Rancid Magazine

R A N C Ii D

justice journal / fall 2018

business matter 5 Letter from Sara

6 Questions About Consent 7 SheCult Spotlight

fiction

10 Hisham’ru by Harmony Taggart

“You can’t pretend to love him forever, Mari.” She kissed me on my forehead.

poetry 18 Alternate Names for Black Boys by Danez Smith “(I thought to leave this blank but who am I to name us nothing?)”

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19 DetoNation by Ocean Vuong

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“There’s a joke that ends with — huh?

It’s the bomb saying here is your father.”

20 The Promised Land by Karla Duran Fajardo

“This country doesn’t want to admit that because of immigrants it has evolved. “

essays 24 The Social Functions of the Prisons in the United States

by Bettina Aptheker

“The semantic somersaults of the prison and State bureaucracy serve a calculated and specific ideological function.”

photography 36 Streets Memorials Project by Hannah Bailey “Activist and artist Cedric Douglas represents the roots of street art to prompt public introspection.”

46 Gendered by Sara Barber

“Perceptions of professions, capabilities, and identities are predisposed by whether we are assigned “male” or “female” at birth. Where does this leave people who don’t fit into that binary?”

52 Revolutionary Reading List 53 Connect + Contact

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to action

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letter from sara

Rancid has been a lifelong dream of mine. I have always considered myself an artist, but politically engaging art has been the most meaningful to me. In my experience, art has been the most impactful method of progressing ideology, and a magazine appears the best method for compiling and sharing that knowledge. Recognizing that things are bad and acknowledging that we can make them better is what this magazine is about. With issues of injustice historically and currently plaguing our world, something must be done.

We must work toward a better world, and this magazine serves as the first step.

Sara Barber

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questions about consent Not all of these questions have right or wrong answers, but they were put together to help people think deeply and open up consersations about consent.

1.

2.

3.

How do you define consent?

Have you ever talked about consent with your partner(s) or friends?

Do you know people, or have you been with people who define consent differently than you do?

4.

Have you ever been unsure about whether or not the person you were being sexual with wanted to be doing

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what you were doing? Did you talk about it? Did you ignore it in hopes that it would change? Did you continue what you were doing because it was pleasurable to you and you didn’t want to deal with what the other person was experiencing? Did you continue because you felt it was your duty? How do you feel about the choice you made?

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5.

7.

Do you look only for verbal signs or are there other signs?

8.

9.

Do you think it is possible to misinterpret silence for consent?

Do you only ask about these kinds of things if you are in a serious relationship or do you feel able to talk in casiaul situations too?

10.

11.

Are you clear about your own intentions?

Do you think about affection, sexuality, and boundaries? Do you talk about these issues with people? IF so, do you talk about them only when you want to be sexual with someone or do you talk about them because you think it is important and you genuinely want to know?

Do you think it is the other person’s responsibility to say something if they aren’t into what you are doing>

12.

How might someone express that what is happening is not ok?

13.

6.

Are you respectful of people who need or want to talk about being abused? Why? Do you think talking ruins the mood?

shecult

a queer arts collective based in Boston, MA Founded in the fall of 2016, SheCult was built with the goal of uplifting queer voices.

Over the years, they’ve published two zines and two full length magazines, with one of each currently in the works. They host open mics and benefit shows featuring entirely queer artists.

Providing spaces for queer people to exist together while mingling and bonding over struggles builds community for activist work.

shecultemerson@gmail.com Instagram:

@shecult_

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Email:

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fic RANCID MAGAZINE

“Never understimate the power of fiction to tell the truth.”

-Leslie Feinberg

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tion 10 Hisham’ru by Harmony Taggart

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Hisham’ru

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By Harmony Taggart

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I have always been quiet. When I was little I was almost silent. My mother thought I was slow. She brought me to doctors asking them to fix me. She asked for my healing with mi sheberach and prayed I would learn to speak. Doctors told her that I was physically and mentally sound. Prayers were sent up with no answer returned. When doctors didn’t tell her what she wanted to hear, she tried hitting words out of me. She drummed words into my skull with her fists. If I had been loud she would have hit me too. If I had been a boy like doctors said I would be, she would have loved me. I spoke only when saying Sh’ma Yisrael and when my brother asked me to play with him. I remember sitting in the sandbox watching him run his toy trucks over his unbruised legs, the dirt cold and grounding beneath my feet. On weekends, we often played outside in that box until shabbat chased us back inside.

My mom named me Mari-Mariamne, the rebellious one. David, the beloved, the wanted. It would have been easy to resent him, but instead his love kept me strong. He knew what was happening in the vague way that a toddler could understand. He knew we were treated differently. When he was in Kindergarten, one of his homework assignments was to draw a picture of his family. I saw him at the kitchen table working on it. He had drawn himself standing in the middle of my mom and I. I was a polka dotted covered stick figure, tan body, brown spots. One of our mom’s arms was three times the length it was supposed to be, stretching across the page to hit me. I told David that he couldn’t give that picture to anyone, because if he did, we would get taken away from mom. I helped him draw another version and explained to him that what our mom did wasn’t what all moms did and he needed to stay quiet.

If it wasn’t for him, I would never be home. As it was, I spent most of my time at Olivia’s house. Olivia had hair like rust colored clay at the bottom of a stream. The glimmer of sunshine reflecting off the surface of the water lights up the depths, and radiates flecks of gold. Her house was a mile away, but the streets weren’t busy and my

surface.” She pressed her hand underneath my knee cap so it bent upwards. Her hand was cold in spite of the humid air. Her fingers slid against my sweaty skin. She told me to start by hitting the same spot on my knee, alternating which stick I used. My wrists felt stiff, but after a half hour I had the basic movement.

The beats got passed off between sticks until it sounded like a lopsided train picking up speed. I was thrown off by the accentuation of the first beat in the measure.

I had different rhythms programmed into my body. In Hebrew, the pulsing, hypnotic prayers are always accented on the second beat, not the first.

We spent the rest of her time in high school before she went away for college passing sticks back and forth between hands, hers guiding mine, her hands resting on my legs. She rubbed arnica gel on the bruises I got from my mom, and when my legs were too bad to drum on she offered up her own.

On a day in August the summer before she left for college, we were inside her house, my legs and back too sore to sit against a hard tree. We sat on her couch sharing a glass of water, watching condensation drip down the cold surface. She got up to get arnica.

“Where’s the worst spot?”

I turned my back to her and lifted my shirt to show a black and blue spot. My mother had come home in a horrible mood.

She was always angry after work, but that day she was especially furious. No matter how mad she was, she made sure to keep the harm covered. My back and abdomen were tattooed with floral bruises. I did my part by wearing long skirts and learning to hide my discomfort when walking.

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mom wasn’t watchful. We forged bus notes so I could get dropped off at her house after school. We spent evenings and summers underneath a big oak tree in her backyard.

She was one of the few people who could get me to speak. I did talk, I wasn’t mute, but I had never thought what I had to say was important. I was a shit story teller. But Olivia listened. She said I was funny when my mom would have hit me.

Her mom didn’t hit her, but was a no nonsense kind of woman. There were no shoes in her house, and there was no arguing after she’d set a rule. Since the day Olivia got back from her first band practice, her mom made it clear she wasn’t getting a drumset. It was too loud. Olivia was still never without a set of drumsticks in her back pocket. All of her jeans had holes in them from her hammering on her knees, creating intoxicating rhythms. She chose to have bruises. I used to stare at the speeding sticks, jealous that they got to use her as their instrument.

The first time I tried playing I was in 8th grade and Olivia in 10th. She asked me if I wanted to try as she reached out and pulled my long skirt above my knee. She uncovered scabbed knees and a welt on my lower thigh.

“Your mom again?”

I nodded, tucking my leg up to my chest.

She nodded and we sat in silence.

“Well you can’t play on that knee. Is the other any better?”

I pulled my skirt up to show her the less bruised leg. She gave me the sticks. They felt foreign and callous. She guided my hands and turned my wrists to a straight, unnatural position.

“Bring this up a bit so you have a hard

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“Mari will you please let me help you?”

I turned back to look at her.

“You know I can’t. David isn’t going to grow up in the system.”

“What if she starts hitting him after you lea-” “Olivia I can’t do this right now.” I got up pulling my shirt down. Olivia touched my arm and drew me back down.

“Wait. Let me put this on please.” She positioned me to face away from her on the couch, and sit between her legs. She lifted my shirt again and began putting the cool gel on. Her touch was soft. “Are there any more?”

I felt her breath on my neck and dropped my head down. Her fingers wrapped around my waist to touch a bruise she’d found a few weeks before.

“How’s this one doing?”

I flinched and shook my head. She moved her hand off the bruise but kept it under my shirt.

“Sorry, sorry.” She pressed against my stomach. I leaned back into her. Her fingers slipped up farther to just under my chest.

“Are you comfortable with this?” Her breath was heavy. It blew across my ear like a wave. I nodded.

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When her mom came home early from work that day she found us naked in Olivia’s bed. She looked at Olivia and asked her if she’d thought of what my mom was going to say when she told her. Olivia jumped and asked why she would tell her. Her mom looked at me hiding under the covers, then back at Olivia. She said, “because you just slept with a minor and I will not be responsible for your disgusting . . . behavior.” Olivia begged but she wouldn’t budge. I finally spoke up and

told Olivia to leave it alone.

My mom didn’t press charges, out of fear of what else the police would find. I’d finally used my voice to tell her that I had wanted to be there with Olivia. That time she hit me to shut me up.

I saw Olivia less during the last two weeks she was in town. There was an unsureness that permeated her confident shell. I’d thought I’d done something wrong.

She stopped touching me, even to soothe the bruise that covered half my back. I held my drumsticks incorrectly, trying to get her to fix me. I reached out to tuck her hair behind her ear and she jumped to go inside, saying she had to pee. Every time our hands almost touched, but didn’t, felt worse than a slap or a punch. I was punished at home, and now she was punishing me, and I didn’t understand. I sent a prayer up, but no answer was returned.

I wondered if God was angry at me for being with Olivia.

A week or so after she left, David came home with a black eye. He was sitting in his old sandbox when I walked down the driveway. He told me a 6th grader at school heard that I was a dyke. The boy asked David if it was true, and when he refused to answer, the kid punched him, saying if his sister was a dyke, David had to be a fag.

Soon after, I met Ezra. Ezra the helper.

Ezra was Olivia when she was gone. He came to my small house after school, played with David, and was nice to my mom. He said Sh’ma Yisrael twice a day and loved his family.

He supported me when I was limping, though back then he couldn’t see what caused my pain. We did homework at the table together, silently. When he kissed me a month after we started dating, his lips were chapped. My

bedeken was held. I looked at Ezra through the impenetrable curtain of white fabric, knowing he wasn’t my bashert. If there are more helpless feelings I don’t want to be privy to them. One moment I opened my eyes to a future I couldn’t allow myself to consider, and in another I ensured that I would never be without some form of veil. In one case my body and her hand created a magnetic force.

In the other I was floating above myself, wishing I could cut the string from my physical self and be sent to starve outside of Olam Ha-Ba with Olivia.

I looked up at her. Her playful eyes held steady. I felt moisture bead in between her palm and my thigh. I could feel sweat collecting in the soles of my shoes, rubbing against white cotton socks. In an attempt to do something other than stare, I started tapping it. One and two and three and four and, One and two and three and four and One and two and three and four.

Hisham’ru lakhem pen yif’teh l’vav’khem, Hisham’ru lakhem pen yif’teh l’vav’khem, Hisham’ru lakhem pen yif’teh l’vav’khem.

Beware, lest your heart be deceived, Beware, lest your heart be deceived, Beware, lest your heart be deceived.

“Let’s go inside. It’s hot out here.” Olivia lifted her hand from my leg. I looked up.

She took her heat away. She stood over me and pulled me up. I jerked forward and accidentally stepped on her foot.

“Oh sorry.”

Olivia took a step back and shook her head.

“No big deal, come on let’s go inside.” She hadn’t let go and I was once again propelled forward.

“I shouldn’t. I have to get back soon.”

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bruises became less frequent as he came over more often. Here I was with a nice Jewish boy, the best my mom could have hoped for.

As long as I was with him, I was safe.

We had sex our senior year. When he saw my scars we sat in silence. He asked if I was ok. I nodded. He asked if I still was still in the mood. I nodded. There was no rhythm, no beat, no synchrony. We eventually got through the motions and figured out a routine. It worked for us. We started planning a life in New England where we would hold shabbat every Friday. I saw a life without my mom, where she would be happy enough to leave me alone.

Olivia came back the summer before Ezra and I went to college. We were outside in her backyard leaning against our tree.

She said there was one on the quad at Smith that reminded her of this one. I sat with my left leg out, my skirt tucked above my knee.

She watched my leg intently as I performed for her. I tapped out the rhythms I’d been praying to, my breath quickening under her gaze. After a few moments, she moved to sit and rest her hand on my outstretched leg.

“You’ve improved.” I stopped my stroke just as the stick was about to crack down on her fingers. I stared at her pale skin. I could feel my leg trembling beneath her palm.

“Thanks.” My mouth felt dry and the word stuck to the roof of my mouth like matzo. She turned to me. I gripped my sticks, holding on to the things that used to feel so foreign, but were now the single part of my body that I understood.

I can still remember the force it took for me to raise my eyes to meet hers. The only time since then that I’ve felt so paralyzed was years later, the moment after the

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“Come on Mari, I promise you’ll be home in time. I just wanna get a drink.”

I stood at her sink washing my hands.

Olivia took a sip of water, then offered the glass to me. We watched, waiting to see if the other would look away. I gulped the water down, focusing on her bright green eyes.

In my distraction I tried to breath in while drinking. I felt water go down the wrong pipe and sprayed it out of my mouth, coughing.

“Oh shit are you alright?” I looked down at the ground, my hands on my knees, as I tried to regain my breath.

“Yeah sorry just-” I started coughing again. Olivia came to my side and rubbed my back. I straightened quickly. “I’m okay, wrong pipe.” I turned around to face her.

She kept her hand on my back. “I should, I should probably go now though.” Neither of us moved. Her fingers pressed lightly into the back of my shirt.

“Yeah, if you wanna go you can go.” She took a small step towards me. I felt her breast against mine. My back met the cold counter top. I tried to count my heartbeats.

“Do you need to right now? Or can you stay a bit longer?” My counting picked up speed, the train got faster, my breath became shallow, her body came closer.

“I could stay another minute or two.” And then she was kissing me and digging her nails into my back. I leaned into her, pressing my hips against hers, feeling more heat than I’d ever felt with Ezra. Hisham’ru. Beware. Ezra.

I felt my chest tighten with grief. I turned my head away from hers shaking it.

“But I can’t do this, I’m with Ezra” Olivia put her hand on my cheek.

“You can’t pretend to love him forever, Mari.” She kissed me on my forehead. I shook

my head and teared up.

“No you don’t get it, he stops my mom.”

“Hey, hey it’s alright, you’re ok, shhhh.”

My face was covered in her long red hair. I grabbed her shoulders, holding on to her. I let her bring me to her bed. We lay there and kissed while I cried. We decided Ezra didn’t need to know.

I spent that summer in rhythmic embraces with Olivia and prayers with Ezra. I stayed quiet, as I always did. At the end of August, Ezra and I went to Brandeis and Olivia went back to Smith. She stopped going back home for breaks and I only went back to see David.

Ezra and I moved through our college years without much thought. David stayed in Kansas and enlisted in the Navy. Our mom sent postcards to her friends featuring shining photos of him, listing his accomplishments in bold lettering. At the end of the letter, a line read “Mariamne has moved to NYC with Ezra and works as a journalist.” David still calls me every other week.

When we were twenty-five, we got engaged and moved to become New York City Jews. He veiled and married me two years later. He loved New York because of the synagogues, I loved it because of the women.

In the small unassuming bars, I found Jen, Alice, Tanya-you name her, I found her and fucked her. I turned away from my prayers and found a new rhythm; a beat that knocked against bathroom stalls when Ezra was working late and slapped my ass when I opened the door to the bar. These women didn’t have eyes that I couldn’t bear to look into, and they weren’t interested in talking.

Ezra never noticed. We were there for each other, but not with each other. We slept next

and then before her to when Olivia was by herself. She stood in front of a poster for a small band she had been in a decade or so ago. She had drumsticks in her back pocket.

I’d listened to some of their music and had once thought about going to a show they had close by, but of course I didn’t. Her page said she was still in the city.

I got up and looked around my bedroom for the drumsticks I’d held on to. One of them has a splinter down the center. I felt her hands wrap around mine as I straightened out my wrists.

V’hayu had’varim ha’eileh asher anokhi m’tzav’kha hayom al l’vavekha.

V’shinan’tam l’vanekha v’dibar’ta bam Uk’shar’tam l’ot al yadekha v’hayu l’totafot bein einekha.

Ukh’tav’tam al m’zuzot beitekha uvish’arekha.

And these words that I command you today shall be in your heart.

And you shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall speak of them when you sit at home, and when you walk along the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

I wrote Olivia a short note, really a sentence, and sent them along with the broken drumstick, to the address listed on her profile. I don’t expect a reply.

I think you are my bashert.

END

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to one another and found comfort in our routine. He wanted to work more closely with our Synagogue, helping with philanthropy projects and I wanted to explore New York.

Neither of us wanted to live without the other.

We were twenty-nine when he gave me Tal and I stopped seeing the other women.

When she was born I promised her she would grow up feeling safe to be just who she is. A year later, he came home to me crying in bed. He sat down and I finally spoke to him.

After I’d broken his life apart, he helped me put mine back together. We looked for apartments and signed divorce papers. Ezra, the helper.

Recently I’ve been thinking about Olivia.

I took Tal to the beach the other day and we hiked the sand dunes. At the bottom of a small tide pool were clumps of red clay. Tal immediately jumped in the shallow water and scooped up mounds of the stuff, coating her clothing in an orange-red slime. When I sat with Tal after her bath, she asked me if I thought her dad had been my bashert. I told her what I always did, that you never know who your bashert is. She asked me to take a guess. I said if I had to I would say he was the closest I would get. She asked why.

“Because God gave me you instead of a bashert my beautiful girl. You’re all I need.”

“Is that why you and dad aren’t together?”

“Dad and I aren’t together because if I ever found a bashert, they wouldn’t be a man.”

“Oh.” While I drove back from dropping Tal off at Ezra’s that night, I broke the promise I made to myself and went online to Olivia’s profile. It didn’t take long to find a picture of her smiling next to the blonde woman. I scrolled back years before her to the brunette

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poe 16

“And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it.

Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”

-Audre Lorde

try

18 Alternate Names for Black Boys

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by Danez Smith 19 DetoNation by Ocean Vuong 20 The Promised Land

by Karla Duran Fajardo

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alternate names for black boys

by Danez Smith

1. smoke above the burning bush 2. archnemesis of summer night 3. first son of soil 4. coal awaiting spark & wind 5. guilty until proven dead 6. oil heavy starlight 7. monster until proven ghost 8. gone 9. phoenix who forgets to un-ash 10. going, going, gone 11. gods of shovels & black veils 12. what once passed for kindling 13. fireworks at dawn 14. brilliant, shadow hued coral

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15. (I thought to leave this blank

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but who am I to name us nothing?)

16. prayer who learned to bite & sprint 17. a mother’s joy & clutched breath

DetoNation

by Ocean Vuong

There’s a joke that ends with — huh?

It’s the bomb saying here is your father.

Now here is your father inside your lungs. Look how lighter the earth is — afterward.

To even write the word father is to carve a portion of the day out of a bomb-bright page.

There’s enough light to drown in but never enough to enter the bones & stay. Don’t stay here, he said, my boy broken by the names of flowers. Don’t cry

toward my father.

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anymore. So I ran into the night.

The night: my shadow growing

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the promised land

By Karla Duran Fajardo I never experienced genocide when I was in Ecuador.

Ecuador was the place that gave birth to my family and me.

At a young age my parents left for the promised land leaving three kids behind.

But I don’t see it as abandonment—I saw it as two parents wanting a better future for their kids. Better than the one they went through as kids Because of their sacrifice we had food and a roof over our heads.

But like many countries in South America, Ecuador was a poor country. My whole neighborhood was built on the backs of hard working people.

I saw strikes all over my city. I saw people trying to overthrow the government because the price of food had gone up.

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I saw many people who had seemed all hunger and loneliness. I saw many people beg for food on the streets. I saw kids my age sell candy so they can support a family.

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I heard stories of survival: How women were left alone to raise multiple kids with no money or land, but still they raise these kids. I saw many orphanages and many kids who died on the streets.

When I was seven, I met a boy younger than me who used to wear his older brother’s shoes. He could barely walk in them but it was better than being barefoot, which was often seen all over the city. We played a couple of times. He was shy but kind. Not long after he got hit by a taxi and died instantly.

I never knew his name or where he lived, but I never forgot the street where he took his last breath.

The USA is a country that has showed me hate. It has showed me people who live with no feelings.

I experienced racism for the first time when I was ten. As an immigrant who didn’t speak English, living in this country was hard.

I met many immigrants who share a similar story to mine, many who suffer discrimination because of the color of our skin.

Like many groups of people, immigrants have their good and bad, but we never hear about the good immigrants.

The ones who fled wars and hunger, many who immigrated by foot with barely any water to a country better than theirs.

I never saw a person being shot but I heard stories from many people who had. Those images will never leave their brains.

People who had never gone through what I and many others have would never understand why people come to this country even if they are not welcome.

It’s better to live in a place full of hatred than to die because of war and genocide. It’s better than to have your kids stolen to fight in a war where the rich use the poor.

This country doesn’t want to admit that because of immigrants it has evolved.

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Because of immigrants this country is going to surpass the hate and learn what the words love and sacrifice really mean.

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ess

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ays 24 The Social Functions of the Prisons in the United States RANCID MAGAZINE

by Bettina Aptheker

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The Social Functions of the Prisons in the United States

by Bettina Aptheker

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O

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fficially it is maintained that there are no prisons in the United States. There is a Department of Corrections, and there are "correctional facilities" equipped with "educational programs," "vocational training" and the necessary "psychiatric therapy." There are also no prisoners in the United States; there are only "inmates." There are most certainly no political prisoners in the United States; only "terrorists" and those who "perpetrate criminal violence"--which is known in the international arena as "criminal communist aggression."

The semantic somersaults of the prison and State bureaucracy serve a calculated and specific ideological function. Once we penetrate this linguistic shield we have the key to understanding the social and political functions of the prison system. The dominant theoretical assumption among social and behavioral scientists in the United States today is that the Social order is functionally stable and fundamentally just.

This is a very basic premise because it means that the theory must then assume the moral depravity of the prisoner. There can be no other logical explanation for his incarceration. It is precisely this alleged depravity that legitimates custody. As George Jackson put it: "The textbooks on criminology like to advance the idea that the prisoners are mentally defective. There is only the merest suggestion that the system itself is at fault..."[1] Indeed the assistant warden at San Quentin, who is by profession a clinical psychologist, tells us in a recent interview that prisoners suffer from "retarded emotional growth." The warden continues: "The first goal of the prison is to isolate people the community doesn't want at large. Safe confinement is the goal. The second obligation is a reasonably good housekeeping job, the old humanitarian treatment concept."[2] That is, once the prisoner is adequately confined and isolated, he may be treated for his emotional

noncriminal behavior.

The source of criminality then is psychological rather than social. The solution to the problem is obvious: quarantine the afflicted individuals; then subject them to treatment. Hence we have correctional facilities rather than prisons; and we have inmates (as in any asylum for the insane) rather than prisoners.

As Herbert Marcuse has so aptly described it: "The language of the prevailing Law and Order, validated by the courts and by the police, is not only the voice but also the deed of suppression. This language not only defines and condemns the Enemy, it also creates him; and this creation is not the Enemy as he really is but rather as he must be in order to perform his function for the Establishment..." [4] In this instance the Enemy is the criminal or the prisoner. The single most important thing to understand in all of this is that the behavioralist view of the criminal has nothing to do with breaking the law. Let us explain this with some well-known statistics. [5] First, it is a matter of common knowledge that only a small number of law violations is detected and reported. Further, even of reported violations only a small percentage actually result in police investigations and arrest.

Second, 90 per cent of all criminal defendants in the United States today plead guilty without a trial because they cannot afford a lawyer, and hope for judicial leniency.

Third, 52 per cent of all people in county and city jails have not been convicted of any crime; they simply cannot afford bail. Many will spend months and even years in jail, awaiting trial.

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and psychological maladies--which he is assumed to suffer by virtue of the fact that he is a prisoner. We have a completely circular method of reasoning. It is a closed-circuit system from which there is no apparent escape.

The alleged criminal characteristics of the prisoner must, in accord with this logical sequence, arise from within the prisoner himself--the prisoner is "crime-prone" like some people are supposed to be "accidentprone." In the nineteenth century, leading theorists put forth the idea that the criminal had certain physical characteristics which shaped his destiny of crime, e.g. slanted eyes and a broad forehead. The alleged depravity and criminality of the poor--because they are poor--is an even older theme in class society, e.g. the ancient idea of the "dangerous poor"; and the oft-repeated phrase of the Founding Fathers, "the rich the wellborn and [therefore] the able." Now our leading penologists and criminologists are much more subtle and sophisticated. They have a veneer of humanitarian instinct but it quickly falls away revealing the racist, anti-human core.

Now, it is argued, the criminal may look like anybody else; but he has acquired certain psychological characteristics which dictate his pattern of criminal behavior. To "unacquire" these characteristics a leading behavioral scientist, James V. McConnell, explains that: "We have but two means of educating people or rats or flatworms--we can either reward them or punish them..."[3] The treatment for what McConnell calls "brainwashing the criminals" to ultimately restructure their entire personality is an alternating sequence of reward and punishment (including especially so-called Shock Treatment) until the prisoner has "learned" what the society defines as

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Fourth, between 30-50 per cent of the prisoners in various cities and states are Black and Brown, while Black people, for example, constitute about 15 per cent of the total population. In the State prisons in California there are 28,000 prisoners, 45 per cent of whom are classified as "non-white."

It should be perfectly clear that thousands upon thousands of people presently in jail and prison have broken no laws whatsoever.

The conclusion from all of this is apparent.

Professor Theodore Sarbin of the University of California criminology department put it very well: "... membership in the class of people known as 'law-breakers' is not distributed according to economic or social status, but membership in the class 'criminals' is distributed according to social or economic status..."[6] Example: the ten executives of the General Electric Company convicted in 1961 of pricefixing involving tens of millions of dollars are law-breakers, and some of them actually served some months in prison. Still, the society does not consider them criminals.

By way of contrast, a Chicano or Black youth alleged to have stolen ten dollars from a grocery store is not only considered a criminal by the society, but this assumption allows the police to act with impunity. They may shoot him down in the street. Chances are it will be ruled justifiable homicide in a coroner's inquest.

What then is the political function of the criminal and the prisoner as they are created and described by the bourgeois penologists and criminologists?

Consider penology as one aspect of the theory and practice of containment on the domestic front, that is consider penology as

the confinement and treatment of people who are actually or potentially disruptive of the social system.

In an increasing number of ways the entire judicial and penal system involving the police, the courts, the prisons and the parole boards has become a mechanism through which the ruling powers seek to maintain their physical and psychological control, or the threat of control, over millions of working people, especially young people, and most especially Black and Brown young people. The spectre of the prisons, the behavioral psychologists, the Adult Authority, the judicial treadmill, haunts the community.

Examine for a moment the operations of the Adult Authority. In California roughly 97 per cent of the male prisoners are eventually released from prison--all of them via parole.

A man is sentenced to a term in prison. In addition to whatever time he actually serves in prison, he is released on parole for five, even ten or more years. The conditions of his parole are appalling. For example, he can be Stopped and searched at any time; his house can be entered without a warrant; he needs the permission of his parole officer to borrow money, to marry, to drive a car, to change his job, to leave the county, and so forth. If parole is revoked the prisoner is returned to custody without trial to complete his full sentence.

Members of the Adult Authority are appointed by the Governor. They are answerable to no one. This, combined with California law which allows "indeterminate sentences" for felony convictions, e.g. one year to life imprisonment, gives the parole board incredible powers.

This entire complex is a system of tyranny under which an ever-increasing number of working people--again especially Black and

Brown people--are forced to live. As such, it is a prelude to fascism. Indeed, Professor Herbert Packer of the Stanford Law School is exactly right in his conclusion that "... the inevitable end of the behavioral view is preventive detention..."[7]

Banfield's analysis of the urban crisis exactly coincides with the behavioralists' view of the criminal. That is, the cause of the urban crisis lies with the existence of what Banfield calls the "lower classes" who are poverty-prone.

These lower classes are of course working people, and Black and Brown people in particular.

They are, Banfield would have us believe, morally depraved and mentally defective. For example, Banfield describes people of the lower classes (quoting from different passages in his book) as: "feeble... suspicious and hostile, aggressive yet dependent... no attachment to community neighbors or friends... lives in the slum and sees little or no reason to complain... does not care how dirty and dilapidated his housing is... nor does he mind the inadequacy of such public facilities as schools, parks and libraries... features that make the slum repellent to others actually please him... prefers neardestitution with out work to abundance with it... the morality of lower-class culture is preconventional, which means that the individual's actions are influenced not by conscience but only by a sense of what he can get away with...."[8] Banfield's description of the lower class is in fact a description of the criminal. And it is precisely at this moment when the description of the lower class and the description of the criminal coincide that we have a central

“...the entire judicial and penal system involving the police, the courts, the prisons and the parole boards has become a mechanism through which the ruling powers seek to maintain their physical and psychological control...�

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For once you accept the behavioralist view of the criminal as morally depraved or mentally defective it is perfectly logical to preventively detain all persons who manifest such tendencies and are therefore potential criminals. Thus, in April 1970 a leading physician and close associate of President Nixon proposed that the government begin the mass testing of 6- to 8-year-old children to determine if they have criminal-behavior tendencies. He then suggested "treatment camps" for the severely disturbed child and the young hardcore criminal.

Even more consequential in terms of their potential political impact are the proposals of Edward C. Banfield, a professor of Urban Government at Harvard, and the chairman of President Nixon's task force on the Model Cities Program. Professor Banfield has recently written a book entitled: The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis.

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aspect of the ideological basis for fascism and genocide. This is exactly Banfield's program.

Summarizing the most salient points in Banfield's program we find these proposals: that the government avoid all rhetoric holding out high expectations for resolving the urban crisis or any of its aspects; that it try to reduce unemployment by eliminating all minimumwage laws and by repealing all laws which give trade unions "monopolistic powers," e.g. the closed shop; that the government abolish all child labor laws and cut compulsory education from 12 to 9 years; that it change poverty definitions from those which encompass relative standards of living to a "fixed standard" and that it encourage or require all persons who fall into this fixed poverty standard to live in an institution or semi-institution; that the government institute vigorous birth control measures for the incompetent poor and send their children to public nurseries; that the government intensify police control and specifically permit the police to 'stop and frisk' and to make misdemeanor arrests on probable cause; that the government speed-up trials and the punishment process; and that the government "abridge to an appropriate degree the freedom of those who in the opinion of a court are extremely likely to commit violent crimes..."[9] This is a fascist program. It is a genocidal program.

Aspects of it are already to be found in Nixon's Organized Crime Control Bill signed into law in October (1970). For example, this bill provides for a special category Of 'criminals' known as "special dangerous offenders." Such a person is defined, in part, as an offender who has been convicted of two or more offenses of a kind punishable by death

or imprisonment for one year, one of which offenses occurred within the past five years and for one of which he has been imprisoned.

As the New Republic's columnist, TRB, noted: "That's a curious juxtaposition--'punishable by

“This is a fascist program.

It is a genocidal program. “ death or imprisonment for more than one year.'

Quite a range, eh?" The "special dangerous offender" can be imprisoned for 20 years at the discretion of the judge, regardless of the prescribed punishment for the original offense for which he was brought to trial.

Here then lies the final significance of a mass political movement to expose the prisons and free the prisoners. The issue is not only reform, but also to mount a struggle to abolish the present functions and foundations of the prison system, an effort which can finally succeed only with the abolition of capitalism.

For, as Engels observed more than a century ago, the prison system under capitalism is overwhelmingly a repressive institution, an appendage of its state apparatus employed to maintain exploitative and oppressive social conditions. Of course, what reforms can be won in day-to-day battle on the legal and political front will be important concessions.

But the point is to attack the whole foundation-all the assumptions--involved in maintaining a rehabilitative prison system which must assume the moral and mental defectiveness of its victims, in the midst of a morally bankrupt, racist, defective and generally deteriorating social order. To do this now is to launch a front-line offense against the increasingly

the prisons--which may constitute violations of law. These actions are politically conceived and engendered by the overt acts of brutality, terror and suppression inside the prisons, and in the ghettos and barrios.

Third, there are many thousands of originally nonpolitical people who are the victims of class, racial and national oppression.

Arrested for an assortment of alleged crimes, and lacking adequate legal or political redress they are imprisoned for long years, in violation of fundamental civil and human rights though they are innocent of any crime.

Finally there are many in prison who have committed various offenses, but who, in the course of their imprisonment, and due to the social conditions they experience, begin to develop a political consciousness. As soon as they give expression to their political views they become victims of politically inspired actions against them by the prison administration and the parole boards. They too may become victims of politically inspired frame-ups within the prison. There are today many who were either never guilty of any crime at all, or were guilty of some offense, and later developed a political consciousness. These include the Soledad Brothers, Ruchell Magee, and the Folsom Strikers.

The intensification of the oppressive functions of the prison system and the emergence of the liberation movements on a new level in the Sixties create the basis for a change in the political consciousness of people in the Communities. More and more people have begun to understand the practical consequences of the prison-police-judical apparatus. It is this fact which now offers us new Opportunities to secure greater and greater mass opposition to the frame-ups and

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fascistic thrust of the present administrations in Washington and Sacramento.[10] For the movement to abolish the present functions of the prison system attacks a basic ideological pillar of fascism at its root.

It is on the basis of these realities that we in the radical and revolutionary movements must broaden and develop our concept of the political prisoner. For the prison system and its various appendages such as the Adult Authority is increasingly used as a political instrument of mass intimidation, subversion, manipulation and terror against working people and the Black and Brown communities, as a whole.

In this regard we may consider four groupings of prisoners who are prisoners by virtue of their political views and activities or are specially victimized on the basis of class, racial and national oppression. First, of course, there are those who become effective political leaders in their communities, and therefore become the victims of politically inspired police frame-ups. They are not imprisoned for any violations of law; but for their political beliefs. Such political prisoners include Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins, Reies Tijerina and Angela Davis. There is a second, though similar category of political prisoner; that is, those who have committed various acts of civil disobedience, or refused, for example, to be inducted into the Armed Forces. They are in technical violation of various laws, but their violations were clearly political acts, and they are political prisoners. Such political prisoners include the Berrigan Brothers, and many thousands of draft resisters. Moreover, there are many in the liberation movements who engage in specific acts of resistance or armed self-defense--both within and outside

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jailings of all political prisoners.

Further, it is precisely this intensification of the socially Oppressive function of the prison system, and the stunning rise of the liberation movements, that creates the basis for a political consciousness among the prisoners as a whole leading to individual acts of resistance and other forms of struggle, including mass political work stoppages by the prisoners and temporarily taking over prison facilities. The greatest achievement of this movement is its growing awareness of the class nature of the prison system. In this way it has been able to unite Black, Brown and white prisoners around specific demands such as we saw in the magnificent Manifesto of the Folsom Prisoners.

The development of a mass movement to free all political prisoners represents the emergence of another front--another aspect-of the growing coalition of all oppressed and exploited peoples against capitalist rule.

If we begin to grapple with some of these developments; if we begin to see the relationship between the prison system and fascist ideology and program; if we begin to see that we must develop our concept of the political prisoner; and if we begin to see the relationship between containment at home and counterinsurgency and aggression abroad--then, we will have opened up whole new avenues for legal and political defense involving many thousands of people which will, in fact, constitute an important part of a peoples' offensive against the Nixon-ReaganAgnew axis.

Seize the Time!

Footnotes: George Jackson, Soledad Brother, Bantam Books, New York, 1970, p. 29 See the especially good article by Jessica Mitford, "Kind and Usual Punishment: The California Prisons," The Atlantic Monthly, March 1971.

James V. McConnell, "Brainwashing the Criminals," Psychology Today, April 1970, Vol. 3, No. 11.

Herbert Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, Beacon Press, Boston, 1970, p. 74.

Time Magazine, "U.S. Prisons: Schools for Crime," January 18, 1971.

Theodore R. Sarbin, "The Myth of the Criminal Type," Monday Evening Papers #18, Center for Advanced Studies, Wesleyan University, 1969.

Herbert L. Packer, "Crimes of Progress," New York Review of Books, October 23, 1969.

Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis, Little, Brown, Boston, 1970, pp. 53, 62, 112 122, 163, and 211, respectively. See the review/essay of this book by Herbert Aptheker, "Banfield: The Nixon Model Planner," Political Affairs, December 1970.

Ibid, pp. 245-246.

See Susan Castro, "Line of Defense Against Fascism," People's World, June 1970, p. 10.

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36 Streets Memorials Project by Hannah Bailey 46 Gendered by Sara Barber

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the street memorials project Stills by Hannah Bailey Film by Anna Lamond and Vivian Williams

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The Street Memorials Project was Emerson College’s first Artist in Residency program.

Activist and artist Cedric Douglas represents the roots of street art to prompt public introspection. His project focused on police violence against black people and aimed to open up a bigger conversation of diversity at Emerson. This film, which can be streamed in full on Rancid’s website, captures Cedric’s process and reactions to the street art memorials project at Emerson.

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gendered

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By Sara Barber

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Gender determines how we function in society. Perceptions of professions, capabilities, and identities are predisposed by whether we are assigned “male” or “female” at birth. Where does this leave people who don’t fit into that binary? People who do not perform their assigned gender face consequences. Gender is reinforced through social repercussions, legislation, and violence.

This work aims to refute what is enforced upon us, exploring how through tender intimacy and resilience the queer community has survived thus far.

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revolutionary reading list

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While this book is considered fiction, I wouldn’t underestimate the ability of this book to tell the truth. Queer narratives, too easily disregarded, are told in their full ache throughout Stone Butch Blues. This book healed parts of me I did not fully realize were hurting. The author has provided free PDFs of this book available online.

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Assata Shakur’s autobiography highlights the perils of being black, of being a woman, and of being a political prisoner. “We have nothing to lose but our chains” is one of the most powerful and resonant exerpts of this read. This book is heartbreakingly tender while remaining vigilant.

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