In the runup to the first Congressional hearing on solitary confinement, we are featuring a video made last fall by Solitary Watch videographer Valeria Monfrini. She took a microphone to Lafayette Park, opposite the White House and two miles west of the Capitol, where she asked locals and tourists the question: “What do you know about solitary confinement?”
While some had an inkling of what solitary confinement is, none knew the extent to which it is used in the United States, where on any given day at least 80,000 people are isolated in the nation’s prisons and jails. Safe to say this is no accident, since most states and the federal government deny that they use solitary confinement (preferring terms like “administrative segregation” or “security housing”). Supermax prisons and solitary units serve as virtual domestic black sites, where inmates live out of sight of the public, the press, and sometimes even their own families.
Reblogged this on http://www.HumansinShadow.wordpress.com/.
Not to be critical of Valeria Monfrini who I applaud for her efforts to conduct these interviews but where in D.C. did you find these people? As everyone knows who has worked there (including myself) there are two D.C.’s. One of vetted government related employees that have passed background checks to receive their positions and the resident underclass. Now I wouldn’t want anyone risking their own safety to conduct such interviews but depending on where and to whom you ask this question you’ll receive polar opposite responses.
The mere fact that this hearing needs to be held is a perfect example of the growing gap between the classes. Because if you were to ask anyone in an underclass neighborhood if they know someone that question I bet the answer is “Hell yeah I do.”
The link between poverty, crimes we “choose” to litigate, and prison is strong. Lack of hope was a source for the FTW (Fuck the World) scrawled on the walls of buildings near our home as I grew up. For we knew as Joseph E. Stiglitz recently wrote in Vanity Fair:
“In America, the chances of someone’s making it to the top, or even to the middle, from a place near the bottom are lower than in the countries of old Europe or in any other advanced industrial country.”
And we can imagine what the odds were in old Europe after we read this view written by Antoine Fregier in 1840,
“The poor and the vicious classes have been and will always be the most productive breeding ground of evildoers of all sorts; it is they whom we shall designate as the dangerous classes. For even when vice is not accompanied by perversity, by the very fact that it allies itself with poverty in the same person, he is an object of fear to society, he is dangerous.”
How different a view than Oscar Wilds who wrote about his own incarceration: “The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man’s life, a misfortune, a casuality, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is ‘in trouble’ simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it.”
I am sure that Fregier’s view has been held by many, if not most, elites long before his time and hence. After all this commonly shared view has helped justify the many forms of inhuman treatment inflicted on this “dangerous class” by a series of fearful oligarchies for as far back as one cares to check.
I can only hope that the members of this Senate committee have finally realized that there can be no top of the pyramid if there isn’t a solid base. But many I fear have still failed to study history.
In an era where distrust of government is growing worldwide there is no place in America where distrust and even virulent hatred of the “man” exists than in a prison. And within our prisons there is nowhere where hatred rules so strongly then in a solitary confinement cell where it festers like an untreated wound.
What then becomes of these tortured souls upon their release? Many of these inmates, at least the ones that survive their ordeal, are released directly onto the street. Thus it is in our interest that they are not filled with hate when we encounter them.
June 2011 , i didn’t know anything but it was a jail were my brother were serving his sentence,June 2012, a year later i find out Pelican Bay is like a cemetery where they(CDcr) is trying to bury my brother alive : (
Solitary confinement? it is inhumane,. they put you in a small cubicle ,let you take a Shower every 3 or 4 days,starve you , invested with roaches. Its okay if we did not tell the world around us to be more democratic,care for your citizens. Correctional facility should be to correct, not destroy the moral of an individual, no wonder they come out so angry, and without hope.Stop this torture, teach them to be productive and caring citizens , so when they come out, they can help others.WE VOTERS ARE TIRED OF PAYING STAFF, that dont get sensitivity and caring test , so to treat human as human and dogs as dogs. Thanks Silvy