Susan Rosenberg, an activist, writer and former prisoner, and Joy James, Brown University political theorist and activist, dicussed the issue of "Democracy and Captivity" as part of the Kirkland Project's series on "Technology, Science and Democracy." The panel was part of a number of events this week on the topic of incarceration and democracy, including the screening of the film Through the Wire, which documented the treatment of political activists in the U.S. penal system, including Susan Rosenberg.
Rosenberg was convicted in 1984 of possessing weapons and false identification papers. She spent 16 years in federal prison before being granted clemency by President Clinton in 2001. At the panel discussion, Rosenberg described how long-term incarceration, particularly the type of isolated incarceration that exists in modern supermax or lockdown prisons, destroys the humanity of prisoners. Many things get lost when one spends long periods in prison isolation, said Rosenberg, including a sense of purpose and identity, the feeling of self-determination, commitments and relationships with people on the outside, and a connection with the physical and natural world. When the world is "stripped bare," said Rosenberg, it gets smaller, and prisoners either become enraged or deeply despairing.
The history of supermax prisons and isolated incarceration, said Rosenberg, is surrounded by a history of suffering and genocide. In the second world war, Nazi doctors experimented on political prisoners to see how extended periods of isolation would affect them. The results of their research have surfaced again today as resources for isolation torture and current "behavior modification" practices in prisons. Throughout history, there has been use of the latest scientific and technological advances to target political opponents, guerillas, and terrorists. The treatment of enemy combatants in Guantanamo Bay and the provisions of the USA Patriot Act, she claimed, are not entirely new, but are merely an extension of the trend the American justice system has been following in the past century. American prisons are now becoming the models for prisons throughout the world. Rosenerg said that "justice and law don't meet in prisons, and the prison system is about neither of these things." While there is a facade of rehabilition in the American correctional system, Rosenberg asserted that it is really all about punishment and an "abusive relationship between people and the criminal justice system."
Joy James is a professor of Africana Studies at Brown University, and put together an anthology titled Imprisoned Intellectuals, made up of the writings of incarcerated individuals. James said that she often finds herself trying to reconcile the coupling of her love for democracy with her rage against the "machinery of oppression" that exists in this country. The science of incarceration and the practice of captivity are as old as European settlement in the Americas, she said, particularly with the nation's history of slavery. James pointed out that slavery is still legal in America - the 13th Amendment technically allows slavery of people who have been convicted of a crime. Also, the slave codes that existed before the Civil War simply became black codes and Jim Crow laws in the postbellum period, so that in some ways, slavery actually existed far longer than is commonly believed. James said that there is a disconnect between infractions and punishment, so that it's not so much one's behavior that determines whether or not they'll go to prison, but often their race or class. For example, she discussed how enforcement of laws against crack cocaine unfairly target people of color and the poor. When 70% of people in prisons are minority members, she said, there is clearly a problem, and law does not mean justice.
When asked by an audience member what the solution to these problems is, both James and Rosenberg said that the answer was complex. For one, said James, you have to look to the people who are inside the prison system for their insight, as she did in creating the book Imprisoned Intellectuals. She also said that we have to "explore what's going on with the incarceration of non-violent criminals," who make up a large number of the people in the prison system. Both James and Rosenberg agreed that the abolition movement against prisons is fraught with problems, such as differentiating between violent and non-violent criminals.
This event was part of the Kirkland Project's 2003-2004 Series, "Technology, Science and Democracy: What's At Stake?" It was also co-sponsored by the program in Africana Studies and Faculty for Women's Concerns.
--Caroline O'Shea '07
