newyorker:
The Caging of America; Why do we lock up so many people?
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
- In this week’s issue, Adam Gopnik writes about mass incarceration and criminal justice in America: http://nyr.kr/A75iOm
Photograph by Steve Liss.
This is important. Remember this every time someone carelessly talks about the “land of the free.” We need to deserve to call ourselves that. Right now, we do not.
At the moment, lawyers at Facebook and Google and Microsoft have more power over the future of privacy and free expression than any king or president or Supreme Court justice. And we can’t rely simply on judges enforcing the existing Constitution to protect the values that the Framers took for granted.
When I started to write it was the ’70s and throughout that decade we didn’t have any problems with book challenges or censorship. It all started really in a big way in 1980 … It came with the election, the presidential election of 1980, and the next day, I’ve been told, the censors were crawling out of the woodwork and challenging, like it’s our turn now, and we’re going to say what we don’t want our children to read.
But I think it’s more than that. It’s what we don’t want our children to know, what we don’t want to talk to our children about; and if they read it, they’ll know it, or they’ll question it.
Young adult lit author Judy Blume on the rise of censorship in school libraries over the last several decades. (via npr)
(via theatlantic)
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.
John Steinbeck, from East of Eden.
Delayed-notice search warrants issued under the expanded powers of the Patriot Act, 2006–2009.
(via Patriot Act – NYMag)
shackdreams:
Jumping the Clam in La Jolla
Photo by Brian Munoz
This is illegal now. For shame.
The internet is now such a pervasive part of so many people’s lives that blocking certain sites, or simply turning the whole thing off – as leaders in Bahrain, Egypt and elsewhere have recently tried to do – can backfire completely, angering protesters further and, from a dictator’s point of view, making matters worse. “The end state of connectivity,” [Shirky] argues, “is that it provides citizens with increased power.”
The road to that end state won’t be smooth. But the compensatory efforts of the authorities to harness the internet for their own ends will never fully compensate. Either they must allow dissenters to organise online, or – by cutting off a resource that’s crucial to their daily lives – provoke them to greater fury.
SXSW 2011: The internet is over | Technology | The Guardian
—
I agree with this. People get very angry when you take power from them.
What’s remarkable about the Internet is that it’s empowered people without them (or their governments) realizing it. It’s happening too fast. Now we can’t dial it back. I think that’s a fine thing.
Securing the Washington Monument from terrorism has turned out to be a surprisingly difficult job. The concrete fence around the building protects it from attacking vehicles, but there’s no visually appealing way to house the airport-level security mechanisms the National Park Service has decided are a must for visitors. It is considering several options, but I think we should close the monument entirely. Let it stand, empty and inaccessible, as a monument to our fears.
…
Some of them call terrorism an “existential threat” against our nation. It’s not. Even the events of 9/11, as horrific as they were, didn’t make an existential dent in our nation. Automobile-related fatalities — at 42,000 per year, more deaths each month, on average, than 9/11 — aren’t, either. It’s our reaction to terrorism that threatens our nation, not terrorism itself. The empty monument would symbolize the empty rhetoric of those leaders who preach fear and then use that fear for their own political ends.
Rio’s drug war - The Big Picture - Boston.com
I love Brazil. These photos of the current unrest in Rio are another reminder that I’m not cut out to live in such a violent city. Rio is the most naturally beautiful city I’ve ever visited. I was lucky to live there for a short three months, but the psychological cost of living there—daily stories of stabbings, shootings, grenades being thrown into restaurants—made it easy to retreat to San Diego. Still, I love it and I miss it. I miss a lot of the people there.
The photos also remind me of some thoughts I’ve had on Brazil’s flag: the sanctification of ”order and progress” (the words on Brazil’s flag) come at a high cost in terms of individual liberties and—based on these pictures—human life.
I don’t like policy makers who focus on order (security!) and progress (the economy!) at the expense of liberty or justice. I believe order and progress are the wrong goals to reach for—that more people benefit from governments that pursue liberty and justice for citizens with the understanding that order and progress will follow. Also, phenomena like WikiLeaks make the pursuit of order sound quaint.
This is about as idealistic as I get, this is about as American as I get, and this also explains much of my frustration with the American federal government.
It also explains why I sometimes felt like Brazil was a fascist state (to see what I’m talking about, read the 2010 Human Rights Watch report on Brazil).
FWIW, if you’re interested in Brazil, order, and progress, watch Manda Bala. The director describes it as a “non-fiction RoboCop depicting a very real broken and violent society.” Blew my mind.
FWIW II, I’ve seen dead people on the beach in both Rio and San Diego, but the guy in Rio was murdered and the San Diegan had a heart attack while surfing.
