General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsYour Home Is Your Prison
On January 27th, domestic violence survivor Marissa Alexander will walk out of Florida's Duval County jail -- but she won't be free.
Alexander, whose case has gained some notoriety, endured three years of jail time and a year of house arrest while fighting off a prison sentence that would have seen her incarcerated for the rest of her life -- all for firing a warning shot that injured no one to fend off her abusive husband. Like many black women before her, Alexander was framed as a perpetrator in a clear case of self-defense. In November, as her trial date drew close, Alexander accepted a plea deal that will likely give her credit for time served, requiring her to spend "just" 65 more days in jail. Media coverage of the development suggested that Alexander would soon have her "freedom," that she would be "coming home."
Many accounts of the plea deal, however, missed what Alexander will be coming home to: she'll return to "home detention" -- house arrest -- for two years.
In other words, an electronic monitor, secured around her ankle at all times, will track her every movement. Alexander will also be paying $105 per week to the state in monitoring fees, as is the custom in Florida and more than a dozen other states.
Such a situation is certainly preferable to being caged in a prison cell. However, does Alexander's release -- and that of others in her shoes -- mean freedom? In reality, an ever-growing number of cages are proliferating around us, even if they assume forms that look nothing like our standard idea of a cage.
As mass incarceration is falling out of fashion -- it's been denounced by figures across the political spectrum from Eric Holder to Newt Gingrich -- a whole slate of "alternatives to incarceration" has arisen. From electronic monitoring and debilitating forms of probation to mandatory drug testing and the sort of "predictive policing" that turns communities of color into open-air prisons, these alternatives are regularly presented as necessary "reforms" for a broken system.
Its worth remembering, however, that when the modern prison emerged in the late eighteenth century, it, too, was promoted as a "reform," a positive replacement for corporal or capital punishment. Early prison reformers -- many of them Quakers bent on repentance and redemption -- suggested that cutting people off from the rest of the world would bring them closer to God. (The word "penitentiary" comes, of course, from "penitence."
An oppressive version of surveillance played a central role in this vision, as in British reformer Jeremy Bentham's famed Panopticon, a model prison in which inspectors would be able to view prisoners at any moment, day or night, while themselves remaining invisible. If the ultimate Panopticon never quite came into existence, Benthams idea profoundly influenced the development of the prison as a place in which, for the prisoner, no time or space was inviolable and privacy was a fiction.
As an idea, the Panopticon remains embedded in our notion of state discipline. Now, it is spreading out of the prison and into the neighborhood and the home, which is hardly surprising in a society in which surveillance and monitoring are becoming the accepted norms of everyday life. Like the plans of the early reformers, many current prison "reforms" share a common element: they perpetuate the fantasy that new forms of confinement, isolation, and surveillance will somehow set us all free.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maya-schenwar/marissa-alexander-house-arrest_b_6497786.html
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)and recommended!
brush
(53,801 posts)What happens if she doesn't have the money every week to pay that, does she go back to jail?
Finding a job for her is going to be extremely hard so how is she supposed to pay that for two years?
After putting her through all they did, that's pretty cruel if you ask me.
brer cat
(24,587 posts)on top of that, possibly court fees, both of which vary by state. It can be hard-to-impossible to pay when jobs are hard to find for anyone, much less someone just out of prison. I think in most cases a return to jail is the result of non payment.
brush
(53,801 posts)but they set up impossible conditions for her to meet so they could get her back in jail.
I just don't get the reason for the cruelty.
It almost goes beyond just racism, like sadism or something.
KingCharlemagne
(7,908 posts)a "prison state," where those of us fortunate enough not to be held behind bars or in various states of probation are still experiencing merely the minimum security level of said prison state. There is no longer even the pretense of habeas corpus nor of due process.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Padilla_%28prisoner%29
TheKentuckian
(25,029 posts)Trillo
(9,154 posts)Perhaps the answer lies in where that $450 per month comes from. If it comes from a part-time minimum wage job, it would require 56 hours of monthly labor to gross $450, and more hours if taxes are withheld. That's almost a week and a half or more of full-time work. Where does rent and food money come from?
I'm not sure that scenario is preferable to being in prison. Perhaps if she can find full-time living-wage work, then her economic scenario changes.
freshwest
(53,661 posts)It says Alexander will be paying over $16 a year for this alternative. The story itself of what was done to her gets my BP going high, really angry. But how the author misses the obvious when describing in such detail everything else, is beyond me.
The article leaps from the way people live in the real world to a well-justified rant on the case and the 'home detention' scam, which the article describes as literally in the house itself, nothing going on outside the home.
How is she supposed to pay for these costs, not to mention what everyone knows, the cost of living such as rent, food, utilities? Are we to believe she has income, not going out to work, that she would make this money at home?
This lends an improbable element to the main story, which quickly goes into a system of predatory 'non-imprisonment.' I'm fine with that, but don't know how the author ignores the basics of how people live. I find this often in media stories, and although I don't expect every article to add in income inequality and the lack of respect for workers and the poor as part of their concerns, it seems to indicate a level of being removed from most of us.
The image of Marissa Alexander as presented in media is not one of independent wealth who does not have to bothered with work to meet expenses. Hope someone will explain how this works. TIA.