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"The prison nation, which is a broader concept than the prison industrial complex, for me represents..."

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“The prison nation, which is a broader concept than the prison industrial complex, for me represents the combination of both incarceration in the literal sense – an influx of people into the criminal legal system in all of its apparatus: jails, prisons, detention centers, etc. … [It is an] increase in arrest and removal of people from their communities into facilities, but it also represents the ideological shift and policy changes that use criminalization and punishment as a response to a whole range of social problems. Not just crime, but also things like policing people who are on welfare, using the child protective services system to control families, the ways that schools have become militarized. So it’s a broad notion of using the arm of the law to control people, especially people who are disadvantaged and come from disadvantaged communities.”

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- Beth E. Richie, author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation.

We need a better politics about state and corporate surveillance and control of daily human life — especially those lives that regularly intersect with public institutions — than a frame of privacy rights.  I keep trying to understand the shock about the NSA collecting phone and internet data, but then I see this painful video of a woman who was sexually assaulted by police, tries to tell a judge what happened, is ignored, arrested, and has her child taken to protective services, and I am reminded that we’re not having the same conversation about “privacy."  

I appreciate how this notion of “prison nation" makes clear that punishment surveillance extends out of literal prisons and into schools, streets, homes…  Some of us have lives that are rendered fundamentally accessible and for the taking. The fact that some guy has a list of my facebook friends, or whatever, is tangential to this core and more urgent truth.

(via computerblu)

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(via so-treu)


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