Category: Uncategorized

maps, population growth, web art project

Full size image

Update 2010-10-17: It seems like a lot of people come to this post looking for a blank map of the United States.  I updated the link at the bottom of the page to point to a much better version from Wikimedia Commons.  Download a SVG/PNG blank map of the United States.

This map has been on my mind all week. It’s from a NYTimes article titled Census Reports Arizona County Still Has Biggest Growth (though the article isn’t just about AZ). It’s a map of relative population increases/decreases around the country. Looking at the map, I want to think in terms of cities or communities as winners or losers or to think about how different or disconnected cities across the country are from each other. But what if this initial perception continues to shape my attitudes, or my actions? What happens when this mentality moves from the individual to the cultural or plays out at a policy level? It seems pretty unimaginative or limiting. This made me think, is there a way of looking at the USA, taking into account factors other than population growth, or incomes, or all the usual metrics of cities and communities? Is there a way of thinking that would show New Orleans as a big green dot and Atlanta as a big red dot? Is there a representation of qualities of cities that would make both New Orleans and Atlanta have the same type of dot? Is the red/green dot dichotomy too limiting to begin with? Let’s make our own maps that maybe show the relative nature of the places we live, or know, or read about, or hear about from a different perspective, with different values or metrics, or with more imagination.

Here’s how:

  1. Download a copy of a blank map of the USA from here.
  2. Draw on the map with a program like photoshop or print it out and draw on it by hand.
  3. Your new map should be a representation of the relative nature of different places in the US using circles of different sizes and colors, but you can use additional graphics/symbols too.
  4. Email your map to map@terrorware.com (or email that address to make arrangements to send it via postal mail).
  5. I’ll post the maps to this site, we can talk about them, and maybe figure out something cool to do with all of them.

New Terre Haute Facility holding Terrorism Inmates

Facility Holding Terrorism Inmates Limits Communication – washingtonpost.com:

Facility Holding Terrorism Inmates Limits Communication By Dan Eggen Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, February 25, 2007; Page A07 The Justice Department has quietly opened a new prison unit in Indiana that houses a hodgepodge of second-tier terrorism inmates, most of them Arab Muslims, whose ability to communicate with the outside world has been tightly restricted.

immigration, detention, the war

On tour, Defiance, Ohio plays a song called “Tanks Tanks Tanks” that seems to be pretty popular with folks.  It’s dancy, and easy to sing-along to, and I think that people identify with its general anti-war message, and its criticisms, echoed everywhere it seems, of the Bush administration’s rational for going to war.  What is overlooked, a lot of the time, is the portion of the song that deals with the prison-industrial-complex.  Will wrote the song, in part, after reading a Harpers article that much of the equipment used by US soldiers in the Middle East is produced using prison labor.  I couldn’t quickly locate the Harpers article, but I found this article, The Prisoners of War by Ian Urbina that describes the relationship between Federal Prison Industries (FPI), also known as UNICOR, described as a “quasi-public, for-profit corporation run by the Bureau of Prisons”, and the U.S. military.  To give an idea of the scope to which the US military is supplied by prison labor, the article mentions the production of the pants worn by most soldiers deployed in the Middle East:

Out of the 1.3 million pairs of these trousers bought by the Defense Department last year, all but 300,000 were produced by FPI, which means that at least three out of four active-duty soldiers in the region wear pants made by the inmates of the FPI factories in Atlanta and in Beaumont and Feagoville, Texas.

Critics argue that using prison labor is exploitative as the inmates are payed low wages (the article claims that FPI laborers are paid from $0.25 to $1.15/hour) and FPI does not have the same obligations to workplace safety standards or paying taxes as other employers.  Advocates of this type of prison labor say that producing these goods with prison labor is preferable to having the goods produced by cheap labor abroad.  Still, as most of these sort of manufacturing jobs are being exported to parts of the world with cheap labor, there are few jobs available upon release that would use the skills that prison laborers might gain while working to produce products for the military.  Also, critics claim that the popularity (and income generated by) for-profit prison labor comes at the expense of other vocational, rehabilitative, and educational programs in prisons.

The bottom line is this: currently, the US military is dependent on supplies from prison labor.  The implication is that the war effort benefits from having a large population of incarcerated people to cheaply produce its uniforms and other equipment. 

Today, I came across an article in the Herald-Times that described the detention of suspected undocumented immigrants, and the effect that their detention had on children and families of the detained.  From the article:

NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — Dozens of young children were stranded at schools and with baby sitters after their parents were rounded up by federal authorities who raided a leather goods maker suspected of hiring illegal immigrants, authorities said Wednesday. Gov. Deval Patrick said the children of the detainees — most of whom are from Guatemala and El Salvador — might not be receiving proper care. “We are particularly concerned about the Guatemalan community and the risk that they may be fearful about disclosing the existence or whereabouts of their children given their history with government agencies,” Patrick wrote in a letter asking U.S. Rep.

The company where the detained workers were employed, Michael Bianco Inc, received multiple government contracts to make products for the military:

 Company owner Francesco Insolia, 50, and three top managers were arrested. A fifth person was arrested on charges of helping workers obtain fake identification. Authorities allege Insolia oversaw sweatshop conditions so he could meet the demands of $91 million in U.S. military contracts to make products including safety vests and lightweight backpacks. Investigators said the workers toiled in dingy conditions and faced onerous fines, such as a $20 charge for talking while working and spending more than two minutes in the bathroom.

Finally, the article shows this image of one of the children of the detained:

So again, there is another example of the war effort requiring resources that are produced through exploitative circumstances.  It is not surprising, of course waging war is expensive, and to try to reduce those expenses, it makes sense that we would use labor that relies on those with little voice in our society and few options – the imprisoned and recent immigrants.  Here is another example of how waging war disproportionately affects women and children.  These costs, these effects of waging war are unavoidable.  Waging war requires too many resources, too much expense for there to be scruples about where those resources come from.  If we find the exploitation of prisoners troubling, if we find the welfare of children troubling, we have to find war troubling.  Period.  But this argument seems redundant, I would suspect that most people who are troubled by the war in Iraq, or any war, are troubled by the plight of the incarcerated in our prison system, are troubled by the welfare of children, by the role that many immigrants play in our society, and those who support the war, are willing to do so at even these costs.  Drawing these connections, for me, only serves to be honest about the costs of our decisions, whether it is our support of the war, or the combination of our decisions that, despite our personal objections, allow the war effort to be continued.  But this doesn’t really make me feel any better, because inaction seems worse, somehow, more cruel, when you know the consequences. 

To bring things full circle going from prisons to the military, to immigration, to children, and then back to prisons,  Democracy Now! reported yesterday that the ACLU was filing suit on behalf of children detained at a controversial immigrant jail in Texas.  At this facility, families are detained pending decisions on their legal status in the US.  Of the approximately 400 people detained at this privitized prison facility, around half are children.

 Link to Arrests of illegal immigrants leaves their kids stranded at school and daycares

“I don’t want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas.”

I stumbled across this quote on the Internet.  It’s from Karl Rove, allegedly uttered at a Republican Women’s convention when talking about the benefits of Bush’s immigration policy.  I came across the quote in the context of an editorial on the conservative National Review website.

The editorial’s commentary is pretty interesting:

It is precisely Rove’s son (and my own, and those of the rest of us in the educated elite) who should work picking tomatoes or making beds, or washing restaurant dishes, or mowing lawns, especially when they’re young, to help them develop some of the personal and civic virtues needed for self-government. It’s not that I want my kids to make careers of picking tomatoes; Mexican farmworkers don’t want that either. But we must inculcate in our children, especially those likely to go on to high-paying occupations, that there is no such thing as work that is beneath them.

…

This is why the president’s “willing worker/willing employer” immigration extravaganza is morally wrong — it’s not just that it will cost taxpayers untold billions, or that it will beggar our own blue-collar workers, or that it will compromise security, or that it will further dissolve our sovereignty. It would do all that, of course, but most importantly it would change the very nature of our society for the worse, creating whole occupations deemed to be unfit for respectable Americans, for which little brown people have to be imported from abroad. In other words, mass immigration, even now, is moving us toward an unequal, master-servant society.

The use of the phrase “educated elite” gives me the fear, and the editorial’s ultimate conclusion seems  to call for a more closed-bordered approach to immigration.  Also, the idea that we don’t already have a master-servant society and attributing this toward mass immigration (um, slavery, colonialism anybody?) seems to make this argument rather rethorical.  Still, it shows that immigration is a complicated issue, even within Republican ranks.  Rove’s comment is disgusting and describes, for me; the desire to preserve resources and privilege for those who have it, at all costs, that I find so frightening.  However, I’m also really uncomfortable with the editorial’s idea that you could equate labor that a young, wealthy person could do voluntarily and temporarily, with the labor reality of many undocumented workers.  I’m not denying that in the history of many families with wealth, there is a working class history, and individuals who made some significant sacrifices for their families.  However, the rags to riches mythology that many conservatives (and punk kids for that matter) use to justify the preservation of resources and privilege is an incomplete narrative.  There are a lot of reasons why some people have been able to accumulate and preserve wealth while others have not, beyond just personal industriousness.  If we’re going to value hard work as a culture, we owe it to ourselves to do that in the open context of those other, often unfair and ugly, factors.

Link

speaking with high school students about prisons/pages to prisoners

Earlier today, Joanne and I went to Bloomington South High School to talk to 4 classes of High School Students about prisons, prisoners, and the work we do with the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project. The experience was challenging, and interesting, and generally positive, even when missing the alarm and waking up only 15 minutes before I was supposed to meet Joanne at the school.

We had been invited to speak by an IU student who was student teaching in a 10th grade English class. We were asked to speak as part of a unit where the students were reading the book A Lesson Before Dying where one of the protagonists is imprisoned and sentenced to be executed.

Others from Pages to Prisoners had spoken to school groups in years past, and Abbey said she had been somewhat disappointed by the outcome. So, Joanne and I came up with an activity to try to make our talk more engaging and to make the talk more of a dialogue between us and the students and to encourage their own critical thinking rather than just listening to and ingesting our oppinions about the criminal justice system. The activity was simple. With the classes we brainstormed ideas, pereceptions, and stereotypes that came to mind when we thought about prisons and prisoners. We also brainstormed ideas about why people in prison might write to us for books. We talked a little about the places where we got these perceptions about prisons. We wrote these words and ideas on the blackboard as we brainstormed them. Then, we passed out book request letters that had been filled and gave the students a few minutes to read the letters. We pre-selected these letters and made notes about their content. We didn’t want to pick letters that created an idealized perception of prisoners, we tried to pick a set of letters that gave an accurate representation of the letters that we tend to receive as a whole. We picked ones that showed a variety of the types of books people request, their motivations, and some of the things they mention about the conditions of incarceration and the psychological implications of being in prison.

Then, we asked the students to describe things that they had found interesting about reading the letters. We made an effort to tie the discussion of the letters back to the ideas we had brainstormed. I tried to ask open-ended questions (thanks mediation training!) to get the students to talk about their letters. “What did the letters you read say about educational programs?” “What kind of restrictions do the letters talk about?”

We closed the presentation by showing some prisoner art left over from the Prison Art Show from this past summer’s Plan-It-X fest.

I’m not really sure what I was expecting the experience to be like, but it definitely felt different. I was hoping that there would be this amazing transformative discussion with the students about prisons that challenged all our perceptions and expanded to social justice topics beyond just prisons. That didn’t materialize, but the teachers said that the students were more attentive than usual, and most seemed to participate in some degree. It’s been so long since I was a 10th grader that I’m not really sure what critical thinking skills are present. More than anything, it just seemed like the students had been conditioned to zone out when someone got up to speak in front of them and to only respond to really directed questions. I found this to be pretty difficult.

One thing that I found really uncomfortable was realizing that some of the students had family who had been incarcerated, or had been to jail themselves. It felt really fake to be standing up in front of a room talking second-hand about things that were really familiar to them. Using the letters helped make the words less my own and more those who were incarcerated, but I still felt a little akward. In the last period, there was a girl who was really outspoken about having a brother who was incarcerated and seemed really spot-on with her analysis and criticism of the prison system. It was awesome and I hope that she continues to feel comfortable talking about her ideas an experience.

Joanne has a great ability teaching and engaging people. She also has a much better handle on prison statistics than I do, and she was a lot more confident and kept things together through the first couple of classes, but I felt like it got easier as the day went on. It definitely helps to have 2 people doing the activity, with one person leading the brainstorming and the other writing on the board, or with one person talking and another keeping a stack of questions, or remembering the general outline as conversations tended to be winding, or filling in additional analysis or points that were missed.

Joanne said that in the future, it would have helped to have an outline to organize the discussion of the letters more, and this seems like a good idea, though it is nice to let the students direct the course and topics of the conversations by their interests.

Update:
In talking to the students yesterday, I tried to draw a parallel between the difficulties getting access to educational and other programming  that someone might experience in prison due to frequent transfers between facilities with the experience of switching schools. In my mediation training, a woman said that over 90% of the students in the public school are in transit (this seems high, but I haven’t had a chance to fact check).  The Monroe Community School Corporation has a program to try to keep elementary school kids at the same school in a given year, even if their family moves to a different part of Bloomington.  But there are a lot more parallels between the education system and the prison system today.

Discipline, and particularly, the way it can be applied arbitrarily, and without any room for dialogue or explaination, is one similarity and a big one that I think resonates with many students.  My friends, who are in elementary school, go to a school where one of the control mechanisms in the classroom is a card system.  When an authority figure perceives a child as misbehaving, the child is made to change their card from green, to yellow, and eventually to red.  I’m not sure what the consequences are for each level, but the troubling part is that the system doesn’t allow for any discussion or the child’s perspective in why discipline was applied.  Also, it’s a school-wide mandate, so teachers don’t have much flexibility in deviating from this system.

While doing my mediation training, a woman from the juvenile probation district came and talked about the issue of truancy, and how she thought it was symptomatic of other conditions that students face in their lives, rather than the problem itself.  More than punishing students for truancy, they aim to find solutions that made going to school more workable given the difficulties in the students’ lives.  It’s a good example of a point where corrections and schools converge.

Finally, I’m reminded of the video on the school to prison pipeline that was part of this past summer’s media that matters film fest.
I think doing this presentation in the future, I would like to focus more on these parallels because I think it would engage the students more and empower them to think more critically.  It might make them look at things they find undesireable about schools as systemic faults that they could choose to try to change or not abide by, rather than an unpleasant inevitability.