{"id":3679,"date":"2007-10-05T12:10:22","date_gmt":"2007-10-05T19:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/10\/05\/a-sentence-to-prison-is-a-sentence-to-be-tortured\/"},"modified":"2007-10-05T12:10:22","modified_gmt":"2007-10-05T19:30:10","slug":"a-sentence-to-prison-is-a-sentence-to-be-tortured","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=3679","title":{"rendered":"A Sentence To Prison Is A Sentence To Be Tortured"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m stealing this link from Brownfemipower<\/a>, who in turn got it from Le Colonel Chabert<\/a>, who in turn quoted Left Turn<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 a Louisiana juvenile prison \u2013 in 2003. Apparently, he was \u201cfussing\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Two years? For sneaking into a hotel pool?<\/p>\n

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<\/em>. 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<\/em> scenario, conceivably the hotel could call the cops on us and we’d spend a night in jail “learning our lesson.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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. […]<\/p>\n

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”….<\/p>\n

…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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And from Lenin’s Tomb<\/a> (once again via Brownfemipower):<\/p>\n

If for any reason you can\u2019t watch the video, there\u2019s a brief synopsis by the documentary\u2019s author, Deborah Davies, on the site:<\/p>\n

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. \u2018Crawl, motherf*****s, crawl.\u2019<\/p>\n

If a prisoner doesn\u2019t drop to the ground fast enough, a guard kicks him or stamps on his back. There\u2019s a high-pitched scream from one man as a dog clamps its teeth onto his lower leg.<\/p>\n

Another prisoner has a broken ankle. He can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Lines of men are now slithering across the floor of the cellblock while the guards stand over them shouting, prodding and kicking.<\/p>\n

Second by second, their humiliation is captured on a video camera by one of the guards.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And they are similar, too, to the images of brutality against Iraqi prisoners that this week led to the conviction of three British soldiers.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-race-racism-and-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3679\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}