WHAT PENAL ABOLITION MEANS TO ME
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
June 29, 2010
Yesterday on blogspot, I passed on a copy of response to the 13th International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA) organized by Queens University Belfast. In this essay, I want to address what that post meant to me when I did it. I haven’t checked email today, but as of yesterday the silence in response to my post was deafening. I can imagine quite a range of private reactions to why I posted as I did. I took up significant cyberspace to post essentially a letter I had written to Billy Brown reporting on ICOPA, and expressing gratitude for greeting me when I returned home from Belfast. How do I justify sending y’all that message?
I’m human.
I wanted first and foremost to let it be known that Billy the first person I reported on ICOPA to, in words that did not did not compromise him in the likely case that our correspondence is monitored. If indeed my mail is read before Billy receives it, maybe readers will learn something useful. I wanted to illustrate how a letter can be written openly and with honor and dignity to any reader. Notice in the letter that anything pejorative about Billy was about what was done to him rather than about him himself. I meant in my post to convey that in my own life, daily encounters with (ex-)prisoners continue to (re-)frame my daily interactions.
Being labeled a penal abolitionist carries a professional risk. I was just privileged and lucky enough to be able to move on to a third US research I university and overturn a denial of tenure there. I’m an academic survivor as an avowed penal abolitionist. Since I am as free to proclaim abolitionism as anyone else I know, I’m here to tell you that my own moral road down abolitionism is messy.
I am at risk of exploiting Billy Brown when I name him and share my letter to him. I tell myself that I am doing Billy honor, and revealing how little and grudgingly gave that trickled into transforming Billy’s life, by telling you about him and about how I try to help spread word among prisoners that there is freeworld understanding outside their walls. I am also revealing myself to be a pontificating, patronizing white male jerk. Bottom line: I really truly feel no superior knowledge to Billy’s.
I am curious to see other ICOPA 13 participants’ reactions to our time together.
Today I got my Ohio driver’s license…huge for me to get away still without glasses—love and peace--hal
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
What Penal Abolition means to me
WHAT PENAL ABOLITION MEANS TO ME
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
June 29, 2010
Yesterday on blogspot, I passed on a copy of response to the 13th International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA) organized by Queens University Belfast. In this essay, I want to address what that post meant to me when I did it. I haven’t checked email today, but as of yesterday the silence in response to my post was deafening. I can imagine quite a range of private reactions to why I posted as I did. I took up significant cyberspace to post essentially a letter I had written to Billy Brown reporting on ICOPA, and expressing gratitude for greeting me when I returned home from Belfast. How do I justify sending y’all that message?
I’m human.
I wanted first and foremost to let it be known that Billy the first person I reported on ICOPA to, in words that did not did not compromise him in the likely case that our correspondence is monitored. If indeed my mail is read before Billy receives it, maybe readers will learn something useful. I wanted to illustrate how a letter can be written openly and with honor and dignity to any reader. Notice in the letter that anything pejorative about Billy was about what was done to him rather than about him himself. I meant in my post to convey that in my own life, daily encounters with (ex-)prisoners continue to (re-)frame my daily interactions.
Being labeled a penal abolitionist carries a professional risk. I was just privileged and lucky enough to be able to move on to a third US research I university and overturn a denial of tenure there. I’m an academic survivor as an avowed penal abolitionist. Since I am as free to proclaim abolitionism as anyone else I know, I’m here to tell you that my own moral road down abolitionism is messy.
I am at risk of exploiting Billy Brown when I name him and share my letter to him. I tell myself that I am doing Billy honor, and revealing how little and grudgingly gave that trickled into transforming Billy’s life, by telling you about him and about how I try to help spread word among prisoners that there is freeworld understanding outside their walls. I am also revealing myself to be a pontificating, patronizing white male jerk. Bottom line: I really truly feel no superior knowledge to Billy’s.
I am curious to see other ICOPA 13 participants’ reactions to our time together.
Today I got my Ohio driver’s license…huge for me to get away still without glasses—love and peace
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
June 29, 2010
Yesterday on blogspot, I passed on a copy of response to the 13th International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA) organized by Queens University Belfast. In this essay, I want to address what that post meant to me when I did it. I haven’t checked email today, but as of yesterday the silence in response to my post was deafening. I can imagine quite a range of private reactions to why I posted as I did. I took up significant cyberspace to post essentially a letter I had written to Billy Brown reporting on ICOPA, and expressing gratitude for greeting me when I returned home from Belfast. How do I justify sending y’all that message?
I’m human.
I wanted first and foremost to let it be known that Billy the first person I reported on ICOPA to, in words that did not did not compromise him in the likely case that our correspondence is monitored. If indeed my mail is read before Billy receives it, maybe readers will learn something useful. I wanted to illustrate how a letter can be written openly and with honor and dignity to any reader. Notice in the letter that anything pejorative about Billy was about what was done to him rather than about him himself. I meant in my post to convey that in my own life, daily encounters with (ex-)prisoners continue to (re-)frame my daily interactions.
Being labeled a penal abolitionist carries a professional risk. I was just privileged and lucky enough to be able to move on to a third US research I university and overturn a denial of tenure there. I’m an academic survivor as an avowed penal abolitionist. Since I am as free to proclaim abolitionism as anyone else I know, I’m here to tell you that my own moral road down abolitionism is messy.
I am at risk of exploiting Billy Brown when I name him and share my letter to him. I tell myself that I am doing Billy honor, and revealing how little and grudgingly gave that trickled into transforming Billy’s life, by telling you about him and about how I try to help spread word among prisoners that there is freeworld understanding outside their walls. I am also revealing myself to be a pontificating, patronizing white male jerk. Bottom line: I really truly feel no superior knowledge to Billy’s.
I am curious to see other ICOPA 13 participants’ reactions to our time together.
Today I got my Ohio driver’s license…huge for me to get away still without glasses—love and peace
Sunday, June 27, 2010
on returning from the International Conference on Penal Abolition
a message to ICOPA people:
June 27, 2010
Dear ICOPA people,
To our QUB hosts, thanks so much for a wonderful conference and fertile ground for learning about things Irish and for renewing and starting friendships with kindred spirits. I returned to Central Ohio last evening with Angela Harvey, aglow with memories of the past week in Belfast. I felt the presence of the rest of you who were in Belfast in spirit if not in body.
Jehanne, I attach photographs of the spot where I scattered Louk’s ashes at my mother’s house, 519 Evergreen Circle, Worthington, Ohio. They lie at the foot of a sculpture by a late Ohio State faculty member and renowned artist David Black. The pictures show the sculpture, its background, and my mother's living room that faces it. What a coincidence that I should return home with Louk’s ashes just in time to celebrate my mother’s 91st birthday today.
When I got home last night the only personal mail I had was from Billy, imprisoned in Indiana. Billy Brown introduced himself to me by letter in 1998 as he began an eight-year stint at the 120-bed security housing unit in Carlisle. Bob Gaucher published an article of his on the experience in the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons. Now Billy is segregation at the Westville Correctional Center.
I have been corresponding with prisoners since I started teaching criminology. In so doing I have set some personal boundaries: I will not give, let alone lend, money to prisoners; I will not do lawyering, especially since I am no longer licensed to do anything legal anyplace. Billy was on 23-hour lockdown when his mother died. Since we met, I have been his sole contact outside his walls. Periodically from when we met, I turned him down when he asked for money.
Billy has been out of super-max custody for a couple of years now, and this year is in segregation, the warden tells me, because he had “gang literature” when they tossed his cell. In March, Billy once again asked me for money. I felt I had run out of excuses, I sent him fifty dollars. He asked for a dictionary. The first Oxford dictionary I mailed was turned down because in Indiana, books (only paperbacks) have to come from publishers or from a group like Midwest Pages to Prisoners. Billy got the dictionary the second time around. With it, he has organized a writing class that meets in his cell. He asked for a copy of Black’s Law Dictionary, which I got through amazon.com for a song. In his correspondence with me, he is suddenly transformed. Concern for helping his students has displaced his anger at those who cage him. He is exuberant in his letters.
When I first sent Billy money, I proposed to send a regular monthly amount to him. He told me he only wanted me to make deposits to his account when he told me he needed them. I have just responded to his first such request in the letter below.
New Zealander Pat Magill is my oldest ICOPA companion. At breakfast yesterday morning before I caught the plane home, Pat asked me, once more, what I thought we could do to make penal abolition happen. I responded that I had given up planning change. Pat calls himself an atheist, I call myself an agnostic. For the first time in our long relationship, I revealed to Pat that I believe that when I let myself engage in the human encounters that come my, things come together.
What an amazing trip. Thanks again one and all—love and peace, Hal
June 27, 2010
Dear Billy,
I got home last night from a week in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where I went to the North/South Irish Criminology Conference and the International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA). Here I found your letters. How wonderfully you write; as a response for starters, I’ve just put $50 in your commissary account. Just let me know when you need more.
My mother is 91 today. In an hour Jill and I will go and celebrate. July 6 she moves to a nursing home, leaving the home she and I moved into in 1957 that is just 2 miles down the road from Jill and me in Worthington. For years, she has called going to a nursing home “being incarcerated,” and from other places she has been while recovering from hip replacements, I agree. Happily, it is a warm, small place right in between my mom’s place and Jill’s and my place. It is just a mile’s walk down the house from our place. We can show up for any meal with her for free, and because her new home , unlike her own place, is wheel-chair accessible, we can take her out and bring her home to visit us anytime. I think she is coming to accept the change.
People who carry on sponsoring ICOPAs share a vision of a world without prisons, and beyond that, for resolving conflicts without resort to state force of any kind. I hosted the only ICOPA in the US in 1991 in Bloomington. ICOPA will not return to the US as long as felons from other countries are barred entry. For us who keep coming back, ICOPA is a place to charge our batteries, knowing that we are not crazy, not alone in mind and purpose. And then we also make new acquaintances. I met someone who teaches sociology at Ohio State, Angela Harvey, who lives in another Columbus suburb about ten miles from me. She is on the national steering committee for a group calling itself “Inside/Out,” where students in the freeworld get college credit for coming to class in prison side-by-side with prisoners who also qualify for college credit. Neat stuff! So now I have found a beer-buddy criminologist next door to hang out with. The daughter of a Dutch criminologist who helped found ICOPA in 1983 and died in March gave me a little wooden urn with some of her father’s ashes. At my mother’s birthday party, I will sprinkle Louk’s ashes outside my mother’s living room window, just past the circular walking path, at the foot of the surrounding forest; I will take pictures and send them to Jehanne for her to post on the web site for the Hulsman Foundation. Academic conferences are normally not all like what I get from coming back to ICOPAs.
It took me so many years as a freeworld adult to be able to cry because I could not afford to cry as a child, for loss of manhood. As you tell it, you cannot afford to cry where you are right now. But you know, with me, your emotions are right out there. Thanks for making me the one guy in the world you can let know, tears or no tears, how deeply you feel anger and love as anyone else on this planet. That’s pretty special. I consider shedding tears to be shedding of pain and anger. If you can’t shed tears literally, I feel your sharing of how you feel in your letters to me to be sacred. Thanks again.
I am sharing this letter with the email-list for those of us who were or had been ICOPA participants. It is fitting that I return from ICOPA to receive your mail.
Love and peace,
Hal Pepinsky
June 27, 2010
Dear ICOPA people,
To our QUB hosts, thanks so much for a wonderful conference and fertile ground for learning about things Irish and for renewing and starting friendships with kindred spirits. I returned to Central Ohio last evening with Angela Harvey, aglow with memories of the past week in Belfast. I felt the presence of the rest of you who were in Belfast in spirit if not in body.
Jehanne, I attach photographs of the spot where I scattered Louk’s ashes at my mother’s house, 519 Evergreen Circle, Worthington, Ohio. They lie at the foot of a sculpture by a late Ohio State faculty member and renowned artist David Black. The pictures show the sculpture, its background, and my mother's living room that faces it. What a coincidence that I should return home with Louk’s ashes just in time to celebrate my mother’s 91st birthday today.
When I got home last night the only personal mail I had was from Billy, imprisoned in Indiana. Billy Brown introduced himself to me by letter in 1998 as he began an eight-year stint at the 120-bed security housing unit in Carlisle. Bob Gaucher published an article of his on the experience in the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons. Now Billy is segregation at the Westville Correctional Center.
I have been corresponding with prisoners since I started teaching criminology. In so doing I have set some personal boundaries: I will not give, let alone lend, money to prisoners; I will not do lawyering, especially since I am no longer licensed to do anything legal anyplace. Billy was on 23-hour lockdown when his mother died. Since we met, I have been his sole contact outside his walls. Periodically from when we met, I turned him down when he asked for money.
Billy has been out of super-max custody for a couple of years now, and this year is in segregation, the warden tells me, because he had “gang literature” when they tossed his cell. In March, Billy once again asked me for money. I felt I had run out of excuses, I sent him fifty dollars. He asked for a dictionary. The first Oxford dictionary I mailed was turned down because in Indiana, books (only paperbacks) have to come from publishers or from a group like Midwest Pages to Prisoners. Billy got the dictionary the second time around. With it, he has organized a writing class that meets in his cell. He asked for a copy of Black’s Law Dictionary, which I got through amazon.com for a song. In his correspondence with me, he is suddenly transformed. Concern for helping his students has displaced his anger at those who cage him. He is exuberant in his letters.
When I first sent Billy money, I proposed to send a regular monthly amount to him. He told me he only wanted me to make deposits to his account when he told me he needed them. I have just responded to his first such request in the letter below.
New Zealander Pat Magill is my oldest ICOPA companion. At breakfast yesterday morning before I caught the plane home, Pat asked me, once more, what I thought we could do to make penal abolition happen. I responded that I had given up planning change. Pat calls himself an atheist, I call myself an agnostic. For the first time in our long relationship, I revealed to Pat that I believe that when I let myself engage in the human encounters that come my, things come together.
What an amazing trip. Thanks again one and all—love and peace, Hal
June 27, 2010
Dear Billy,
I got home last night from a week in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where I went to the North/South Irish Criminology Conference and the International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA). Here I found your letters. How wonderfully you write; as a response for starters, I’ve just put $50 in your commissary account. Just let me know when you need more.
My mother is 91 today. In an hour Jill and I will go and celebrate. July 6 she moves to a nursing home, leaving the home she and I moved into in 1957 that is just 2 miles down the road from Jill and me in Worthington. For years, she has called going to a nursing home “being incarcerated,” and from other places she has been while recovering from hip replacements, I agree. Happily, it is a warm, small place right in between my mom’s place and Jill’s and my place. It is just a mile’s walk down the house from our place. We can show up for any meal with her for free, and because her new home , unlike her own place, is wheel-chair accessible, we can take her out and bring her home to visit us anytime. I think she is coming to accept the change.
People who carry on sponsoring ICOPAs share a vision of a world without prisons, and beyond that, for resolving conflicts without resort to state force of any kind. I hosted the only ICOPA in the US in 1991 in Bloomington. ICOPA will not return to the US as long as felons from other countries are barred entry. For us who keep coming back, ICOPA is a place to charge our batteries, knowing that we are not crazy, not alone in mind and purpose. And then we also make new acquaintances. I met someone who teaches sociology at Ohio State, Angela Harvey, who lives in another Columbus suburb about ten miles from me. She is on the national steering committee for a group calling itself “Inside/Out,” where students in the freeworld get college credit for coming to class in prison side-by-side with prisoners who also qualify for college credit. Neat stuff! So now I have found a beer-buddy criminologist next door to hang out with. The daughter of a Dutch criminologist who helped found ICOPA in 1983 and died in March gave me a little wooden urn with some of her father’s ashes. At my mother’s birthday party, I will sprinkle Louk’s ashes outside my mother’s living room window, just past the circular walking path, at the foot of the surrounding forest; I will take pictures and send them to Jehanne for her to post on the web site for the Hulsman Foundation. Academic conferences are normally not all like what I get from coming back to ICOPAs.
It took me so many years as a freeworld adult to be able to cry because I could not afford to cry as a child, for loss of manhood. As you tell it, you cannot afford to cry where you are right now. But you know, with me, your emotions are right out there. Thanks for making me the one guy in the world you can let know, tears or no tears, how deeply you feel anger and love as anyone else on this planet. That’s pretty special. I consider shedding tears to be shedding of pain and anger. If you can’t shed tears literally, I feel your sharing of how you feel in your letters to me to be sacred. Thanks again.
I am sharing this letter with the email-list for those of us who were or had been ICOPA participants. It is fitting that I return from ICOPA to receive your mail.
Love and peace,
Hal Pepinsky
Friday, June 11, 2010
burdens of proof
“Evidence-Based” Wishful Thinking
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
June 11, 2010
You can’t accommodate violence if you can’t recognize the full extent of it. Today even from generally critical news sources I hear that evidence from the Gulf of Mexico indicates that the gush of oil from the ocean floor won’t be stopped until two relief wells have been drilled in August. Cutting off oil blowouts even in shallow water is a tricky trial-and-error process at best (see http://blogs.ft.com/energy-source/2010/06/01/how-difficult-are-relief-wells-some-comparisons-with-montara/ ).
Every time BP promises containment, the gush of oil continues. Today the USG estimates the flow to be greater than earlier thought, and that is before BP cut through the riser in its latest attempt at containment.
If this were courtroom testimony, BP would by now be thoroughly discredited, and so would government and media sources who believe that two “relief” holes will cut off the Gulf blowout come August. Maybe so. Drill baby drill, and perhaps this time history will not repeat itself and BP will finally shut the blowout off. I say that on its face, there is no more reason to rely on this miracle than Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara had to rely on evidence of “light at the end of the tunnel” in the Vietnam war in 1967. Now as in 1967, we continue to believe that human will and effort can triumph over catastrophic human disaster.
It didn’t take me long after law school to discover that burdens of evidence depend on what we jurors or evaluators are prepared to believe. Right now, we are unprepared to accept that we cannot close that BP has opened in the Gulf. We are unprepared to accept that self-employment is the only option other than combat for global “redundancy.” As I recognized a week ago once more, we are unprepared to recognize that the greatest physical threat to our own children are adults like ourselves into whose care we most entrust our children.
“Evidence based” has become a cliché in my own field of criminology for the continuing myth that underclass young men of color, especially in places on the other side of the planet like Afghanistan/Pakistan, are the greatest threat to our capacity to sustain one another at home. As an advocate, I have sat in on all manner of administrative and legal forums for assessing “best evidence.” I have learned that the weight of evidence depends on what listeners want most strongly to believe. I continue to find that the burden of evidence rests on those who as Max Weber put it put forward
“inconvenient facts.” One of my principles of peacemaking is that would-be peacemakers know the world to be far more seriously violent than warmakers allow themselves to acknowledge. Such is the reality of human burdens of proof. Love and peace--Hal
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
June 11, 2010
You can’t accommodate violence if you can’t recognize the full extent of it. Today even from generally critical news sources I hear that evidence from the Gulf of Mexico indicates that the gush of oil from the ocean floor won’t be stopped until two relief wells have been drilled in August. Cutting off oil blowouts even in shallow water is a tricky trial-and-error process at best (see http://blogs.ft.com/energy-source/2010/06/01/how-difficult-are-relief-wells-some-comparisons-with-montara/ ).
Every time BP promises containment, the gush of oil continues. Today the USG estimates the flow to be greater than earlier thought, and that is before BP cut through the riser in its latest attempt at containment.
If this were courtroom testimony, BP would by now be thoroughly discredited, and so would government and media sources who believe that two “relief” holes will cut off the Gulf blowout come August. Maybe so. Drill baby drill, and perhaps this time history will not repeat itself and BP will finally shut the blowout off. I say that on its face, there is no more reason to rely on this miracle than Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara had to rely on evidence of “light at the end of the tunnel” in the Vietnam war in 1967. Now as in 1967, we continue to believe that human will and effort can triumph over catastrophic human disaster.
It didn’t take me long after law school to discover that burdens of evidence depend on what we jurors or evaluators are prepared to believe. Right now, we are unprepared to accept that we cannot close that BP has opened in the Gulf. We are unprepared to accept that self-employment is the only option other than combat for global “redundancy.” As I recognized a week ago once more, we are unprepared to recognize that the greatest physical threat to our own children are adults like ourselves into whose care we most entrust our children.
“Evidence based” has become a cliché in my own field of criminology for the continuing myth that underclass young men of color, especially in places on the other side of the planet like Afghanistan/Pakistan, are the greatest threat to our capacity to sustain one another at home. As an advocate, I have sat in on all manner of administrative and legal forums for assessing “best evidence.” I have learned that the weight of evidence depends on what listeners want most strongly to believe. I continue to find that the burden of evidence rests on those who as Max Weber put it put forward
“inconvenient facts.” One of my principles of peacemaking is that would-be peacemakers know the world to be far more seriously violent than warmakers allow themselves to acknowledge. Such is the reality of human burdens of proof. Love and peace--Hal
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
I Feel the Earth Shift (Carole King)
I FEEL THE EARTH MOVE, UNDER MY FEET (Carole King)…
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu; pepinsky.blogspot.com
June 9, 2010
I feel myself living in the midst of when prophecy fails in the Gulf of Mexico. I think all of us who live in the Eastern United States are trying to stave off reality, which as I see reality, is elemental inference from the oil wound in the Gulf.
The US government persuaded BP to drill a second “relief well” to take a shot on shutting off oil hemorrhage. It is reported that the government demanded BP drill a second relief hole because the chances are so slim that either hole will connect with a magic 6-8 inches of hole to shut off the perhaps 100,000 barrels of oil that are due to spew out of the Mexico gulf wound for what an oil hydrologist on democracynow.org today project is enough pressure to keep spewing for 20-30 years.
I see no way that the already overfished, arctically melting Euro-American-centered North Atlantic Ocean will tilt a global re-balance, in which Euro-Americo-Atlanticus becomes a human wasteland.
No need to panic. Most everyone who reads this message is for our lifetimes relatively, personally survivable. But let’s be honest among ourselves: In echoes across the North Atlantic gulf stream from below New Orleans to above Reykjavik, the era of Euro-American imperialism is ending, and for generations to come, the North Atlantic region will largely wallow in its own waste. I don’t wish my own family and friends in this portion of the globe any ill will, but it just seems that we in the North Atlantic community are becoming global climatic refugees of our own making. I hope we live with this new reality in grace and mutual dignity. Love and peace--hal
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu; pepinsky.blogspot.com
June 9, 2010
I feel myself living in the midst of when prophecy fails in the Gulf of Mexico. I think all of us who live in the Eastern United States are trying to stave off reality, which as I see reality, is elemental inference from the oil wound in the Gulf.
The US government persuaded BP to drill a second “relief well” to take a shot on shutting off oil hemorrhage. It is reported that the government demanded BP drill a second relief hole because the chances are so slim that either hole will connect with a magic 6-8 inches of hole to shut off the perhaps 100,000 barrels of oil that are due to spew out of the Mexico gulf wound for what an oil hydrologist on democracynow.org today project is enough pressure to keep spewing for 20-30 years.
I see no way that the already overfished, arctically melting Euro-American-centered North Atlantic Ocean will tilt a global re-balance, in which Euro-Americo-Atlanticus becomes a human wasteland.
No need to panic. Most everyone who reads this message is for our lifetimes relatively, personally survivable. But let’s be honest among ourselves: In echoes across the North Atlantic gulf stream from below New Orleans to above Reykjavik, the era of Euro-American imperialism is ending, and for generations to come, the North Atlantic region will largely wallow in its own waste. I don’t wish my own family and friends in this portion of the globe any ill will, but it just seems that we in the North Atlantic community are becoming global climatic refugees of our own making. I hope we live with this new reality in grace and mutual dignity. Love and peace--hal
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