MENTAL ILLNESS IS NOT A CRIME IN NYC
Rights for Imprisoned People with Psychiatric Disabilities (RIPPD) is an activist group in New York City that is working to end the practice of incarcerating people with mental illness.
This video documents RIPPD’s campaign to bring Community Crisis Intervention Teams to the NYPD. After police in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, killed Iman Morales by taser, RIPPD wants to change the way police interact with community members by creating specially trained advocates to de-escalate situations, breaking the cycle of violence.
The video is a production of the Red Channels Media Collective.
Fighting Prisons
Activists and organizations working in and around prisons gathered at the 2nd US Social Forum in Detroit to share knowledge and make connections across what proved to be a diverse and vibrant landscape of practices. Over 50 panels were convened, involving hundreds of individuals representing communities from all over the country. Addressing the crisis happening in the incarceration system, people agree, requires a broad-based approach that includes different strategies, tactics, and angles of approach. Below are 4 topics we feel represent that diversity and provide a rough schematic of the range of ideas and activities.
* Prison Abolition:
Depopulating prisons and even eliminating the system of locking people up as a response to social problems altogether is the goal for most prison activists. It forms the “no compromise” framework that drives most of the activism regarding incarceration. David Stein talks about Critical Resistance, a national organization of individual chapters, which firmly calls for prison abolition and actively fights any expansion of the prison system. In the video, he describes some of the strategies the organization has used to fight new prison construction, some of the alliances created through that fight, and the importance of combatting the creation of every new cell.
Links:
Critical Resistance
* Advocating for Incarcerated People:
Imprisoned people face myriad of life-threatening obstacles on a daily basis. Natalie Holbrook, who works with the American Friends Service Committee in Michigan, is part of a direct advocacy program that addresses the needs of imprisoned people on a case-by-case basis. At least 40% of the cases her group gets involved in have to do with physical and mental health issues that are not being addressed by the correctional system. Holding the system accountable for its actions and failures, she says, is critical. Her office also maintains important contact with people who are being held in long-term extreme segregation, offering kind words and the reassurance that someone, indeed, is monitoring the situation.
Links:
Prisoner Advocay-AFSC Criminal Justice Office
* Addressing Trauma within Communities:
In order to respond more effectively to harm and abuse within our communities, a growing number of activists are developing liberatory programs to address harm and trauma without resorting to oppressive and retaliatory systems. Micah Frazier works with Generation 5, a group committed to ending child sexual abuse in five generations. They use transformative justice to help train community members to better recognize and respond to harm.
Links:
Generation 5
* Immigration, Criminality and Confinement:
The efforts to criminalize millions of undocumented people currently living in the US will greatly increase the number of jailed people and represent an unacceptable expansion in the logic of the social “value” of prisons. Luis Fernandez works with the Arizona based Repeal Coalition, which fights to overturn anti-immigrant legislation. He talks about the challenges of working within a system that literally does not recognize the validity of entire communities, and that uses racism and economic enticements to factionalize the movement.
Links:
The Story All Around Us
Listen to This: Crown Heights Oral History Project is an audio archive that attempts to supplement the official history of this dynamic community in central Brooklyn, bringing together the personal histories and memories of longtime residents of a storied neighborhood. Program director Alex Kelly brought together five students from Paul Robeson High School to invite Crown Heights residents to share their stories—in their own voices. The result is a group of over 40 conversations, each with its own particular perspective on a complex community that is composed of a variety of ethnicities, languages, histories, and cultures.
The act of recording and giving voice to hidden narratives opens up questions not only about the nature of identity in a hybrid neighborhood, but more importantly about whose stories rise above the din and whose get swallowed up in a textbook’s lessons.
We spoke with Monica Parfait, one of the students involved with the project, about creating a new history for this corner of New York City.
Listen to some of the stories recorded by Listen to This.
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Eunice Oden Eunice Oden: A Southerner at heart, Eunice speaks about her first experience in New York City after growing up in North Carolina. |
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Michoel BerhmanMichoel Berhman: A resident of the neighborhood for 34 years, Michoel explains the patchwork of cultural enclaves (including the one he calls home, the Lubavitch) that make up Crown Heights. |
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Stefanie Siegel Stefanie Siegel: At a time when Paul Robeson High School is in danger of closing, Stefanie describes the challenges facing the school and how students and teachers can take control back. |
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Melina BernadineMelina Bernadine: In a community that has at times been overrun by riots, crime, and drug use, Melina recalls how “somehow things started to change.” |
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Meredith Staton Meredith Staton: After 50 years in the community, Meredith speaks to the impact of the riots in 1991, but also about the importance of moving on. |
Black-and-white photographs by Cheney Orr.
Tale of a Walled Town
Ours is a grimy bit of blue;
And very small;
And sunbeams scarce adventure to
O’ertop the wall.
A bird that flutters swiftly by;
A wind that passes with a sigh;
A cloudlet sailing slow and high;
And that is all.
O matins, and O vesper bells,
Toll slowly!
A city of a thousand cells—
A thousand individual hells.
Incarcerated in the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadephia in 1916, Clarence Alexander Rae, a convicted book thief, penned the internal experience of a life interupted. The narrative he traces through his book of poems, A Tale of a Walled Town, follows the path of subjection, the result of inescapable regimes of surveillance and control. Dedicated to “Our Lady with the Lamp,” it is one of the earliest tales of captivity to emerge from the modern prison complex, an outcropping of reformist practices that ultimate strove to control the body so as to free the soul for enlightenment.
In his recent book, The Prison and the American Imagination, Caleb Smith calls the prison narrative “the first distinctly American literary genre.” He cites Mary White Rowlandson’s 1682 text, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, as one of the earliest captivity narratives, and perhaps one of the most fascinating. Abducted by what she labels the devilish native peoples and held in slavery while they massacred the settlers of New England, she describes the horrors of being held against one’s will. Her six-year-old daughter dies, and Rowlandson’s madness drives her to hug the corpse through the night until it is torn from her: “I cannot but take notice how at another time I could not bear to be in the room where any dead person was, but now the case is changed; I must and could ly down by my dead Babe, side by side all the night after.” Echoing the work of sociologist Loic Wacquant, Smith concludes that “the captivity narrative has served to reinforce, perhaps even to create, identities in conflict: white against red, or against black, or against shades of brown.” In a strange way, the prison narrative is the most American of all, and the one in which our systems of disenfranchisement and prejudice are erected and enacted.
When a prisoner first arrived at Eastern State after the usual surrender of possessions would, he would be stripped down, his hair shaved close, he’d be numbered, then led to his box of solitude with a hood over his face that obscured all light and sensation. In the early years before they instituted hoods with holes for the eyes, he’d never leave his cell without all of his senses being enshrouded in darkness. There would be no letters or news from his family on the outside, and only the occasional word from a guard could be heard—he was essentially, Smith argues, buried alive and transformed into bare life. The only book that was allowed in the cells was the Bible.
The building itself was the hailed as the perfect system of the time, and its architect, John Haviland, became the prison architect of the 19th century on the backs of this effort. Eastern State accepted its first inmates in 1829, but wasn’t completed until 1836. The radial plan allowed the 450 solitary cells (each with a small skylight) to be policed efficiently—long rows connected the wings to a central command center. Inmates found themselves in a very small, vaulted cell with a bed that was hung from chains, with a small space for their required work. A small peephole allowed the guards to look in whenever they felt the urge, and food and materials relating to their work was passed through a small slit in the door that remained closed when not in use. The real surprise was the water tap and flush toilet in every cell, at a time when many in the city just a few miles south of the walls did not have such luxuries.
There is something distinctly Poe about all of the tales from the inside of this early supermax; the narratives of these inmates is thoroughly gothic with its medieval iron gates, deep shadows, unnatural solitude, and persistent nagging of emerging psychoses. Perhaps Edgar Allan Poe, residing at the time not too far away from the prison walls, wrote in the shadow of Haviland’s much-praised architectural feat. The prison’s first board of directors wrote that the architecture would “turn the thoughts of the convict inwards upon himself, and to teach him how to think.” In effect, the total immersion in solitude would lead the convict to split his criminal mind from his “penitent” mind, and hence our word “penitentiary.” In the mind of the Quaker reformers who inspired this new prison philosophy, the inmate would eventually wrestle with this split until they reached a state of passivity and contentment—a mythology of resurrection if there ever was one.
While in the 18th century justice was carried out within communities that inspired their own form of punishment (mainly focusing on the Hammurabian eye-for-an-eye style), the turn of that century saw the rise of institutionalized punishment. The Walnut Street Jail was built in 1790 by a bunch of Quakers living in Philadelphia, and was effectively the first prison that was focusing on reforming its inmates. Buildings built for mental and physical torture, these early jails (like New York’s Newgate Prison of 1797 and Auburn Prison of 1816) had moved the hangmen outside but kept the interiors similar to those more medieval-styled sites. Inmates would mingle and live in giant pits of rooms, and the overcrowded spaces essentially gave rise to a population better trained in all acts of criminality. Eastern State, in some ways, was seen as a vast improvement on these earlier conditions, and even the eyes of civilized Europe turned toward the building for inspiration. Charles Dickens famously made a visit to Eastern State during a trip through the States, and the master of sympathy found something he didn’t expect. He wrote that the inmates were “dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair,” and wondered of one prisoner “why does he stare at his hands and pick the flesh open…and raise his eyes for an instant…to those bare walls?”
By the end of that century, the Supreme Court was investigating the mental anguish of enduring long-term solitary confinement, which Dickens surmised was “immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.” A century after total solitary confinement was abandoned at the prison, Eastern State shut its doors in 1971, and has since been allowed to degrade into a glorious ruin that perhaps, poetically, mirrors the degradation that occurred in each prisoner’s mental and emotional life. National Geographic’s recent special, Solitary Confinement, featured some inmates being held in solitary in the Colorado State Penitentiary, and many of them stated how they would act out just to get a hit from a guard’s club. That one touch—no matter how brutal or how much it reasserted the power differential—would remind them that they are at the bottom of it all a part of the human community. And when we read the tales from Eastern State, the lore of the old world, it is easy to see a sort of neuroses that we have toward those who are confined—the hoods, the vaulted ceilings, the rupturing of all ties to the outside, the obsession with reform and the inability to make that happen. There is more to be said about the Quaker ties, and certainly with the Biblical and resurrectionist undertones of much to do with the early solitary confinement set-ups, but it’s worth just drawing it back to today’s prisoners, Eastern State’s legacy.
Listen to a piece from June 2009 by the National Radio Project, which spoke to some inmates being held in solitary confinement, and some of the family members on the outside.
George Prochnik’s Pursuit of Silence
“As we all know, absolute silence is impossible—it’s the ending of all vibrations, total death,” states George Prochnik, the author of the new In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise (Doubleday, 2010). Our sonic landscape is a mixture of signal and noise, silence and form, and Prochnik’s pursuit is to take our aural “temperature,” to encourage us to think about our sonic architecture. Take a short soundwalk through any American city and the level of noise is overwhelming; we decide to combat the sonic vertigo caused by blaring horns, engine roars, babies’ cries, and machine hums by turning on our iPods and tuning out. As Prochnik argues, the problem begins at the exact moment that we reach for a noise-making device to re-upholster our sonic environments, to combat an uncomfortable level of noise by adding yet another layer of sound. In Pursuit of Silence puts forth the claim that we have lost our ability to listen to the many textures of the world and to inject our personal space with varied levels of silence.
Edited into our interview with Prochnik is sound from Freesound.org. As a database of sound recordings submitted by sensory ethnographers and sound artists from around the world, the Freesound Project offers us a window back into the realm of silence. The Project works on the same level as Prochnik’s oft-repeated quote from Thoreau: “silence has different depths, like fertilities of soil.” If there are different textures to our acoustic landscape, it is vital that we recover the experience of them and the ability to listen closely and find meaning.
What do we mean when we talk about silence?
In a Bookforum review of Prochnik’s book, J. Gabriel Boylan summarized the dangers of constant exposure to noise: “It turns out that the peak of brain activity, of thinking, comes in the tiny pauses between sounds, when we simultaneously process the previous sound and anticipate the next. When noise never abates, brain activity tends to flatline.” The disappearance of silent spaces is endangering our ability to obtain a reflective, active state of mind. One of the most dramatic moments in Prochnik’s latest effort comes when he spends a night shift with a police officer in Washington, DC who frequently responds to calls of domestic violence. He tells Prochnik how the scene upon arrival is frequently one of deafening noise—layers of televisions, radios, stereos, and the inevitable screaming of the angry parties—but when he asks that these devices are turned off and the couple sit down quietly, the violence comes to a halt. We are, as Prochnik puts it, “living after the third sonic fall,” in a moment in history when we have taken the decibel levels of the Industrial Revolution and two world wars and added a third layer of noise on top. As a result, we’ve lost the close connection with our environment—that heightened awareness and ability to be surprised—that comes with the ability to pluck out sonic information from the general hum of life.
As Prochnik told Paul Holdrengraber in a conversation at a recent NYPL Live event, “the quest always begins in silence, whether it’s an animal stalking its prey or a thinker answering a question. The start of the question is silence.” During the course of his “quest” in the book, he encounters the “boom car” fanatics of Florida, neuroscientists who are looking at how consistent exposure to noise rewires our neural pathways, architects working to transform spaces for the deaf community, friends at the Brooklyn Friends Meeting House, and more. In the end, he writes that “instead of being against noise, I think we need to begin making a case for silence.”
As Prochnik states, we’ve turned “so many of our public spaces into noise dumping grounds and what we can put into a direct feed into our ears is somehow more interesting.” We put on our earbuds to exert at least a minimal amount of control over the noise, and in so doing enact a tiny personal protest against the barrage of sound that ultimately further removes us from our environment. The simple act of tuning out erases deliberate thought, i.e. silence, and causes a deficit of listening. “I don’t think it’s about fabricating silence,” Prochnik told us, and rather “it’s about defabricating the noise.”
Building Silence
“Silence doesn’t just happen magically, it needs a space.” Prochnik’s assertion speaks to the need to find what he calls “that aural truffle.” When Prochnik turns the lens back toward his own environment (that of Midtown Manhattan), he discovers the allure of the pocket park for providing that “site of refuge” from the proverbial hustle and bustle. Also called a minipark or a vest-pocket park, these tiny patches of green space are squeezed into the irregular waste products of zoning codes or haphazard development.
The first pocket parks were built in the years following World War II, when the frequent bombing campaigns in Europe turned the urban layouts into Swiss cheese-like schematics. Today, in particularly blighted urban environments like Detroit and Philadelphia, city officials have made it a priority to develop more of these pocket parks out of the empty lots that are cropping up every day. In Philadelphia, for instance, the population of the once-bustling industrial hub has dropped 26 percent since the 1960s, from a peak of 2 million to less than 1.5 million today. The infrastructure and space could support many more residents, but the 25,000 vacant lots (the highest per capita rate in the nation) have led to a city plan that is needlessly sprawling. The Philadelphia Horticultural Society’s Philadelphia Green program has launched a campaign to inform city officials on how to build in more green space, at once reclaiming the vacant land and providing a vessel of solace within a city littered with assaulting noise.
As Prochnik makes clear, these reclaimed holes in the city grid do not produce silence exactly, but rather something akin to silence. In a world that lacks “acoustical contrast,” it is comforting to be able to sit down and observe the many layers of aural information that rise above the baseline. In one section of In Pursuit of Silence, Prochnik visits with some of the leaders of the sound mapping initiatives taking place right now by the European Environment Agency—initiatives that are mired in bureaucracy and produce maps that are essentially endless data streams that might never actually catalyze change.
“Rather than just being against noise and telling people who have no experience of silence, ‘be quiet,’ people who at this point literally don’t know what the means, we’ve got to start showing them what it means to be for silence,” Prochnik told us. “We’ve got to give them the space to do it and it’s got to be experiential.”
Silence Now
Silence=Death
Avram Finkelstein, a member of the Silence=Death Project, talks about AIDS, ACT-UP, institutional silence, Holocaust imagery, street art, and the making of an iconic political image. The pink triangle, silence=death poster became representative of AIDS activism during a period when literally, a deathly silence was imposed upon the AIDS crisis. Ronald Reagan, then president, simply pretended it didn’t exist. The conflation of the health crisis with gay liberation further complicated the situation politically. Avram talks about the radical possibilities envisioned by the poster, and the ability for repression to reconstitute itself even where you least expect it.
“Silence is death” implies action, action of resistance and action of oppression. On the other hand, institutional democracy establishes an equivalency between silence and death that ensures that we are perpetually, all, silent and dead. Power is segregated and protected from the effects of speech and action. It is deaf, and increasingly alienated from “speech” that is not “spending”. What precedes any ability to act is the necessity to locate oneself in the network and answer the question: what/who am I connected to? What are the limits and boundaries of my silence/death? What is my sphere of action/life? How can we fight the inverse proportionality between the magnitude of the AIDS crisis and the amount Americans give a shit about it?
Deterring Vagrants
In traditional societies and settings, sound can take on a sacred quality—the ringing of bells, chanting, blowing of horns are all meant to invoke the gods’ passions and attentions. At the turn of the last century when the mechanical revolution turned aviators and broadcasters into secular gods, the hum and roar of industrial machinery took on this sacred aspect of noise. Power is displayed through displays of noise; sound is a conduit for whatever a culture or individuals hold as the divine.
What we can call urban white noise may not be taken as sacred, but it is held up as a fact of life to be guarded, a basic human right. When state- or city-sanctioned brash displays of noise (parades for example) occur, the intrusion in the sonic landscape is meant to draw the populace out of their safe indoor enclosures and into the streets for approved gatherings. As Jonathan Sterne wrote in Open, Muzak was developed a few decades ago in order to mimic this urban white noise, and create boundaries between the inside and outside. Now, store owners broadcast their Muzak into parking lots to claim that territory (which once was a space perfectly balanced between the public and private) as “inside.” As he states, “it takes a space that lies ambiguously between public and private and renders it as a private space.”
The main motive, he finds, was always to drive away unwanted customers and loiterers—particularly those “dangerously” aimless teenagers. He continues:
Soon after the success of a 7-Eleven convenience store in Edmonton [Canada], other downtown businesses joined together to blast Muzak in a city park to drive away ‘drug dealers and their clients. Police say drug activity has dropped dramatically.’ By the end of the year, the New York Times hailed this new use of programmed music as one of the major events of 1990. Following trial runs in western Canada, the Pacific Northwest and Los Angeles suburbs, in 1990 and 1991 Southland Corporation installed Muzak speakers in the parking lots of its 7-Eleven stores all over Canada and the United States. Soon after, the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal began using programmed music to deter loitering. By 1992, it had become a familiar tactic: A group of Cincinnati merchants is among the newest clients piping Muzak into the streets to repel teenagers and vagrants. ‘We’re trying to cut the crowds of young kids’, says Robert Howard, president of the Corryville Community Council.
Today, we can see how the evolution of this intrusion into environments that were previously sacredly quiet: a TD Canada Trust ATM at Front Street East and Jarvis Street in Toronto has committed the ultimate social and sonic violation. As reported by the CBC, what is being called “a vagrant deterrent system” was set up that would broadcast a piercing, screeching sound all through the night to keep the homeless and vagrants from using the then-unused ATM booth as a shelter. It has been sounding off for the past month, and, as the article says, “repeated attempts to nix the noise have fallen on deaf ears.”
Besides invading the private spaces of the neighbors, the “vagrant deterrent system” offends the social system by using noise to keep spaces enclosed. When once sound was used to pull people together, why are we constantly using it to keep what are thought to be “outsiders” outside?
Silent Sound
There were rumors during Operation Desert Storm that the United States military was using an ultra-sophisticated mind-altering technique that amounted to “silent sound” weaponry, which was reported in a March 26, 1991 newsbrief by ITV News Bureau Ltd (London). It is alleged that the U.S. PsyOps team took over FM transmitters in Riyadh after a military command-and-control system was destroyed, and began broadcasting signals on the 100 MHz frequency. Embedded in the radio signals was a subliminal system that was capable of implanting negative emotions—fear, anxiety, despair—into the minds of the listeners. Not just telling them how to feel, but making them feel it.
The technology that is capable of this “mind alteration” is called the Silent Sound Spread Spectrum (SSSS) or S-quad, and was developed by Oliver M. Lowery in U.S. Patent #5,159,703. The patent’s abstract reads: “A silent communications system in which nonaural carriers, in the very low or very high audio frequency range or in the adjacent ultrasonic frequency spectrum, are amplitude or frequency modulated with the desired intelligence and propagated acoustically or vibrationally, for inducement into the brain, typically through the use of loudspeakers, earphones or piezoelectric transducers. The modulated carriers may be transmitted directly in real time or may be conveniently recorded and stored on mechanical, magnetic or optical media for delayed or repeated transmission to the listener.”
Scientists since his patent’s approval have been studying exactly which brainwave patterns produce which emotions, and by broadcasting the same patterns over the airwaves, the emotion can be silently triggered in any humans within earshot.
Whether or not the reports of silent sound technology are science fiction or the rantings of paranoid individuals, the implications for the imposition of emotional noise into unsuspecting individuals is terrifying. We have the capability to simultaneously broadcast terror abroad and bliss on the homefront; the soundscape and emotion-scape are able to be entirely manipulated by human hands.
Who controls noise, and shouldn’t our ears be liberated from such manipulative wave patterns? Shouldn’t we expect to be able to “hear” (as in, recognize that we are hearing a message) the weapons used against us and our enemies? Is there a difference between silent sound weaponry and the Long Range Acoustic Device?
The Theatre Weapon
As Paul Virilio writes in War and Cinema, “the theatre weapon has replaced the theatre of operations. Indeed the military term ‘theatre weapon,’ though itself outmoded, underlines the fact that the history of battle is primarily the history of radically changing fields of perception.” The battlefield is not just a contest, then, between armies and their sophisticated weapons, but a site for psychological and perceptual combat. He points to a well-known example of acoustic weaponry, the German Stuka, otherwise known as the Junker 87 as a weapon designed not just to eliminate the enemy and his safe hiding places, but specifically engineered for psychological warfare and the destruction of perceptual comfort.
The Junker 87 would climb up to 15,000 feet, and as the pilot located his target through a window in the cockpit floor, he would launch into a startling dive towards the ground below—at a 60 to 90 degree angle with a speed of about 350 miles per hour. The pilot would complete this terrifying dive and then pull up, and along the way, the extensive stress of diving and climbing at over 5 gs would cause severe vision impairment, a grayish haze would come over the perceptual field known as “seeing stars.” Often, the force would cause the pilot to black out, but the Junker 87 came prepared with safety mechanisms to ensure that the mission would be carried out even without a conscious pilot.
The real battle was not in the air, but on the ground. Virilio writes of how the German dive-bomber would sweep down on its target “with a piercing screech designed to terrorize and paralyze the enemy.” It is what Julian Henriques calls “sonic dominance”—the condition when hearing overrides all other senses and an absolute wall of noise. “Sound itself,” Henriques states, “becomes both a source and expression of power.”
stuka A Junker 87 taking a dive.
This sound, which is now to us completely ubiquitous in our urban landscapes (how different is it, really, to the constant fly-overs?), was a key component of the German spectacle of war. As Virilio says, “war can never break free from the magical spectacle because its very purpose is to produce that spectacle: to fell the enemy is not so much to capture as to ‘captivate’ him, to instill the fear of death before he actually dies.”
Unfortunately for the Germans, the victims of the sonic assault of the Junker 87 eventually became accustomed to its noise, and it no longer produced the same terror. This is the point at which military engineering collides with artistic invention—the constant need to move forward, to produce new spectacles. Luigi Russolo, the Futurist theorist of the “art of noises” who appears a few times on this site, had it right: “Each sound carries with it a tangle of sensations, already well known and exhausted, which predispose the listener to boredom, in spite of the efforts of all musical innovators.” If acoustic weaponry becomes ever louder as each invention marches toward obsolescence, how are we ever going to designate an end point? Where is the limit to how much noise we can stand to produce and endure?
Supermax Solitude
Activist and filmmaker Laurie Jo Reynolds has made a film called Space Ghost that compares the disconnection felt by astronauts as they separate themselves from the earth, with the disconnection of prisoners who become isolated from culture and human connections:
Space Ghost compares the experiences of astronauts and prisoners, using popular depictions of space travel to illustrate the physical and existential aspects of incarceration: sensory deprivation, the perception of time as chaotic and indistinguishable, the displacement of losing face-to-face contact, and the sense of existing in a different but parallel universe with family and loved-ones.
Laurie Jo is also an organizer of the Tamms Year 10 coalition, a group that is advocating for the reformation of the Tamms super max prison located in Southern Illinois.
From their website:
In 1998, the first prisoners were transferred from prisons across the state to Tamms CMAX, in Southern Illinois. This new “supermax” prison, designed to keep men in permanent solitary confinement, was intended for short-term incarceration. The IDOC called it a one-year “shock treatment.” Now, ten years later, over one-third of the original prisoners have been there for more than a decade. They have lived in long-term isolation—no phone calls, no communal activity, no contact visits. They only leave the cell to exercise alone in a concrete box 2 to 5 times per week. They are fed through a slot in the door.
These activist contend that the disconnect these prisoners experience is tantamount to torture. Charles, who has been confined in Tamms since 1998 points out, “I will ask you, lock yourself in your bathroom for the next 10 years and tell me how it will affect your mind.”
These disruptions are a kind of gap, breaking relationships that aren’t merely superficial, but are critical connections at every level of our being.
Swarm Aid
Dilip Ratha, a World Bank economist who specializes in migration, estimates that migrant workers direct an astounding $330 billion flow back to their home countries. To properly appreciate the figure, if you add up all the foreign aid given to developing nations in the world, you only reach $100 billion. Ratha, on his blog People Move, estimates that money from remittances may reach a tenth of the global population. One of the largest motors of the global economy is being driven by a hidden consensus among the world’s undocumented, poor, and unrepresented. This conglomeration is characterized by its
swiftness: they react instantaneously to new economic possibilities and realities
self-sacrifice: evidence suggests that remittances actually increase during economic downturns, meaning that workers actually send more money to family members during times of hardship.
and vulnerability: denied rights and protections, we know the story of immigrant workers.
The collapse of the construction industry in Dubai has generated a peculiar phenomenon, an airport parking lot filled with cars abandoned by fleeing workers:
Invading Mina Yanacocha
The trappings of power can often be seen in the things and peoples that are silenced; internal contradictions in logic and morality become salient when a hegemonic silence (on such things as racism, sexism, injustice) is broken. The communal silence that is erected and upheld by private and public institutions does not rely on an obvious form of coercion, but rather it is socially shared. “If you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all” has become a cultural form of censorship—shoving the unruly excess of meaning that resides outside of institutional enclosures into a nice, neat box.
The guerilla filmmaker has a tool that is on its own silent, but with the technological advances in synch sound over the past fifty years, has verbal capabilities. How do you combat institutional silence—that denial of the excess, that inability to confront what is before one’s eyes—with a device like a camera? You turn the lens back on the institution, and reveal its own exterior, which then might just penetrate.
Peru’s Mina Yanacocha, the largest gold mine in South America, originally filmed in silence:
Anonymous: Invisible Political Body
“Anonymous is a group, in the sense that a flock of birds is a group. How do you know they’re a group? Because they’re traveling in the same direction. At any given moment, more birds could join, leave, peel off in another direction entirely.”
–Chris Landers, Baltimore City Paper, 2008
A loose coalition of internet denizens, probably the offspring of the anarchic early era of the WWW (Phrack gone global), Anonymous is the unhinged ego of the democratic corpus. It is the ultimate “coalition of the willing”, a political order completely driven by consensus, the territorial overlap of the desires of a multitude of, as they refer to themselves, “fags.” Anonymous is real.
Hal Turner vs. 4chan.org: January 2007, Anonymous took white supremacist’s Hal Turner’s website off-line through a denial of service attack.
“Distributed Denial of Service:” At its height, 4chan.org was one of the most visited websites on the planet. 4chan was a manifestation of democratic power, the force and wrath of its “flock” could be directed instantaneously, flooding networks with images, videos, emails, until those systems were rendered useless, offline, deaf. 4chan poses the problem that is ultimately resolved by myspace, youtube, facebook, and google. “How do we create a forum that connects millions of people while simultaneously deny them the power that their consolidation creates?”
Another example: Anonymous Iran distributes anti-blocking software to specifically work around Iran-regime specific internet censorship tools.
