Jesus was a death row prisoner

 

I’ve decided to declare a Prison Justice Day on my social media on this Easter Sunday. Seems apt.

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Prison guards lack ‘common understanding’ on basic respect for inmates: survey

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Comments on prison stories always interesting. "You don’t know the kind of people guards have to deal with!" How does the commenter know?

They watch too many episodes of Law and Order & think they "know how it is".

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Drugging Aggression Behind Bars

“Proper forensic psychopharmacology does not begin with a marginally trained prison employee popping a pill into an inmate’s mouth, although that is the rule rather than the exception in many if not most jurisdictions.”

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When you search "prison" in YouTube & you either get reality TV shows or video from game "Prison Architect" The reality of it has ceased #spectacle

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Free after 42 years? 

42 years in prison. Wrongly convicted.

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The "othering" of prisoners. Othering is the opposite of belonging.

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Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Shame of Three Strikes Laws

“While Wall Street crooks walk, thousands sit in California prisons for life over crimes as trivial as stealing socks”

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This is the result of mandatory sentencing. The crime and it’s punishment become disconnected. All crime becomes equated with all other crime regardless of it’s seriousness or effect. There is no room for discretion. “A crime is a crime” becomes literal.

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Young man faces paralysis in eye-for-an-eye sentence

“Saudi Arabia, beloved US/Western ally, is going to surgically paralyze someone who has been in prison since age 14.”

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Many more news items could be included here. The distortion of crime and punishment by way of what is often called “the prison-industrial complex”, now with a lot of help from an occluded media, by way of fervent views that skew towards absolutist ideological systems, by way of social atomization massaged by a bombardment of fear based messaging, by way of anomie based on the erroneous belief that a “just world” exists for individuals, by way of manipulation by distant political and corporate interests… has reached a point where neither prisoner nor keeper remains human, nor can remain human. They are characters or rather caricatures.

The connection can no longer be made, although it is true: Jesus was a death row prisoner.

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Some useful reading:

Biopower (as Biopolitics) and Thanatopolitics– the politics of power exercised over living bodies (ie in prisons, the use of torture and capital punishment)

The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich [PDF]