had intricate self-education regimes that involved military and weapons instruction, history classes, and political development. Republican prisoners focused on the history of Ireland and of republican struggle. Classes were run in a hierarchical and didactic fashion and there was little official encouragement to study external political struggles or philosophies, such as Marxism.

IRA mural, portraits of 10 hunger strikers who died in prison in 1981

During the blanket protest and the hunger strikes, there was no possibility of formal education. But the deprivations of living naked except for a blanket, on 24-hour lockup without washing facilities, two to a cell whose walls were smeared with their own excrement, and where the only material objects were a mattress and such contraband as they were able to smuggle in paradoxically became in a very intense sense a liberation. Without books, newspapers, radios, cassette players, or computers, republican prisoners turned to one inalienable resource: oral culture. They gathered in the evenings close to their cell doors and shouted down the wings to their comrades. They told stories, taught each other Irish, and had political discussions. Unlike previously, the form of education was now collective rather than hierarchical, informal but highly effective. In their own way and through necessity the prisoners had discovered a form of education that was more Paulo Freire than Vladimir Lenin.

Although some loyalist prisoners also sought the return of political status by going on a blanket protest for a time, they did not endure the mass and sustained experience that republicans had. Consequently, they did not develop equivalent techniques and attitudes to a liberationist form of self-development.

Republican prisoners carried over the lessons learned during the blanket protest to the post-hunger-strike period in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Beyond involving themselves in formal education courses, they continued their self-education program through collective and egalitarian methods. They also built up an impressive library where they could read about political struggles elsewhere, socialist and Marxist ideas, women’s liberation, etc.

In this period, the OC for each wing was the only person who could deal directly with the prison authorities. For their part, the authorities rarely ventured into the wings and then usually by prearrangement with the OC. Despite confinement, the republican prisoners had retrieved a relatively liberated space, which they used to full advantage in many ways, including planning what became the largest prison escape in post-war European history in 1983. They exploited the space culturally as well. They produced a regular discussion journal, a CD of republican songs, and an oral history of their experiences during the no-wash protest and hunger strike, all of which were sold outside.

UDA wing, showing mural of avenging loyalist and other emblems

For their part, the loyalist prisoners meticulously re-created the paraphernalia of military marching bands popular on the outside—uniforms, drums, and bannerettes—out of cardboard and cloth, and paraded in the narrow confines of the prison corridors playing music. In addition, all the political groups painted political murals.

In the IRA (Irish Republican Army) wings, there were murals on a relatively wide range of themes. By far the most common was Celtic mythology. Next in terms of quantity were memorial murals, including portraits of the 10 hunger strikers who had died. A number of historical murals depicted the republican Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. Other murals were on international themes, including the plight of Native Americans. Che Guevara was depicted, as were Steven Biko and Oliver Tambo. Finally, there were murals in support of the Irish language, especially on the one wing where all the Irish-speaking prisoners were housed.

The most common theme in the INLA (Irish National Liberation Army) murals related to Irish history, in particular the original republicans, the United Irishmen, of the late 18th century. Portraits of dead INLA leaders, dressed in military-style black berets, were also common. Cuchulainn and Che Guevara were also depicted.

The predominant theme in the UDA (Ulster Defence Association) wings was the military activity of their organization. The most striking of these murals depicted Eddie, the mascot of heavy metal group Iron Maiden. Portrayed as a loyalist, he strode through a wasteland past crosses bearing the names of republican political parties. Behind him stood the Grim Reaper. Other murals commemorated dead comrades.

UVF mural, depicting motorized division of UVF, 1914

In their wings the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) painted on two main themes: the military activities of their organization and memorials to dead comrades. Other murals depicted the turbulent period at the start of the 20th century, when the original UVF was formed to oppose Home Rule for Ireland and later joined the British Army and was slaughtered at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

Most of the murals in the LVF (Loyalist Volunteer Force) wing were quite small representations of loyalist flags. The most prominent mural was a portrait of LVF founder Billy Wright, who was killed in prison by the INLA.

While each group of murals mirrored their equivalents in loyalist and republican areas outside the prison, the overlap was most obvious in relation to the loyalist murals; the predominant theme inside and outside the prison was the valorization of the armed activity of the respective military groups.

Republican muralists inside the prison and outside had more scope for artistic imagination. History, myths of origin, international struggles and heroes, current affairs—all these could be translated into pictorial messages. Hence, the republican prison murals overall, and the IRA murals in particular, had much less stress on armed activity.

The INLA prison murals were the most likely to depict guns and gunmen. But the INLA and the IRA prison murals were stronger on historical themes than the loyalist murals, and much stronger in relation to mythology. Similarly, there was a stark difference in relation to international references, with loyalist murals having none and republican murals, particularly IRA murals, having many.

These murals were clearly about political identity and the expression of that in alien circumstances. But there was much more involved. As politicized prisoners, republicans and loyalists, and particularly the former, were intent on maintaining their political beliefs and organization as a challenge not just to the system of imprisonment but to the wider system of power that gave rise to their imprisonment in the first instance. In the battle for control, cultural artifacts such as the murals became a sign and means of the prisoners’ appropriation of space and power. Thus, the painting of murals was not simply art, but resistance.

• • •

The groups listed below had prisoners in Long Kesh, separated in their own wings. All painted murals.

IRA—Irish Republican Army. With roots in insurgency against British rule in Ireland in the 19th and early 20th centuries, this organization reformed in 1969 and was the main republican military organization from then through until the ceasefire of 1994. Seven of the 10 hunger strikers who died in Long Kesh prison in 1981 belonged to the IRA.

INLA—Irish National Liberation Army. This group was formed in 1974 with the goal of establishing a socialist republic in Ireland, free from British rule in the northeastern six counties. It was militarily active until 1998. Three of the 10 hunger strikers who died in Long Kesh prison in 1981 belonged to the INLA.

UVF—Ulster Volunteer Force. Formed in the mid-1960s, this group saw its goal as twofold: military opposition to republican insurgency and the maintenance of Northern Ireland as an integral part of the United Kingdom. It declared a ceasefire in 1994.

UDA—Ulster Defence Association. This military organization was formed in 1971 as a self-defense group for loyalist working-class areas, especially in Belfast. It later developed into a large organization with goals similar to that of its smaller rival, the UVF. The UDA declared a ceasefire in 1994.

LVF—Loyalist Volunteer Force. Formed in 1996 as a breakaway from the Ulster Volunteer Force, this small group claimed to combat republicanism, but in fact targeted nationalist civilians. It imploded in feuds around the year 2000.

* Bill Rolston is an emeritus professor at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, where he was previously Professor of Sociology and Director of the Transitional Justice Institute. For a more in-depth discussion see “Prison as a Liberated Zone: The Murals of Long Kesh, Northern Ireland,” State Crime 2(2) 2013: 149–72.

by Margaret Randall*

International Women’s Day, March 8^th, is my favorite holiday. Every year I write a brief tribute—to remind my friends and also myself how much women everywhere give to resist oppression and sustain life. Usually I’ve focused on a group of women whose ordinary heroism was particularly noteworthy since the previous March. South African or Palestinian women. The desperate women of Syria and Sudan. Women in prison. Women right here in the United States, who face every sort of degradation. This year I want to honor our scribes, the women in so many different parts of the world and throughout history who, often against incredible odds, have told our stories and kept history alive. Not just women’s history, everyone’s. I want to narrow my focus to women who tell our stories—in dozens of different ways. If our stories are not preserved and told, we cannot know who we are. And if we do not know who we are, we will never become who we want to be: healthy, creative, brilliant and compassionate peace-making contributors to society.

Image by Rini Templeton (riniart.org)

Women often tell our stories and the stories of others through art. Guatemalan women embroider them into the intricate huipiles (blouses) indigenous to each of the villages in that country, where individual and collective histories can be read in brilliantly colored strips of flowers, birds and other symbols denoting origin, civil status, number of children and more. Closer to home, Navajo women weave them into rugs, and many Pueblo women fashion them into pots or storyteller dolls. Women were prominent in sewing squares in what would become the great AIDS quilt of the 1980s, finally so large that it could not be unfolded in its entirety on the Washington mall. The HIV/AIDs pandemic devastated communities but gave women the opportunity of bringing traditional quilting skills into an arena of commemoration and resistance. Some of the greatest poetry of the 20^th and 21^st century has been written by women; in the US names such as Hilda Doolittle (HD), Muriel Rukeyser, Meridel LeSueur, Mary Oliver, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Joy Harjo, and Sandra Cisneros are only a few in a very long list. All these women artists, well known or anonymous, have told pieces of our story. Their words exhilarate and empower us. They give us literature and recovered memory.

Women often tell our stories from situations of terror and confinement. Recent decades have seen women here and throughout the world speaking out about incest, rape, and battery, telling our stories despite the threats of those who would silence us. Each woman’s story makes many others possible. And all our stories together have changed the way society views domestic violence.

After Chile’s 1973 fascist coup, some three thousand men and women were disappeared or tortured to death. The more fortunate were forced into exile or filled the dictatorship’s prisons and concentration camps. It was in those prisons and camps that women began producing arpilleras, applique squares made with bits of cloth and small lengths of thread. These scenes, which often also incorporated words, told picture stories of repression and resilience, a universal desire for peace and security. In Vietnam, during the last years of the American War, women prisoners wove delicate baskets from strands of their own long hair. Those baskets, too, told empowering stories of resistance.

Just touching on a few examples of the deeply creative ways women have found to break the silences imposed upon us by centuries of gender discrimination would require a piece much longer than this one. So I will end with a dramatic story in which several generations of women have contributed to telling a history never meant to be told. In South America, during the 1970s and ‘80s, what we called the Dirty Wars took place in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. Brutal dictatorship attacked whole generations of freedom fighters and ordinary citizens, many of them women, who were struggling for a minimal rule of law. Young couples were often captured together. Sometimes the woman was pregnant. The men would most often be tortured and killed right away, but the pregnant women were kept alive until they gave birth. Thus began a heinous chain of events, in which the infants of revolutionaries were handed over to childless couples among the fascist ranks. Their mothers, newly delivered, were then murdered as well.

For decades a group of women who call themselves The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have marched weekly in Buenos Aires’ civic square, carrying photographs of their disappeared children and demanding to know where their bodies are buried. The Mothers eventually became the Grandmothers. As the stolen children grew up in the homes of those consciously or unconsciously responsible for their parents’ deaths, a new technology for determining genetic identity became available: DNA. A group of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) brought the technology to Argentina and offered it to the Mothers, who over time developed a genetic database. Through the next couple of decades, some of the stolen children—now in their thirties—have had occasion to wonder about their origins.  Slowly, in some cases hesitatingly, they have approached the Mothers or the Mothers have approached them. To date, more than one hundred stolen children have been reunited with their grandparents.

On this International Women’s Day I want to pay tribute to the Mothers who have become Grandmothers, refusing to give up on telling the stories of children who were taken from them so brutally, never to be seen again. And I want to pay tribute to those young revolutionary women, murdered after giving birth, who continue to tell their stories, with their own DNA, from beyond their unknown graves. They write these stories not with public speeches or poetic words, not with human hair or scraps of cloth, but with their genetic material, the remnants of their own bodies—and the help of a science focused on life rather than death.

Whatever it takes. And as long as it takes.

* Margaret Randall (mrandall36@gmail.com )is a feminist poet, writer, photographer, and social activist. The most recent of her more than 80 published books is Che on My Mind (Duke University Press, 2013).

by A.J. Caro*

Qalandia checkpoint, Fall 2013. Photo by A.J. Caro.

At a Glance (Source: Amnesty International)

• Amnesty International documented the killing of 22 Palestinian civilians in the West Bank in 2013. At least four were children.
• According to the UN, more West Bank Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in 2013 than in 2011 and 2012 combined.
• In the last three years at least 261 Palestinians, including 67 children, have been seriously injured by live ammunition fired by Israeli forces in the West Bank.
• More than 8,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 1,500 children, have been wounded with rubber-coated metal bullets and the reckless use of teargas since January 2011.

* * *

Sheer wanton killing and violence against Palestinian people—children, women, men—by Israeli forces, and especially by Israeli citizens living in illegal settlements, is not news to those who know the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).  The Amnesty International report released this week, “‘Trigger-happy’ Israeli Army and Police Use Reckless Force in the West Bank,” yet again amply documents what AI describes as “mounting bloodshed and human rights abuses in the … OPT as a result of the Israeli forces’ use of unnecessary, arbitrary and brutal force against Palestinians since January 2011.” According to the report, based on data gathered during the years 2011–2013, Palestinians appeared to pose no direct threat to the lives of Israelis and the evidence suggests that they were killed willfully. Philip Luther, Middle East and North Africa Director at AI, stated that “The report presents a body of evidence that shows a harrowing pattern of unlawful killings and unwarranted injuries of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces in the West Bank.” The violence is ongoing and is committed with impunity despite increasing international pressure to cease it. Moreover, the killings and injuries perpetrated by Israel as the occupying power constitute violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law. (For more information on international human rights law in Occupied Palestine click here.)

The often-heard justification is that Israeli violence, whether committed by armed forces or civilians, is “retaliatory.” The data suggest otherwise. According to one source, between the 29 September 2000 and 17 October 2013, 129 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians versus 1,519 Palestinian children killed by Israelis, 1,104 Israelis and at least 6,836 Palestinians have been killed, while 9,104 Israelis and 50,742 Palestinians have been injured (see www.ifamericansknew.org).

What the various sources report is a mere fraction of the violence committed against Palestinian people under Israeli occupation. The World Health Organization defines violence as “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation.” Palestinian people in the OPT are victimized by every element of this definition. Most disturbing is the persistence and banality with which such violence is perpetrated.

I have seen firsthand many of these various forms of abuse during my time in the West Bank. Before my first visit, nearly 10 years ago, a Palestinian friend visiting my home in the US commented matter-of-factly, “Your life is so orderly and predictable.” Because indeed it is, her observation did not even register at the time but came into full consciousness as I lived my daily life in the OPT. The randomness of checkpoint crossings and closures, the military incursions including night raids with attack dogs into towns, villages, and refugee camps, and the construction of new roadblocks and other impediments to movement, all add up to leaving for work under one set of circumstances and returning later in the day to another, often experiencing delays and feelings of tension, frustration, and anger. Nothing is certain except uncertainty. And the conditions in Gaza are beyond belief…

The manifestation of state policies and procedures that structure the Israeli occupation, these conditions also interrupt even the best-planned events—not to mention limit, or entirely prevent, Palestinian people’s access to education, healthcare, and emergency medical services (research the number of births at checkpoints, for example). These practices curtail family visitation, create deep insecurity, and generally impair the fulfillment of basic human rights and the attainment of a humane quality of life. For example, a resident of Qalandia refugee camp described the time back in December 2013 when Israeli soldiers invaded her home with a dog in the middle of the night:

It was about 2:00 a.m. when we heard banging on the front door. My husband and I knew that it must be the Israeli army. My husband went to open the door and I went to cover my head with a scarf. Just as I was putting on my scarf I turned around and was shocked to see there were soldiers in the living room with a big dog. The dog was muzzled. I could not see my husband and froze from fear. The dog then jumped on me and I fell to the ground. Whilst the dog was on me the soldiers didn’t make a move and just stood by watching. I tried to tell them to stop the dog, but my voice was barely audible. The dog remained on me for about 10 minutes.

Another form of violence concerns residency rights and the separation of families when their members have different IDs marking them as inhabitants of Jerusalem and the West Bank, for instance. This is the story of Nida, a 33-year-old woman who lives in Jerusalem with her husband and five children, aged four to 13. Nida has an Israeli-issued Jerusalem identity card, but her husband, who was born in a refugee camp in Bethlehem, has a West Bank identity card. After living in Bethlehem for the first seven years of her marriage, in 2007 Nida moved with her family to the At Tur neighbourhood, in East Jerusalem.

My husband applied for a residency permit from the Israeli Ministry of Interior, but the authorities rejected his application. The reason the authorities gave from rejecting my husband’s application was that his brother was been in an Israeli prison. My children’s applications for Jerusalem identity cards were also rejected because we used to live in Bethlehem. Before we moved to Jerusalem, I could not pass through the checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem with my children without risking being turned away. Not having the proper documents also limited my husband’s freedom of movement and made it difficult for him to find a good job. If my husband is caught in Jerusalem without the proper papers he will be separated from us and transferred back to Bethlehem…. When my mother-in-law died my husband had to smuggle himself into Bethlehem to attend her funeral. This involved a great deal of risk and cost us a lot of money. Sometimes I think of emigrating to the Gulf States because I get tired of constantly worrying about my children’s future in Jerusalem. If I had my time again, I wouldn’t marry a man with a West Bank identity card. It feels like this identity card issue controls every aspect of our lives, our present, future, dreams and ambitions.

It is important to note that the violence is gender, class, and age based. For instance, young men, especially those living in refugee camps where incursions occur regularly, are judged an a priori threat to Israeli life. But no Palestinian is “safe,” hence exempt from direct Israeli violence—at home, on the streets of towns, villages, refugee camps, or at checkpoints, the Ben Gurion Airport, and bridge-crossings into Jordan. Nowhere. Omar, the Academy Award-nominated film just premiering in the US, speaks loudly and convincingly on point.

These appalling violations, indeed the entire Occupation, would not be possible without US military, political, and economic support. As has been asked of us countless times, when will we, as people of conscience, committed progressives, and taxpayers, unequivocally and firmly act to end the Occupation, for a free Palestine?

For more information, go to:
www.btselem.org/about_btselem
www.wclac.org
www.alhaq.org

* A.J. Caro is a longtime activist in the peace and justice movement who frequently visits Palestine and Israel and other militarized areas of the world to understand the nature and impacts of armed conflicts.

by Gregory Shank*

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

William J. Chambliss was an important founder of the radical criminology movement in United States and an enduring friend of Social Justice. He is listed as a Contributing Editor on our 1974 inaugural issue, consistently offered thoughtful peer reviews of articles, and shortly before his death undertook an essay on President Obama’s contradictory drug policy at our urging. He was well traveled and worldly, and thought and wrote about matters of consequence. His work was generally prescient, reflecting a keen social conscience and moral indignation over hypocrisy in the academic and political spheres. He was never boring. His activist sensibilities were honed in the struggles of the 1960s and his thirst for knowledge compelled him to size up the players involved in the issues that interested him, such as state-organized crime (from death squads to illegal incarceration and police brutality). He saw with his own eyes the plight of California migratory farm workers and the denizens of Seattle’s skid row, visited Southeast Asia to built upon Alfred McCoy’s work on CIA opium smuggling via Air America in the Golden Triangle (where he spoke to Company agents, a Laotian army general, and poppy growers and heroin traffickers), interviewed gangland financial wizard Meyer Lansky during his research on organized crime, and rode along with cops in Washington, D.C., to document the hyper-policing of black youth under the rubric of the war on drugs. His “Another Lost War: The Costs and Consequences of Drug Prohibition” [free download], published by Social Justice in 1995, excoriated an irrational US drug policy—pursued by Bill Clinton almost as vigorously as by the Reagan and Bush administrations—because it criminalized an entire generation of young men and women of color, institutionalized racism in criminal justice practices, and created widespread corruption in politics and law enforcement.

We admired his work as a fellow editor when he launched Contemporary Crises in 1977, because the journal framed social problems within the larger political economy, including the embedded structural conflicts between social groups. He had the ambitious goal of building an alternative to conventional social theory by developing critical analyses of crime, law, and the world system. In short, he tried to create a forum for critical criminological, legal, and development studies and to promote emergent intellectual traditions then calling themselves radical, critical, Marxian, or conflict studies—to achieve an international perspective in a period soon to be dominated by capitalist globalization. It was a valuable and bold experiment, although the synthesis was difficult to realize. Also admirable was Bill’s audacious use of his American Society of Criminology (1988) and Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP, 1993) presidencies. In the former, he emphasized crimes by and against the state, from the industrial genocide in Nazi Germany to the indictable offenses of Lt. Colonel Oliver North during the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra scandal. At the SSSP, he introduced his ethnographic research on the race and class dimensions of policing practices and the incarceration industry it fed.

Bill always knew for whom the bell tolls. Though we will greatly miss him now, his contribution and example will undoubtedly stand the test of time. His remarkable academic, intellectual, and organizational achievements are ably captured by Richard P. Appelbaum and Mark S. Hamm. We urge you to read their respective essays, “Never Afraid of Living: William Chambliss, 1933–2014,” and “Chambliss, William J.: Power, Conflict, and Crime” (Encyclopedia of Criminological Theory, Volume 1, edited by Francis T. Cullen, SAGE, 2010).

* Gregory Shank is the co-managing editor of Social Justice.

by Andreana Clay*

The Stuart Hall Project, Stuart Hall, (c) Smoking Dogs Films 2013

Phillip Seymour Hoffman died of a heroin overdose this week and I had all kinds of feelings about it: he was a brilliant actor, one of my favorites, who was very serious about craft. I immediately rented all his movies and holed up with my girlfriend to watch them over the weekend. His life and his death meant something to me: the skill he put into his craft, and the beauty that he brought to the world through said craft. It meant something; it means something, to me.

When Whitney Houston died almost a year ago to the day, it meant something different to me. She was an African American woman whose music had shaped my life at a time when I was discovering what it meant or was going to mean for me to be a Black woman, as a teenager quickly moving into that realm—one many Black girls race and/or are raced into.

I am talking about these two seemingly disparate celebrities and my relationship to them because Stuart Hall died earlier this week. It is because of him that, as a writer and an academic, I am able to describe why these folks matter, personally and more generally, to the world. It is precisely his writing and work that allowed me to care about the work of celebrities like Hoffman and Houston. To let it matter, in a bigger way.

I came to sociology through feminism and, specifically, women’s studies. Women’s studies was a place that I fit in, the only place I felt that I fit in. I was taught by women of color, schooled in women of color feminisms, and used that to develop my own voice. Sociology almost took that voice away, the one I had honed and worked on for years.

Until I found Stuart Hall. It was my second year in my PhD program and I was struggling to hang on. Ok, it may not be that dramatic, but I was struggling: the women of color feminisms and feminist ethnography that brought me to the program I was in were slowly disappearing amid professors taking long sabbatical leaves, others going on the market, and others already gone. So I waded through and into my cultural theory class, where I was introduced to Stuart Hall. Like others, “What Is This Black in Black Popular Culture?” was really all I needed to steady myself back into the discipline. To take myself seriously and, more important, to study the things that mattered to me: music, Blackness, and youth. But it was more than that. Stuart Hall reminded me—a poor, working-class Black woman—of things that I thought I had to hide: the ways I connected with popular culture, found myself in it when I felt like there was no other place for me to go, wrestled with it, and critiqued it when the representations of Blackness were so far from what I imagined and knew Blackness to be. He allowed for all of that in his writing and for all of that in sociology. He made a space for me, a space for those of us who really weren’t supposed to be there—multicultural/diversity (those words exactly) discourse aside.

That critique, in some ways, of multicultural discourse, while acknowledging the broad spectrum of Blackness and marginality, is another reason that “What Is This ‘Black’?” was such a turning point for me. “Gramsci’s Relevance for Race and Ethnicity,” “Encoding and De/Coding,” and the “Introduction” to Representation have made it into my writing and into my bones over the years, but “What Is This ‘Black’?” stands out because of the moment that it was written. In 1993, hip-hop, the music and culture I was able to write about seriously after reading Hall, was perhaps at its most diverse—including artists like Me’Shell Ndegeocello, A Tribe Called Quest, and De La Soul, alongside folks like Tupac, Cypress Hill, and The Notorious B.I.G. It was a moment when the hip-hop generation distinguished itself in popular culture and Black political and cultural discourse from the generations before—in style, affect, and representation. I like to think that Hall acknowledges and speaks directly this when he states:

Within culture, marginality, though it remains peripheral to the broader mainstream, has never been such a productive space as it is now. And that is not simply the opening within the dominant of spaces that those outside it can occupy. It is also the result of the cultural politics of difference, of the struggles around difference, of the production of new identities, of the appearance of new subjects on the political and cultural stage. This is true not only regarding race, but also for other marginalized ethnicities, as well as around feminism and around sexual politics in the gay and lesbian movement, as a result of a new kind of cultural politics.

This and other passages solidified my relationship and love for Stuart Hall and are the reason I mourn so fully today. His never wavering acknowledgement of the ways in which Blackness and Black culture exist—the innovators, the new developments, and the ever-changing meanings. He allowed all of us a space in his definition, one that in sociology we need to continue to create.

Rest in power, Stuart Hall. You will be missed.

* Andreana Clay is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at San Francisco State University (e-mail: andreana@sfsu.edu). Her book, The Hip-Hop Generation Fights Back, was published in 2012. Andreana blogs at queerblackfeminist.blogspot.com.