August 5
USA:
'CSI effect' has juries wanting more evidence
Like viewers across the nation, folks in Galveston, Texas, watch a lot of
TV shows about crime-scene investigators. Jury consultant Robert
Hirschhorn couldn't be happier about that.
Hirschhorn was hired last year to help defense attorneys pick jurors for
the trial of Robert Durst, a millionaire real estate heir who was accused
of murdering and dismembering a neighbor, Morris Black. It was a case in
which investigators never found Black's head. The defense claimed that
wounds to the head might have supported Durst's story that he had killed
Black in self-defense.
Hirschhorn wanted jurors who were familiar with shows such as CSI: Crime
Scene Investigation to spot the importance of such a gap in the evidence.
That wasn't difficult: In a survey of the 500 people in the jury pool, the
defense found that about 70% were viewers of CBS' CSI or similar shows
such as Court TV's Forensic Files or NBC's Law & Order.
Durst was acquitted in November. To legal analysts, his case seemed an
example of how shows such as CSI are affecting action in courthouses
across the USA by, among other things, raising jurors' expectations of
what prosecutors should produce at trial.
Prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges call it "the CSI effect," after
the crime-scene shows that are among the hottest attractions on
television. The shows -CSI and CSI: Miami, in particular - feature
high-tech labs and glib and gorgeous techies. By shining a glamorous light
on a gory profession, the programs also have helped to draw more students
into forensic studies.
But the programs also foster what analysts say is the mistaken notion that
criminal science is fast and infallible and always gets its man. That's
affecting the way lawyers prepare their cases, as well as the expectations
that police and the public place on real crime labs. Real crime-scene
investigators say that because of the programs, people often have
unrealistic ideas of what criminal science can deliver.
Like Hirschhorn, many lawyers, judges and legal consultants say they
appreciate how CSI-type shows have increased interest in forensic
evidence.
"Talking about science in the courtroom used to be like talking about
geometry - a real jury turnoff," says Hirschhorn, of Lewisville, Texas.
"Now that there's this almost obsession with the (TV) shows, you can talk
to jurors about (scientific evidence) and just see from the looks on their
faces that they find it fascinating."
But some defense lawyers say CSI and similar shows make jurors rely too
heavily on scientific findings and unwilling to accept that those findings
can be compromised by human or technical errors.
Prosecutors also have complaints: They say the shows can make it more
difficult for them to win convictions in the large majority of cases in
which scientific evidence is irrelevant or absent.
"The lesson that both sides can agree on is, what's on TV does seep into
the minds of jurors," says Paul Walsh, chief prosecutor in New Bedford,
Mass., and president of the National District Attorneys Association.
"Jurors are going to have information, or what they think is information,
in mind. That's the new state of affairs."
Lawyers and judges say the CSI effect has become a phenomenon in
courthouses across the nation:
- In Phoenix last month, jurors in a murder trial noticed that a bloody
coat introduced as evidence had not been tested for DNA. They alerted the
judge. The tests hadn't been needed because the defendant had acknowledged
being at the murder scene. The judge decided that TV had taught jurors
about DNA tests, but not enough about when to use them.
- Three years ago in Richmond, Va., jurors in a murder trial asked the
judge whether a cigarette butt found during the investigation could be
tested for links to the defendant. Defense attorneys had ordered DNA tests
but had not yet introduced them into evidence. The jury's hunch was
correct - the tests exonerated the defendant, and the jury acquitted him.
- In Arizona, Illinois and California, prosecutors now use "negative
evidence witnesses" to try to assure jurors that it is not unusual for
real crime-scene investigators to fail to find DNA, fingerprints and other
evidence at crime scenes.
- In Massachusetts, prosecutors have begun to ask judges for permission to
question prospective jurors about their TV-watching habits. Several states
already allow that.
- Last year in Wilmington, Del., federal researchers studying how juries
evaluate scientific evidence staged dozens of simulated trials. At one
point, a juror struggling with especially complicated DNA evidence
lamented that such problems never come up "on CSI."
The CSI effect also is being felt beyond the courtroom.
At West Virginia University, forensic science is the most popular
undergraduate major for the second year in a row, attracting 13% of
incoming freshmen this fall. In June, supporters of an Ohio library drew
an overflow crowd of 200-plus to a luncheon speech on DNA by titling it
"CSI: Dayton."
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department crime lab has seen another
version of the CSI effect. 4 technicians have left the lab for lucrative
jobs as technical advisers to crime-scene programs. "They found a way to
make science pay," lab director Barry Fisher says.
Shows' popularity soars
CSI, which begins its 5th season next month, was America's
2nd-most-popular TV program during the season that began last fall, after
the Tuesday edition of American Idol.
CSI and a spinoff, CSI: Miami (which is about to begin its 3rd season),
have drawn an average of more than 40 million viewers a week during the
past TV season. Law & Order, whose plots sometimes focus on forensic
evidence, has been the 13th-most-watched show during the 2003-04 season,
averaging about 15 million viewers. On cable, the Discovery Channel, A&E
and Court TV have programs that highlight DNA testing or the analysis of
fingerprints, hair and blood-spatter patterns.
CSI: NY, set in New York City, is slated to premiere next month.
The CSI shows combine whiz-bang science with in-your-face interrogations
to solve complex crimes. Some sample dialogue from actor David Caruso, the
humorless monotone who plays investigator Horatio Caine on CSI: Miami: "He
(the bad guy) doesn't know how evidence works, but you know what? He
will."
The shows' popularity, TV historians say, is partly a result of their
constant presence. Counting network and cable, at least one hour of
crime-forensics programming airs in prime time six nights a week.
The stars of the shows often are the equipment - DNA sequencers, mass
spectrometers, photometric fingerprint illuminators, scanning electron
microscopes. But the technicians run a close second.
"It's 'geek chic,' the idea that kids who excel in science and math can
grow up to be cool," says Robert Thompson, who teaches the history of TV
programming at Syracuse University. "This is long overdue. ... Cops and
cowboys and doctors and lawyers have been done to death."
Departing from reality
Some of the science on CSI is state-of-the-art. Real lab technicians can,
for example, lift DNA profiles from cigarette butts, candy wrappers and
gobs of spit, just as their Hollywood counterparts do.
But some of what's on TV is far-fetched. Real technicians don't pour caulk
into knife wounds to make a cast of the weapon. That wouldn't work in soft
tissue. Machines that can identify cologne from scents on clothing are
still in the experimental phase. A criminal charge based on
"neuro-linguistic programming" - detecting lies by the way a person's eyes
shift - likely would be dismissed by a judge.
But real scientists say CSI's main fault is this: The science is always
above reproach.
"You never see a case where the sample is degraded or the lab work is
faulty or the test results don't solve the crime," says Dan Krane,
president and DNA specialist at Forensic Bioinformatics in Fairborn, Ohio.
"These things happen all the time in the real world."
Defense lawyers say the misconception that crime-scene evidence and
testing are always accurate helps prosecutors. "Jurors expect the criminal
justice system to work better than it does," says Betty Layne DesPortes, a
criminal defense lawyer in Richmond, Va., who has a master's degree in
forensic science.
She notes that during the past 15 years, human errors and corruption have
skewed test results in crime labs in West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
California, Texas and Washington state.
But prosecutors say the shows help defense lawyers. Jurors who are regular
viewers, they say, expect testable evidence to be present at all crime
scenes.
In fact, they say, evidence such as DNA and fingerprints - the staple of
CSI plots - is available in only a small minority of cases and can yield
inconclusive results.
"Defense attorneys will get up there and bang the rail and say 'Where were
the DNA tests?' to take advantage of the idea that's in the juror's mind,"
says Joshua Marquis, a prosecutor in Astoria, Ore. "You've got to do a lot
of jury preparation to defeat that."
Some prosecutors have gone to great lengths to lower jurors' expectations
about such evidence.
In Belleville, Ill., last spring, prosecutor Gary Duncan called on seven
nationally recognized experts to testify about scientific evidence against
a man accused of raping and murdering a 10-year-old girl. The witnesses
included specialists in human and animal DNA, shoe-print evidence,
population statistics and human mitochondrial DNA, genetic material that
is inherited only from one's mother and that seldom is used in criminal
cases. Duncan won a conviction.
"I wanted to be certain the jury was clear on the evidence and its
meaning," he says. "These days, juries demand that."
CSI producers acknowledge that they take some liberties with facts and the
capabilities of science, but they say it's necessary to keep their story
lines moving.
Elizabeth Devine, a former crime lab technician who writes and produces
episodes of CSI: Miami, spoke at a training seminar for prosecutors last
year in Columbia, S.C. She said that if the shows did not cut the time
needed to perform DNA tests from weeks to minutes, a villain might not be
caught before "episode 5."
For all of CSI's faults, some lab technicians say they have a soft spot
for the TV version of their world. "It's great for getting people
interested (in) careers" in forensic science, says Barbara Llewellyn,
director of DNA analysis for the Illinois State Police.
Terry Melton, president of Mitotyping Technologies in State College, Pa.,
says the programs have made "jury duty something people now look forward
to."
And Fisher says the shows have given "science types" like himself some
unexpected cachet.
"When I tell someone what I do, I never have to explain it now," he says.
"They know what a crime-scene (technician) does. At least, they think they
do."
(source: USA TODAY)
*****************
Doing Time for Political Crime----Paul and Silas, Bound in Jail
Dave Gilbert, serving a life-sentence in New York, has just come out with
an important, wonderful book, No Surrender: Writings from an anti-
imperialist political prisoner, and Staughton Lynd, counsellor to death
row in Ohio, has just published the scathing j'accuse of our times,
Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising.
Forty years ago they were prominent in SDS (Students for a Democratic
Society), and around then they sang a song that had come up north with the
civil rights movement and which became as appropriate to black power
militants thrown into the penitentiary by COINTELPRO as it had been to
'the beloved community' suffering in the racist lock-ups of Mississippi.
Paul and Silas, bound in jail
Had no money for to go their bail
refrain:
Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.
We have shut up more than 2 million behind bars, with almost five million
on probation or parole. As the war and empire grow, so do the prisons. The
one lurches recklessly about the planet, insanely flaying about like an
ogre gone mad; the other swells behind green berms interlaced with
gleaming razor wire where 'stress positions' are studied by social
scientists and death is dealt out by injection needle. Empire and prison
grow together in parallel. The ogre is two-headed in the USA: one head has
just grunted in Boston, and during the pause before the other head starts
to bellow in New York, let us bend our ears to these voices from below,
from inside the belly of the beast.
David Gilbert is a political prisoner. Staughton Lynd writes about prison
politics. Dave Gilbert is a lifelong staunch ally of the black
revolutionary movement. Staughton Lynd has been a civil rights worker, lo!
these many decades. Dave has long thought that the 'white working class'
was on the whole hopelessly compromised by the white supremacy of the
ruling class. Staughton shows that on 'the race question' the prisoners of
Ohio's maximum security prison - black and white - expressed themselves as
"the convict race." Dave writes now from his tiny cell about the whole
world.
Staughton, a peacenik of the world (Palestine, Nicaragua, South Africa,
and Youngstown), writes about eleven days in one prison down in Piketon
county along the Chillicothe River.
The Dean of the University told the students "don't go into Harlem." David
did, and he listened to Malcolm X. So much of his politics, the genius of
his activism, came from the AfroAmerican struggle. Dave linked the cry of
"Black Power" to the struggle of the National Liberation Front in Vietnam.
Dave Gilbert in 1965 founded the 1st anti-Vietnam war committee at
Columbia University. He welcomed in 1967 into SDS the 1st pure statements
of women's liberation. He then helped lead the Columbia strike of 1968. In
addition to being an activist, David was a man of words, a careful fighter
in the battle of ideas, able to assemble convincing argument and to
express moral indignation with dignity and righteousness without yelling,
as I remember from editorial meetings of the graduate student union
journal, Ripsaw. He helped SDS to see that the USA was an empire (Niall
Ferguson, Michael Ignatieff, take note).
Dave Gilbert helped form the Weather Underground. Without killing anyone,
the Weather Underground bombed military and corporate targets, during the
early 1970s. Another voice from Columbia University at the time is
provided by Barry S. Willdorf, Bring the War Home! A Novel About
Resistance to the Vietnam War and Racism in the United States Marine
Corps.
Only thing that we did wrong
Was staying in the wilderness so long
refrain:
Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.
Dave Gilbert wrote, "any white movement worthy of the name 'revolutionary'
had to take on the task of building an underground that could carry on
armed struggle against this criminal government." This is the writing of
historical agency, but it is also writing from too long a stay in the
wilderness. What is a revolutionary? What court could bring "this criminal
government" to trial? What is a "white movement"? These questions were not
answered, though they remain on the table. As for the meaning of
"underground", and "armed struggle," the answers became clear.
What David did wrong happened in 1981 when Thatcher and Reagan were in
power, and the prisons grew. In fact it was the year when the "golden
gulag" was placed around the neck of the republic, as Ruth Gilmore shows.
David Gilbert was arrested for his role as a driver in a notorious attempt
to expropriate a Brinks money truck in Nyack, N.Y., in which 2 police
officers and one Brinks guard were killed. As an accessory he is now
serving a life sentence in the N.Y. state prison system, shunted about
according to the whim and ways of the Department of Corrections - now
Elmira, now Attica, presently Dannemora.
At the opening of his trial in September 1982 he said to the court which
he and his co-defendants, Kuwasi Balagoon and Judy Clark, refused to
recognize, "We are neither terrorists nor criminals. It is precisely
because of our love of life, because we revel in the human spirit, that we
became freedom fighters against this racist and deadly imperialist
system."
We may identify 3 types of political prisoner. The first is defined well
by Dave Gilbert. "A political prisoner," he writes, "is anyone whose
incarceration is a result of his or her actions taken, or positions
espoused, on behalf of a political cause - specifically a political cause
on behalf of the oppressed and downtrodden in society and against the
powers that be." He then proceeds to identify different types of political
prisoners, viz., prisoners of war, resistance fighters, civil disobedience
activists, and prisoners of conscience.
Staughton Lynd illustrates how prisoners may become political as a result
of incarceration. This is a second sort of political prisoner. The
prisoners learn to respect one another; the prisoners come to expect
respect.
The story he tells began on Easter Sunday, April 1993, at the Southern
Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. A long train of abuses on the
part of the prison authorities included over-crowding, racist
double-celling, coaching witnesses, massive shakedowns, scrapped programs,
increased use of snitches, deal cutting, criminal misconduct, and forced
application of a type of TB tests which violated religious taboo. As a
last resort, the prisoners, mostly black, took hostage from the mostly
white guards, and over the course of the eleven day occupation of the
prison one correctional officer and nine prisoners were murdered.
It was one of the longest prison riots in U.S. history, yet it was not
publicized much at the time because Janet Reno, the lictor of the Clinton
administration, ignited the conflageration at the Branch Davidian compound
in Waco, Texas, where so many were consumed, white and black. The flames
of federal destruction were more attractive to the media observers than
the pathetic graffiti inside Lucasville - "Black and White Together 11
Days," "Convict Race," or hand-drawn press releases on bed sheets - "The
state is not negotiating," "This administration is blocking the press from
speaking to us!!" Two members of the convict race, a white one and a black
one, stood shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the yard, surrounded by
the firepower of the State of Ohio and ignored by media bullhorns.
5 men are currently on death row for the murder of the correctional
officer. They are George Skatzes (Aryan Brotherhood), Siddique Abdullah
Hasan (Sunni Muslim), Jason Robb (Aryan Brotherhood), Namir Abdul Mateen
(Sunni Muslim), and Bomani Hondo Shakur whose name means Thankful Mighty
Warrior. These men are solid with each other.
There is a point at which the welder's torch becomes so hot, and burns
with such purity, that it's flame is no longer yellow, orange, or red, but
burns blue. Then it is capable of cutting through steel. Staughton Lynd
has consumed the trial transcripts, he has patiently endured the hysteria
of the media, he has listened to the men on death row for seven years, and
he has lived the struggles of the rust belt. His torch has illuminated all
the evidence, it burns well beyond heated anger and smoldering resentment,
and by cutting through the state-sponsored lies, threats, evasions,
harassments, racist provocations, snitching, and venality, it has attained
the efficiency of the blue flame of truth.
If you want to understand the American gulag, if you oppose the death
"penalty" of innocent people, if you can imagine honor, solidarity, and
respect among the poorest and most degraded white, brown, and black, if
you can imagine Aryan Brothers, Muslims, and Black Gangster Disciples in
unity against a common enemy - the wall - then you are ready for this
j'accuse: "I accuse the State of Ohio of deliberately framing innocent
men." This is state-sponsored terrorism, pure and simple. The goal is
precisely to re-assert murderous race relations, for there are more
parallels than one between the Lucasville rebellion and the Waco massacre.
Staughton Lynd explains that respect, derived as it is from the Latin verb
"to see," is at the base of 2 of the world's profoundest political values,
Satyagrah from the east, habeas corpus from the west. Satyagraha is what
Gandhi believed in. It means clinging to the truth, and truth is the
opposite of violence.
When we recognize the truth of another person, when we refuse to overlook
them, then we respect them. Respect is tied also to the writ of habeas
corpus, "the foundation of the Anglo-American system of justice, because
it requires the state to produce the prisoner in open court so that
friends and relatives can see the prisoner, and can confirm with their own
eyes and ears that the government has informed the prisoner of the
specific crimes with which he or she is charged."
Marilyn Buck who herself has served twenty years in prison for political
crime, writes of the difficulty of writing, "It is a never-ending effort
to get hold of reading materials and to keep them, or to do research, much
less to read, study, and think. Thought is constantly disrupted; arbitrary
rules and interruptions create a chaos in which sorrow, discontent, and
rage are the generalized response to and currency of the harsh cruelty,
brutality, and absences of imprisoned women's and men's lives. Noise,
stress, fear, even mental breaks fill the time and space of the prison
world."
The outstanding journalists in the American prisons are Paul Wright, Mumia
Abu-Jamal, Ray Luc Levasseur, Marilyn Buck, Sundiata Acoli, Wilbert
Rideau, Ron Wikberg,Jalil Muntagim, and Dave Gilbert, comparable to the
revolutionary 1790s in England when an extraordinary assortment of 'guests
of His Majesty' involuntarily gathered in Newgate prison - radicals,
democrats, commoners, abolitionists, mutineers, Jacobins, vegetarians,
Irish freedom fighters, union organizers.
Let us describe the virtues of No Surrender with the help of Ho Chi Minh,
also a prison poet.
The body is in prison,
The mind escapes outside:
To bring about great things
The mind must be large and well-tempered.
David Gilbert's mind escapes outside, to the whole world. He describes it
in a nutshell. "Today's world economy has evolved into a colossal system
of debt peonage, with some 70 nations and billions of human beings in its
cruel thrall. It's a system that brings unprecedented wealth to the
superrich while, literally, squeezing the lifeblood out of the people who
can least afford it."
He describes it in the round. He writes about extraordinary Sandinistas,
twelve women in Nicaragua; he writes about young Palestinians and Israeli
human rights activists during the intifada in Gaza; he writes about the
trafficking of Burmese women and girls into brothels in Thailand; he
writes with unalloyed admiration of the restrained testimony of Japanese
American women; he writes about the disappeared in Guatemala and the
deterioration of human rights in East Timor; he writes about the dirty war
in Columbia and the democratatorship in Bogota; he writes about Chico
Mendes and the empate, or stand-offs, of the Brazilian rubber-tappers; he
writes about the organ cancers of Navajo teenagers and ecological
"sacrifice zones" of New Mexico; he writes with lyricism and
fellow-feeling for the Zapatistas of Chiapas; he is open-minded about the
Sendero Luminoso in Peru and distills a useful set of criteria for
noticing when a revolutionary movement is going badly astray; he writes
with passionate intensity about the eboli virus in Zaire and the
prevalance of AIDS in Africa.
Indeed on that subject though the "body is in prison" it could as well be
in Africa. He pioneered the system of AIDS education known as "peer
counseling," against bureaucrats of health as well as the bureaucrats of
punishment. In this, he was like his forbears, Dr. James Parkinson, the
English Jacobin who diagnosed shaking palsy and was a revolutionary
democrat during the 1790s, or Dr. Che Guevara for whom the health of the
body politic was foremost and whose clinic straddled the Atlantic to
include Africa and America. Dave Gilbert has 'brought about great things.'
David's mind has become large and well-tempered. He grapples with some of
the thinkers on the outside who also aspire to do great things. He thinks
with, rather than against or upon, Barbara Kingsolver, bell hooks, Manuel
Castells, Walter Rodney, and Christian Parenti, in essays that are
independent appreciations in respectful, intelligent conversation.
His essays on other political prisoners like Leonard Peltier or Mumia
Abu-Jamal are tributes of intelligence and honor. His recollection of his
comrade, Ted Gold, who died in the townhouse explosion on 11th street in
New York on March 1970, and his tribute to his comrade Marilyn Buck doing
twenty years in California prisons, are written with ardor and passion.
His three haiku poems to Mumia I can compare only to E.P. Thompson's
homage to Allende. He reaches out to his fellow internationalist, the
Belfast freedom-fighter of the IRA, Joe Doherty, who did nine years in the
U.S. gulag quoting his poem,
Some say soon, my walls will fall
In the dust I'll dance to the chorus of Mankind.
Joe Doherty was released as part of he Good Friday Agreement off 1998.
Gilbert is liberal with praise, and though criticism is always direct it
is always gentle. His letters to his son, like Gramsci's letters from
prison to his son, are pure fancy, pure delight. The two of them, father
and son, engaged in an epic creation on successive long-distance phone
calls which, like the blind bard who told the story of Troy, they had to
do so sightless. They call it "The Vortex." As an introduction to the
feeling of the Weather underground organization nothing exceeds the
courage, cunning, suspense and righteous adventure of "The Vortex" except
perhaps the South African novelist, Neil Gordon's The Company You Keep.
But David Gilbert was a Weather person, and doesn't he deserve to suffer?
This is the tune of the New York Times whose fulsome pleasure greets the
surfacing of these revolutionary militants from the cold underground with
odious little pills of hate setting in motion, as Wordsworth put it under
similar circumstances, "the insinuated scoff of coward tongues."
Radical chic to identify with the outlaws; social banditry became the
icing on the cake; and of course it is easy to scorn these postures and
pretensions are deservedly scoffed. The postures - "We are all outlaws"-
claimed the Berkeley radicals, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers. Are all
prisoners political prisoners? No, but we held that all prisoners could
become political prisoners, since inherent in times of change is the view
and the experience that human beings can change, our sympathies may
enlarge, our consciousness can be raised. Later, after the times changed,
well then, we separate the sheep from the goats, and any fool can see that
you were a sheep all along, and you, why you were born a goat!
At some moments in history it is not yet clear what is going to happen, we
already know that our own actions help determine the outcome, we have a
full sense of historical agency. It is not the times that are a-changing,
it is we who change. It is the revolution which makes the revolutionaries.
On the other hand, realism is the cry of repression; it clangs shut with a
metallic finality, and we turn away, shoulders slightly sunk, scratching
our heads sadly. If we look back in that mood feeling only "the melancholy
waste of hopes o'erthrown" (Wordworth again), we begin to prepare the
ground for apostacy. Realism is a mask that protects us from both. That
scholarly stance is well represented by Cummins in his account of the
California prisoner movement.
The course of Michel Foucault through this time had a similar starting
point in the general strike of Mai '68 and an apparent similar conclusion
in the incarceration of its ultras by 1971. That year he formed Groupe
d'information sur les prisons, whose methodology was to have those who
suffered speak for themselves. In September was the Attica massacre, in
December a prison mutiny at Toul, France. In November 1971 he shocked Noam
Chomsky in debate by declaring, "The proletariat doesn't wage war against
the ruling class because it considers such a war to be just. The
proletariat makes war with the ruling class because, for the 1st time in
history, it wants to take power." It's a point.
In contrast to the Marxist tradition which puts the concept of Value at
the center of its critiques, Foucault put the emphasis on Power. This
corresponded to a late 60s discourse that emphasized ethnicity in the
Third World revolutions, black, and brown and red. In those days the word
"nation" among revolutionaries carried much the same freight that the term
"commons' does today, a locus of collective resources, a place of
cooperation, mutualism. Unlike the commons whose borders remain contested,
the 'nation' was an ethnic, a racial construct.
In weakness we create distinctions, then
Deem that our puny boundaries are things
Which we perceive, and not which we have made.
The study of the labor theory of value leads to the understanding of the
global nature of capitalism without the puny boundaries. This has become
clear with neo-liberalism. The second significance of this concept of
value is that in raising the problem of the transformation of value into
price, it enables us to understand the re-distribution of surplus-value as
rent, interest, and profit, and the continuous struggle for unity within
the capitalist class.
Five years after the massacre Foucault visited Attica concluding, "Attica
is a machine for elimination." Prison was a place of exclusion and
marginalization. In contrast to 'workers,' it contains 'plebeians.' This
was a distinction that ran parallel to a Marxist contrast between
'proletariat' and the 'lumpen-proletariat.' In England at the time the
Warwick School distinguished 'social crime' from 'crime without
qualification.' I don't think either the French scholars nor the ones in
England fully absorbed American experience, which, as Gilbert points out,
is the experience of slavery and genocide, the preconditions for the
economic and technological base of the continent and the cultural and
political superstructure of the regime. In America the prison was seen in
continuity with the plantation, while in Europe its progenitor was the
workhouse. In America simplification gave us white and black rather than
pleb and prol or worker and lumpen. Foucault's microphysics of power
became totalizing, and petrified in American academia. Hence, Foucault's
epigones were seriously flawed.
Hence, also, as Staughton Lynd implies, the fallacy of essentialist
whiteness studies which the 'convict race' overthrows.
Foucault's last lectures were on Diogenes, the ancient Greek slave
philosopher, who faced with imperial warfare sought to serve the cause, or
reflect it back to the citizens, by incarcerating himself in a barrel.
Truth is always embodied.
At the end of Huckleberry Finn Tom Sawyer makes a game with Huck about the
escape of Jim. "I was studying over my text in Acts Seventeen, before
breakfast." Tom Sawyer is such a jerk - his reference to scriptures should
be to Acts Sixteen, and he is such a white jerk, right out of "O Brother,
Where Art Thou?" But Acts 16 records a serious liberation episode.
But about midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns of
praise to God, and the prisoners were listening to them; and suddenly
there came a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison house
were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone's
chains were unfastened. (Acts 16: 25-6)
It is not just the apostles or the political prisoners who were freed,
there is no sharp distinction here between the political prisoner and the
other kinds.
There is a third meaning (I think) to political prisoner, in addition to
the one Dave Gilbert defines or that Staughton Lynd describes. The
prisoner may be freed, or released, or amnestied, as a result of political
changes. The act of freeing the prisoners, the opening of the jails, may
be an act which in itself politicizes prisoners at the instant that they
cease to be prisoners, and it is not an attribute of individual. This we
could call the jubilee moment. Isaiah (6:1) explains, "he hath sent me to
bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the
like opening of the prison to them that are bound." Later when the
carpenter's son returned to his birthplace, he preaches to the poor the
very words, "he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach
deliverance to the captives, and the recovering of sight to the blind, and
set at liberty them that are bruised." (Luke 4:18) Later we learn that
this particular son of man will separate the sheep from the goats:
"when I was hungry you gave me nothing to eat, when thirsty nothing to
drink; when I was a stranger you gave me no home, when naked you did not
clothe me; when I was ill and in prison you did not come to my help."
(Matthew 25: 42-4)
How can we contribute to the climate of opinion which will look upon
amnesty favorably? We must be prepared to discuss regime change at home.
How do we get Diogenes to come out of his tub? We have some inspiring
experience. For instance, Staughton Lynd concludes his j'accuse with a
chapter on Attica and amnesty.
Armed forces of the state, governed by Rockefeller, killed 29 prisoners
and 10 hostage guards on September 1971. Within a mere five years scandal
broke out in the prosecutor's office, and amnesty was declared to all
concerned. Since the scandal of prosecutorial misconduct is as serious in
Ohio as it was in New York, Lynd can call for amnesty for the Lucasville
Five on death row, innocent of killing.
The very moment we thought we was lost,
Dungeon shook and the chains fell off.
refrain
Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.
In the middle ages it was an aspect of kingcraft: opening the jails at
coronation! In the coronation charter of Henry I for instance 5 August
1100 he pledged, "I forgive all pleas and all debts." Also, "I remit all
murder-fines which were incurred before the day on which I was crowned
king." The world celebrates 14 July, Bastille Day, when the hated prison
of the French monarchy was opened by the sans-culottes in 1789. At the
beginning of that decade Newgate prison in London was opened up by the
London crowds. The first long poem of the American Revolution was a poem
about POWs and the British "prison ships." In 1796 when Paul became Tsar
of Russia he opened the prisons releasing all the captives including
Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the Polish patriot and one time artillery officer for
George Washington. In the February revolution in 1917 when the Tsar fell,
Lvov freed the political prisoners in St. Petersburg, and the proletariat
of the city completed the work he began by opening the prison doors for
all. Thus, the dungeon can shake!
In a December 1990 meeting in New York of former political prisoners,
Dorubha, the former Black Panther, took a race line, and began to "mau
mau," or berate, the predominantly white audience concerning the inherent
racism of the white working class. We sat in silence. Who wants to defend
the white working class? In the following months, however, here's what we
noticed.
With the downfall of Duvalier, Fort Dimanche was opened in Port-au-Prince
just a few days before Titid was inaugurated president. The Free Mandela
campaign had vast planetary effort which opened the door for him in 1990.
In 1991 April 3 dozen more political prisoners were released from Roben
Island. Then the Birmingham Six were released in England . In June 1991 a
guerrilla attack freed 131 people incarcerated in San Salvador's largest
prison: dynamite blew a hole in the wall, guards and guerrillas battled
for an hour, with four guerrillas and two soldiers killed. The Good Friday
Agreement of 1998 between Britain and Ireland provided for the release of
prisoners. Thus the chains may fall off!
So much of American history takes place in the prison, the plantation, or
the factory. Dave Gilbert has been inside too long, listening to the
discussions outside without being part of them. His politics is expressed
sometimes in a kind of shorthand or formulas which derive their meaning
only from a living context . He often laments the absence of the "mass
base." Once such shorthand was necessary in the heat of the times.
However, the context has cooled considerably. The formulas are left, like
fossils. We find them, beautiful in their detail, embedded in rock at
various strata.
We have to deduce their context, and think to ourselves, for example,
something like: 'ah, there must have been an ocean here once: must have
been zillions of beautiful critters: looks like something came down on
them heavy, seems that over here it was sudden, over there it was gradual.
The compression is the result of the weight of time and the heavy toll of
repression - COINTELPRO, assassination, cocaine, betrayals.
"To be buried in lava and not turn a hair, it is then a man shows what
stuff he is made of," Samuel Beckett wrote. Let the lava be white
supremacy of the ruling class. Then the steadfast hair may be John Brown,
or George Skatzes, or David Gilbert. Anyone who has taken this journey has
met such living fossils, tiny signs, which as soon as you get used to
looking, seem to be everywhere. History is moved forward by such
exceptions. At the time of the Roman empire, I think the number of
exceptions was twelve, though most of them turned a hair when the heat
came down. When Gandhi visited with the King of England he did not wear
trousers, and I do not believe that a single hair on his spindly legs
turned either.
Not lava, but an eroding mudslide was provided by William Bennett's Book
of Virtues which we search in vain for an entry on "love," or one on
"generosity," or on "solidarity," or on "hospitality." These are some of
the virtues of Dave Gilbert's book. Jason Robb on death row in Lucasville,
Ohio, provides Staughton Lynd with the "Noble Virtues" and the "Nine
Charges" of the Aryan Norse which begins with the oath: "to maintain
candor and fidelity in love and devotion to the tried friend: though he
strike me I will do him no scathe."
These values can help us recover from 'Vietnam syndrome.' We have tried
increasing the number of capital punishments, only to learn that it leads
to more war. We have tried increasing the number of prisoners as a means
of combating crime only to become more frightened. The 'Vietnam syndrome'
is the result not of defeat, for in truth, we (you and I, dear reader)
were not defeated. The corporate, ruling class was defeated. A 'syndrome'
is a cluster of pathological symptoms. In this particular syndrome, dread
and shame are outstanding components, to wit, the shame of the
criminalization which we have perpetrated within our own class, and the
dread that some time, some way, we will be held to account. "While there
is a soul in prison, I am not free," said Debs.
Huge amounts of social complicity and political denial are required to be
'good Americans.' It happened two hundred years ago at the time of the
French Revolution; let us call it 'the Jacobin syndrome' which Wordsworth
diagnosed:
. mid indifference and apathy
And wicked exultation, when good men
On every side fall off, we know not how,
To selfishness (disguised in gentle names
Of peace and quiet and domestic love,
Yet mingled not unwillingly with sneers
On visionary minds) . in this time
Of dereliction and dismay
The 'Vietnam syndrome' cannot be overcome with more wars (Grenada, Panama,
Kosovo, Iraq). The wars are prepared - we are softened up - by the
exercise of capital punishment. At first just 1 or 2 - the hood is placed
over our eyes - like Ricky Ray Rector, (you will not find this death in
Clinton's My Life), but then with legislative sensitivity making more
capital punishments possible, as in the 1996 Effective Death Penalty Act -
the electrodes are attached to our fingers - until the possibility is
realized by the Governor of Texas who kills more than 100 - we are placed
on a little box and told that an abyss awaits us. We ignore the judicial
slaughter, the lord high executioner then becomes President, and the
public - hooded, electroded, pushed to the edge, and now suffering itself
to be barked at - is sufficiently softened to be taken to war, cowering,
stunned, and ever so soft, only to find . the Hard Site at Abu Ghraib.
There one of the imperial torturers, one of the softeners up, had learned
his trade as a guard at S.C.I. Greene where Mumia Abu-Jamal had been
locked down.
>From Pennsylvania to Baghdad! From the Alleghenies to Mesopotamia! O my
people!
Regime change in the USA? 'Regime' does not mean government or
administration. 'Regime' means the set of conditions by which the system
is maintained. This helps us understand our tasks. While imperialism runs
on oil it is not driven by it; while a gang of neocon free marketeers
usurps the government, it does not control the capitalist regime or the
production of surplus value. The death penalty and the growth of the gulag
have been essential to the form and function, the soul and spirit, of the
global empire. Our movement must free our political prisoners and abolish
the death penalty, 2 preconditions of the regime to come. Otherwise, we
may tumble uselessly in our tubs.
Only thing that we did right
Was the day we begun to fight!
refrain
Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.
Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University of Toledo. He is the
author of 2 of CounterPunch's favorite books, The London Hanged and (with
Marcus Rediker) The Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the
Revolutionary Atlantic. Linebaugh asks that any readers who have cases and
stories of amnesties, and getting out of jail, by all the variety of
means, contact him at: [email protected]
FOR FURTHER READING
Daniel Burton-Rose, Dan Pens, Paul Wright (ed.), The Celling of America:
An Inside Look at the U.S. Prison Industry (Common Courage Press: Monroe,
Maine, 1998)
Richard Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California's Radical Prison Movement
(Stanford University Press: Stanford, California, 1994)
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage:
New York, 1979)
Michel Foucault and John Simon, "On Attica," Telos 19 (spring 1974)
David Gilbert, No Surrender: Writings from an Anti-Imperialist Political
Prisoner (Abraham Guillen Press: Montreal, 2004)
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Globalization and US Prison Growth: from military
Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism," Race & Class 40, 2/3 (1998/9).
Neil Gordon, The Company You Keep (Viking: New York, 2003)
Lee Griffith, The Fall of the Prison: Biblical Perspectives on Prison
Abolition (Eerdmans Publishing Company: Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1993)
Staughton Lynd, Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising (Temple
University Press: Philadelphia, 2004)
Barry S. Willdorf, Bring the War Home! A Novel About Resistance to the
Vietnam War and Racism in the United States Marine Corps (A Gauche Press:
San Francisco, 2001)
Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of
Crisis (Verso: New York, 1999)
(source: CounterPunch)
