Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns

PRISONS AND SOCIAL DEATH PART 2: BALTIMORE

If you are from Baltimore, you probably know that there has been a 5 day occupation of the site where a $104 million youth jail is planned to be built. On Monday 6 people were arrested for trespassing state property when they entered the site to construct a schoolhouse in protest of the jail. I have not been in town for the occupation, so I can’t really give an analysis of what took place.

A youth jail is essentially the worst thing that could happen to a community—rather than providing support, guidance, resources, and activities for youth, it preps them for a lifetime of incarceration. While I was researching the proposal several months ago I read that 99% of the incarcerated youth in Baltimore are black, so the population that is being targeted is clearly racialized. Along with the youth detention center, a $181 million women’s detention center was also proposed, but pressure led officials to put the plans to build the women’s jail on hold, probably because the population of incarcerated women has declined significantly. But why haven’t the plans to build the youth jail been trashed? Both the women’s and youth jails were based on a fallacious “forecast” made in 2007 that predicted increases in crime. But despite the impression people get from The Wire, crime has declined drastically in the last several years. In fact, the population of jailed youth was approximately 50% of what was predicted for 2010. Obviously the issue isn’t crime. Even when that is the pretense for building more jails, the numbers they are using to back their plans are nonsensical.

The main justification for the youth jail was The Project Program for New Youth Detention Center report made by Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPS). In addition to being outdated, the report did not indicate who conducted the forecast and, overall, was full of all kinds of methodological errors such as inappropriate aggregate analysis, incorrect population data, incorrect arrest data (based on arrests for all ages, not just youth), etc. Erroneous data + flawed analysis of that data = WHO THE HELL ARE YOU TRYING TO FOOL? The report has no basis in any kind of reality, except the reality of the prison-industrial complex. At a time when libraries, rec centers, school programs, and others services are being dismantled, there is absolutely no reason why this plan should appear to be even remotely logical to anyone.

Some documents and resources:
Schools Not Jails! (campaign to stop the Baltimore Youth Jail)
Critique of Maryland’s Population Forecast: No Call for a New Youth Detention Facility
Release from Jail: Moment of Crisis or Window of Opportunity for Female Detainees in Baltimore City?

*

While we’re on the topic of prisons and jails, I read a good article by Cassandra Shaylor that talks about the way solitary confinement is used against women of color in prisons—It’s Like Living in a Black Hole: Women of Color and Solitary Confinement in the Prison Industrial Complex. Not surprisingly, one of the biggest problems is the rampant sexual assault of incarcerated women, especially since around 60% of incarcerated women are survivors of sexual abuse. The article discusses the dynamics between the guards and female inmates:

Due to their relative lack of power, women prisoners are vulnerable to such attacks by guards. This is especially true when they are isolated from other women. The sense of entitlement male guards feel as a result of their status in a masculinist institution within a patriarchal culture, coupled with the subordinated status of female prisoners as women and as “property of the state,” promotes such abuse.

[…]

The fostering of a perception of prisoners as less than human allows state employees to deny the women any semblance of dignity and to abuse them without compunction. This discourse of subhumanity evokes connections to slavery and the manner in which slaves were dehumanized in order for slave owners to treat them like chattel. The economy of the prison is fueled by such notions, as women bodies can be more easily reduced to the mere property of the state.

Here are more passages that get at what I’ve been thinking about imprisonment and social death:

This author [Eldrin Bell] would argue that what is also relevant in his statement is the division between two other notions of America -one inside and one outside. Through the space of the prison, there is a contest over what it means to be American. Racism is a constitutive piece of this construction.
When individuals are imprisoned, they are no longer considered national subjects; they lose most of their rights as citizens and are thus perceived to be outside of the national body. This is especially true if, in addition to transgressing prescribed societal norms through activity that is deemed criminal, they are racialized subjects. Many people express no opposition to the diminishing civil rights of prisoners, in large part because they believe that individuals forfeit those rights when they commit criminal acts. Individuals outside of prison define themselves as “good” citizens in contrast to those inside. […]
Prisoners thus represent the abject of the nation, in large part because a For women of color this expulsion compounds a pre-existing invisibility. Not only are they absent in discourses about race, gender, and prison, but their very bodies are hidden by the state thus rendering them completely invisible.

Here is a film I made about the abuse of women by prison guards, cops, and border patrol officers (trigger warning for sexual assault):

The Wing Thing from Digital Desperados on Vimeo.

Notes:

1. derica liked this
2. apartmentbolcroatia reblogged this from loneberry
3. croatia-holiday-apartments reblogged this from loneberry
4. bol-croatia reblogged this from loneberry
5. singkrenisite liked this
6. curate reblogged this from loneberry
7. nyzzz liked this
8. thecyberpunkapocalypse liked this
9. curate liked this
10. theslowlearner liked this
11. walterdavis liked this
12. loneberry posted this