Motley Moose – Archive

Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

Can we talk about incarceration?


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This is not going to be a long commentary.

Someone recently sent me a link to a news item, from Ohio.

Ohio Prisons Shut Off Electricity In Exchange For Payments

This was during a time period when I was sweating and uncomfortable in an extended heat wave in my part of the Northeast, and since I don’t have air-conditioning I was jumping into the shower several times a day to cool off.

If you are locked up, and they shut off air, cooling systems, during a heat wave-how many folks on the outside give a damn?


In the Ohio case the ACLU immediately responded.  Just as other civil liberties groups and grassroots groups of activists and family members of those who are locked up as well as international organizations like amnesty international have raised an outcry. But for the most part, the story was simply a blip in local news.

At the same time a prisoner hunger strike continues in California, a state with a very large population of inmates (over 200,000).

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You can read the hunger striker’s list of demands here.

Many online comments to stories about the strike are essentially “let them die..it will save our tax dollars.”  

Over the July 4th weekend I attended a small reunion of members of the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Party, where we got a chance to as a group, speak to one of our comrades who is locked away – over the phone. We each took a turn to speak, and give him strength. He in turn assured us he is staying strong, but I left there with a lump in my throat, and thinking about trying to raise this issue, yet again, online.

We are aware that we have quite a few brothers and sisters who are serving over 800 years of prison time – much of it as a result of COINtelpro. We have a small “alumni” association, doing the best we can.

We have a brother who is very ill in Angola Prison in LA. Herman Wallace.  Amnesty international has taken up his case, for compassionate release.

Herman Wallace and fellow prisoner Albert Woodfox were placed in isolation in 1972. Since then they have been confined to 6.5 X 9 ft cells for 23 hours a day and allowed out only to exercise alone in a small outdoor cage, to shower, or to walk along the cell unit corridor. Both men were convicted of the murder of a prison guard yet no physical evidence links them to the crime; potentially exculpatory DNA evidence has been lost, and the testimony of the main eyewitness has been discredited. These serious legal concerns compound the injustice of decades of cruel confinement.

Now 71 year old Herman Wallace is terminally ill with liver cancer. Call on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to end the 41 year nightmare and release Herman so that his family can care for him during his last months.

Click here to sign their petition.

The Angola 3 have a series on Daily Kos, and at other places around the web, but haven’t raised a significant level of outrage or interest from a broad swath of those who include themselves in political boxes that are liberal or left.  

I am feeling pretty frustrated. Given the level of vituperativeness exhibited towards Trayvon Martin (not just on right-wing sites), tarred with a “thug” label (read: black criminal) and “blame for his own murder” rhetoric, which essentially tells people it was okay for him to be shot and killed, I have little hope that the voices of the left will make much of an effort to make incarceration, and those human beings locked away, many in solitary for more than 40 years a priority.

This brief comment is a question to readers.  

Do you think that we will ever be able to make the criminal injustice system, as it applies to incarcerees who are not high-profiled, or white, a priority?  

Have the prison porn, anti-crime, law and order mantras made it impossible for us to garner support from those who embrace a leftist, liberal, progressive, radical perspective around other issues?

I know that many people have a list of what they feel are their top priorities for change.  Climate change, the environment, Wall Street, racism, voting rights, gun control, the war on women, the war on drugs (mostly about pot) LBGT rights….rarely do I see folks put the incarceration nation at the top of their lists.

Yes, I know that there are groups devoted to ending solitary, ending the death penalty, ending torture, defending high profile cases, getting those wrongly convicted released…but I’m not sure that there will ever be a time in the foreseeable future that there is a massive outcry about the status quo – simply because too many people agree that inmates deserve to be where they are, and ignore their treatment once locked away from view.

There was only one reader comment attached to a news update on the Ohio situation.

To me it represented  the way too many people think, no matter their party affiliation.

What I’d like to know is why should people support feeding and taking care of persons who deliberately go and do things and get thrown in jail ? They need to stop being crooks drug dealers and all the other things that get them thrown in there

I’d like to ask what you think some practical solutions are, short term and long term for moving this issue up on folks list of priorities?

Or is it futile…and will the few of us who’ve been doing this work for decades continue to be a tiny minority?

Cross-posted from Black Kos)


Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 28 Comments

28 comments

  2. wordsinthewind

    when people calling themselves progressive are free to spout racist hatred it doesn’t seem like they would care about those who are different any more than the right does. In a way I’m glad to see those lefties marginalizing themselves, now they need to quit pontificating and start listening.

  3. bfitzinAR

    I’m not really hopeful here.  Part of it is the stereotyping.  Once a person is in jail, for whatever reason, he/she is no longer a person – felon, jailbird, criminal – but not a person.  Part of it is racial – locking up scary brown people and throwing away the key means fewer brown people to be scared of.  Part of it is the same sociopathic dead space that sees people in trouble as “moochers” who need the rug pulled out from under them (again) so they’ll quit being moochers.  If I were a practicing christian, I’d probably say something about people claiming to be who not just ignore but actively do the opposite of what Jesus told folks to do if they wanted a place in the Father’s House (which included visiting those who are in prison with the purpose of making sure they weren’t being abused).  Part of the problem is the privatization of the prison industry – there damn well shouldn’t be a prison industry any more than there should be a medical industry or a surveillance industry – which means money in “trickles up” into CEO pockets while services decline.  As long as Randism is the rule, there probably isn’t a practical solution.  If there is any practical way to bring this nation to the “Golden Rule” sort of thinking, that’s your first step in practical solutions for decent treatment of those in jail as well as jobs programs, education programs, and a strengthened safety net for everybody.

  4. bubbanomics

    he’s pretty close to the edge on this issue.  I’d agree with bfitz above in terms of being pretty frakking far from hopeful.  Your final boxed quote sums up the feelings of a pretty sizable majority of americans, I’d bet.

    US Death Penalty Support Stable at 63%.

    If 63% of Americans support the death penalty, it’s hard to imagine much of an interest in reform.  Some recent CA polling shows a mixed bag:

    Sixty-three percent of voters in the poll by the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and the Los Angeles Times said they favored releasing low-level, nonviolent offenders from prison early.

    72 percent, were comfortable with reducing sentences for minor crimes

    When asked whether it’s better to save money by reducing the inmate population or keep inmates locked up to protect the public, respondents chose the latter option, 47 percent to 41 percent.

    People are insufficiently engaged on this matter. Mostly I think it’s a very uncomfortable topic, and it’s easier for people to imagine “they got what they deserved” and go on with their lives.  In some sense the alternative is unthinkable, so people choose not to think about it.  The level of participation at Seeta’s excellent  http://criticalmassprogress.com/ blog (myself sadly included) tells you something.

  5. JanF

    “let them die..it will save our tax dollars.”

    And it isn’t just the internet bravery of the comments section at news or blogging sites. It is in people’s hearts.

    Some of the stories about the failed privatization of prisons has put the issues of prisons back in the news but there is not enough discussion about the humanity of those incarcerated. In fact, in some states, as you know, a felon loses his or her voting rights permanently and are forever incarcerated in a second class citizenship even after they are released from prison.

    This issue falls under the category of human rights. It would seem that progressives should have room in their hearts for caring about the plight of the incarcerated.

    Here is a pretty famous incarceration remembered:


  6. Avilyn

    For one, as was said above, once somebody is in jail and considered a felon, it is easy to marginalize them as “less than”; although what that says about us as a people is scary (to take the measure of a person, look to see how they treat those less powerful than them, to paraphrase Harry Potter).  I admit I can fall into this category at times, as I have a hard time finding sympathy for the likes of people like Jerry Sandusky, domestic abusers and rapists, given my past.

    Another huge issue is the privatization of our prisons and the failed drug war, and how the archaic laws are applied disproportionately to minorities.

    At the root, I think, is the inequality of our society.  I listen to Thom Hartmann a lot, and he points out that when people are given no options, they’ll turn to illegal activities; and that for want of opportunity, drug dealers would in other situations be entrepreneurs.  

    I don’t have any brilliant answers, other than perhaps working with Libertarians (shudder) to end the drug war, and to fight like hell for the social safety net and other programs that lift people out of poverty.

  7. kishik

    being money-makers.

    My cousin had done a pretty intensive report on the California prison system.

    Pretty scary and intense when you think how it’s the dollar which has driven crime legislation.

    This is an interview in which she expounds on how the prison guard union has been a force in driving the expansion of prisons, and thus to support the whole system of incarceration, keeping inmates IN the prisons.  Without prisoners, you are out of business.  Union member prison guards are thus out of a job.

    http://www.kalw.org/post/polit…

  8. PadreJM

    no, I can’t — at least not without becoming so enraged that I cease to be able to maintain any coherence.

    The issues are so many and diverse that they are overwhelming, beginning with the demise of the rehabilitation model in favor of a strictly punitive one; and running straight through until we get to the inexcusable fact that the criminal justice system, collectively, has become the largest mental health care provider in the country, turning upside down the whole point of deinstitutionalization.

    Even if we could have confidence that all, or even a major portion of prison inmates were guilty and justly sentenced, a point I am far from willing to concede, their inhumane treatment has no place in a civilized society.

    Then add to that the mythology embraced by the vast majority of the public: that luxuries in prisons abound, that educational opportunities are readily available to all behind bars; that one need only claim mental defect (or even distress) in order to avoid conviction let alone incarceration . . . its enough to make one despair.

    The owner of one of the most successful furniture stores in my hometown started with an upholstery business in a garage, having learned that craft while serving a prison sentence for a felony in the 1940’s.  The community accepted him as having “served his time,” and supported his making a new life for himself, even celebrating his story of redemption.  Now, the only skills convicts are likely to learn are better ways to commit even more criminal acts while they serve lengthy sentences with little or no hope of legitimate employment upon their release.

    Try to talk about that in most cities in which I’ve worked, and one is dismissed as “soft on crime,” and a hopelessly idealistic “bleeding heart liberal.”

    OK.  I’ll admit it.  My heart does bleed.  But only because it’s so frequently broken over just such atrocities.

  9. LauraFall

    injustice of a prisoner conditions worsen for them in retribution.

    Income inequality is a factor, I think white privilege is a bigger one.

    The huge disproportion of AA prison population to whites means that most white people don’t directly know someone who has been incarcerated, hear the stories, know what the conditions are really like.

    My belief is that if as many white families had a son, daughter, niece, nephew, cousin, close friend, incarcerated and knew what it was really like there would be more of an outrage.

    Since just about anything can get smuggled into and out of prisons maybe a lot of video recorders actually recorded inside, uncensored by prison Admins,  put all of it into one documentary. There are documentary film makers who might care enough to do one, but you know the Admins would clean shit up for a day and it would be a bullshit picture of what it’s really like.  

  10. iriti

    Solitary confinement ought to be legally classified as cruel and unusual punishment. It likely never will be and its use will be left to the judgment of a group who tend to see anyone who has been jailed as ‘the other’.

    The racial disparity doesn’t help. My sense is that a white man is innocent until proven guilty and a black man is guilty until proven innocent.

    As to how to build appropriate outrage, I just don’t know if it’s possible any more.  

  11. creamer

    Too many times I’ve heard friends and others refer to us and them. It’s not “how can we stop big city violence”, “it’s why can’t they.”

     I think some of it’s just lack of interest in anything that doesn’t have a direct affect on a person. A big part of it’s racial, but I think part of it is national focus on the individual. It’s about me and not only do I not have time for anything or anyone that isn’t me, I really don’t care.

     As I get older, most of the optimism of youth and belief in people’s (Americans) better angels has disappeared. I find that the cause’s and beliefs I support have more to do with how I view myself in relation to right and wrong than any real hope that we will affect much change.

      When you peel back the veneer of America, you find a lot that’s ugly.

    All that being said, I glad you write Denise.  

  12. Diana in NoVa

    In common with other commenters, I don’t know what the answer is. As discouraging as it seems now, I think part of the answer is for you and others to keep writing diaries like this one.  The effect of water on stone, you know: when enough of them impinge on our collective consciousness, something will be done.  Things will happen.

    Think about the death penalty.  For years it seemed firmly entrenched in our culture.  Then remember The Innocence Project, which (if I remember correctly) began as a law school exercise. Nowadays, people are being freed because of The Innocence Project.

    In the meantime, prejudice, ignorance, and indifference will continue. It’s discouraging.

    But where there’s life, there’s hope.

  13. plf515

    Solitary Confinement Watch is a group started by Jim Ridgeway. Ridgeway has been reporting on the horrors of prison life (and particularly solitary) for quite a while; until recently for Mother Jones, but now on his own.

    Here is their website  

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