I’m stealing this link from Brownfemipower, who in turn got it from Le Colonel Chabert, who in turn quoted Left Turn:
I want to tell you about Emmanuelle Narcisse. He was a tall, slim, handsome young man who was killed by a guard at the Bridge City Correctional Center for Youth – a Louisiana juvenile prison – in 2003. Apparently, he was “fussing” in line, talking back to a guard. The guard punched him in the face, one blow, and Emmanuelle went down backwards, slamming his head on the concrete. He took his last breath there behind the barbed wire of that state run facility. The guard was suspended with pay during the investigation. No indictment was ever filed against him.
There is also Tobias Kingsley ((Name has been changed for purposes of confidentiality.)) , sentenced when he was 15 to two years in juvenile prison for sneaking into a hotel swimming pool (his first offense).
Okay, let me interrupt the quote for a second to point out that two years in JV for sneaking into a hotel pool is a perfect example of how white Americans like me simply live in a different country from Black Americans like Tobias.
Two years? For sneaking into a hotel pool?
I did shit like that when I was a teen — and I was pretty meek. I knew plenty of kids who went to my high school (in a wealthy, overwhelmingly white town in Connecticut) who’d do shit like that and much worse all the time. What was the worst that would happen? Most likely we’d get caught and chased or thrown out. Possibly hotel security would call our parents and we’d get a stern talking to. As a far outside chance, and this is the end-of-the-world total catastrophe worst case scenario, conceivably the hotel could call the cops on us and we’d spend a night in jail “learning our lesson.”
But two years in jail? Inconceivable. It would never, ever happen to us, not in the country I grew up in. No one would “ruin our lives” over teenage pranks like that, not in the country I and other rich white kids grew up in.
That’s white privilege at its rawest. I grew up in a country where my transgressions would be forgiven, where I’d get second third fourth fifth sixth seventh chances, where the authorities were concerned that my life not be ruined. Tobias did not grow up in a country like that. Because I was white, and well-off, and he is Black, and (I suspect) not well-off.
Tobias endured physical and sexual abuse inside the prison. He said that guards traded sex with kids for drugs and cigarettes, and sometimes set kids up to fight one another, making cash bets on the winner. His mama said he was never the same after he came home. She said the nightmares, the violence, the paranoia persisted years after the private lawyers helped him come home early. His battles with addiction and depression are not yet over. […]
And despite efforts to get someone, anyone to care and to act, these young people most often end up statistics in somebody’s dismal report, or an anecdote in an article just like this. Because people don’t care. Because these young people are not just poor, they are not just Black, they are “criminals”….
…There is nothing broken in this system. In fact, usually (when it is not disrupted by 50,000 protestors), it is quite efficient at doing precisely what it was created to do. In the Deep South, the criminal justice system as we know it was built after the abolition of slavery, as part of the terror machine which destroyed the briefly federally protected Reconstruction era. Without nuance or subtlety, the system was created by wealthy, land owning whites to keep Blacks “in line,” on the plantation, and working for next to nothing. Thanks to the Thirteenth Amendment which abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime,” laws and codes were invented that criminalized the very existence of Black people, police were hired to “enforce” those laws, and courts were mandated to send these newly created “criminals” to jail, or better yet, to be leased out to the very plantation owners they had been “freed” from just months before. The “justice” that was once meted out by slave owners who were “masters” of their property, was now taken care of by the law. The word “slave” was replaced by the word “criminal.”
And from Lenin’s Tomb (once again via Brownfemipower):
If for any reason you can’t watch the video, there’s a brief synopsis by the documentary’s author, Deborah Davies, on the site:
The prison guards stand over their captives with electric cattle prods, stun guns, and dogs. Many of the prisoners have been ordered to strip naked. The guards are yelling abuse at them, ordering them to lie on the ground and crawl. ‘Crawl, motherf*****s, crawl.’
If a prisoner doesn’t drop to the ground fast enough, a guard kicks him or stamps on his back. There’s a high-pitched scream from one man as a dog clamps its teeth onto his lower leg.
Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can’t crawl fast enough so a guard jabs a stun gun onto his buttocks. The jolt of electricity zaps through his naked flesh and genitals. For hours afterwards his whole body shakes.
Lines of men are now slithering across the floor of the cellblock while the guards stand over them shouting, prodding and kicking.
Second by second, their humiliation is captured on a video camera by one of the guards.
The images of abuse and brutality he records are horrifyingly familiar. These were exactly the kind of pictures from inside Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad that shocked the world this time last year.
And they are similar, too, to the images of brutality against Iraqi prisoners that this week led to the conviction of three British soldiers.
But there is a difference. These prisoners are not caught up in a war zone. They are Americans, and the video comes from inside a prison in Texas.
Maybe it’s white privilege–maybe. But really, Amp, I think it’s class privilege. I know a fair number of white people who spent time in juvenile correctional facilities (I’m not certain what “juvenile prison” is exactly) for offenses like “possession of alcohol, 2nd offense;” they were all poor, with no social network into the world of people who could talk to the school authorities.
Let me, though, strongly second your headline point. Our prisons are brutal and brutalizing places, and that needs to change.
Sam it’s not about primarily about class. In fact, I think this is one case where race matters much more than class. I’m not discounting class, but I’m struck by some of the differences between how poor whites are treated and poor blacks are treated.
I went to a rural all white very poor high school, and kids did all kinds of crazy shit. Unlike many of my poor black counterparts, we had no security guards or cops in our schools and no metal detectors. None of that stuff. One time I watched a kid put another kids head through a window–I don’t know exactly what the punishment was, but the perpetrator was back in school.
That’s doesn’t mean that the kids in my school weren’t treated more harshly than the kids in Amp’s school. The kids at my school probably couldn’t afford a lawyer. But the distinct advantage that my classmates had was the nobody was constantly looking over their shoulder. In many white neighborhoods, including poor ones, you don’t see the cops driving around constantly. In fact, they only come around when they get called.
And BTW I teach college students who attended exactly the same kind of schools that Amp went to in suburban in NYC. They will be the first to tell you that their schools are swimming with drugs–illegal prescription drugs, cocaine, heroin, you name it. Our studies tell us that young whites (and young Native Americans) are particularly prone to drug use/abuse. In fact, in the data I found from the mid-1990s about 30% of young whites had used drugs in the past year, and the comparable number for blacks was 18%. But somehow blacks make up some where between 50-60% of the arrests for drug possession in that same age group.
There is something glaring wrong when the group doing the most drugs gets away with it so much.
If you’ll forgive me nit-picking just a tiny bit, Rachel, what’s wrong isn’t that me and people like me generally get away with using drugs; it’s that other people don’t. :-)
Sam, I think that this involves both class and race, and I mentioned both class and race in my post. I did emphasize race more than class, but to tell you the truth I haven’t read enough research on the topic to be sure which is more important.
Rachel,
You may very well be right. There are three important distinctions–black/white, poor/not-poor, and rural/urban (urban kids seem to get away with less regardless of race and class). Since my opportunity for observation was primarily on the juvenile justice system side, I saw black kids, and white kids, who were there for really minor offenses. (You and I grew up in very similar areas IIRC.)
I knew that prison conditions were awful in the US, I had no idea it went so far as the scene being described at the end of this post.
At the private school I attended in Scotland there was a group of boys who went out drinking (underage of course) and on their way back to the boarding house, walked across the tops of every car on a residential street, denting the roofs and hoods of most of them, and stealing the decals as they went, building up a little collection of Mercedes and BMW badges. If this had been done by a bunch of 17 year old boys from the council house neighborhoods, they would have all had to go to trial for vandalism, and may well have gone to jail or juvenile detention. Since it was boys from “nice” families, the headmaster of the school took them door to door to personally apologize to the car owners and they were grounded for a couple of months.
And if they are driving around, often they pull over Black or Latino motorists that they don’t believe “belong” in that neighborhood. Unlike most Whites, Black and Latino motorists who aren’t poor or are in fact quite affluent can still be followed around or pulled over by police even in their own neighborhoods or other middle-class or affluent neighborhoods, or if they are driving expensive looking vehicles. Even if Whites were being singled out due to being poor(due to classism), this behavior doesn’t go up the economic scale in the same way it does for African-Americans and Latinos.
Among those racially profiled in this matter are the following. Black judges, Black prosecutors, Black C.E.O.s and ironically, Black police officers(who can also be and have been killed by White officers when trying to assist them if they are plain-clothed, a different type of profiling).
Sometimes Whites can be pulled over and questioned by police if they are in poor neighborhoods dominated by Black or Latino residents but unlike the Black person(who is seen as a criminal) not “belonging” in a predominantly White neighborhood(which is seen as filled with “good” people), a White person might be seen as potentially a criminal(i.e. most often there to buy drugs) only because the Black and/or Latino poor neighborhood is itself profiled as being criminal or a “bad” neighborhood. My mom used to tutor in South Central for example and was pulled over a couple times b/c police couldn’t figure out what she was doing there and would in fact say so.
Speaking of the latter, I was walking through a neighborhood which was mostly White, wealthier, lots of tenured and retired academics and a Black man driving a car pulled over asking me if I’d seen a current color and type of car moving and parked. I told him, no. I walked down the hill and saw police officers in uniform and two White detectives in an unmarked car. They knew who I was and when I passed them came over and told me what was going on. I mentioned my runin with the man asking about the same kind of car they mentioned. They seemed a bit interested and asked me to describe him. They listed races, White, Hispanic and Black and I said, he was Black. The guy I spoke with had been concerned when he’d asked me about the car so I thought that maybe he was the guy looking for his car which was the one reported stolen. I didn’t know what the detectives’ perception of my encounter was.
Later that day at a meeting, I ran into the area commander who told me he’d heard one of his detectives had shaken me down. I assumed he meant the two White detectives, that I’d run into. But he mentioned a name and knowing who that person was, I realized he was the Black man in the first car.
I realized too that I’d jumped more quickly to realize that the two White men(even before seeing their faces, one of which I did recognize) were detectives and the Black man wasn’t. Both had police cars around them at the time. It reminded me of a test often given to police officers where they are shown a White man pointing a gun at a Black man and a Black man pointing a gun at a White man and asked to identify what’s going on based on what they see.
Which one is most identified as the criminal? Which one is most identified as a plain-clothed officer? It might be easier for Whites and maybe others to see the Black man with a gun as a criminal and it might be more difficult to see him as an officer even when he’s not viewed as a criminal. That bias of Black equating criminal and not equating police officer(both which have caused the deaths of Black police officers in Providende, R.I, Los Angeles, Oakland and other places) is often seen in law enforcement and I think definitely the rest of the criminal justice system as well. That’s why there’s more policing and a kind of lockdown atmosphere at public schools which are predominatly Black and/or Latino in student composition as well.
Radfem-
Same sort of thing happens in the neighborhood where I grew up–the police were supposedly very ‘strict enforcers’ of the speed limit, but if you were from that neighborhood, you could go far over the speed limit and never get a ticket. It was a wealthy suburban neighborhood, so the way to tell if you were local was simply by looking at the car–if it was nice and new, you were probably from there, and if it wasn’t, you’d get pulled over for going five over the speed limit. My mom bragged about this like it was a good thing–the police ‘protecting’ village residents. But it was so absurd.
Amp said, “If you’ll forgive me nit-picking just a tiny bit, Rachel, what’s wrong isn’t that me and people like me generally get away with using drugs; it’s that other people don’t. :-)”
We’ll have to debate that one more later. Personally, I wouldn’t be cool with drug legalization for teenagers, and I wouldn’t want kids getting high in school.
I suspect that by “get away with” you mean something other than “avoid jail”, since we have no reason to think that arresting young buyers helps protect them.
There’s something seriously wrong with a prison system that allows such events. From outside the USA, it seems part of a pattern of belief, heretical if you are a Christian, that there can be no redemption: that the criminal is forever damned.
There are prisoners who are dangerous, but other stories suggest that they are allowed to be dangerous: used as tools in the institutional drive to hell.
I’m no bible-quoter, I doubt I’m properly Christian, but I know the New Testament enough to know that Christ urged his followers to help people who were in prison. We don’t know what these prisoners did, or what choice they thought they had. The guards: they do have a choice. If I believed in Hell I’d expect them to arive on the express elevator.
Hm. When I first read the title of this thread, I thought it was going to be about how inmates are treated by other inmates, not by correctional officers. Seems to me from what I’ve read that that’s the biggest risk.
I’m no bible-quoter, I doubt I’m properly Christian, but I know the New Testament enough to know that Christ urged his followers to help people who were in prison. We don’t know what these prisoners did, or what choice they thought they had. The guards: they do have a choice. If I believed in Hell I’d expect them to arive on the express elevator.
Dave, I think you’ve got a pretty good handle on the concept. That kind of thinking can make you more of a Christian that some people who go to church every Sunday.
Same sort of thing happens in the neighborhood where I grew up–the police were supposedly very ’strict enforcers’ of the speed limit, but if you were from that neighborhood, you could go far over the speed limit and never get a ticket.
That can be applied to almost any area where the cops in the area come from the area, or nearby.
I live in Illinois. I go on campouts and other Scouting activities in Wisconsin a lot. It’s taken as unassailable truth that you are 10x more likely to get popped for a given moving violation in Wisconsin if your plates are Illinois plates than if they are Wisconsin plates. Obviously I have no actual data, but it stands to reason that people from Illinois are less likely to be able to show up and contest a Wisconsin ticket than people from Wisconsin, which makes the cops’ jobs easier and increases revenue/ticket. Generalize that to “people outside an area are less likely to contest getting a ticket for a violation if it’s inconvenient for them to come back to the area they got the ticket in.” Then generalize further to “if they lack the time or money to contest the ticket.” Then consider on what basis a cop might be able to make a snap judgement on whether or not the driver of a car qualifies under those criteria.
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The scary side of that fact is that half the USA thinks that prisoners are coddled, and at the same time think that getting prisoners raped is cool. I remember one article where a judge actually told a kid “shape up, or you’ll go to prison and get raped”.
The American public has just accepted that prison rape happens, and that’s fine. Hell, it’s even funny! Half the internet is still giggling over the “Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison” line from Office Space.
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The state attorney general in California made a joke about inmate rape. I don’t remember how much criticism he got for it.
Wikipedia: Bill Lockyer
See, I think that this is no joking matter. I’ve come down on numerous issues saying “enforce the law and assess the punishment.” Let me go on record that while I say “no less than the law allows”, I also say “no more than the law allows”. Being subjected to rape, assaults, etc. while behind bars seems like cruel and unusual punishment to me and is pervasive enough that it should be actionable by inmates on that basis.
OTOH, that comment by the judge seems to me to be practical advice; it may be wrong, but that’s what’s going to happen, and he’s doing the kid a favor by making him aware that it’s not just something that happens on TV.