Unit Reflection for Week 11 (Boothe/Orwell/et all)

Like all of Boothe’s texts so far, I found this one really informative and pretty comprehensible. I appreciated that he is really upfront about his limitations (he states very clearly that he is only qualified to speak with (some) authority on MR within the context of North America) and the lengths that he goes to to demonstrate how any person with any political leaning/motivation can employ these dishonest methods (they are not themselves inherently connected to any ideology/power structure.)

I think he does a good job of showing not only how/why people might distort information, but also connecting those reasons to each other to show us just how fraught with ill-intentions, silence, confusion, dishonesty, money, etc is involved in the dissemination of, and consumption of, information.

I just started reading a new book by Jackie Wang called Carceral Capitalism. It’s a semiotexte (I would be interested in hearing and Linguist or Rhetorician’s opinion on semiotexte, honestly) by a poet I really love about (many things, including) mass incarceration, for profit punitive models, capitalism, the nexus of these things, and prison abolition.

I’m not very far along in the book (because it’s this time in the semester and I’m working almost every day) but recently I was reading about the introduction of technology, to prisons generally, and in Florida, more specifically. Wang writes that for a long time prisons integrated almost no technology into their infrastructure. Prisoners could pay money to send e-mails but were generally unaware of the technological developments going on “outside.”

Then she writes about how this changed, and technology became more readily available to prisoners. At first this seems really positive, and in a sense, it is. Prisoners have a much easier time communicating with loved ones, for example. I felt like this was a prime example of information that I have difficulty accessing, and fact-checking. Given how much information is out there, how sensitive the information can be, and how badly I can imagine powerful people do not want their practices revealed. I began to feel that if only I had taken it upon myself to learn about the specific and plentiful restrictions on inmates, and if only many others had to, then things would be vastly different and communication between inmates and their friends/peers/partners would be even further than it is now.

But Wang goes onto explain how technology drastically changes things very quickly. Soon, a skype like technology begins to replace certain visits. Here, she discusses her mother’s use of the service to speak with her brother, who’s incarcerated. She writes that her mother enjoys the service because it allows her to show her son her home. So while Wang concedes that the electronic option has benefits, she writes that she is concerned that if these types of services grow to supplant all in person visits prisons will cease to exist, experientially, for all those who do not either work, or serve sentences in them. For Wang, public access to prisons is crucial to the understanding of, and ending of, their brutality.

This made me think about Orwell and his concern about Dying Metaphors. I’ll admit I’m not his biggest fan but I did enjoy when he wrote “The idea that art is apolitical is itself a political stance.” (or something to that extent.) I suspect that Orwell would consider “the cage” a tired af metaphor. That can be found in almost any medium, in almost any era, emblematic of almost any thing.

[THIS IS MY PERSONAL FAVORITE https://bombmagazine.org/articles/skull-bones/]

And I started to think that some metaphors are dying, and that is precisely the reason to keep using them? If we know that prisons and carceral practices are intentionally (oftentimes for immense financial and personal gain) obscured from the public, and that the we are also being thoroughly discouraged from actually accessing these spaces, then perhaps we should not hesitate to invoke the metaphor (if it is called for, and not merely for dramatic effect…I think the link I shared actually does a great job of addressing this difference.) While, of course, pursuing more phenomenological research as well, so that the reality of prisons is, at the very least, on the public’s periphery, as often as possible.