The JCI Prison Scholars Program

Tag: violence

  • Don’t Call it a Comeback

    It wasn’t too long ago that I was expecting not to teach for the Scholars Program anymore. Things don’t always work out as you expect! But, as of this past Wednesday, I was glad to find myself back in prison. Wait… well, you know what I mean.

    There have been some changes since I was last inside. Our old “inside coordinator,” Vincent Greco, has since been released – great for him! But an adjustment for the program – fortunately, one of our long-term students has stepped up and seems to be doing a solid job of things. I’ve gotten letters from a couple of guys who had been in my classes with return addresses from other facilities, but I also saw some familiar faces on my way in.

    Things are a little up in the air, so this summer I’m only teaching a short course – four sessions on non-violent resistance (to war) based around the War Resisters’ International Handbook for Non-Violent Campaigns. Since we hadn’t met before, we started class out with just some general discussion of what violence is, and why one might at least sometimes decline to use it in pursuit of a goal. I got to go over some of the Chenoweth and Stephan data on the success of non-violent campaigns in response to the entirely unsurprising view that some of the guys expressed that clearly, whichever side of a conflict was more willing to use violence (and more extreme violence) would win. I’m not sure they’re convinced – apparently they had a class last semester with a guy who taught a course on why violence is inevitable (I leave for a few semesters…).

    Running the class itself brought me back to the familiar dynamic these classes often have. Unlike courses I’ve taught in “normal” university settings, the guys in the class are much less willing to let anything I say go unchallenged (itself a challenge when we can’t go to the internet on someone’s laptop to resolve a question), and they are much more eager to pull the class off into their own directions. Which sometimes leaves me feel like I’m just barely riding the wave rather than running a class, but comes from an interesting and good place, I think – we end up talking about whether Mormons count as secessionists because someone has noticed that I didn’t exactly define what counted as successful secession when I was discussing the data… so it represents people engaging with the material, even if often in a way that comes out of left field from the perspective at the front of the class. Oh, and of course, we had at least two conspiracy theories floated.

    I’m looking forward to our next session.

  • Violence (5/2/14)

    So, at the last Violence class, we were talking about both a section on the rise of the Black Panther Party (from Black Against Empire) and on the early inroads of militarization into police forces (from Rise of the Warrior Cop). A few interesting things came out of the conversation.

    First, what ended up being the first question was, “why aren’t we talking about violence in prisons in this class?” Good question. The best answer I could give the guys was that research on violence in prisons is pretty sketchy (at least in the US), and so I was not in a position to teach anything about it. Actually, I am quite interested in it, but am trying to get my ducks in a row on how to actually conduct research. Unfortunately for researchers, the Maryland Department of Public Safety does not currently permit interview research in correctional facilities (and cannot guarantee confidentiality for mail surveys). I did invite them to talk about it in class, but no one volunteered. I also invited them to write about it, so let’s see.

    Second, while I did try to keep bringing it back around to the material for the class, the conversation they kept wanting to bring it back around to was the issue of what violence is, particularly the concept of “structural violence.” Unsurprisingly perhaps, most of the folks in the room were pretty friendly to the idea of structural violence, though we did have some interesting discussions about whether there was a need to draw the line somewhere (so that not everything bad is violence), and about how to understand “local” power imbalances – e.g., one (white) student was skeptical that black prejudice against whites is never backed up by power (meaning it’s not “racism” in the way that academics tend to use the term), because he’d been beaten up a few times when visiting a black girlfriend in her neighborhood. So we had a lively debate about that (there were divergent theories about why I don’t get beaten up when I bike my daughter to her school in Park Heights).

    Third, we talked a bit – and some of the guys had been in either my class on James or Josh’s on Arendt – about the Panther’s use of violence. As Mr. Jihad pointed out to me, it’s telling the story a bit unfairly to characterize the Panthers as a “violent organization,” but it was important to their role that they were at least willing to threaten and use violence in a way that other groups weren’t. Newton’s analysis of the need for armed resistance is in line with the Marxist analysis of the lumpenproletariat – the proletariat has a lot of (potential) revolutionary potential if it can become organized, because it can down tools, break the machines, stop working, etc. The bosses need the workers! The problem for unemployed inner-city blacks at the time of the Panthers was that many of them lacked even this kind of power – they were lumpenproletariat in the Marxist analysis, outside the class struggle. So, on the one hand, the idea that they need to assert themselves via violence is sharp. On the other hand, there’s a reason that Marx (unless I’m misremembering) identified the lumpenprotetariat as the “dangerous classes” – violent, and a tool particularly of nobility and financiers because they share a lack of productive role in the current system. The concern is essentially that the violence of the lumpenproletariat cannot or will not be turned to revolutionary ends, but only lets them serve as thugs for existing power structures. Seen through the lens of Arendt on totalitarianism, there’s the worrisome possibility that violent action by disenfranchised groups may not be aimed at supporting the powers that be, but may end up serving those ends by creating a kind of ‘reaction formation’ of state repression. This is all very impressionistic, but the roots of US police militarization in reaction to the unrest of the 60s makes it suggestive. We also had some splits there – some folks arguing that repression was the inevitable result of non-nonviolent action, while others supported “diversity of tactics.”

    Finally, Josh called me out in the class on the way that the concept of privilege interacts with questions about whether, e.g., it’s helpful to analyze black-America-in-general as a kind of internal colony of white-America-in-general. But I’ll probably have to get to that later.

  • Life: A Short Story

    Today’s post comes with two apologies. First, to you readers – here at the Program, many of us have been experiencing end-of-semester crunch in our day jobs.

    Second, this post comes with an apology to the student whose writing it is. Last summer, I taught a course titled Political Analysis and Political Narrative. Since the course focused on the way that James told the history of the Ste-Domingue (Haiti) revolution in such a way as to “argue” for his preferred Marxist understanding of politics, over the course of the class students were asked to write narratives of historical events – whether “public” history or the story of something that happened in their own lives – in a way that made a political or moral point.

    (more…)

  • On Charles Taylor

    As part of my class on violence, we looked at the civil wars in Liberia as an example of civil conflict, and a springboard for talking about how civil conflicts develop and how acts of violence and atrocities come to be committed in them (we also watched the brutal but pretty solid documentary Liberia: an Uncivil War).  The students were very interested in the conflict – in part because of the roots of modern Liberia in a US “back to Africa” movement, and also because many of the COs at Jessup are from Liberia. A few reported to me that they’d had interesting conversations with the staff about it, and Mr. Greco tells me that he’s been making copies of my Liberia materials (mostly the Wikipedia page for a general overview, plus an excerpt from Liberian Women Peacemakers).

    Here are one of my student J.E.’s comments on Liberia’s war.

    Liberia was Lord Captured!

    Charles “President” Taylor – War Lord or Robin Hood?

    Fear of rebels and government retribution keeps many of Liberia citizens in silence.

    Getting the inside story on Liberia most feared and infamous war lord was no easy take because Charles Taylor did not give interviews and the people did not know who to trust.

    Liberia is among the top 10 countries with the highest homicide rates in the world. This is a high violence society with a comparable murder rate to Colombia, Jamaica, and South Africa, mostly due to political violence and corruption.

    The US-controlled media say that almost 80% of the murderous violence that goes on in Liberia is caused by the rebels, while the residents say that it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between the US backed rebels and the government forces.

    Why did the people of Monrovia willingly die for Charles Taylor?

    Some describe Taylor as Liberia’s answer – a modern-day Robin Hood in a sense, whose benevolence in Monrovia afforded him absolute control and respect as a role model and President.

    Charles Taylor’s popularity stemmed in part from his generosity toward the people of Monrovia – he gave money to those in need and provided them with a source of livelihood and also kept them safe in his own way from the Rebels (smile). Through his generosity, Taylor gained the loyalty of his people.

    This loyalty did not end with his national people, but with neighboring revolutionaries supporting him.

    A lot of Charles Taylor’s supporters believe he was tricked by the US government in the first place, while others feel he is guilty because they blame him for letting so many innocent people die.

  • On Charles Taylor

    As part of my class on violence, we looked at the civil wars in Liberia as an example of civil conflict, and a springboard for talking about how civil conflicts develop and how acts of violence and atrocities come to be committed in them (we also watched the brutal but pretty solid documentary Liberia: an Uncivil War).  The students were very interested in the conflict – in part because of the roots of modern Liberia in a US “back to Africa” movement, and also because many of the COs at Jessup are from Liberia. A few reported to me that they’d had interesting conversations with the staff about it, and Mr. Greco tells me that he’s been making copies of my Liberia materials (mostly the Wikipedia page for a general overview, plus an excerpt from Liberian Women Peacemakers).

    Here are one of my student J.E.’s comments on Liberia’s war.

    Liberia was Lord Captured!

    Charles “President” Taylor – War Lord or Robin Hood?

    Fear of rebels and government retribution keeps many of Liberia citizens in silence.

    Getting the inside story on Liberia most feared and infamous war lord was no easy take because Charles Taylor did not give interviews and the people did not know who to trust.

    Liberia is among the top 10 countries with the highest homicide rates in the world. This is a high violence society with a comparable murder rate to Colombia, Jamaica, and South Africa, mostly due to political violence and corruption.

    The US-controlled media say that almost 80% of the murderous violence that goes on in Liberia is caused by the rebels, while the residents say that it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between the US backed rebels and the government forces.

    Why did the people of Monrovia willingly die for Charles Taylor?

    Some describe Taylor as Liberia’s answer – a modern-day Robin Hood in a sense, whose benevolence in Monrovia afforded him absolute control and respect as a role model and President.

    Charles Taylor’s popularity stemmed in part from his generosity toward the people of Monrovia – he gave money to those in need and provided them with a source of livelihood and also kept them safe in his own way from the Rebels (smile). Through his generosity, Taylor gained the loyalty of his people.

    This loyalty did not end with his national people, but with neighboring revolutionaries supporting him.

    A lot of Charles Taylor’s supporters believe he was tricked by the US government in the first place, while others feel he is guilty because they blame him for letting so many innocent people die.

  • Rehabilitation vs. Retribution vs. Liberation, Part I: The Context of Violence

    Rehabilitation vs. Retribution vs. Liberation, Part I: The Context of Violence

    "Geese are Taking Over" by Fred Dunn (via Flickr)
    “Geese are Taking Over” by Fred Dunn (via Flickr)

    Everyone in the program was pretty excited to see a couple of our instructors, Drew Leder and Mikita Brottman, featured in an article – a cover article no less – in the Baltimore City Paper this week. It’s also wonderful to see some of our students, like Mr. Hardy and Mr. Fitzgerald, being named and given a voice, even if the Department of Corrections still reserves the right to restrict who may speak to reporters. And the article did a fine job of capturing the variety of those specific voices, rather than presenting the incarcerated men as an undifferentiated mass of “prisoners” – several of the unnamed students were immediately recognizable, just from the way Mr. Woods reproduced their cadences and attitudes on the page. One of our goals is to help humanize incarcerated individuals to the wider world – among the first questions we get from new people we tell about the program is usually some variation on “aren’t you scared?” (no) – and painting such a nuanced portrait of some of our classes is something a journalist is far better at than we philosophers

    But, since I am a philosopher, I wanted to talk a bit about the philosophy that I bring to teaching in and helping to coordinate the program, with respect to one of the issues that the article raises.

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  • Violence (4/18/14)

    So, the Violence class. I’ve wanted to teach a course like this for a while, for two reasons. First, it’s a matter of professional interest to me – especially to look at violence as a phenomenon that cross-cuts issues that are often academically stove-piped (e.g., war, psychology of trauma, domestic violence). Second, it’s an issue that I thought would be of particular interest to our students, and on which they might have some important insights to share.

    This past Friday, our topic was sexual violence. We were reading (/should have read) some excerpts from Brison’s Aftermath, along with a USIP Special Report on the motivations of Mai Mai militia members who commit rapes in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Griffin’s “Rape: the All-American Crime.” We’d also just finished a session on “terror,” where we read Scarry’s chapter on torture – with the intent that there would be some links between her analysis of the silencing and identity-destroying effects of torture and those effects of sexual violence on women, particularly the way these effects impact women beyond the class of direct victims of overt sexual violence.

    It was a tough class and highlighted some of the ways I feel like I haven’t been able to make this course in general the kind of class it should be.

    It wasn’t tough in the sense that it led to hard, painful conversations. Quite the opposite, actually. The one topic that the guys really seemed interested in there was talking about the details of the war (that’s not unusual – my plan over the summer is to note this clear line of interest and teach a class on the Congo wars). For the rest of the time, it was hard to get anyone to talk.

    I suspect – though I don’t know – that part of the problem is that this might be a bit too close to home, while at the same time not being close enough to home, for our students. On the one hand, a constant weird dynamic in the class is that I am a student of violence but my life has been largely untouched by it – this is, of course, not the case for a lot of the guys in the class. On the other, Josh and I made a conscious choice not to have a reading that was directly focused on something like prison rape, for fear that it would be too direct an approach for some of the men (we have at least one student we know to be in prison for rape, so that’s pretty direct, but prison rape is a present threat for at least some of them) – despite the fact that it’s a serious problem, with recent statistics indicating that the number of sexual assaults in prisons (mostly of men) is about even with the number of assaults in the entire nation outside of prisons (both are estimated to be on the order of 200,000 per year).

    But, mostly, it was me trying to fill time by talking, and a bit of that professorial, “so, do you see Griffin’s argument? Does it make sense to you?” getting vague assent.

    In addition, I worry that I have not used this class as a strong enough platform for engaging on the moral issues that are directly relevant. For example, two sessions ago when we talked about the way that militaries maintain themselves, one of the readings was about the idea that masculinity is a social construction intended to make militaries possible. One of our students basically pushed the – horrible – line that women can’t be allowed into the military because then it’s inevitable that men will rape them. Josh and I both tried to bring the student to understand that that was a pretty backwards way of looking at the problem, but given that more students seemed to be nodding along with him than with us, I fear we failed entirely.

    I don’t want to remove blame from my teaching style (or from guys not doing all the readings, and so clamming up – perhaps a side effect of making the reading load a bit too heavy for this class). But our hesitancy to go directly after the issue of prison rape may also have been part of the problem. The most fruitful conversation I had was after class had officially ended, with two of the guys in the class who have been in prison longer-term (though, they are also guys with whom I have a longer and deeper relationship than many of their classmates, so that may be part of the equation).

    In a nutshell, they told me two things. First, they said that the kind of rape that happens at least in their prison, has changed over the past decade or so. As they described it, it used to be that it was pretty common for sexual predators to straight-up roam the halls and just grab people who might be out of sight of the guards (as a side note, they focused entirely on rape of incarcerated men by other incarcerated men, though the stats I cited above indicate that a huge amount of abuse is by correctional officers). Now, they said, predators had to operate by “trickery,” and described a more common practice as a guy known to be a predator befriending a new guy and convincing him to transfer to share a cell.

    Second, when I asked, “so what do you think changed?” their answer was that it was the beneficial effect of the programs that now exist in JCI, like the Alternatives to Violence Project, and the volunteer college courses that we teach. I can’t verify that! But, walking out of a class where I was feeling a bit of a failure as a teacher, it was a nice thought to have.

  • Labyrinth Lord (Games and Game Design, 4/11/14)

    This is a bit belated, as it relates to last Friday’s class (but I thought I should write it up before I leave to teach this Friday’s class).

    Josh has already put together a nice write-up of basically what this class is on about. But he’d asked me to write up our particular experience from last week, in which I facilitated a game of Labyrinth Lord (LL). For those of you not hip to the OSR (that’s the “old school revival” for those of you not hip to it), LL is a “retro-clone” – a fan-made version of an older edition of Dungeons and Dragons made possible by the fact that you can only copyright the particular expression of a game and some proper names of things (so no beholders), but not the rules of the game. For anyone reading who is entirely unfamiliar with role-playing games (RPGs), I’m not going to try to explain them here, but you might want to check out the wikipedia entry, or Epidaiah Ravachol’s excellent micro-game, What is a Roleplaying Game?

    These older editions of D&D are long out of print, but there’s a significant constituency of players for them, motivated by some combination of nostalgia and the fact that the earlier games supported a simpler, more player-skill-focused (that is, it matters more whether you, the player, think to describe your character as twisting that strange carving gently or casually than what number is next to her “find traps” skill on her character sheet), and harder (in the sense of “your character is more likely to die”) experience than some of the newer editions.

    Anyway, for us, we wanted to use LL as a way to segue out of abstract and board games into more story-focused games (there’s a whole long argument about the line between games like D&D or LL and “story games” that, if you are likely to be at all interested, you surely already know about, but whatever). RPGs have some of their roots in wargames (like Diplomacy, which we’d already had them play), and the natural thought that it might be cool to, say, act out what that imaginary fleet commander trying to take Sevastopol is thinking about, rather than just treat it like an abstract token on the board. We decided to start with LL both because it shows its roots in these wargames relatively clearly, it’s pretty complex for folks used to simple board games but pretty simple compared to some of its RPG brethren and sistren, and it’s a clone of the version of D&D most folks of my/Josh’s generation discovered RPGs through back in the 1980s.

    The session was a bit chaotic. We had thirteen students show up. And, since they’ve run into some difficulties with playing unfamiliar games on their own during the “study halls” without an instructor present, we’ve decided to use class time to walk at least partially through games rather than just leave them to figure it out. And after all, very few of us who played RPGs learned our first one by sitting down with the massive rule-book. I know for me, I played D&D in the back of Tom Lopez’ van many times before I ever had the books on my own, and most other folks I know have similar stories of being introduced by older siblings, friends of the family, etc.

    The plan was for me to run the beginning of Dyson Logo’s fun little Goblin Gully adventure, doubling the number of creatures so that there’d be some threat to a party of thirteen characters, and with Josh acting as “caller” to try to corral everyone into having a coherent party decision. It didn’t quite work out.

    After the boring preliminaries (what do all these numbers on the sheet mean?), we went with tradition and started them in a tavern. This led into the traditional questions of “why would we go investigate this maybe monster-infested slave pit on the outskirts of town instead of continuing to drink in the tavern?” and “why is this so dumb?” So, I threw them the “there’s maybe a magic axe”rumor, and that was enough to convince most folks that they should head to the gully.

    We got about as far as the tree with the goblin guards. Under the guidance of a guy who’d played D&D before, they decided to have the thieves try to sneak up – but level 1 thieves are really pretty crummy at sneaking, so they were soon facing a bunch of arrows from goblins in the tree. One thief was immediately cut down, and the other started to run away.

    Interestingly, this caused a bit of a split in the group. Some of the guys wanted to regroup and start shooting things at whatever was in the tree shooting at them. A few decided to run away and look for another way in. One guy declared that he was going to throw his spear at the thief who was running, declaring that he was a coward, and shouldn’t have run away.

    This last was the most interesting to me – as it led to a bit of a conversation about the social contract. On the one hand, “I kill that guy” is probably pretty familiar to a lot of people who played these games when they were tweens or teenagers. It’s a pretty natural response, when you’re told that in this game you can do anything you want (that is within the reasonable fictional powers of your character), to try to push the boundaries a bit – my early D&D games were full of stupidity like “I steal from Lydia’s character,” “I kill the bartender,” and “I moon the dragon.” But the man playing the halfling who threw his spear was a bit more sophisticated than that in his motivations – he wasn’t just trolling, and he tried to make the case to the rest of the group that killing one of their mercenary band who showed cowardice in that way was the appropriate thing to do.

    I’m underselling the chaos of this session more than a bit here to pull out the interesting bit (to me) at the end, and I wouldn’t run a thirteen-player game of LL again anytime soon. It also drove home that while, historically, games like this were many current players’ introductions to the genre, they’re not maybe the easiest access point. Play did stop a few times over things like, “so, it says Paralysis/Petrification 16, and I’m a Magic-User, does that mean I can paralyze people?” But I’m hoping to, next time, use the friendly-fire demise of Mr. Hoppe’s cowardly (or perhaps merely reasonable!) thief to start conversations about social contract issues, genre expectations,  and kinds of fun – after all, if everyone knew we were playing a game about a hard-bitten mercenary band that brooks no cowardice, that could be a cool game.