3 posts tagged “prison”
An Amherst student and a Hampshire County Correctional Facility inmate have a Boston Globe op-ed:
Yes, going to prison necessarily entails the loss of liberty. But the right to vote is in many ways more important than the right to walk freely down the street: Voting is the most basic check against the coercive power of the state. The places where that coercive power is most starkly exercised, such as prisons, are also the places where that most basic of checks becomes more important. The fact that prisoners have a big stake in governmental choices isn't an argument in favor of disenfranchisement; it's an argument against.
And because the vote is so essential to democratic citizenship, it is also an important part of reintegrating inmates with society. Prisons separate and divide, but at their best they also prepare inmates for life after imprisonment. Rebuilding civic engagement is perhaps the most important part of that process.
A nice photo of the winter solstice.
A well-written, in-depth, Washington Post article (part of a series on the DC public schools) that examines an inner-city high school, and the myriad of challenges faced by the teachers, in particular Frederick Willis, a young, African-American math teacher who is assaulted by one of his students:
Two boys appear outside the door. One has been kicked out of Cox's class for being disruptive. The other is a student of Willis's. They peer through the window and laugh. They bang on the door. Willis shoves the metal door open, and it hits his student. A knot swells on the student's forehead, and blood runs down past his eye.
A deep sense of inevitability descends on the afternoon.
"Why you hit me? Why you hit me?" the boy screams. "Look what the (expletive) you did to my head." The bell rings. Students file out. The boy continues yelling and cursing. He is stomping up and down. A crowd gathers, egging him on. You can't let him do that (expletive)! Steal him, son! kids yell.
The two boys push into Willis's class. Other students follow. The one who is bleeding turns over desks. He knocks over a computer. He tears apart the bulletin board that told them to respect themselves and their school.
All around, kids shout for vengeance.
Willis rushes out and down the stairs. The two boys follow him. The crowd follows them, 20 kids or more, running and jumping down the steps. Everyone is hollering. The last of the crowd gets to the first floor and rounds the corner.
Suddenly, kids are running back against the crowd. As he flees, one boy yells: "He put that nigga to sleep!" His voice echoes. Bodies blur in a rush. Seconds later, the hallways clear, the yelling grows distant and a surreal scene comes into focus.
On the floor, a few yards from the main office, Fredrick Willis lay crumpled. He is not moving.
Last, but not least, an award-winning GQ piece on Calvin Willis, an innocent man sentenced to life in Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola) for the rape of an 10 year-old girl, and how a legal secretary named Janet Gregory took up his case as he spent year after year in jail for a crime he didn't commit. Calvin grew up poor and black. Janet grew up poor and white, in a racist and abusive household. Cutting off all forms of expression is prison Calvin reveals himself only in his letters to Janet:
He tells her about being paid four cents an hour to pick cotton in the fields surrounding the prison, and how much worse this is than being paid nothing at all. He tells her what it's like watching the children of the guards, who live on the plantation grounds, grow up, and how strange it is to see young boys who once called "Hey, nigger!" to him as he worked the fields become guards themselves—yes, that much time is passing—with rifles in their hands and toothpicks in their mouths and absolute power over where he rests his eyeballs. He tells her he is losing his grasp on time, losing his ability to count, in a way; how during his first four years of imprisonment, at Caddo Correctional, time was still solid, still the bedrock of his reality, each day marked by a beginning and an end linked by a continuous line of being, but how at Angola, a place that cannot possibly be real (can it?), he has learned that a man's grasp on time is like his good health— something taken for granted until it dissolves. He tells her about the way a cell becomes a kiln in the summer, the air void of motion, 110 degrees at two in the morning, the way he will take a tin cup and splash the brown water from the tap onto the concrete floor, then lie in it face down, spread-eagled and naked, his nose and mouth filled with the ever present shitstink bubbling up from the drain, his ears filled with the baboon shrieks of men whose consciousness has been reduced to the purely physical, saying to himself over and over, for hours on end, I will not die in Angola.… I will not die in Angola.… I will not die in Angola.…
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