[blind-democracy] incarceration

From: Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2015 11:31:00 -0400

There is, by the way, an excellent article in the October Atlantic, which is
on BARD, on the subject of The Black Family and Incarceration by Ta-Hanisi
Coates.

Miriam

-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, October 12, 2015 10:55 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: (no subject)

Middle Class America lives in a sanitized world. A self imposed, rose
colored glasses, Land of Oz.
So far removed from the real world, the so called American Middle Class will
not allow themselves to think about a world described in this article. Even
Jesus Christ wanders about our churches dressed in neat, cleanly laundered
garments, with a neatly trimmed beard and quaffed hair. Even his color has
been sanitized. So, how can we begin a process of cleaning up the dirt and
slime in our ghettos and slums, if we pretend they do not exist?
Too bad our memories are so short. How many great empires fell
because they ignored the needs of the masses? When there are more
people on the outside, the walls begin to crumble.
From the days of Jericho, when Joshua brought down the walls that protected
those who had believed they led charmed lives, all down through history.
Even the great wall of china could not protect the people from the growing
masses of outsiders.
Our Ghettos and Slums are filled to overflowing with "outsiders".
This is where the change will occur, not among we Progressive thinking
Middle Class White folk. While we are busy clucking our tongues and trying
to figure out how to clean up our messes, the mess will rise up and take
over.

Carl Jarvis

On 10/12/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

'A Pipeline Straight to Jail'
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_pipeline_straight_to_jail_201510
11/
Posted on Oct 11, 2015
By Chris Hedges

Boris Franklin in a classroom at Rutgers. When he was in prison, he
was a student under the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative
Education in Prisons Consortium (NJ-STEP), and he is now attending
Rutgers under the university's Mountainview Program. (Michael Nigro)
The defeat of the Harvard University debate team by a team from the
Eastern New York Correctional Facility in the Catskills elucidates a
truth known intimately by those of us who teach in prisons: that the
failure of the American educational system to offer opportunities to
the poor and the government's abandonment of families and children
living in blighted communities condemn millions of boys and girls,
often of color, to a life of suffering, misery and early death. The
income inequality, the trillions of dollars we divert to the war
industry, the flight of manufacturing jobs overseas and the refusal to
invest in our infrastructure wrecks life after innocent life.
I spent four years as a graduate student at Harvard University.
Privilege, and especially white privilege, I discovered, is the
primary prerequisite for attending an Ivy League university. I have
also spent several years teaching in prisons. In class after class in
prison, there is a core of students who could excel at Harvard. This
is not hyperbolic, as the defeat of the Harvard debate team
illustrates. But poverty condemned my students before they ever
entered school. And as poverty expands, inflicting on communities and
families a host of maladies including crime, addiction, rage, despair
and hopelessness, the few remaining institutions that might intervene
to lift the poor up are gutted or closed. Even when students in
inner-city schools are not the targets of racial insults, racism worms
into their lives because the institutions that should help them are

nonexistent or deeply dysfunctional.

I stood outside a prison gate in Newark, N.J., at 7 a.m. last April
24. I waited for the release of one of my students, Boris Franklin,
who had spent
11 years incarcerated. I had ridden to the gate with his mother, who
spent her time reading Bible verses out loud in the car, and his
sister. We watched him walk down the road toward us. He was wearing
the baggy gray sweatpants, oversize white T-shirt and white Reeboks
that prisoners purchase before their release. Franklin had laid out
$50 for his new clothes. A prisoner in New Jersey earns $28 a month
working in prison.
Franklin, with the broad shoulders and muscular chest and arms that
come with years of lifting weights, clutched a manila envelope
containing his medical records, instructions for parole, his birth
certificate, his Social Security card and an ID issued by the
Department of Motor Vehicles, his official form of identification. All
his prison possessions, including his collection of roughly 100 books, had

to be left behind.

The first words he spoke to me as a free man after more than a decade
in prison were "I have to rebuild my library."
"You don't know what to think or feel at that moment," he said to me
recently about the moment of his release. "You are just walking. It is
almost surreal. You can't believe it. After such a traumatic
experience you are numb. There is no sense of triumph."
When Franklin was in prison, he was a student under the New Jersey
Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons Consortium (NJ-STEP).
Now, at 42, he is attending Rutgers under the university's
Mountainview Program for ex-offenders. He is seeking a degree in
social work and plans to assist the formerly incarcerated. This is an
unusual and rare opportunity for a freed prisoner.
Franklin, like many others I have taught, should never have ended up
in prison. His brilliance, his hunger to learn and his passion for
ideas, if nurtured, would have led him to a very different life. But
when you are poor in America, everything conspires to make sure you
remain poor. The invisible walls of our internal colonies, keeping the
poor penned in like livestock, mirror the physical walls of prison
that many in these communities are doomed to experience.
"I started school in Piscataway, N.J.," he said. "It was predominantly
white. There was a lot of space. It was clean. There was order. People
walked down the halls in lines. I had been prepared in Head Start."
When he was in the second grade, his family moved. He started
attending an inner-city school in New Brunswick. The two schools, he
said, "were night and day." The classrooms in New Brunswick were
shabby, dirty and overcrowded. Many of the children were "loud and

disruptive."

"In Piscataway we were taught how to learn, how to read and scan texts
for information," he said. "New Brunswick was a zoo. It was mostly
black and Hispanic. There were fights all the time. I doubt the
teachers were even qualified. It was not an environment where you
could teach anything. Kids would come to school and slam things down
or turn stuff over. They were angry. I remember seeing a girl in my
class, a victim of child abuse, with welts all over her. She later
became a drug addict. Your fight-or-flight mechanism as a child is

activated even before you walk out of the house.

Your blood pressure goes up. There are drugs and alcohol all around you.
You
see fights on the way to school. You see dope addicts slumped over.
You see police jump on someone and beat 'em up. You run into gangs of

kids."

"I knew kids who dropped out of school because it was dangerous to be
in school," he went on. "If you had a fight they would find out what
school you went to and they would be there to retaliate when you got
out. We used to take bats and knives to school and put them by the
door when we came out in case there was a confrontation. I got my
first weapons charge at 14 for a handgun. You are not in a state to
learn anything. Of course criminals have low brain arousal. They have
been desensitized since childhood. This is how you deal with constant
danger. You go numb. And you become a danger to others and yourself."
"The students in my third-grade class were tracing out letters," he said.
"They were trying to learn how to write. I was writing in cursive. I
could multiply and divide. They did not know how to add and subtract.
The two schools were only 20 minutes apart. But in New Brunswick you
were not taught how to think. You were taught rote behavior, to obey.
I was told to sit in the back of the class, be quiet and wait for the
other students to catch up.
But they never caught up."
"There was usually drugs in the homes," he said. "I had friends whose
homes were raided when they were children. Most of the parents were
getting high, including my father. I did not know any child who did
not have a drug addict in the home. And if a person was not a drug
addict he or she was often suffering from some form of mental illness.
It seemed everyone was dealing with something. Those who were left
with their grandparents were in the best situation. Kids would say
they were living with their grandmother. They would never mention
their mother or father. I never saw the fathers of most of my friends.
They had disappeared or were in jail."
"I remember when my friend Carl Anderson's father came home from
jail," he said. "We were in the seventh grade. We were sitting in the

classroom.

Somebody said, 'Carl, that's your father outside.' We all turned around.
Carl was my best friend. I had never seen his father. He looked like
[boxer] Marvin Hagler. He had a leather jacket, a bald head and a
goatee. Carl was excited because his dad was home. That same year we
were walking home from school and this lady who was getting high ran
up to him and said, 'Little Carl, they just locked your father up. He
cut somebody's throat down in the projects.' You could see everything
drain out of his face. He shut everything down. How do you learn to
deal with that? You learn not to care.
We were using a lot of misplaced aggression. That night we were
probably fighting somebody. I could feel his pain. You want to get it
out? We will get it out. That's how you dealt with it. That's how
everybody dealt with it. Take it out on somebody else. When I would
get hit in the house I would come outside and the first person lookin'
at me I would say, 'What you lookin' at?' I would jump them or chase
them or something. My mother told my father, 'You can't hit him
anymore. You are making him violent.' "
"There is a stigma that comes with being poor," he said. "If you are
poor you are bad. You are worthless. You are ridiculed. You are picked on.
Markets are built on this. This is how you can sell a kid from the
inner city a pair of $200 sneakers. He is buying his identity. He is
buying his self-esteem. And that's why poor people hustle. That's why
I started hustling [drugs], to buy things. The gratification is
immediate. You wear that stuff and it is like you are magically not
poor anymore. It is a trigger to go back to selling drugs. I remember
when I was struggling. I had grits one night for dinner because that
was all that was in the cabinet. I panicked. By the next day I decided
I would do something criminal to change my situation."
"What's the best that can happen to you, even if you don't go to
jail?" he asked. "Check out bags at Wal-Mart? A warehouse job? That's
as far as you can go in this world if you are poor. The only education
the poor are given is one where they get to a place where they learn

enough to take orders.

They are taught to remember what is said. They are taught to repeat
the instructions. There is no thinking involved. We are not taught to
think. We are educated just enough to occupy the lowest rung on the social

ladder."

"No one in prison wanted to admit they were poor," he said. "A friend
of mine in prison told all these big-drug-dealer stories. He has been
in and out of jail for 20 years. But one day we were walking on the
basketball court. He got honest. He told me he had been sleepin' in
his car. Sometimes motel rooms. Basically homeless. No education. No
connections. The only people he knows are inmates. He does not know
anyone in the working world who can help him put in an application and
say a word for him. When he got out he went to the guys he knew from
jail still in the streets. That was his network. That's most people's
network. 'Can you get me some dope? What's the price? Who's moving
it?' That's your economy. That's the one you go back to.
That's how you survive. His brother is doing 30 years. His nephew is
doing
16 years."
"One of my four children went to school in New Brunswick," Franklin said.
"And he is in jail. The other three, who did not go to school in New
Brunswick, have college degrees or are in college. You go to schools
like the one I went to and you enter a pipeline straight to jail. When
I walked into the mess hall in prison it looked like my old school
lunchroom, including the fights. When I walked into the yard in
prison, it looked like my old playground, including the fights. When I
was in the projects it looked like prison. When guys get to prison the
scenery is familiar. If you grow up poor, then prison is not a culture
shock. You have been conditioned your whole life for prison."
His family moved again when he was a child. He entered Franklin High
School in Somerset, N.J., but his years in a dysfunctional school
meant he was now woefully unprepared, struggling and behind. "Students
in Franklin High School had continued in the pace I had started in," he

said.

He had become acculturated to poverty. He would not go to college. He
would, as so many of his peers did, end up in prison. And it was in
prison that he, like many others, found refuge in books and the world
of ideas.
"You have a lot of intellectuals in prison," he said. "There are
people who think about things, who read things, who try to connect the
dots. People read psychology and science to see how things fit
together. You see libraries in some cells. You hear people say, 'I got to

get my library up.'

You would go from one cell with a library to another. It was like a cult.
When you first loan a book to someone in prison you loan a tester. You
do not loan a valuable book. If the person who borrows the book reads
it and talks about it, then they get another book. But if they leave
the book sitting on their shelf, if it doesn't get read, they never
get another book."
"There are a lot of guys in prison who read everything," he continued.
"When
I saw that those prisoners won the debate with the Harvard team I was
not surprised. I took classes where there were prisoners who had read
everything the professor had read. I was intimidated to take classes
with certain guys.
They read constantly. They retained all the information. And they
could relate it to whatever we were talking about. On the outside they
never had a chance."
"Look at the faces of the young kids, when they first start out," he said.
"They have wide, bright eyes. Then look at the pictures of the faces
of people in prison. Their eyes are low, slanted, shifty, beaten. They
are worn out. How you do you get from that child to that man? Look at
the community.
Look at the schools. Look at what is done to the poor."
The photo of Boris Franklin at the top of this article is a still from
the documentary movie "Can Our Families Come," now in production. The
film, directed by Michael Nigro, is about the U.S. prison system and
the mounting of the play "Caged," written at a New Jersey
maximum-security penitentiary by 28 prisoners under their teacher,
Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges. Nigro is a New York City filmmaker,
journalist and activist, and his website is at partiallysubmerged.com.

http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/ 'A Pipeline
Straight to Jail'
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_pipeline_straight_to_jail_201510
11/
Posted on Oct 11, 2015
By Chris Hedges

Boris Franklin in a classroom at Rutgers. When he was in prison, he
was a student under the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative
Education in Prisons Consortium (NJ-STEP), and he is now attending
Rutgers under the university's Mountainview Program. (Michael Nigro)
The defeat of the Harvard University debate team by a team from the
Eastern New York Correctional Facility in the Catskills elucidates a
truth known intimately by those of us who teach in prisons: that the
failure of the American educational system to offer opportunities to
the poor and the government's abandonment of families and children
living in blighted communities condemn millions of boys and girls,
often of color, to a life of suffering, misery and early death. The
income inequality, the trillions of dollars we divert to the war
industry, the flight of manufacturing jobs overseas and the refusal to
invest in our infrastructure wrecks life after innocent life.
I spent four years as a graduate student at Harvard University.
Privilege, and especially white privilege, I discovered, is the
primary prerequisite for attending an Ivy League university. I have
also spent several years teaching in prisons. In class after class in
prison, there is a core of students who could excel at Harvard. This
is not hyperbolic, as the defeat of the Harvard debate team
illustrates. But poverty condemned my students before they ever
entered school. And as poverty expands, inflicting on communities and
families a host of maladies including crime, addiction, rage, despair
and hopelessness, the few remaining institutions that might intervene
to lift the poor up are gutted or closed. Even when students in
inner-city schools are not the targets of racial insults, racism worms
into their lives because the institutions that should help them are