A few weeks ago, while stumbling around on Facebook, I found an old ‘acquaintance’ of mine: a man who, over thirty years ago, went to the same boarding school as I did. I poked around further; his page was not guarded by his privacy settings from snoops like me. On it, I found a groupContinue reading “On Bad Memories And Moving On”
Tag Archives: prisons
Orange Is The New Black And The Privatization of Prisons
Spoilers Ahead. Orange is The New Black has attracted–not unjustifiedly–some flak for its powerful and painful fourth season: it has been accused of being ‘trauma porn for white people,’ and of having ‘failed the Dominican community.’ Still, the show has provided some powerful drama in those thirteen episodes, largely by throwing off any pretensions thatContinue reading “Orange Is The New Black And The Privatization of Prisons”
Bertrand Russell On Deterrence By Making ‘Freedom More Pleasant’
In ‘What I Believe,’ an essay whose content–selectively quoted–was instrumental in him having his appointment at the City College of New York revoked¹, Bertrand Russell wrote: One other respect in which our society suffers from the theological conception of ‘sin’ is the treatment of criminals. The view that criminals are ‘wicked’ and ‘deserve’ punishment isContinue reading “Bertrand Russell On Deterrence By Making ‘Freedom More Pleasant’”
Prisons And Boarding Schools: The Informer Phenomenon
I’ve made note here, on this blog, on some interesting similarities between prisons and boarding schools: the discipline, the regulation of time, the uniforms, the social dynamics. Yet another similarity may be found in the ubiquity of informers: moles, spies, double-agents, leakers, snitches–call them what you will–conduits for the passage for information to administrative andContinue reading “Prisons And Boarding Schools: The Informer Phenomenon”
Vincent Simmons: ‘The Innocent Burn When Falsely Accused’
A few decades ago, while watching a Bollywood potboiler at home with my parents, I saw a central character react sharply to a concocted accusation–perhaps of theft–by the movie’s villain, out to frame him and send him to jail so as to clear the way for his other nefarious plots. As our hero responded toContinue reading “Vincent Simmons: ‘The Innocent Burn When Falsely Accused’”
‘A Manual For The Police On How To Conduct Beatings’
Leonard Strickland was beaten to death; in jail, by prison guards. Those who did so, and those who supervised them, were secure in the knowledge that very little would be, and could be, done to bring them to justice. History and the law is on their side. In 1992, in one of Clarence Thomas‘ earliestContinue reading “‘A Manual For The Police On How To Conduct Beatings’”
Gideon’s Army: Fighting A Just War
The first time I saw Gideon’s Army, Dawn Porter‘s documentary about three public defenders fighting a lonely battle in the American South, I watched impassively, even as anger and sadness swirled within me. The second time I did so–yesterday, in a classroom with the students in my Philosophy of Law class–I blinked back tears. (MoreContinue reading “Gideon’s Army: Fighting A Just War”
School Discipline And Socialization For The Carceral State
Schools are a buffer zone, artfully, strategically, placed between zones of dysfunction–the homes of ‘broken’ families, populated by the wrong ethnicity and racial category, which produce criminality and social pathology–and the rest of society. Here, a net may be cast, trawling through the swarms of schoolchildren, catching the bad, the misbehaved, the unrepentant repeat offendersContinue reading “School Discipline And Socialization For The Carceral State”
‘Orange Is The New Black’ And Boarding Schools
As I make my way through the second season of Orange Is The New Black, Netflix’s original series based on Piper Kerman‘s memoir, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison about her experiences at FCI Danbury, a minimum-security federal prison, I’m struck again by how much of the prison experience remindsContinue reading “‘Orange Is The New Black’ And Boarding Schools”
Debating Teams And The Prison-Industrial Complex
The news that a team of prisoners–incarcerated criminals from the Eastern New York Correctional Facility–had beaten, in debate, Harvard’s team, was not slow in spreading. After the initial informal reactions on social media–many of which expressed glee at Harvard’s comeuppance by plebes–had died down, a more measured response followed, one which stressed that such aContinue reading “Debating Teams And The Prison-Industrial Complex”
Samir Chopra 