Hey, we're going to meet in... about 40 minutes, and I wanted to remind you about it, and also send along some quotes that I thought about while reading "Hidden War" (chapter 5 of Tip of the Spear).

quotes & reflections

Long before abolition was in vogue, Little articulated an abolitionist critique, voicing principled opposition to ameliorative reforms based on an understanding that they would extend the prison's life. His analysis anticipated and radicalized French theorist Michel Foucault's oft-cited observation that prison reform is a constituent element of the prison itself. (page 155)

... Auburn and Attica represented "decades of painful exhaustion of all peaceful means of obtaining redress, of the impossibility of obtaining justice within the "legal" framework of an oppressive racist society [...] the fact that what he called the "Attica Reform Demands" were aimed at many of the conditions that his successful litigation should have already resolved demonstrated that captives had no choice but to rebel, seize hostages, and adopt a more revolutionary posture. (page 157)

... tension, breakdowns in discipline, and rebellion are attributed mechanistically to prison infrastructure, but also for how it forecloses the possibility that tension might be lessened by reducing the total captive population through "upstream" interventions such as public investment in education and social services, decriminalization, or arrest diversion. Expansion is a reformist imperative that accepts the permanence of the prison as a given and sees its progression as the only viable option. (page 161)

the potential benefits of each humanizing reform were immediately neutralized by repressive counter-reforms. Oswald removed the screens but replaced them with three-foot tables, "so actually you're further away than you were from your loved ones on the screen," Sostre explained in an interview. Making a similar point, another captive explained that after Attica, they were allowed to spend more time in the yard, but that security protocols were changed so that jogging and exercising were only permitted on an individual basis and gatherings of more than six at a time were criminalized (page 167)

While I was reading this chapter, I couldn't help but think about the conciliatory approaches of "AI harms" research, and the efforts to legitimize algorithmic systems as the only way to shoulder projects like health fascism and the increasingly pervasive surveillance state into which many of us are apparently literally and figuratively buying stock.

Near the end of the chapter Burton writes about Green Haven, and I have to admit I'm a little nervous at the prospect of a turning point where the people who want to insist on being the center of power - in Burton's case the prisoncrats, but in my field the technocrats and "AIcrats" or whatever we want to call them - and attempting to accomplish that by offering a couple of fig leaves to people who understandably want some relief from systems policing and surveilling them 24/7. My project is abolition, and I'm acutely aware (maybe more acutely aware, now) that there will be centrists trying to keep this system held together just like the fascists, because in their minds any future with uncertainty - even if that uncertainty is toward peace and justice - is worse than a future with a certainty of oppression and violence.

What will be our three-foot tables that replace screens?

video chat details

In about 40 minutes (at 12pm ET) let's get together¹ and chat about whatever we've read this week. The link to join is here (if that doesn't work, the url is below)

https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom

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supporting The Sameer Project

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