September 99
American Friends Service Committee Peacework Magazine Patrica Watson, Editor Sara Burke, Assistant Editor Pat Farren, Founding Editor
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Fax number: pwork@igc.org Peacework has been published monthly since 1972, intended to serve as a source of dependable information to those who strive for peace and justice and are committed to furthering the nonviolent social change necessary to achieve them. Rooted in Quaker values and informed by AFSC experience and initiatives, Peacework offers a forum for organizers, fostering coalition-building and teaching the methods and strategies that work in the global and local community. Peacework seeks to serve as an incubator for social transformation, introducing a younger generation to a deeper analysis of problems and issues, reminding and re-inspiring long-term activists, encouraging the generations to listen to each other, and creating space for the voices of the disenfranchised. Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC. |
The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the US Prison Industry edited by Daniel Burton-Rose; Common Courage Press, 1998, 263 pp., $19.59
Horace Seldon, who for many years directed and still inspires Community Change in Boston, teaches about anti-racism at Boston College.
This book is about me. It may be about you. It is about the failure to be OUTRAGED at what we are allowing to be done with prisoners in the United States.
It is about commodification of prisoners. It is about privatization of prisons for profit. It is about punishment during incarceration. It is about prisons existing as closed societies with walls built to be impenetrable by prisoners from the inside and by the public from the outside. It is about a media which enflames a public mind set on punishment rather than correction. It is about ill-framed "three-strike" programs for uninformed political platforms. It is about long months of isolation punishment. It is about deprivation of basic human health services for prisoners. It is about massive cut-backs of educational programs, no longer offering hope for self-development. It is about TV's used as a kind of hypnotic opiate to pacify prisoners. It is about prisoner families deprived of contact. It is about reprisals, and pay-offs, and diabolic schemes to control thought and behavior. It is about death rows, and holes, and guard goon-squads. It is about lies and deception by prison administrators. It is about a 13th amendment to our Constitution which leaves open the possibility of involuntary servitude for those serving sentences for conviction of crime. It is about chain gangs. It is about forced cheap prison labor. It is about prisons built, prisons filled. It is about prisoner rebellions and protest, and massive responses to control.
This book is about the nature of our society. It is about a people who have no right to call ourselves civilized if we allow our prisoners to be treated as they are.
It is mostly by inmates or former inmates from our prisons. It is for advocates. It is for ME, YOU, a generally unknowing public kept in the dark, closed out from places of privilege.
This book demands ACTION; don't ever put it on a shelf!
Author's note: Two other "companion books"-White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race, by Ian F. Haney Lopez, NYU Press, l996 and Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience by Angelo N. Anchecta, Rutgers Univ Press, 1998-are very helpful in understanding how historical legal actions and opinions have shaped concepts of citizenship to the convenience of white privilege, and have placed groups of people, mainly Latino and Asian, in a racial spectrum which classified them as "outsiders," limiting possibilities for citizenship, and still suspect even when citizens.
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