by Bob Barber*

In this series of dispatches, veteran Bay Area journalist Bob Barber shares his impressions and views from the streets of Cleveland, Ohio, during the Republican National Convention.

Photo by Bob Barber

• Friday, July 14

It’s hot here in Cleveland, like in the 80s with the predictable humidity. Just like those good old summer days I remember while growing up here. But next week it’s supposed to get hotter. In the weather and on the streets.

Downtown Cleveland, Public Square, a mile away or so from the Quicken Loans Arena/Progressive Field. Not much is “happening” directly. But the streets are slowly being closed down for the duration of the convention. Eight-foot-high continuous metal fencing is being put up around the big office buildings. The police helicopter buzzes overhead.

Public Square, which is apparently where the “free speech” space is going to be, looks today like a typical weekday lunchtime. But the pro-life forces are out, with big signs and a couple of large trucks driving around and around the square, with huge grotesque photos on their sides and “Defund Planned Parenthood” in block letters. One of the folks told me they had been there all week because the goal was to influence the Republican platform and make sure it had the “defund Planned Parenthood” plank, in which they succeeded. They weren’t being pro-Trump or anti-Trump, they just wanted the platform language. An hour later they were gone.

Overhead, a small plane circles lazily trailing the banner “TrumpReleaseYourTaxReturns.com”.

Over by the “Q” arena and the baseball stadium, all the outer walls are blanketed with RNC banners and such. No more giant photos of LeBron James for now. The great Left Field Deck of the stadium is renamed “The RNC Freedom Marketplace.”

Around town you can pick up the current issue of the local alt-weekly Scene, which contains “A Very Special R.N.C. Coloring Book: Because If They Can Act Like Children, So Can We!” Featured on the cover, ready for your crayons, is Donald Trump as King Kong, climbing the Terminal Tower and swatting away the biplanes.

The police force has apparently received a $50 million federal grant and beefed up its force from 1,500 up to about 4,000. It seems to be the only US police force undertaking such a mission while under direct federal monitoring for corruption, excessive use of force, etc.

I ask one of the staff people sweeping the public square whether they are worried. She says, well yes, “but having a trial run with 1.3 million people a couple of weeks ago was good practice (i.e., at the Cavaliers’ celebration).” “On the other hand,” she adds, “they were all happy.”

There probably won’t be that many people here next week, but they most certainly won’t all be happy.

(And, oh yes, all over the freeways, those electronic billboards are reminding everyone: “If You See Something Say Something. Call the RNC Tip Line 1-800-Call-FBI.” I kid you not.)

• Saturday, July 15

The People’s Justice and Peace Convention, which will be going on here side-by-side with the RNC, has been in the works in Cleveland since late 2015, before Trump was the “presumptive nominee” or anything. It took me a while to get a handle on the activities, and the sponsors, and the general idea. It appears that the idea was motivated first by activists in the Cleveland Nonviolence Network, the Sierra Club, and others. I couldn’t help but look for the invisible, conspiratorial groups behind the scenes. Didn’t find them. But that doesn’t really prove anything.

This convention was described as the capstone activity, as a multi-page, multi-issues draft platform was presented for finalization and presentation to both the Republican and Democratic parties. I didn’t stay for the whole thing. But it was pretty clear that their work would have been much the same no matter who the nominees were to be. The platform includes sections on economic justice, international justice, and racial and social justice. I wondered if this was part of a national series of related efforts. Apparently not.

The event was held mostly at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church, one of the many large black churches in Cleveland that have been at the heart of activism and popular struggle for decades. Some church members were deeply involved, but I would say that most participants were younger and older white activists. A few national organizations had their hand in, such as Codepink.

It felt a lot like conferences and activities that I’ve been to before. Maybe a little more “civil” in the disagreement sphere—or maybe the disagreements had all been fought out before today. For example, the workshop on the Boycott/Sanctions/Disinvestment movement appeared to have no one who opposed the idea, which may suggest either that this type of action has moved toward the “mainstream” of progressive thinking, or that opponents had dropped away.

An animated and tense discussion emerged during the workshop on Combating Islamophobia. Some wanted to connect historical white hatred of Muslims with white racism against blacks (so many black slaves were Muslims), and others expressed disappointment that their efforts to be “American” were being increasingly rebuffed. One woman said she felt that even to go outside into the world on any given day and remain proud was her personal form of jihad—which she said means mainly ‘to persevere in the face of hardship.”

And there was quite an argument in the workshop on education as to how to hold teachers “accountable,” even if not by the use of standardized tests.

I asked several of the black members of the Olivet Baptist Church whether they expect “trouble” next week in Cleveland. One woman said, “No—not from us—we’re not going to destroy our own city. But maybe from outsiders.” The memory of the Hough and Glenville “riots” in Cleveland in the 1960s is still very real here. Another woman told me that she had been a teenager in Birmingham when George Wallace was governor of Alabama. “He was beyond all boundaries of rationality. I had thought we were past all that. But maybe the hatred has come back. Or maybe it just went underground and never really went away. Look at Trump.”

Elsewhere in Cleveland today, it was reported on local TV that organizers of a rally involving some Black Lives Matter people and the New Black Panther Party had decided not to pursue their “open carry” rights as had once been considered. I don’t have any independent verification of that. Open carrying of some guns is legal in Ohio, and we probably haven’t seen the last of that aspect.

Over the next couple of days, the scene is most likely going to intensify. I’m aware of several progressively oriented marches Sunday and Monday. But also, the Westboro Baptist Church people are arriving from Kansas, along with Bikers for Trump and I’m not even sure who else. (Here is an interview in which the Bikers for Trump leader explains that they are coming to Cleveland to “help keep things calm.”)

• Sunday, July 16

Downtown today there didn’t seem to be much happening. Clumps of bystanders and tourists. RNC delegates looking around trying to get their bearings and find things to do. Media and people and photographers looking for things to cover. The security perimeter is expanding slowly but surely, constricting access for vehicles and pedestrians. The shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge has put everyone even further on edge, even as the specifics and details remain somewhat obscure as I write this.

The airplane-towed banner of the day overhead: “Hillary for Prison 2016: Infowars.com.” In Public Square a lone individual with a rifle strapped over his shoulder (open-carry, legal) is surrounded by a horde of reporters. The only part of the dialog I could hear was a question as to whether he was worried whether there might be an accidental discharge. “Guns don’t go off by accident,” he said.

But in the afternoon, a planned event called “Circle the City with Love” brought a couple of thousand people out to march from the city’s west side over a bridge on the Cuyahoga River to the east side with a message of peaceful coexistence among communities and authorities. (See here for more.) Another march through downtown was more politically focused on an anti-Trump and antiracism message.

Tomorrow begins the “real thing.” The Republican Party announced that the theme of the day will be “Make America Safe Again.” Speakers are said to include Rick Perry, Rudy Giuliani, and Melania Trump, among others.

• Monday, July 18

Fifty years ago today in 1966 the “Hough riots” broke out in Cleveland after an incident involving the refusal of a restaurant owner to provide a glass of water to a black customer, instead posting a racist sign, “no water for niggers [sic].” This spark lit an urban fire that was ready to happen. Enormous destruction and loss of life ensued. These events and later ones in Cleveland also had an enormous effect on me as a high school student at the time in a nearby suburb. There are numerous histories of this watershed event in Cleveland and the country (here’s one). This anniversary is not far from the minds of many black Clevelanders, I’ve discovered this week.

Three years ago today, the young black man Tyrone West was the victim of police violence in Baltimore, not long after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of Travon Martin in Florida. (The story is told here.)

On this July 18 in Cleveland, the “public spaces” opened up. One “public space,” a speakers’ platform in the downtown Public Square, has been reserved by almost 50 individuals and organizations over the next days. Today I was there to hear speakers from Black on Black Crime, Inc., a Cleveland non-profit, focus on the fact that multiple shootings and killings took place over the weekend in black communities while hundreds or thousands of police were downtown guarding the convention (see here).  The speakers urged the national and international media as well as Republican delegates to go visit the “real Cleveland.” They also urged black youth to “throw down your weapons and seek guidance from your elders.” And they thanked Donald Trump for “bringing white supremacy out of the closet.” The demand for better police protection in black communities is being raised throughout the country.

Two public parks that are more than a mile or two from the convention area opened today also as public political spaces, but, as of this morning, very few of the organizations with reserved space seemed to have arrived. It’s hard to imagine too many people will go to these spaces unless they have a specific desire to do so. It would be tempting to say this was the idea.

The March to End Poverty (http://endpovertynow2016.org) drew maybe 1,000 people for a rally and march through the east side of Cleveland into downtown. This was another event where the politics were independent of the candidates. Participants included local, regional, and national organizations and ranged from The Lorain Ohio Immigrant Rights Association (LOIRA) to the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), which has been organizing tomato pickers and others in Ohio and elsewhere for decades (see pictures), to a range of socialist and communist organizations, to black community activists and a variety of musicians.

The crowd included a large number of older movement veterans and a larger number of younger activists of all kinds. No wonder the music alternated between the live performance of the hip-hop supergroup Prophets of Rage and recorded versions of Neil Young’s Four Dead in O-hi-o and Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth. Something happen’n here, indeed. (Speaking of music, I also learned that Woody Guthrie wrote a song in 1950 about the Donald’s racist slumlord father Fred, called Old Man Trump. See here and here. Woody may never have recorded it but Ani DiFranco and Tom Morello did—the link in the first of the two mentioned here.) Chatting with several in the crowd about youth and age, I got feedback that followed a common theme, summarized by one like this: “The elders know things the youth need to learn, and the youth see things the elders don’t.”

Another theme emerged in conversation about the meaning of the Hough riots 50 years later. More than a few people told me it seems that the current moment is cycling us back to even before those days, in terms of the overt racism and xenophobia afoot in the country. But at the same time they recognize that positive change has occurred in US society. “Too many youth don’t really know what it took to get us this far” was a common observation.

Then there were the police. Thus far, in the last few days, it appears no overt conflicts have broken out between police and demonstrators. That could change of course, although hopefully not. The police presence is overwhelming—in preparing for this week local and state police have come in at least from, according to what I’ve seen, Florida, Michigan, New Orleans, and Austin. What’s new (or maybe not so new) is the degree to which they use bicycles to move about, to exercise crowd control, to re-deploy, and so on. If you’ve viewed some of the TV or Internet coverage, there’s a good chance you’ve observed this.

In the evening, I’ve been distracted while RFLMAO over Stephen Colbert’s take on the first night of the convention. I hope you have too. A little laughter in the midst of all this scariness can’t be bad.

• Tuesday, July 19

They say the next few days will apparently see even warmer temperatures and higher humidity in Cleveland. But wait, there’s more, maybe. If you caught any of the TV or other news coverage on Tuesday of what went on outside the convention, you might be worried too, since there’s two more days to go.

In the mid to late afternoon Tuesday the downtown Public Square filled with people. Some fights started. A lot of yelling was going on. As I got there from another rather startling experience elsewhere (more on that below), squads of police were rushing into the space with their bicycles and on foot, quickly pushing through the crowd and dividing the space into four quadrants so it became more difficult for people to get into each others’ faces. News reports indicate a few arrests were made and after a few hours the scene quieted (a local news report on the day can be found here). But I detected something disquieting.

At the peak of the chaotic moments, from one corner came a chant: “Off the Pigs.” From another corner, someone with a bullhorn carrying a Trump sticker was shouting “Blue Lives Matter” (as you may know, a counter to “Black Lives Matter” that refers to police). At the public microphone at the Square, members of the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church were proclaiming their certainty that “God Hates Fags.” And most amazingly, perhaps, on another side of the square to their right, a group of opposing Christian conservatives were accusing the Westboro people of hating the military and the police and assuring them that when they went to hell, they should not plan to call the army or 911 for a rescue.

Little of this had much directly to do with Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, although they both got called some pretty nasty names, as did Barack Obama. Tempers as well as temperatures seem to be rising.

I can expand a bit here on the conflict between the Westboro people and their opposition because I witnessed two separate incidents within an hour or so of each other. I have to say these were among the most bizarre spectacles I have ever witnessed.

You may have heard of the Westboro Baptist Church: in addition to their virulently anti-gay ideology and activities, they often picket public military and police funerals because they believe these memorials represent the worship of idols instead of the one true God (this is how one of those church members described it to me). They had a scheduled event today at the edge of the Cleveland State University (CSU) campus, holding their signs for motorists and passers-by while one of the members stomped on a US flag and a rainbow flag at the same time (see picture). Another member told me, when I asked, that they see the presidential race as featuring “a baby-killer and proponent of sodomy on the one side and a serial adulterer on the other side,” both indicative of the “wicked leadership” under which the US suffers. No endorsement for either, there. Why had they come to Cleveland? I asked. Because they go where large numbers of people who live under idolatry are gathered, to spread their message.

But waiting for them when they arrived at CSU was another group of people with their own signs and bullhorns. I never did discover if this is a group with a name but their signs referred to the websites http://jesuspreacher.com and http://warnthewicked.com. This group insulted the Westboro group in more ways than you could count or would want to repeat, for about half an hour. Then they left.  “Shame on you for defiling our soldiers” was one of the more polite comments. I have some audio recordings of both groups and I can’t even bring myself to listen to them, let alone spread them around.

About an hour later this scenario was recreated downtown at Public Square, as I mentioned. But there this face-off became part of the larger chaos I described above. You could imagine that the only missing element was someone with a gun in the square or on a roof nearby (although who knows if they were missing). This is where I begin to worry that the until-today relatively controlled street scene may be on the verge of falling apart. A couple of spontaneous marches broke out of the square late today. Meanwhile, as you probably know, the attacks on Hillary Clinton from Chris Christie and others inside the convention grew to what one friend wrote me sounded like a virtual call for lynching (I didn’t hear Christie). As far as I can tell, the major scheduled anti-Trump marches have already taken place, potentially leaving protesters with little to do besides get angry at pro-Trump forces or the police, and vice versa. The public speaking platform at Public Square will remain open, making it entirely possible that the scene at the Square or elsewhere could get really ugly.

I certainly hope not.

• Wednesday, July 20

Wednesday here in Cleveland at the Trump Republican Convention. The street protest scene is winding down, not heating up, I think. My concern that the end of organized action might lead to greater chaotic action did not materialize. For most of the day, police and media representatives greatly outnumbered everyone else in Public Square. Otherwise, at various times, the apparently most disciplined groups dominated the scene.

The men from the conservative Christian WarnTheWicked.com, about whom I wrote yesterday, kept their megaphone going for hours, with intermittent heckling from LGBT folks and supporters. At one point, as well, NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League) had the public microphone across the square and they had some back-and-forth.

The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) contingent had their megaphone time at the Square as well, after their attempt to burn a US flag at the delegate entry point to the convention a mile or so away resulted in a number of arrests and dominated local news coverage.

No real conflict took place in the Square. My guess is that contrary to my concerns, the end of organized activities led to a reduction in direct protest, not an increase. Other factors were probably at play as well—fatigue, heat, work schedules.

But, as I learned too late to get there, community organizing continued to be the focus of a gathering at the Olivet Institutional Baptist Church on Cleveland’s east side, where I began this series of reports several days ago at the People’s Justice and Peace Convention.

I had a chance to chat with a couple of young white guys in the Square, Trump supporters, and ask them about their outlook on the current moment. Their pictures are attached.

Jason said he comes from a “fairly nuclear middle class family,” is a political science major in college in Cleveland, and works at a local tavern as a bar-backer and busser. He hopes to go into a career at the State Department or Peace Corps, drawing on his experience of community service at his church, “to share America with the world.” He said “we may not perfect in every respect but we are the best in the world.” Jason was carrying a rifle (1942 vintage single-bolt action)—one of the few “open carriers” at the square this week. He said he is exercising his Second Amendment right backed by state law and wants to “destigmatize gun ownership against the dangerous media tendency to make all gun owners out as crazy people.” He supports Trump because Trump wants “to make America first, as it should be,” as compared to the “internationalists” who destroyed the steel industry in Cleveland.

The other young man, whose name I unfortunately failed to get, stood out in his Breitbart.com-marketed t-shirt reading “Border Wall Construction Co.” He told me the election to him is about whether there is a global government or a United States of America. Would he work on a wall on the border? I asked. “Sure—the pay would probably be pretty good,” he said. I wondered what it would take to help these guys and many other people come to a different understanding.

• Thursday, July 21

The scene at downtown’s Public Square was chaotic and noisy all day, with many of the same organizations hectoring each other, far outnumbered by police and media. One new and refreshing group that took the public microphone was the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, a heavily youth-based network of organizations from around the country that has been growing since about 2005 (see picture). I loved how organized and articulate they were. And having arrived by caravan to Cleveland, they’re on their way to Philadelphia with the same messages for the Democrats, as are probably any number of other groups. 

A march was scheduled to cross one of the Cuyahoga River bridges, organized by health workers at the (huge) Cleveland Clinic, under the name Stand Together Against Trump (STAT). They wore t-shirts reading “Muslim Doctors Save Lives in Cleveland.” Some confusion ensued and apparently they ended up returning back across the bridge, maybe forced by police or maybe of their own decision. The local online report is here.

Before all that, I went back to the Olivet Institutional Baptist Church on the east side, where a conference called Impact 2016 has been going on all week to follow up on last week’s People’s Justice and Peace Convention. Today the group was discussing the problem of how to ensure their young people know their own history. My impression was that for them, moving along on community business like this was more important than protesting in the streets. I was glad to start and end my week there.

• • •

Some initial concluding thoughts: As we move forward, one issue that is right on front of us is the management of protest and discontent. I’m pretty sure there will be quite some detailed discussion of this in journals and blogs in the coming weeks, both at this Republican convention and Democratic one. The design of the public spaces around the convention area was pretty clearly aimed at fragmenting and disorganizing dissent—not that progressive forces don’t also contribute a level of fragmentation. But beyond the design of space, the level of police presence was overwhelming. As widely reported, police were brought in from all over the country, and they had what was probably a great opportunity to practice coordination among themselves, the use of tactics involving bicycle and motorcycle brigades and up-to-date lightweight body armor, and crowd control. This needs a lot of analysis by those who are in a position to do so. Actually, the loudest and most frequent sirens you would hear through the city was when several busloads of police were being moved around in convoys of buses accompanied by motorcycles with lights flashing and sirens screaming. At any given point or moment, it was a common sight to see police units deploying and redeploying on foot and on wheels. Are we seeing a “new normal”?  

More striking, and certainly more positive, was the complexity of the “generation gap.” So many organizations and activities involved large numbers of young people of all colors, genders, sexual orientations. A high level of awareness clearly exists among them that it is their future that is directly at stake in the current crises of race, class, and especially environmental destruction. At the same time, from the Black church to the Public Square, “elders” are struggling with how to effectively pass on what we know while reflecting on what we don’t know, about how the world looks to the next generations. The single most profound comment I think I heard this whole week, as I mentioned a few days ago, is that “elders know things that youth don’t, but youth see things the elders don’t.” How do we turn that insight into action?

Then there is Cleveland. Behind the glitter of the convention is a city and a population that is in desperate straights. Even the local TV stations had to acknowledge it is a “tale of two cities.” When speakers urged the national and international media to “come see the real Cleveland,” they meant it. Interestingly, the New York Times published a video report today which captures the reality of life in large swaths of the black community (here). This says it better than I ever could.    

• • •

* Bob Barber is a veteran Bay Area journalist and activist in movements relating to anti-imperialism, racial and social justice, and labor organizing.

by Anastasia Powell*

Image by Willow Brugh via Flickr.

Most of the time victims of sexual violence are silenced, their experiences minimized, or their realities ignored entirely. Perhaps that is why the victim’s impact statement in the high-profile Stanford case has been so widely shared in both print media and online. When you think about it, we rarely hear about sexual violence and its impacts from victim-survivors themselves. This is despite almost one in five American women (19.3%) experiencing rape in their lifetime, and more than twice as many (43.9%) experiencing other forms of sexual violence including coerced and unwanted sexual contact.

There are, of course, varied and complex reasons as to why we don’t hear about these rapes. Many are not reported to police. For some victim-survivors the trauma of the assault is already too much of a burden, and one that will only be amplified by a court case. In light of the mere six-month jail sentence handed down by Judge Aaron Persky’s to the convicted sex offender Brock Turner (of which it emerges he may only serve three), one can start to understand why few victim-survivors of rape go forward with an official report. Even if they persist through the trauma, the odds of a just outcome in the criminal justice system hardly seem worth it.

So we rarely hear about rape from rape victims. Yet, we do hear and witness a lot about rape and sexual violence more broadly. And much of what we hear and witness is so problematic—so inherently unjust—that many have suggested that we are living in a rape culture. In 1984 Dianne Herman described the United States as a “rape culture.” While not the only scholarly reference to the term, Herman defines this as the dominance of a cultural association between violence and sexuality such that heterosexual intercourse “is based on a rape model of sexuality.” The concept then, in Herman’s terms, suggested that sexual aggression is not just common, but is often normalized in cultural expectations and sexual practices.

Some scholars and commentators, such as Christina Hoff Summers and Camile Paglia, have famously critiqued the very notion of a rape culture, suggesting that there is an unfounded feminist “hysteria” surrounding rape and that the problem is not nearly as prevalent as is often claimed. Yet there is overwhelming evidence, both locally and globally, that sexual violence is a significant and prevalent problem. Also, it is not merely the prevalence of sexual violence that defines a rape culture.

The concept has received renewed use and attention in recent years, arguably in no small part due to the prolific engagement of feminists with social and online media, and that certainly appears to be associated with a greater voice and influence in mainstream media debates. In its contemporary usage, the concept of rape culture is popularly deployed to identify the sociocultural basis—and thus the shared social responsibility—for sexual violence. This is opposed to viewing sexual violence as a problem solely caused by individual pathology, such as mental health issues, alcohol misuse, or an innate hostility and aggression. Rape culture is also a concept that is used in critique of the all too frequent responsibilization of women and girls for their sexual victimization. It refers to a “non-consent” culture – a culture where women and girl’s sexual autonomy and human right to make sexual decisions are not protected or taken seriously.

A further critique offered by some contemporary deniers of the concept of rape culture is that we can speak of support for sexual violence as constituting a “culture” only if it is all-encompassing and dominates every level of a society. Such a critique is arguably problematic on at least two fronts.

The first of these is that “culture” is not itself a singular or one-dimensional concept. We openly acknowledge, and even sometimes celebrate, ethnic, language, and religious diversity as representative of our “multicultural” societies. Yet few would deny the relative influence of Anglo-Christianity in shaping the culture of societies such as the United States. To say that we are living in a rape culture then, is not to deny the existence of diverse, equitable, and consensual sexual attitudes and practices in our culture. Rather, the concept highlights and problematizes the relative influence of implicit or explicit support for sexual violence.

The second problem with denying the existence of a rape culture is that there is evidence of support for sexual violence at every level of many societies, including, but by no means limited to, the United States. To unpack this evidence, I find it useful to frame the concept of rape culture within an ecological or public health model—a model that articulates the societal, institutional/organizational, relational, and individual contributors to social and health problems. As such, rape culture refers to:

• Societal-level support, such as legal structures, popular representations, and persistent gender inequalities that set the conditions for the differential valuing of women’s rights to sexual autonomy;
• Institutional and organizational support, such as the barriers to reporting sexual violence whether to formal justice processes or to organizations (including workplaces and universities), many of which do not take victim reports seriously, rarely pursue action and/or minimize the responsibility of perpetrators, and further traumatize victims who do try to report;
• Relationship and peer-level support, such as peer group and relationship practices that normalize or minimize men’s sexual aggression, including what Walter DeKeseredy refers to as “male peer support”;
• Individual-level support, such as individually held attitudes and beliefs that minimize sexual violence, blame victims, and excuse perpetrators.

Thinking about rape culture as a concept encompassing these multiple layers helps us to identify a range of strategies we can take to challenge rape culture and change the story.

Do I think that we, in many countries including the United States, are living in a rape culture? Yes. But what gives me hope that the relative influence of rape culture in our societies will slowly diminish is that I also think that we live in a “multicultural” or sexually diverse society. One where there is active resistance to rape culture, in many places and with growing, albeit varying, influence. And while it will take continued resistance, activism, and reform, free and active consent is a core sexual value that is worth fighting for; not just to improve justice responses for victim-survivors of sexual violence, but to change the culture and more proactively prevent sexual violence before it starts.

References

Breiding, Matthew J. “Prevalence and Characteristics of Sexual Violence, Stalking, and Intimate Partner Violence Victimization-National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, United States, 2011.” American Journal of Public Health 105, no. 4 (2015): E11.

Daly, Kathleen, and Brigitte Bouhours. “Rape and Attrition in the Legal Process: A Comparative Analysis of Five Countries.” Crime and Justice 39, no. 1 (2010): 565–650.

DeKeseredy, Walter S., and Martin D. Schwartz, eds. Male Peer Support and Violence against Women: The History and Verification of a Theory. Northeastern University Press, 2013.

Gavey, Nicola. Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape. Routledge, 2013.

Gotell, Lise. “Reassessing the Place of Criminal Law Reform in the Struggle Against Sexual Violence.” In Rape Justice, pp. 53–71. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015.

Herman, Dianne. “The Rape Culture.” Culture 1, no. 10 (1988): 45-53.

Phillips, Nickie. Beyond Blurred Lines: Rape Culture in Popular Media. Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.

Powell, Anastasia. “Seeking Rape Justice: Formal and Informal Responses to Sexual Violence through Technosocial Counter-Publics.” Theoretical Criminology 19, no. 4 (2015): 571–88.

Powell, Anastasia. “Seeking Informal Justice Online.” In Rape Justice, pp. 218–37. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015.

Powell, Anastasia, and Nicola Henry. “Framing Sexual Violence Prevention.” In Preventing Sexual Violence, pp. 1-21. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014.

• • •

*Anastasia Powell (email: anastasia.powell@rmit.edu.au) is a Senior Lecturer in Justice & Legal Studies at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University), and has written extensively on sexual violence, justice, and digital culture including the forthcoming book Sex, Violence, and Justice in the Digital Era (with Dr. Nicola Henry).

Anastasia Powell, “Unpacking ‘Rape Culture’ after Stanford and Beyond.” Social Justice blog, 07/06/2016. © Social Justice 2016

by Stephen Platt*

Image: First Suicide, by 6I33 (via deviantart).

Despite “encouraging signs of progress” in suicide prevention in the United States, the suicide rate continues to rise, particularly among middle-aged white men. The drive to reduce the overall suicide rate is necessary but not sufficient: it is also vital to acknowledge and tackle the underlying inequalities that leave the socioeconomically disadvantaged at greatest risk.

The persistence of large inequalities in health—even in countries with long-standing social, healthcare, and other policies aimed at creating more equality in well-being—demonstrates deep roots in systems of social stratification. To be poor and economically disadvantaged means greater risk of ill health and shorter life expectancy.

Over the last two decades there has been growing international consensus about the need to address these inequalities, not least because many are “unnecessary … avoidable … unjust and unfair, so that the resulting health inequalities also lead to inequity in health.” As a result, the goals of public health policy, particularly in post-industrial Western countries, have widened from a narrow focus on improving overall population health to reducing inequity in the social distribution of health.

With respect to the prevention of suicidal behavior, however, there has been a nearly universal failure to consider issues of equality in the formulation of national strategies. In the United States, for example, the 2001 National Strategy for Suicide Prevention, despite recognizing that “the elimination of health disparities [including those associated with education and income] and the improvement of the quality of life for all Americans are central goals for Healthy People 2010,” failed to set any target for reducing inequalities in suicidal behavior. The 2012 refresh of the suicide prevention strategy similarly focused only on the overall prevention and reduction of suicidal behavior.

How important is this failure to apply an equity lens to suicide prevention strategy and activity? I have conducted a review of worldwide research on socioeconomic inequalities in suicidal behavior (Platt 2016). The weight of evidence points to the association between socioeconomic inequalities and suicidal behavior across a range of indicators at two levels: individual (e.g., suicide rate among unemployed people or people living in poverty) and aggregate (e.g., suicide rate in times of economic expansion and recession, or across regions with differing income profiles).

• Individual-level studies report significantly higher risk of suicide among unemployed people compared to those in work. Aggregate-level analyses present a more mixed picture; nevertheless, on balance they suggest that the suicide rate rises over time as the unemployment rate rises, especially in the context of economic recession.
• There is substantial evidence of a positive association between economic recession and suicide, particularly from studies carried out in middle- and high-income countries (Haw et al. 2014). This extensive literature covers a period of more than 80 years, from the Great Depression of 1929–1932, via the Asian economic crisis of 1997–1998, to the global 2008–2010 economic recession. An analysis of trends in suicide in the United States from 1999 to 2010 (Reeves et al. 2012) shows that there was an acceleration in the suicide rate from 2008, coinciding with the onset of the recession, which resulted in an estimated 4,750 additional suicide deaths by 2010. The recent National Center for Health Statistics report found that the upward trend in suicide from the start of the millennium accelerated from 2006 to 2014 (the latest date for which statistics are available), suggesting that the impact of recession on suicide rates is not easily reversed.
• There is strong evidence of an inverse relationship between occupational social class and risk of suicidal behavior: the lower the social class position, the higher the rate of suicidal behavior.
• A study of socioeconomic inequalities (measured by educational level and housing tenure) in suicide in 10 European populations found that lower educational attainment tends to increase the risk of suicide among men, but to be protective against suicide among women. The risk of suicide is greater among tenants than among homeowners for both men and women.
• In a systematic review of socioeconomic characteristics of regions and their suicide rates, the majority of studies found that more impoverished communities tend to have higher suicide incidence.
• The results of an empirical study conducted in Scotland confirm that, whereas socioeconomic disadvantage at both the individual and aggregate level is associated with increased suicide risk, the influence of individual social class is far stronger than the influence of area-level socioeconomic deprivation in accounting for suicide-related inequality. The suicide rate among those in the lowest social class living in the most deprived areas is approximately 10 times higher than the rate among those in the highest social class in the most affluent areas.

If governments are to tackle inequalities in suicidal behavior, they will have to face and resolve many policy challenges. Foremost among these is the choice of the strategic approach to reducing inequality.

It is not simply the poorest who experience less than optimum health; there is a gradient of risk across the whole population. Governments need to be clear whether they are seeking to improve the health of the most disadvantaged in absolute terms, reduce the health gap between most disadvantaged and the most advantaged/average, or reduce the gradient of health inequalities associated with socioeconomic inequalities (whereby the lower an individual’s socioeconomic position, the worse their health) (Graham 2004). Each of these strategic approaches has strengths and weaknesses.

Strengths of a focus on disadvantage or reducing the gap include a concentration of resources on the most needy in both socioeconomic and health terms, as well as an ambitious target to galvanize action. Drawbacks include: directing attention away from those who are privileged; shifting focus from inequality-generating structures to assumed personal deficits of those at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy; and obscuring inequalities in life chances and health chances across the socioeconomic hierarchy.

Strengths of a focus on health inequalities as health gradients include: explicit recognition that narrowing the gap is not sufficient for reducing socioeconomic inequalities in health, and an increased focus on social inequalities—in life chances, living standards, economic wealth, and political power—and the structures that maintain them. However, this latter strength is also a potential weakness in that it requires a political ideology that is too radical for most governments in the best of economic times and virtually unthinkable in the worst of economic times.

The approach to tackling inequalities in suicidal behavior depends on the overarching philosophy of health inequality reduction that is adopted by the government. A concentration on reducing the overall level of suicide in society or on reducing suicide risk only among the most disadvantaged may result in little change in relative risk between the most and least privileged, and it may even result in an increased relative risk by widening inequalities. On the other hand, the development and delivery of effective public policy interventions that reduce poverty, boost educational performance, improve housing conditions, and reduce unemployment would address the fundamental sources of disadvantage faced by many population groups, leading to a reduction in their risk of suicidal behavior.

• • • 

References

Graham H. 2004. Tackling inequalities in health in England: remedying health disadvantages, narrowing health gaps or reducing health gradients? Journal of Social Policy 33: 115–31.

Haw C, Hawton K, Gunnell D, Platt S. 2014. Economic recession and suicidal behaviour: possible mechanisms and ameliorating factors. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 61(1): 73–81.

Platt S. 2016. Inequalities and suicidal behaviour. In International Handbook of Suicide Prevention: Research, Policy and Practice, edited by R O’Connor, J Pirkis. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. 2nd ed. In press.

Reeves A, Stuckler D, McKee M, David Gunnell, Chang S-S, Basu S. 2012. Increase in state suicide rates in the USA during economic recession. Lancet 380: 1813–14.

 • • •

* Stephen Platt is Emeritus Professor of Health Policy Research at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He has published widely on social, epidemiological, and cultural aspects of suicide and self-harm. He is Vice-President of the International Association of Suicide Prevention and an adviser to Samaritans and the Scottish and Irish Governments on suicide prevention.

Stephen Platt, “Suicide Prevention: It’s a Social Justice Issue.” Social Justice blog, 05/13/2016. © Social Justice 2016

by Rebecca Gordon*

Witness Against Torture: Detainees, Forward. Photo by Justin Norman. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via shriekingtree Flickr.

The 2016 presidential campaign has put torture back on the American agenda. Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are campaigning on promises to bring it back, and even Marco Rubio hinted in that direction. (Of course torture never left the Secure Housing Units of US prisons, where it is hidden in plain sight.) The post–Vietnam War consensus that torture is wrong—at least when US citizens are directly involved—has well and truly broken down. Torture has now become mainstream.

The ethics and efficacy of torture are once again up for national debate, if by “debate” one means pronouncements such as Donald Trump’s guarantee made to a cheering crowd at a November 2015 rally in Columbus, Ohio. “Would I approve waterboarding?” he asked. “You bet your ass I would—in a heartbeat,” and he said he “would approve more than that,” because “it works, okay? It works.” Marco Rubio promises captured “terrorists” what he calls a “one-way ticket to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, [where] we are going to find out everything they know.” Not to be outdone by Trump or Rubio, during a recent Republican debate, Ted Cruz offered his explanation for why waterboarding is not torture, in a mangled reference to an infamous John Yoo-Jay Bybee memo dating from the George W. Bush era. “Under the law,” Cruz explained, “torture is excruciating pain that is equivalent to losing organs and systems, so under the definition of torture, [waterboarding] … does not meet the generally recognized definition of torture.”

Of course Cruz is wrong. In fact, US federal criminal code Section 2340 describes torture as “an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering … upon another person within his custody or physical control.” The UN Convention against Torture (which the United States ratified in 1994, making it a part of US federal law) employs similar language. To count as torture, the victim’s suffering need not, as the memo actually reads, “be equivalent to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” You can, in fact, torture someone without killing him.

While it is disturbing, it is not surprising to hear Ted Cruz trumpeting his willingness to embrace torture, given the competition he faces in the primaries. What is more disturbing is that this once-discredited Bush administration definition of torture should still be a common feature of ordinary discourse on the subject. (Even Bush & Co. “withdrew” this bit of legal counsel once it found its way into public view in 2004, replacing it with a kindler, gentler memo. If it had been the Nixon administration, I suppose they’d have said that the original memo was now “inoperative.”)

Why are we still debating whether or not torture is illegal and wrong?

I would argue that it is in large part because the people who wrote those memos, and the ones who designed and implemented the Bush-Cheney torture programs, have enjoyed complete impunity. It’s ironic, in a way, that Cruz made reference to the Yoo-Bybee memo, which was addressed to Bush’s then counsel to the president. That document’s original purpose was to offer legal reassurance that no one in the CIA or Department of Defense would face prosecution for torture under Section 2340. Most of the memo’s body concerns the arguments “a defendant” might make, if charged with the crime of torture.

In fact, many of the Bush-era memos about torture reveal a primary concern, not with the requirements of the law, but with the exigencies of ass-covering. For example, in 2003, the CIA’s general counsel, Scott Muller, issued a memo “for the record,” detailing a long list of high-ranking officials who had signed off on “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including then Attorney General John Ashcroft, Assistant Attorney General in Charge of the Criminal Division Deborah J. Daniels, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Counsel to the President Alberto Gonzales, Counsel to the National Security Adviser, Counsel to the Vice President David Addington, and the General Counsel to the Department of Defense William J. “Jim” Haynes II.

As late as 2005, John Rizzo, who served in various posts as legal counsel for the CIA, repeatedly asked the Justice Department for reassurance that the agency’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” was not prosecutable. Steven Bradbury, who was then principal deputy attorney general, gave Rizzo the answer he was hoping for, in a memo dated May 10: “In sum,” Bradbury wrote, “… none of these specific techniques, considered individually, would violate the prohibitions in Sections 2340-2340A.”

None of these high officials, nor their ultimate bosses, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, has been held accountable. Indeed, President Obama signaled clearly that this would not happen, when at the beginning of his first term, he stated that in regards to possible crimes committed in the so-called war on terror, “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” When mounting pressure finally shook loose a redacted 500-page summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s mammoth report on CIA torture, Obama reprised this refrain even as he admitted in 2014 that “we tortured some folks.” He advised those who read the summary “not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job those [CIA] folks had,” adding that “a lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots.”

No one above the level of lieutenant has been held accountable for past torture. One result of this impunity is that many more Americans believe in the rightness and efficacy of torture today than did 20 years ago. A 2015 Pew Research Center poll of citizens in 38 nations showed that the “US public is among the most likely to consider torture justifiable: 58% say this, while only 37% disagree. There are only five nations in the survey where larger shares of the public believe torture against suspected terrorists can be justified: Uganda (78%), Lebanon (72%), Israel (62%), Kenya (62%) and Nigeria (61%).” No wonder so few voices have been raised to protest the Republicans’ promises to bring torture back.

Alberto Mora, who raised red flags about torture as early as 2002 and who resigned his post as General Counsel to the Navy in 2006, makes this point most eloquently in a recent Los Angeles Times piece. I leave a few last words to him: “Our failure to hold ourselves accountable drains the crime of torture of its proper gravity, serves to encourage those (like Trump, Rubio and Cruz) who wish to use it again, and helps explain why being pro-torture is no longer stigmatized.”

• • •

*Rebecca Gordon teaches in the Philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States (Oxford University Press, 2014) and American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes (Hot Books, 2016).

Rebecca Gordon, “Torture, It’s Back in Fashion.” Social Justice blog, 03/23/2016. © Social Justice 2016

by Patrice McSherry*

Image: Inti-Illimani play in one of Santiago’s stadiums in 1971.

The New Song movement that emerged in the 1960s in Chile was rooted in popular musical traditions that were passed down through generations. The young musicians drew from folk traditions but created new musical, instrumental, and poetic forms that revolutionized the musical culture of Chile. Songs like “Plegaria a un Labrador” (Víctor Jara), “Venceremos” (Inti-Illimani), and “El Pueblo Unido” (Quilapayún), with their stirring music and socially conscious lyrics, became well-known anthems of the popular movements of the 1960s and 70s. They had a universal quality as well, crossing borders and communicating with people around the world who shared similar dreams of social justice.

This music is far more than a relic of the past. Today, New Song is part of the cultural patrimony of Chile. The songs evoke and symbolize a historical period, and are embedded in the historical memory of Chileans and non-Chileans. But many of the original musicians have continued to create, develop, and grow, producing an abundance of new music, recording albums, and performing in large concerts where they are welcomed as beloved figures. Quilapayún, for example, celebrated its 50th anniversary with dozens of concerts before tens of thousands of people. In April 2015, the group gave a free concert in the plaza behind the presidential palace, La Moneda, before thousands of people. It was the first time the group had played in this plaza in more than 40 years. The concert included an “exorcism” of Augusto Pinochet.

During the 1960s and 1970s profound political changes were taking place in Chile, in other parts of Latin America and around the world. New political and social movements of students, workers, peasants, urban shantytown dwellers, and other groups mobilized to demand rights and political inclusion along with structural changes in elitist systems.  The 1960s were marked by the Cuban revolution and the war in Vietnam, and many young people in Chile, as in other countries, were strongly anti-imperialist and in favor of progressive social change. The New Song movement was an organic part of these broader social mobilizations, and it played a key role in the democratization movement “from below” to transform Chilean state and society, culminating in the election of democratic socialist Salvador Allende in 1970.

New Song captured the struggles and aspirations of popular sectors and illuminated the harsh social realities they faced in Chile and Latin America. Mariela Ferreira, singer and instrumentalist of the folk group Cuncumén, put it well: “The mix of political lyrics and sound was important, but even more, the music was a key element of the social movements, the historical moment, the marches, the hopes of millions: the music transmitted that.” Formerly invisible and marginalized people became protagonists and universal figures in New Song. The artists expressed the deepest emotions and hopes of broad popular sectors and politically committed intellectuals.

The artists themselves, in conjunction with students, unionists, municipalities, parties of the Left, and peasant organizations, created the first informal structures to diffuse the new music: the peñas. A key component of the growing movements for social change, particularly New Song, was this ingenuity in circumventing the machinery of the dominant culture—elite control of radio and television stations, ownership of theaters and performance venues, all of which provided the tools for political control and censorship—through the creative powers of people and the support of key organizations. The multifaceted artistic currents of the time, including New Song, captured the ethos of expanding counterhegemonic movements that challenged entrenched power relations in Chile. I analyze this hegemonic system and its challengers in my book Chilean New Song: The Political Power of Music 1960s–1973, drawing on the theories of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist from the early 20th century who wrote extensively on the role of cultural power in maintaining exclusionary, elitist capitalist systems. The artists, poets, and musicians of New Song were organic intellectuals in Gramsci’s sense, critiquing social inequalities and oppression while also inspiring hopes among large sectors of society for a different, socially just system.

In the context of Latin America, the role of the Chilean New Song musicians was particularly important and powerful because they were organically linked to political parties of the Left and popular movements deeply involved in these socio-political transformations. The musicians—Víctor Jara, Patricio Manns, Isabel and Ángel Parra, Quilapayún, Inti-Illimani and so many others—were troubadours of the growing counterhegemonies in Chile. New Song articulated the invisible and suppressed music, values, and culture of majority populations of the region. The songs created consciousness, questioned existing relations of power, and expressed the dream of a better future. Moreover, the musical movement was a catalyst, not only a mirror, of the social movements. The New Song movement helped to create change—although not in a planned or deliberate way—by attracting masses of people to political causes, popularizing radical-democratic and socialist political visions through their song, and inspiring broad sectors of society to fight for progressive social change.

In 1973, a bloody U.S.-backed military coup overthrew Allende and implanted state terror in Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship. Víctor Jara was murdered in Chile Stadium, where thousands of Allende supporters were detained. Ángel Parra was imprisoned in the National Stadium with thousands of others and then transferred to the remote Chacabuco prison camp. Many other musicians were forced into exile. A long night of repression and fear descended upon Chile. But the music of New Song did not die. In fact, the musicians played an important role in inspiring new human rights movements in exile, and sustaining people under repression in Chile. The music became globalized, a central element in burgeoning movements of solidarity with the people of Chile. Cassettes with New Song music were smuggled back into the country. The song “El Pueblo Unido” became known worldwide and translated into numerous languages. The music was a central part of innumerable international acts, demonstrations, meetings, marches, and rallies as multitudes of people around the world denounced the dictatorship and demanded the return of democracy.

Today, new generations of Chilean musicians draw inspiration from the movement and many consider themselves descendants of New Song. Its musicians are cultural references and living legends in Chile, and its music one of the country’s most original and beautiful cultural treasures.

* J. Patrice McSherry is a political science professor, currently collaborating with Instituto de Estudios Avanzados (IDEA) in Santiago. She is author of Chilean New Song: The Political Power of Music 1960s to 1973, published by Temple University Press in 2015. The book won the 2015 Cecil B. Currey Award from the Association of Third World Studies for best book on the developing world.

Patrice McSherry, “The Chilean New Song Movement: Far More Than a Relic of the Past.” Social Justice blog, 03/14/2016. © Social Justice 2016

by Bernard Dreano*

© Maxppp (at www.francebleu.fr)

In this chilly evening of November the 27th, a few hundred people are on the Place de la République. Many are meditating, praying, or just silent around the big statue of the Republic in the middle of the square, surrounded with candles, messages of peace, children’s drawing, flags of different countries, and banners. An Arab is selling French flags. International TV channels have parked their vans nearby.

After the massacre, people look for ways to express sympathy for the victims, who were mostly young, under 35 years old, as well as ethnically and nationally diverse: 23 nationalities represented, all kinds of people from middle-class hedonists to practicing believers of Islam: the typical gathering on Friday night in the XIth district of Paris.

Parisians made a point of returning to the terraces of cafes where the shootings took place, to concerts, theatres, cinemas, and football matches. A strong feeling of the need to stand together, to avoid division, was expressed all over the nation. Gatherings took place in several big cities, with significant participation by all kinds of people, including Muslim minorities. In Bordeaux, the mayor of the town and potential conservative candidate Alain Juppé marched with the local imam, rabbi, and bishop, as well as representatives of political parties and human rights NGOs. The media didn’t talk too much of such events, since in the name of the state of emergency most demonstrations were forbidden by the authorities, and none allowed in Paris.

After the attack the authorities have proclaimed a state of emergency. The parliament has tightened the emergency law of 1955 (a law promulgated during the bloody Algerian war at the time of French colonialism). Only a handful of MPs (some of the Greens and leftists) did not vote for the decree that allows putting under arrest people whose “behavior” could threaten public order.

A first victory for the terrorists?

Of course the police are looking for the fleeing terrorists. Of course all means should be implemented to arrest the murderers and prevent new attacks. And of course we should fight the causes in Europe, in the Middle East, and in Africa that move people to adopt the sectarian, jihadist ideology of movements like ISIL.

A few days after November 13th, the police arrested or killed the surviving members of the bloody attacks during a very violent assault in a house in a poor neighborhood in Saint Denis, near Paris, a few hundred meters from the basilica where the kings of France are buried. The 71 inhabitants living there have not yet been relocated, and sleep in a sports hall. The State of Emergency policy does not have time to care about such collateral victims.

But who is really targeted in the name of the state of emergency?

As Le Monde observed and as the Human Right League denounced, the state of emergency is being used to harass ecological activists and to block demonstrations denouncing the irresponsibility of governments facing climate change and expressing the demands of civil societies during the COP21 meeting. Even an organic farm was raided by the gendarmes, perhaps looking for bombs in the cabbages, and placards denouncing environment policies were seized as “terrorist” materials.

It must be underlined that French leaders are not all on the same page. Some think that expressions of civil society should not be banned during the COP21. But among hardliners is the Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who clearly targeted ecological activists, even before the attacks, as “troublemakers” and now has the occasion to repress them.

In addition to the “ecowarrior danger,” the events of November 13th are being used to whip up fear of “foreigners,” especially the “migrants” who are refugees from Middle East and African hells. The “invasion” must be stopped! Or as Mark Rutte, the Dutch Prime Minister warned, Europe will suffer the same fate as the collapsing Roman Empire. The “barbarian danger” justifies the necessity of control at the borders, a purely rhetorical gesture given that internal European borders cannot be closed, unless you build a wall. The Prime Minister also threatens to withdraw French nationality from “delinquents” who have a double nationality, thus creating a climate of insecurity for maybe two million French citizens.

All this rhetoric of war, and nationalist and xenophobic statements, will not stop terrorism. In a way this is a first victory for the ISIL murderers themselves because this was explicitly one of the goals of their attacks: to create a climate of fear and hysterical reactions, and promote fractures within Europe by putting Muslims minorities under pressure and developing insecurities for migrants, as well as recruiting new members.

On the one hand, we have the very positive attitude of most French people, not falling into the fear trap, staying together, and opposing anti-liberty measures. On the other hand, several organizations and a large sector of the political elite are reacting with fear, adopting the demands of the extreme right to target foreigners, migrants, and all kind of “interior enemies,” including ecological activists. The polls indicate a rise in support of the xenophobic and racist National Front in the coming regional elections, while a sector of the right-wing conservative parties and left-wing Socialist Party have already de facto adopted National Front positions. Which side will prevail is the question for France, for Europe, in the coming months.

This evening (November 27th) I leave the Place de la République to go to a meeting in a little room, not far from the Bataclan, the music hall where the biggest massacre took place. Here I talk to Louai Abo Al Joud and Youssef Sedik, two courageous members of the Aleppo Media Centre, in northern Syria, who are fighting both the Assad regime and ISIL. They’re opposed to fighting ISIL via US and French airstrikes and Russian bombing. But that’s another story. For now, we prepare for the COP21 in Paris and, despite all difficulties, we will organize our civil society initiatives!

• • •

Bernard Dreano, a civic activist since the 1960s, is active in the “alterglobalist” movement, member of the international council of the World Social Forum. He is president of the Paris-based Center of International Solidarity Studies and Initiatives (CEDETIM) and founding member of the Assemblée Européenne des Citoyens (Helsinki Citizen’s Assembly – France). He is the author or editor of several books (in French), recently The Pearl and the Colonel, Reflection on the Arab Revolutions (Non Lieu, Paris 2011), and Human (In)security, the Struggles for Peace in the XXIst Century (Non Lieu 2015).

Bernard Dreano, “Letter from Paris: Which Side Will Prevail?” Social Justice blog, 11/29/2015. © Social Justice 2015

by Keramet Reiter*

Replica of a SHU solitary confinement cell. Photo by Steve Rhodes.

On September 1, 2015, California prison officials agreed to a settlement in the case of Ashker v. Brown. Todd Ashker, together with the other prisoner plaintiffs housed in California’s Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit (SHU), alleged that the practice of assigning hundreds of prisoners to solitary confinement for indefinite terms dragging out 10 years and beyond violated the US Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, as well as basic due process rights. In the Ashker settlement, prison officials promised to drastically reduce the use of isolation in California, ending four years of intensive collective action and litigation about the practice.

Prisoners in isolation had led three separate hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their confinement between 2011 and 2013. The hunger strike leaders—all of whom were serving indefinite terms in isolation as “validated” gang members—collaborated across previously mortally divisive gang rivalries to coordinate the collective actions. In a system renowned for institutionalizing racial segregation, the prisoner hunger strikers set aside racial divisions, uniting behind the common goal of criticizing both the harsh conditions of their confinement and the administrative process by which prison officials (not judges) determined they were gang members. Three pieces of evidence, like a tattoo (Aztec tattoos might establish Mexican Mafia membership) or being in possession of revolutionary literature (the writings of George Jackson might establish Black Guerilla Family membership), could send a prisoner to isolation forever.

The third hunger strike, in August of 2013, involved 30,000 prisoners, some of whom refused food for 60 days. Following the first hunger strike, the prisoners secured a team of civil rights counsel, including Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (based in San Francisco) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (based in New York City). In May of 2013, the legal team sought to certify a class of people who had been in isolation in the Pelican Bay SHU for 10 years or more: 500 prisoners.

At the time, no US court had found high-tech isolation in supermax facilities like the Pelican Bay SHU, for any period of time, to be unconstitutional. California prison officials conclusively won the right to maintain prisoners in long-term solitary confinement in the Pelican Bay SHU more than 15 years before the first hunger strikes, in a landmark case called Madrid v. Gomez (1995).

Throughout the hunger strikes and the early stages of the Ashker litigation, prison officials focused on maintaining their hard-won, total control over isolation in California. In 2012, prison officials initiated preemptive but superficial reforms, eliminating automatic assignment of gang members to indefinite isolation and instituting a new program to facilitate the transition of some gang-affiliated prisoners from the SHU. Publicly, officials persistently reaffirmed the need for long-term isolation of gang members. They filed affidavits in the Ashker case characterizing the lead plaintiffs as vicious, manipulative, and self-interested gang leaders. In a 2013 Los Angeles Times op-ed, Secretary of Corrections Beard described the Ashker plaintiffs as “convicted murderers who are putting lives at risk to advance their own agenda of violence.” The scale and duration of the nonviolent hunger strike, involving sustained collaboration of alleged rival gang leaders, provided a wordless but decisive rebuttal to Beard’s assertions.

After Judge Claudia Wilken certified the class of 500 prisoners who had spent more than 10 years in the SHU (in June of 2014), prison officials transferred 8 of the 10 named Ashker plaintiffs out of the Pelican Bay SHU. Undeterred, Judge Wilken issued an order in March of 2015 permitting these plaintiffs to continue to serve as class representatives. The prisoner plaintiffs then filed 10 damning expert reports assessing the destructive impact of long-term solitary confinement. The case was not going away. Talks of a settlement brewed.

Meanwhile, prison officials continued to move some prisoners out of isolation in the Pelican Bay SHU into general prison populations throughout California. Hugo Pinell was one of these prisoners. Nicknamed “Yogi Bear,” Pinell spent 45 years in total isolation deep within the California prison system. He was originally convicted of a rape, in 1965. But in prison, he was convicted of killing one correctional officer in 1970 and of assaulting two other correctional officers during George Jackson’s fatal escape attempt from San Quentin in 1971. (Of the “San Quentin Six” charged with conspiring to help Jackson escape, Pinell’s was the only conviction that was never overturned.) Pinell was one of the first prisoners moved into the Pelican Bay SHU when the facility opened in 1989, to house allegedly dangerous prisoners in long-term isolation. Pinell would spend the next 25 years alone in an 8×10-foot windowless, poured concrete cell, under fluorescent lights that never completely turned off. He would have, at most, 10 hours per week out of this cell for solitary exercise in an outdoor “dog run” or to shower. Pinell’s last contact visit with a friend or relative was in December 1970.

On July 29, 2015, however, Pinell’s circumstances changed. Prison officials moved him into the general prison population at California State Prison, Sacramento. Pinell became a test case in the prison system’s nascent efforts to cut down on the use of indefinite solitary confinement. The test failed. On August 12, two prisoners stabbed Pinell to death. A riot followed; 11 more prisoners sustained non-fatal stab wounds.

Pinell’s death foreshadowed all the ways reform of solitary is and will be difficult. In general, prisoners who have spent decades in isolation are likely to suffer from some mental health problems—whether anxiety, hallucinations, or depression—and to have difficulty adjusting to human contact, let alone life in a general population prison. Prisoners like Pinell, who spent 45 years in isolation, are especially likely to be well known to other prisoners who might have something to prove by planning a violent attack. Likewise, Pinell was well known to prison staff, who also might have had something to prove (about the necessity of keeping prisoners isolated) by permitting violence against him to take place.

Nonetheless, Pinell’s death hardly stalled the momentum of solitary confinement reform in California. Prison officials and the Ashker plaintiffs announced their settlement agreement just two weeks later. The 33-page agreement included five critical provisions, focused on the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison:

1. Justifications for Confinement: Gang validation is no longer grounds for assignment to isolation in California; instead, prison officials may only assign prisoners who break specific in-prison rules to isolation.
2. Durations of Confinement: Indeterminate isolation is now banned; five years is the new, hard limit on how long any prisoner can spend in isolation in the Pelican Bay Security Housing Unit (SHU).
3. Conditions of Confinement: After five years, even dangerous or non-compliant prisoners must be provided with some opportunities to participate in education and rehabilitation programs, have regular contact with other prisoners, and have physical contact with approved outside visitors.
4. Retroactive Application: California prison officials agreed to apply these new rules to all prisoners currently housed in the Pelican Bay SHU, moving all eligible prisoners into the general prison population within one year.
5. Data Collection: Officials agreed to provide for 24 months thorough monthly data about the characteristics of the SHU population to plaintiffs’ lawyers, in order to document ongoing compliance with the agreement.

The settlement attracted national attention and is still being celebrated by prisoners, their families, and legal advocates. Perhaps it will be a model for other states to reduce or eliminate prison conditions the United Nations has conclusively defined as torture. One settlement agreement, however, cannot sweep away decades of abusive prison policies. First, it is a settlement, not a legal opinion. At best, the settlement is a non-binding model of what other jurisdictions might attempt. Second, even though prison officials withdrew many of their claims about the dangerousness of SHU prisoners by agreeing to the provisions of the Ashker settlement, these beliefs have hardly been renounced. The genuine fear prison guards experience in coping with hunger strikes, managing mental illness, or dealing with prisoners like Hugo Pinell must be acknowledged and addressed, so that they are motivated to strategize to support, rather than resist, reform. Third, the data collection and monitoring associated with the settlement is scheduled to conclude in two years—and may never be made public in the first place. The practice of solitary confinement has historically been defined by discretion and invisibility, and is therefore hard to investigate, control, and reform. So the practice of solitary confinement could easily retreat back into the shadows in two years, absent longer-term requirements to institutionalize transparency.

Hopefully, the Ashker settlement has actually unsettled solitary confinement practices in California. But that is just the first step on a long journey towards serious and sustainable reform.

• • •

* Keramet Reiter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law & Society and at the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine. She has written about supermaxes and solitary confinement in the University of California Irvine Law Review, Punishment & Society, and the South Atlantic Quarterly, and she is currently finishing a book, Prisons within Prisons: The Hidden Hell of the American Supermax, scheduled for release by Yale University Press in 2016. She is co-editor, with Alexa Koenig, of the just released anthology Extreme Punishment: Comparative Studies in Detention, Incarceration and Solitary Confinement (Palgrave Press, 2015).

Keramet Reiter, “(Un)Settling Solitary Confinement in California’s Prisons.” Social Justice blog, 9/28/2015. © Social Justice 2015

by Phil Scraton*

Image by RISIBLErandom, from Deviant Art.

September 11, 2001. The day imprinted on a disparate international collective consciousness. As two planes hit New York’s twin towers, another engulfed the Pentagon in flames, and United Airlines Flight 93 plane came down in Pennsylvania en route to its target, I slipped traversing a ramp in Verona, severing my quadriceps tendon. Undiagnosed but in great pain, I flew home. A week later the tendon was repaired but I was soon in intensive care, pulmonary emboli—blood clots—to both lungs. It was touch and go.

Days later I lay in a ward shared with five others. Ankle to hip in plaster, oxygen mask, and intravenous heparin. Drifting in and out of sleep I could hear the others shouting at the never-off television. It was vitriolic, hateful, and deeply racist. As our doctors and nurses, many first generation immigrants to the UK, went about keeping us alive, they were forced to run the gauntlet of xenophobic commentary. To those around me, dependent, vulnerable, and offensive, their carers appeared to be invisible.

The guy in the next bed was particularly obnoxious. He shouted his demands for attention while berating “rag-heads,” “coolies,” and “Arabs.” From the corner of my eye I could see blood transfusing into his body. I lowered my oxygen mask and in an unusually soft, gasping voice I said, “Whose veins do you think that blood ran through before it saved your life? African? Asian? Aboriginal? Blood has no apparent culture, religion, or identity.”

Reality dawned. The thought that the blood now mixing in his veins could be “alien” triggered panic. Apoplectic with rage, he began shouting, soon losing control of his breathing. I reached for the emergency buzzer and pressed it. As a doctor and nurses arrived I closed my eyes as if nothing had happened.

Over the months of my recovery I edited Beyond September 11. The book was a dissenting collaborative voice against the mobilization of lethal force by the Blair-Bush alliance, signing us up to a “war on terror.” The book’s authors predicted what followed: escalation of war and insurrection; human rights abuses and Guantanamo; destabilization well beyond the borders of Afghanistan and Iraq; the inexorable rise of political fundamentalism; and so on.

September 10, 2015. Fourteen years on, men, women, and children are floating face down in the Mediterranean. The feet of their more fortunate fellow refugees tramp the roads and railway lines through Europe. Despite being on Europe’s doorstep, until now little attention has been paid to the persistent displacement of people from their war-torn homes. For years, struggling states have accommodated millions in tented villages. But now refugees are crossing borders, in search of peace and stability on “our” land. Predictably, within its tightly controlled borders the UK Government is out-of-step with the growing “refugees welcome” movement. It perceives and portrays open arms as an implicit threat to its much-vaunted, but unsubstantiated, “economic recovery.”

Fundraisers and clothes collection points yet again demonstrate deep-rooted compassion by many within our communities. Yet they are no substitutes for the necessary political and economic solution required. In Westminster politicians are faced with the legacy of their inherent chauvinism. Yet again the language of suspicion manifests itself in a discourse of “genuineness,” of hordes massing at the gates, about to “swamp” “our” cities and “our” way of life; of “terrorists” smuggling themselves in through the backdoor.

Without question, the realization of the extent of the refugee crisis is the defining issue of the moment. All European states, their politicians and their civil servants, are exercised in finding short- and long-term resolution. With one notable exception: The Northern Ireland Assembly is again teetering on the brink. As the parties’ MLAs [Members of the Legislative Assembly] crowd, like nodding dogs, around leaders interviewed by increasingly incredulous journalists, their sectarian prejudices are rarely far from the surface.

Watching what has been described as a train wreck unfold, the myopia that dominates politics in this place is palpable. Interviewed by the BBC’s Mark Carruthers, the Minister for Finance Arlene Foster—now doubling as “acting” First Minister—let the genie out of the bottle. Unequivocal and unhesitant she stated her primary function would be as “gatekeeper.” She was now a lone ranger, left in post by her resigning Democratic Unionist Party colleagues. This will ensure, she said, that “rogue Sinn Fein and renegade SDLP [Social and Democratic Labour Party] ministers” would not take “actions that will damage Northern Ireland and principally, to be honest, damage the Unionist community.”

Whatever the outcome of the next weeks, it is clear that this is the severe and unacceptable language of intolerance. It is a rhetoric that can only feed sectarianism and make more difficult the excellent cross-community work that has been progressed by our under-resourced community-based organizations. We look to politicians to represent the best interests of all their constituents, regardless of their perceived or proclaimed identity.

It goes without saying that the recent killings in an internecine conflict of well-known Republicans Gerard ‘Jock Davidson and Kevin McGuigan have had a massive impact on their families and their communities. Not that long ago similar killings also occurred within Unionist/Loyalist communities where paramilitaries still have a presence. These are the outworkings of the decades of war, but no way are they a prelude to its return. The exploitation of such events for political and ideological advantage is unacceptable. Arlene Foster’s misuse of the Chief Constable’s assessment that the Provisional Irish Republican Army remains active, while adopting the language of insurrection to delegitimize both Sinn Fein and SDLP ministers, crosses the line, purposefully delivering Northern Ireland to the brink of direct rule by the UK Government.

Shell-shocked refugees fleeing their homelands have raised international awareness of the excesses of sectarianism, resulting in an outpouring of support from across Europe including Northern Ireland. Yet the alienation and myopia of point-scoring sectarianism at home, demonstrated on the corridors and stairwells of the Stormont Assembly (the “parliament” of Northern Ireland), reinforces the violent rhetoric of entrenched division.

In a few months’ time I’m due back in hospital and, no doubt, will require a post-op blood transfusion. Loyalist, Unionist, Protestant, Republican, Nationalist, Catholic, Secularist, Agnostic, Atheist—whoever is the donor—gratefully and with humility I thank you in advance for your generosity.

  • • •

* Phil Scraton is Professor of Criminology in the School of Law, Queen’s University. Beyond September 11: An Anthology of Dissent is published by Pluto Books. His most recent books are Power, Conflict and Criminalisation; The Violence of Incarceration (with Jude McCulloch); and The Incarceration of Women (with Linda Moore). The new edition of his bestselling Hillsborough: The Truth will be published early in 2016.

Phil Scraton, “September 11: From Verona to Belfast.” Social Justice blog, 9/11/2015. © Social Justice 2015.

by Alessandro De Giorgi*

The materials presented in this blog series draw from an ethnographic study on prisoner reentry I have been conducting between March 2011 and March 2014 in a neighborhood of West Oakland, California, which is plagued by chronically high levels of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, drug addiction, and street crime. Since 2011, with the agreement of a local community health clinic that provides free basic health care and other basic services to marginalized populations in the area, I have been conducting participant observation among several returning prisoners, mostly African American and Latino men between the ages of 25 and 50. In this series of blog entries, I will be presenting ethnographic snapshots of some of these men (and often their partners) as they struggle for survival after prison in a postindustrial ghetto. For more detailed information on this project, please read here. Other episodes in this series:
#1 – Get a Job, Any Job 
#2 – The Working Poor
#3 – Home, Sweet Home

  • • •

The jail’s policies and informal custodial practices, and much of the interaction between jailers and the jailed, contain a thinly disguised element of intentional meanness. This is so because most persons who determine jail policy or manage the jail, as well as the general public, believe that jail prisoners are disreputables who deserve to be treated with malign neglect.
—J. Irwin, The Jail (1985/2013, p. 45)

It’s just like … when things not going right for me out here and I’m having hard times … I’ll be saying to myself, “It’s time to go back to jail.” Sometimes I felt like I’d rather be in jail than out here, because out here I can really hurt somebody that’s an innocent person, but if I harm somebody in there, it’s like a piece of shit…. We’re nothin’ in there, so they ain’t going to trip if I hurt somebody in there.
—Rico

Contemporary debates on the crisis of mass incarceration in the United States are mostly driven by cost-benefits considerations, a circumstance that largely explains the current bipartisan support for timid reductions in the prison population (see Aviram 2015). In California, the prospected readjustment of the penal state has taken the ambivalent form of a “realignment” of penal powers, whereby large numbers of nonviolent prisoners formerly housed in state prisons are now being channeled into the local jail system. In fact, since the introduction of California’s Public Safety Realignment Act (AB109) in 2011, over one-third of the decline in the 40,000 prisoners registered in the state’s correctional population has been offset by a simultaneous increase in jail populations (PPIC 2015)—a process more aptly defined as transcarceration than as decarceration (see Lowman, Menzies & Palys 1987).

Conspicuously absent from the current “smart on crime” rhetoric is any serious consideration of the growing role that penal institutions—and jails in particular—have come to play in the lives of the urban poor, their families, and their segregated communities in the wake of two decades of welfare retrenchment, rising unemployment, and savage cuts to public services (Dolan & Carr 2015). Similarly, no serious reference is made to the urgent need for massive investments in social services—not drug courts, community corrections, or other “net-widening” measures, but actual social programs like housing subsidies, health care, food assistance, and a basic income—for the urban poor currently being warehoused in penal institutions who will eventually join the burgeoning army of returning ex-prisoners. Given the current trend toward the decentralization of the power to punish, the role of county jails in the governing of social marginality will only become more prominent in the future, a prospect that should raise public concern, given the abysmal conditions under which people often serve time in jails, where rehabilitative programs are virtually nonexistent, educational opportunities are a mirage, and medical services are even worse than those provided in state prisons—and deemed unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in Brown v. Plata. Under these circumstances, and in the absence of any political project to tackle chronic urban poverty and soaring levels of social inequality, the current rearticulation of the penal state will likely result in further overcrowding and decay of local jails, increasingly turned into modern-day poorhouses, and in the dumping of hundreds of thousands of unemployed and unemployable individuals into the dilapidated neighborhoods they came from.

In the following notes I document how, despite the abysmal levels of neglect and abuse characterizing these institutions—particularly in terms of the physical and mental health of their guests—jails have come to represent one of the few residual forms of “public relief” from the sheer destitution the poor experience in the postindustrial ghetto, often representing their only chance to gain access to food, shelter, and sporadic healthcare. Of course, this is not to suggest that prisons should continue to offer their “services” to the urban poor; however, we should wonder whether the hands-off approach currently advocated by reformers and presidential candidates across the political spectrum represents nothing more than the latest chapter in a long history of public retrenchment from the ghetto and malign neglect toward racialized urban poverty.

• • •

Naira sitting in her living room a few weeks after her release.

November 24, 2013
It’s 7 a.m. on a foggy Sunday. I have an appointment with Rico at his apartment in East Oakland to drive him to San Raphael to pick up his girlfriend Naira, who is due to be released from Marin County Jail. She was arrested a few weeks ago after trying to cash a $500 check that someone else had forged, in exchange for a $50 cut. This happened after the financial assistance she receives from the Indian tribe she belongs to was cut several times, going down from $900 to $650. Naira believes the tribe is investing millions of dollars in the construction of a gigantic new casino and resort in Sonoma County. This makes it difficult for Naira and Rico, who only works a few hours a week at the community clinic in West Oakland, to pay for their rent—$850 for a single bedroom apartment in a dilapidated area of East Oakland—and other living expenses.

Rico, his hair freshly combed and dressed up for the occasion, is waiting for me outside the apartment. He is talking with a tattoo-covered Latino man in his early 50s, whom he introduces as an old friend. They both get in the car and I drop the man off a few blocks later. Rico tells me that Manuel had been one of his customers back in the day, when Rico sold drugs to support his own heroin addiction. The night before, he brought him some Kentucky Fried Chicken because he didn’t have anything to eat.

Rico is excited. During our half-hour drive to San Raphael, we listen to loud salsa music from his phone as we overlook the breathtaking views of sunrise over the Bay Area. He anticipates that Naira will look much better than before she went to jail, because at least inside “She been eatin’ decent food, sleepin’ more, and not be using drugs” for a few weeks.

Alex: So have you been visiting her?
Rico: I haven’t even talked to her on the phone.
Alex: Really?
Rico: Cuz she can’t call me collect, and I don’t have no money. Plus, that’s a little space for us to, you know … think. Yeah, especially her…. In a sense it’s good [that she’s gone to jail], so she can get her mind back on track.

We arrive at the Marin County Jail. The building looks like a fallout shelter, with just-released people emerging like ants from a nest. I wait in the car while Rico and Naira embrace and kiss in front of the jail’s entrance. Surrounding them are other couples and families who are reconnecting, much like new arrivals at an airport. In the car, Naira takes the backseat, while Rico sits next to me.

Naira: I just came out! I had to wait. I delayed everybody cuz they didn’t have my check ready.
Rico: They cashed it for you?
Naira: No, they gave me a check. They don’t give you cash when you come out over here.
Alex: So how much did they give you?
Naira: Whatever I had on my books.
Alex: Oh, okay so they just gave you back your own money. I thought they gave you some sort of gate money…. You know, like when they release you from San Quentin and you get $200 at the gate?
Naira: Yeah, if that was the case I’d come to jail every week!

On our trip back to Oakland, Naira shares what she saw in jail:

Alex: So, how was the food?
Naira: It was good. It was real good! We get soup on Tuesday and Thursday, and we had soda and popcorn on Saturdays. It was real good. Plus, they gave me bus tickets.
Rico: These ain’t good over here.
Naira: Oh, they don’t work over here? Let’s see. I know you can get a transfer that works. I think that works.
Alex: What’s the value?
Naira: Two dollars…. They give you enough to get home.
Rico: How ‘bout yard time? Small yard in there?
Naira: Yeah, small yard. Mess around. A lot of crazies in there though, man.
Alex: Crazies?
Naira: Yeah, a lot of young girls there, oh wow, I was like, this one was punching herself around. You’ve got all these personalities coming out, it’s crazy. This one sister just laughed to herself, the other one [was] carrying a conversation by herself, the other one the other day was banging her head against the wall … it made her bleed. My cousin had to go tell the deputy, they had to put her in the cell with the camera…. This one lady, they wouldn’t give her her meds and she just went off. She wiped her shit all over the cell and windows…. it was gross. Had it, you know, all over her face.
Rico: Did they give you yours [medications] quick?
Naira: No, I just barely got mine, like last week. Took them a week just to come see me.
Rico: You gotta call and get your prescription, tell ’em to send it.
Naira: They don’t even care about meds; they don’t unless you go off, then they put you in a padded cell and then they realize, “Oh, maybe she does need her meds.” They’re all young girls—I mean, they’re young—that are crazy.
Alex: So would you say it happens with younger people more often?
Naira: Yeah, more younger ones than these older ones…. Like, about 20 to 21, 18 or 19.
Rico: How many to a pod?
Naira: Two to a cell. One of the girls, she’s a chef too. Yeah, I helped her while she was coming down off alcohol pretty bad. She’s a diabetic, too, and they wouldn’t give her her medicine.
Rico: That’s crazy, diabetics need their stuff!
Naira: Takes ‘em a while to get medication in there. I even brought all my paperwork to show what medication I was taking and verify and it still took them two weeks to give it to me.
Alex: Seriously?
Naira: Yeah, like the doctor came and see me and says, “How do you feel?” I said, “It feels like my brain is loose, like you turn yourself around and kinda like dizzy. That’s how I feel.” She said, “Oh…” Then she kept judging me, “Oh, I see some interesting tattoos on you, are you gang affiliated?” I said, “No.” And she thought, “Yeah right, yeah, whatever…” She’s like, “Do you know Daniel?” What does that have to do with my medication!? “Do you drink or smoke?” “Yeah.” “You do drugs?” I said, “Maybe once in a while.” “Yeah right,” she says, and it’s like she just kept criticizing me. I’m like, “Am I gonna get my meds or what?”
Rico: If I was diabetic and they didn’t give me mine I would file a lawsuit. Lawsuit for real.
Naira: The girl was like passing out. I had to find her sugar and kept giving her sugar, make sugar-water…. She’s just like, “Oh, thank you.” I was like, “They don’t give a fuck in there.” She barely could talk; she was like barely holding herself up.
Rico: It’s not like Santa Rita, where they’ll give you your meds quick. In there, they interview you when you first go in and you see a doctor and everything.
Naira: They do up in here too! And I even gave them my paperwork. “Well, we got to verify this.” They verified it and gave me my inhaler, but they didn’t get my other medication. She goes, “Well you was taking these meds?” I said, “No, I still am.” She said, “Well…” She looked at the third paper and said, “Oh yeah, I see they did verify it.” Didn’t bother to turn the page, that’s why. They have a bunch of women in there right now just going off, yelling and screaming all night.
Alex: Is it very noisy at night?
Naira: Yeah. In Santa Rita, they held the crazy people in another place; they’re not in the housing unit. Right here they’re right in the middle, with all the windows and they get so crazy…. They be taking they clothes off and standing there naked in the windows, yelling and you can’t even talk on the phone cuz they say, “What you looking at, you bitch?” “I’m just talking, talking.” They don’t house them separately; they’re like right in front where we have our pod time, it’s like you can’t help but see them because they’re like … all the way around you. You see ‘em banging their heads. One girl was bleeding. And then they take them to the padded cell and they’re all rough with them, you know, they get all rough with them. And they’re doing something really bad. The deputies in there… They all know what happened with the medications, but it ain’t none of their business.

When we get back to East Oakland it’s past 8:30 a.m., and the sun is now high in the sky. As we drive through International Boulevard, I see on the sidewalks the assorted population that crowds the streets on a Sunday morning: scores of homeless people pushing carts, drug addicts and alcoholics passing out on benches, street-food trucks selling burritos and tamales, families dressed up for church walking amidst street prostitutes, and groups of youngsters in oversized white t-shirts standing in front of liquor stores. We stop at the McDonald’s restaurant on 98th Avenue, where Rico and Naira get two coffees, an orange juice, and four pastries, for a total of $8.50. While we’re waiting in line, we see Rico’s friend Manuel standing outside. After we’ve picked our orders, we exit the restaurant and Naira and Rico greet their friend.

Manuel hands a heavy plastic bag to Rico, who tells me it’s a free turkey his friend just got from a local church. Next Thursday is going to be Thanksgiving, and Rico insists that I take the turkey home as a thank you for the ride today. I decline politely. Then we share some cigarettes outside McDonald’s with Manuel, who tells Rico that Naira looks much healthier after her period in jail. As she lights his cigarette, he comments, “You look good, Naira! You really needed it, uh?”

References
Aviram, Hadar. 2015. Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era and the Transformation of American Punishment. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Dolan, Karen and Jodi L. Carr. 2015. The Poor Get Prison: A Comprehensive Look at the Criminalization of Poverty. Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies. At http://www.ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/IPS-The-Poor-Get-Prison-Final.pdf.
Irwin, John. 1985/2013. The Jail: Managing the Underclass in American Society. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Lowman, John, Robert J. Menzies, and Ted S. Palys (eds.). 1987. Transcarceration: Essays in the Sociology of Social Control. Aldershot, UK: Gower.
PPIC. 2015. Realignment, Incarceration and Crime Trends in California. San Francisco, CA: Public Policy Institute of California. At http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_515MLR.pdf.

• • •

* Alessandro De Giorgi is Associate Professor at the Department of Justice Studies, San José State University, and a member of the Social Justice Editorial Board. He thanks his research assistants Carla Schultz, Eric Griffin, Hilary Jackl, Maria Martinez, Samantha Sinwald, Sarah Matthews, and Sarah Rae-Kerr for their invaluable contribution. For a more detailed description of the project, see here.

Alessandro De Giorgi, “Reentry to Nothing #4 —‘In the Shadow of the Jailhouse’” Social Justice blog, 9/4/2015. © Social Justice 2015.