Father Daughter Prison Dance to the Beat of Colonization of Parenting and Hetero-nomative Ideals

Here is a link to the article: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/06/virginia-jail-holds-father-daughter-dance-for-prisoners/

Followed by some of my many thoughts:

In ABC News headlining article published June 23 2013, author Steve Osunsami describes a father daughter dance put on by a Virginia jail. The article includes emotionally evoking photographs of black fathers dressed in suits holding young black girls. Osunsami writes “All of the prisoners at Virginia’s Richmond City Jail admit they made poor choices, and could be better father” (Osunsami, 2013). The article goes on to describe how children pay the price for the poor choices made by “troubled men” who miss out on raising their children (Osunsami, 2013). The article is inflammatory in several ways, the first being that it expresses concern on behalf of the state surrounding the well-being and togetherness of black families and communities. Despite practices of forcibly separating black parents and children from each other under slavery and sexual violence perpetrated by the state against black men and women, and ongoing slandering of black parenting, reducing black fathering to child support money; the article allows the state to pose as a guiding force for dysfunctional black parents.

            The article portrays the jail and larger criminal justice system as a benevolent but unfortunate solution to inherently criminal black behavior. The article portrays the state as paternal and caring for black girls, which is ironic in face of the fact that black women continue to be unfairly criminalized and viciously negatively stereotyped. Welfare discourses and practices and the Criminal justice system portray and treat poor black women as if they shouldn’t exist and as if they are a burden to society by state and federal programs. Welfare programs and the criminal justice system specifically target black women with mechanisms of shame and victim blaming. Furthermore, the article’s sad tone around unfulfilled black fatherhood responsibilities implies that black fathers are failures instead of acknowledging the ways in systematic oppression violates black family structures.

            Perhaps the most troubling undertone of the article is that it attempts to highlight an instance in which prison officials graciously provide black fathers with an opportunity to be fathers in a way that exploits their privacy and dignity. Further, father daughter dances are part of a white cultural phenomenon that falls into a specific socio economic culture and thus the article presents a white-washed ideal of what being a good father looks like. Furthermore, the jail’s efforts to provide a father daughter dancer should be questioned for their agenda in attempting to instill yet another hetero-normative and religious based notion of family onto black communities.

Prison Industrial Complex - A Profitable Venture!

Bar Code

Next Window Please..

Who's Getting Rich Off the Prison Industrial Complex?

     Angela Davis's book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, describes a phenomenon that should make even staunchest capitalist shake in his or her proverbial boots.  In chapter 5, Davis describes the prison industrial complex (PIC) and how it came to being in the United States, and to some degree, other countries around the globe.  In terms of how the PIC came to being, Davis describes how the state, with its ever-shrinking budget, resorted to privatizing prisons, thereby making them for-profit organizations that have a responsibility to meet shareholder expectations around profitability.  As a result, privately-owned prisons are incented to keep people incarcerated, as the state pays them based on prisoner headcount.  In chapter 6, Davis also described what must happen in order to change this bleak scenario.  For starters, she describes decriminalizing activities that primarily target the poor and people of color, like drug possession laws.  Ultimately, Davis presents a compelling argument as to why prisons are truly obsolete from the perspective of preventing crime and rehabilitating perpetrators of crime.  I think her ultimate point of this book to highlight the notion that prisons exist for one reason only – to make their owners and stockholders rich.

     In concert with this theme, I have selected three different images/articles (see above links) that are complimentary to Davis’s arguments.  The first image is a barcode, the same ones found on just about everything you buy at a store, with a prisoner’s arms pushed out between the bars, to make the barcode look like a jail cell.  This image is an interesting metaphor for the PIC as it implies a commodification of prisoners, implying that there’s a profit to be made.  It also demonstrates how prisoners are dehumanized in American society, a notion supported even by our own vernacular – they are ‘prisoners’, not ‘people’, and more specifically, they are a product to be sold for profit, not a human life that should be rehabilitated and restored as a functioning member of society.

     The next link demonstrates the notion that people of color, and in particular black men, have a greater tendency to be incarcerated, and thereby commoditized, than to be supported by fair treatment laws such as Affirmative Action and education.  Personally, I find it interesting and horrific that the state will provide effectively unlimited support for institutions of incarceration, yet programs such as Affirmative Action receive little, if any, state support.  Additionally, capitalists from the same corporations that profit from the incarceration of millions in the U.S. quickly cry ‘Socialism’ when public programs are created to help poor communities and people of color.  Why is that?  Why is one scenario acceptable and the other considered a mortal sin?  More importantly, why do Americans, by-in-large, accept this dichotomy in general and the institutional racism it supports implicitly, yet at the same time preach freedom for all?  The answer must come from the same roots as the justification for the notion that “all men are created equal”, yet blacks continued to be enslaved when that famous phrase was coined.

     Finally, the third link is an article from the HBO series Vice.  This article calls out, by name, the profiteers from the PIC.  I’ll let the article speak for itself and not describe it in too much detail, other than the fact that my stomach literally turned while I was reading it.  The truly scary part is, these profiteers, instead of simply admitting that they are okay with earning money off the backs of prisoners, have convinced themselves that they are justified for effectively promoting yet another means for commoditizing the poor in general, and black men specifically.  Conscious folks might refer to this as modern-day slavery, primarily because, it is…..

Negative Effects of the Privatization of Education

http://www.salon.com/2014/02/19/4_ways_privatization_is_ruining_our_education_system_partner/

            Just as prisons have started to be privatized over the years, so has the education system. With this privatization of both structures, there have come negative consequences.  In the article, Four Ways Privatization is Ruining our Education System; Buchheit brings to light the issues of privatization.  Private schools are not improving education, just as private prisons are not improving the incarceration system in our country.

Having the profit motive distorts the goals of education just as profit-motivating prisons have perverted the system. When you bring profit into play it is hard to see any honest motive in these systems other than making money, and at that, making money at any cost even that of the student/prisoner.  As Buchheit states, “Our nation’s impulsive experiment with privatization is causing our schools to look more like boardrooms than classrooms” (2014). This goes for the prison system as well. Only in the case of prisons, sentences are extended and sentences are harsher for miniscule crimes in order to support the private corporation funding the prison. As Buchheit discusses, the profit motive leads to “questionable ethics among school operators…” just as in the prison system. Davis discusses in her book, Are Prisons Obsolete, the affects of systems where prisoners are treated as less than human, in a very unethical manner.

Buchheit discusses the third reason in the higher education system, as why privatization of education is wrong.  As the prison system takes advantage of the poor, in criminalizing those in poverty at a higher rate than middle class and upper class counterparts, so does privatized college education.  As Buchheit quotes in his article, “At the college level, for-profit schools eagerly clamor for low-income students…who conveniently arrive with public money in the form of federal financial aide” (2014). This same issue goes for private prisons, feeding off of the government for money, getting a certain amount for each prisoner they hold in the facility each year.

 Finally, in both the privatized school and prison, there is unequal treatment/help available. Lower-performing children are being left behind in the education system, and prisoners who need mental treatment or rehabilitation are being left to rot in cells versus getting the help they need. While there are some differences in the privatization of schools and the prison system, both have, clearly, very negative effects.