The injustice of the prison system is something I’ve wanted to research and write about for a couple of years now, but I haven’t had my thoughts and actions coordinated enough to complete such a task regarding any subject, much less one so complicated. I’d like to live my life more consistently with my principles, and I think that focusing on this topic is a start.
As far as putting feelings into action, the only salient idea I’ve come up with so far is to send letters to inmates and find out about their lives, what their conditions are, on what grounds they’ve been placed in confinement, and really just give them an opportunity to reach out to someone on the outside. I know a number of people in there probably don’t have friends or family who write, call, or visit regularly. It’s the sort of thing that people seem to have empathy for when it comes to the elderly in nursing homes, but we as a society often have an ethical blindspot when it comes to incarcerated individuals. With COVID-19, I suspect the level of isolation must be particularly pronounced, while they’re having to deal with the anxiety of living in an environment where they are especially susceptible to the virus.
I was unsure which inmates it made the most sense to contact, so I came up with a briefly thought out and minimally considered plan to gather a random sample. I went to the Travis County inmate database and searched for people with the most common last names. It’s pretty arbitrary, but that’s kind of the idea. Compiling a list by inputting the 35 most common last names throughout the country gave me a total of 266 inmates.
I’ve begun writing up a template I could use, and I know there are options online where I could send letters out to everyone at the same time without having to go through the rigor and tedium of labeling, printing, and mailing them on my own, but I imagine that route would end up being prohibitively expensive. So for now I’m just thinking about things I would like to know about as far as what’s going on in Travis County correctional facilities and what, if any, information I would like to share with them. And then in the near future I’ll look at how to actually convey those missives.
There are so many things that have inspired me to go down this road, and I couldn’t begin to name all of them, but I’ll offer a couple off the top of my head. One was watching the complete series of Orange is the New Black, and another was the Adam Ruins Everything episode about prison conditions and unfair sentences where he really breaks down how racist and otherwise discriminatory US policy is.
Something especially powerful was reading Noam Chomsky’s writings on the use of the criminal justice system to make enough things illegal that the government can arrest anyone at any time for going about their lives. It’s one of those sly ways that the rulers of our inconsistently free country manage to impose oppressive measures that rival those of officially authoritarian regimes. I guess the main difference in our country might be that the privileged are granted disproportionate power and consideration, so we just aren’t as intimately aware of what’s happening here.
I know that selective enforcement of law to target groups unpopular to the elite was a particularly rampant strategy practiced in the 1970s during the peak of the Black Power Movement and other political organizing that sought liberation for the dispossessed. I think our country probably has a lot more political prisoners than we’re willing to acknowledge. Given that over a quarter of prisoners in the world reside here it’s also plausible we might have the highest population of such individuals.
I have a lot more I want to get into, but I’m going to save that for upcoming posts. I’ll recommend that episode of Adam Ruins Everything for now, as it has a lot of information packed into 30 minutes, and if you have some extra time the whole series is really well done.
As far as putting feelings into action, the only salient idea I’ve come up with so far is to send letters to inmates and find out about their lives, what their conditions are, on what grounds they’ve been placed in confinement, and really just give them an opportunity to reach out to someone on the outside. I know a number of people in there probably don’t have friends or family who write, call, or visit regularly. It’s the sort of thing that people seem to have empathy for when it comes to the elderly in nursing homes, but we as a society often have an ethical blindspot when it comes to incarcerated individuals. With COVID-19, I suspect the level of isolation must be particularly pronounced, while they’re having to deal with the anxiety of living in an environment where they are especially susceptible to the virus.
I was unsure which inmates it made the most sense to contact, so I came up with a briefly thought out and minimally considered plan to gather a random sample. I went to the Travis County inmate database and searched for people with the most common last names. It’s pretty arbitrary, but that’s kind of the idea. Compiling a list by inputting the 35 most common last names throughout the country gave me a total of 266 inmates.
I’ve begun writing up a template I could use, and I know there are options online where I could send letters out to everyone at the same time without having to go through the rigor and tedium of labeling, printing, and mailing them on my own, but I imagine that route would end up being prohibitively expensive. So for now I’m just thinking about things I would like to know about as far as what’s going on in Travis County correctional facilities and what, if any, information I would like to share with them. And then in the near future I’ll look at how to actually convey those missives.
There are so many things that have inspired me to go down this road, and I couldn’t begin to name all of them, but I’ll offer a couple off the top of my head. One was watching the complete series of Orange is the New Black, and another was the Adam Ruins Everything episode about prison conditions and unfair sentences where he really breaks down how racist and otherwise discriminatory US policy is.
Something especially powerful was reading Noam Chomsky’s writings on the use of the criminal justice system to make enough things illegal that the government can arrest anyone at any time for going about their lives. It’s one of those sly ways that the rulers of our inconsistently free country manage to impose oppressive measures that rival those of officially authoritarian regimes. I guess the main difference in our country might be that the privileged are granted disproportionate power and consideration, so we just aren’t as intimately aware of what’s happening here.
I know that selective enforcement of law to target groups unpopular to the elite was a particularly rampant strategy practiced in the 1970s during the peak of the Black Power Movement and other political organizing that sought liberation for the dispossessed. I think our country probably has a lot more political prisoners than we’re willing to acknowledge. Given that over a quarter of prisoners in the world reside here it’s also plausible we might have the highest population of such individuals.
I have a lot more I want to get into, but I’m going to save that for upcoming posts. I’ll recommend that episode of Adam Ruins Everything for now, as it has a lot of information packed into 30 minutes, and if you have some extra time the whole series is really well done.
Comments
Post a Comment