Whose Freedom? Whose Safety? OBE #4 (again)
"The fastest growing kind of public space in America is prisons."
Who benefits from the prison systems? Who gets put into the prisons? I just saw "the Road to Guantanamo" and was talking to a friend about it the other day. She told me that there's some sort of new law makes it nearly impossible to prosecute if you have been abused by a guard in prison. Guantanamo Bay is an extreme example of a prison as are some of the public spaces that Zukin discusses are extreme examples of privatized public spaces. However, it's all the start of a trend and none of it is getting better. Zukin's discussion of prisons of course brought to mind the excerpt from Foucault's Discipline and Punishment, which we read. It also relates directly to Davis' assessment of LA. I found this reading very compelling, just as a few of my classmates did. I think anyone who has studied sociology, particularly at a more liberal University, like the U would. I'm currently taking a course about social stratification and we just so happened to cover white collar crime as opposed to street crime today.
We learned that the prisons are built to house the poor, not the rich. Drug offenders who affect an arguably much smaller group of people with their "crimes" are subject to harsher punishments than ceo's who "fudge the numbers" and steal billions of dollars, effecting countless other people, with the punishments increasing for the poor as their social status and income decreases, and the punishment decreasing for the ceos as their stolen income, celebrity(society of the spectacle), and ability to pay their way out of trouble, increases. ( Does anyone follow me?)
The freedom that our wars protect is not necessarily your or mine. The safety that prisons give is only an illusion. Is it not pop culture knowledge and quite a cruel "joke" that people make uncomfortably, that prisons do not rehabilitate but instead facilitate the degredation of those who are imprisoned? "Don't drop the soap." Are you kidding me? That's definitely not funny. No matter what crime you've committed you should n't expect to have to join a a gang in order to protect yourself from other prisoners or even "guards". why is it that when someone gets caught with "ganja" over a certain amount they get 6 mo.s in jail along with violent offenders who aren't getting proper care, in fact are most likely being provoked towards more violence, while when someone gets caught stealing millions from their stock-holders they get a month or less, if that, in a cozy low security facility.
I don't remember where I read or saw it, but someone said that our increase in prisons is a sure sign of the breakdown of "social fabrics" (was that Davis?, or maybe Gowan?) . It's like putting a bandaid on a severed limb and hoping it will heal. Why is it that people get free housing when they commit a crime but have to pay 80% or more of their income for terrible housing if they're trying to make it on minimum wage? We live in a culture, a society that would rather imprison people and label them as "bad" than try to understand what led them to land in a certain situation. Our media certainly re-inforces that culture of fear that uses social segregation and inprisonment to keep those with enough money, and their wealth, "safe." I guess it's the point of Zukin's piece, but I don't feel that I can relate to such a culture, like the physical spaces have become more difficult to feel a part of, so has the idealogy.