Resistances: La torture dans tous ces Etats américains

May 2, 2013 by 2 Comments

Dans la même semaine la torture a été à l’honneur deux fois aux Etats Unis. Tout d’abord Asa Hutchinson, un ancien représentant républicain au Congrès, ancien sous-secrétaire d’Etat  au département de la sécurité intérieure sous le gouvernement George W. Bush, et un des deux rapporteurs de la commission d’étude sur le traitement des détenus après le 11 Septembre, a présenté à la presse le rapport qui conclu officiellement que les Etats Unis, sous la présidence de G W Bush, ont pratiqué la torture pour interroger ses prisonniers après les attentats du 11septembre.

Il a déclare : “We found that U.S. personnel, in many instances, used interrogation techniques on detainees that constitute torture. American personnel conducted an even larger number of interrogations that involved cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment. Both categories of actions violate U.S. laws and international treaty obligations.”

« Nous avons constaté que le personnel américain, dans de nombreux cas, a utilisé des techniques d’interrogation des détenus qui constituent une torture. Le personnel américain a mené un plus grand nombre d’interrogations qui ont impliqué un traitement cruel, inhumain ou dégradant. Les deux catégories d’actions violent les lois américaines et les obligations des traités internationaux. »

Parallèlement, la chambre de l’Etat du Maryland (un Etat mitoyen de Washington) a refusé d’examiner en dernière partie de session pour l’année 2013 une loi qui aurait interdit d’entraver les femmes enceintes emprisonnées dans le Maryland durant les deux derniers semestres et l’accouchement. Les autorités pénitentiaires assurent que cette loi n’est pas utile puisque les femmes ne seraient attachées qu’en cas de nécessité.

Les associations de défenses des femmes prisonnières, telle que Power Inside, ont fourni des témoignages accablants démontrant que les femmes étaient très souvent entravées. Cela laisse à penser que les cas de nécessité sont donc fondés sur des paramètres qui ne respectent en rien la dignité de ces femmes.

Quelques données nous permettent de comprendre que les standards d’humanité sont déplacés. Un tiers des femmes emprisonnées dans le monde le sont aux Etats Unis. Dans trente deux Etats il est légal d’enchainer ou de menotter des femmes enceintes y compris lors de l’accouchement. Les mères font parties de la population carcérale dont le nombre augmente le plus rapidement. Bien souvent, on emprisonne les femmes avant leur procès, par exemple, dans le Maryland, à Baltimore 90% des femmes incarcérées, dont 79% sont noires, attendent d’être jugées. De plus la grande majorité des femmes sont envoyées en prison pour des crimes non-violents.

La loi actuelle dit que dans le Maryland les menottes, les entraves ou chaines pour les jambes et le ventre peuvent être utilisées pour maitriser/contrôler les femmes enceintes pendant le transport, le travail, l’accouchement et les suites d’accouchement.

Les témoignages sont là, Angela a eu les mains et pieds attachés pendant son transport a l’hôpital et une grande partie du travail et ce n’est que sur l’insistance du docteur qu’elle a accouche sans chaine, de même Danielle raconte son accouchement attachée et humiliée avec plusieurs voyages a l’hôpital toujours avec des entraves aux chevilles et aux mains.

Il nous faut reconsidérer ce que torture veut dire. Avons nous besoin de lois internationales pour imposer aux Etats Unis de traiter les femmes enceintes incarcérées avec respect. La grossesse constitue un grand moment de vulnérabilité pour les femmes défavorisées en général. De plus les lois sont aussi punitives que les aides sociales manquent gravement et que la précarité augmente.

Déjà en 2010 le rapport sur le respect par les Etats-Unis de ses obligations en matière de droits de l’homme dans le domaine de la santé reproductive et sexuelle remis pour revue aux Nations Unis, faisait état de la torture quotidienne infligée aux femmes les plus vulnérables.

Malgré tout, dans le Maryland la loi qui aurait protégé les femmes enceintes emprisonnées est restée sans suite.

Brigitte Marti bridgemarti@gmail.com

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Resistances: Demand state responsibility or is the state a vendor of misery?

April 17, 2013 by 1 Comment

Last Friday, in a post about the imprisonment of asylum seekers in private facilities in Australia, Dan Moshenberg demanded that the state be held responsible for the atrocities committed on hunger strikers who were in prison and never charged with any crime whatsoever.  What would constitute a public policy in which the state contracts its responsibility?

The same day, the New York Times reported that the presence of police in schools has resulted in an increased number of children in the criminal justice system. For over twenty years, police officers have been present inside middle and high schools across the United States. After the most recent school shootings, the NRA has lobbied hard for having more police officers in school. According to the Times, with the help of federal subsidies, local districts pay for their own police. Does this mean that patrolling schools has become a new business that is contracted to the police, which was once a public service agency? Does the school police budget compete with the school educational budget? Shouldn’t those scarce and dwindling resources be allocated to enhance the pedagogical and educational role of schools?

Contracted police surveillance had hurt more than it’s helped. Rather than `keep the peace’, police presence have created more schoolhouse disturbances, and has contributed to channeling youth – particularly African American, Hispanic and disabled students – into the penal system. The marriage of school and police has increased the vulnerability of the already-most-vulnerably by interrupting their schooling, instead of giving them the support they need.

A 15-year-old student talking to Democracy Now about the school-to-prison-pipeline in New York City had this advice for mayor Bloomberg: “Take all the amount of student safety agents that you get in schools, take the amount of funding you give them, and give it to the school, give it to the Department of Education, so they can give it to our schools. If I was running a school, the perfect school for me would be more restorative justice, peer mediation, clubs in schools that actually the students actually want to go to and feel like they belong to, and no student safety agents and no metal detectors.”

From Australia’s detention of asylum seekers to the police surveillance of middle and high school students in the United States, unfair, and often brutal, treatment has been turned into a commodity. Let’s demand that the state be accountable for having sold off its responsibility.

Brigitte Marti bridgemarti@gmail.com

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Resistances: Censoring women and poetry

March 29, 2013 by 2 Comments

“They hate our freedom,” said President Bush in 2001. We are not sure who “they” were or what freedom he was talking about, but the statement was presumptuous and based on false arguments. What freedom are we talking about? What are its dimensions, who is allowed to hold it and who not, how much can we have, and who places limits on it and how?

In a recent Performance Poets gathering in a chain bookstore, poet Pramila Venkateswaran read her poem entitled “Ode to the Vagina.” Two parents passing by with their children heard the words of the poem. They complained to the chain about the language that they overheard that evoked female body parts. Notwithstanding that it was a reading space for a special event, the chain commanded the host, Performance Poets, out. The latter had to apologize and state that they would make sure that invited poets would not read anything that was injurious, hateful and obscene. As Venkasteswaran said, the poem talked about the sacredness of the woman’s body, not its obscenity. How did writing about the female body become an object of censorship? That is the real question.

Spaces for poetry and other art works are sparse in corporate America and are increasingly under scrutiny of standardized definitions of morality that impede dissent or simply questioning, one of the beauties of poetry. The poet Aimé Cesaire once said that poetry is a way of saying everything while seeming to say nothing, but everything is there. He thought that he could get around censorship. Is it still possible to do that under the current neoliberal order? Meanwhile, the same corporate world uses public airwaves to bombard children with incredible violence and denigration of women.

And forget about poetry; a high school teacher may lose his job for using the word vagina…

For the sake of freedom, here is the poem:

Ode to the Vagina

Strictly vertical , as if you were bisecting
A woman’s lips, you loosen up with time.
You speak volumes, learning to shed
Learned shame the more you understand
Yourself.

You first saw yourself in a mirror
And drew back in horror at your
Dark amorphousness, as once men did
When they thought you had teeth that would
Dismember them.

People thought your tongue was dangerous,
It made them want you more when they
Found you enjoyed receiving them.
But when you expressed yourself more,
you were shunned.

You did not rest, for rest to you was death.
Instead you embraced your darkness.
It kept calling out to you, come, come,
you yearned to enter it,
this jet brilliance of space,
emptiness that knows itself without
intermediaries, the beginning,
velvet and longing, bearing creation
after creation after creation after
creation.

You are goddess, unquenchable
weaving an endless yarn. You are
endless, but no yarn, for you are no fake,
despite your games sometimes
of acting, faking some beached creature
wailing its diminuendo—that’s your recreation.

But deep within, you are surprise and
cornucopia. Old age and desert sands
are not in your language. You speak
of rivers, you sport in soft sand
that turns with the moon, you know
how to rebel, how to give and take,
you know the delicate ring of fire
that the barbaric will enter despite
your shrill “No.” You know that the barbarian
is your own personal stranger.

You reignite,
you choose,
you want to wake
up to your own solitary self.

by Pramila Venkateswaran

 

Brigitte Marti bridgemarti@gmail.com

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Resistances: Revealing the code of silence that rules reproductive rights

March 8, 2013 by Leave a Comment

In Algeria abortion is simply illegal. A woman can be punished by six months to two years in prison and a fine. The abortionist is subject to one to five years in prison and a hefty fine.

According to the president of a women’s rights association, as reported in the Algerian newspaper L’Expression, there are about 80 000 abortions a year for 775 000 pregnancies in Algeria. The police reported only 27 cases in 2012. So what is happening in Algeria?

The code of silence is the rule.

Women who seek help with unwanted pregnancies have few options and they all imply a sense of shame and fear. The rule is to use word of mouth information and have enough money, on average $400, which is high price in Algeria.

The journalist of L’Expression follows the same principle of word of mouth to investigate the providers’ identities, how women get information and how the procedure is performed. It leads him and his partner to doctors who are militant and outraged by the situation as well as to charlatans who take advantage of women’s desperate search for relief. In any case, women are ashamed, isolated and have no protection and no recourse as they face horrendous medical consequences.

The article sends a clear message that this situation is shameful for society and that it has to change. As the reporters note, there have been changes, especially with the advent of the Internet. Women in Algeria have begun to engage in a public forum to break the rule of silence. We have seen the possibilities of these strong women’s voices in neighboring countries.

The code of silence has become the rule as well for many women in the United States seeking reproductive services where, law after law, women’s right are being restricted, putting many women to precarious situations. In 42 states restrictions on abortion rights have already been anticipated under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which will be enacted in 2014.

2012 has been the second year with the greatest number of new legislation to restrict access to reproductive services such as abortion, with about 122 provisions related to restrict access to reproductive health. Being a woman at the age of reproduction is a risky condition … in the United States as in Algeria.

Stop the code of silence, let’s hear women’s voices and respect their right to be.

Brigitte Marti bridgemarti@gmail.com

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Resistances: Plenty of reasons to be outraged

February 21, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Jessica Valenti started a recent address with a question that she said a young man asked her: “Why are you so angry?” She immediately said that she was not angry but sad and exhausted. Then after enumerating a series of laws and actions against women and reminding the audience that the Hyde Amendment has nullified the Roe decision for many financially vulnerable women, she finally admitted that she is angry: “I am angry that forty years after Roe, women are still fighting for recognition of our basic humanity.”

The fact is that there are plenty of reasons to be outraged.

A recent study demonstrates that, in the United States, many actors are eager to deny women their basic humanity and access to care and are already doing great harm to pregnant women thanks to recent legislation that put a pregnant woman in a lower rank than a fetus.

The feticide laws have encouraged and required health providers to inform police of pregnant patients who had problems with drugs. Many providers comply with these demands quite easily, especially when their patients are African Americans and/or poor. In many instances, for women patients, and especially for African American women patients, there is no medical confidentiality.

Why are so many American doctors ready to relinquish their medical ethical responsibility toward their women patients? A court can put a fetus in protective custody with a guardian to the fetus being appointed by a court decision requiring “the fetus to be detained…and transported” to the local hospital for “in patient treatment and protection.” The care of the mother is not considered, whether by health care providers of the pregnant woman or whether by the court.

Where are medical ethical rules for women like Laura Pemberton who wanted to have a vaginal delivery after having had a C-section? Her doctor used a court order to perform the surgical procedure. Pemberton was strapped and hauled off to a judge who decided her fate. Neither she nor her husband was allowed legal assistance.

In case after case, pregnant women who have sought help for reasons ranging from problems with drugs to requesting vaginal birth as the first option have been threatened and persecuted instead of being helped, and all of this with the approval of their own health care provider.

Where are the social workers and social programs to support women with the problem of drug addiction? Instead, their lives are torn apart even more?

Astonishingly, already inadequate access to health care is threatened during pregnancy, especially, but not only, for women who live in precarious conditions. They need to be listened to in order to receive the most appropriate care. Instead of receiving health care, they get prison.

Absurd situations have been created to intimidate and even terrorize pregnant women.  Sometimes the State goes to unbelievable lengths. For example, one woman was imprisoned because she “did willfully and unlawfully give birth to a male infant”.   In its absurdity, the wording of the official court document shows the profound disdain for the life of the pregnant woman

Sending pregnant women to prison in the name of protection of the personhood of the fetus while prenatal care provided by the state to incarcerated women is notoriously inadequate, if not absent, is absurd … and criminal.

There is an alternative.

Under the Nazi occupation of France, authorities commanded French doctors to report any wounded person. The board of the newly formed French Medical Association responded immediately:

“The President of the French Medical Association takes this occasion to remind every colleague that when called to assist the sick or the wounded, there is only one mission to fulfill and that is to deliver care. Respect for professional confidentiality is a necessary condition for the trust those who are ill have in their physicians. No administrative reason whatsoever exists that allows you to free yourself from this obligation.”

This declaration was sent to every doctor in the country. It became the nonnegotiable rule of ethics. It still is. This declaration is engraved on marble and is visible in the hall of the French Medical Association building in Paris. It is also taught in medical school to future doctors who would have eventually to fight for their patients’ protection. To this day, medical confidentiality is key and protects patients, even in court.

Doctors, nurses and other medical and social workers should be protecting women, who deserve the care they need. Instead, they have become `providers’, removing their human responsibility that the French doctors once understood to be their unbreakable ethical duty. Alternatives to state brutality already exist. Being ethical sometimes demands resistance to inhuman laws.

Brigitte Marti bridgemarti@gmail.com

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Resistances: French prison workers win the right to labor protection!

February 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Until now in France, being employed while incarcerated was not placed under labor protection of the civil society. Instead, it was regulated by the prison system. There was no work contract and wages were as much as three times less than minimum wage. On Friday, a court decision changed all that, placing prison workers’ protection under the regime of regular labor laws.

While in jail as a remand prisoner, Marilyn Moureau worked for a phone company. She was laid off for having placed personal phone calls during her work time. In the language of prison management, she was “déclassé” (displaced), a term designed to mark the difference between prison labor and `real’ work. She took her former employer to the Labor Relations Board (prud’homme) and charged them for not respecting proper employment procedures. She won and got everything that is guaranteed by law for workers, including damages and compensation.

This is an important decision because it asserts that work is work whether workers are incarcerated or not. Labor rights should apply to every worker, including prisoners. It also states that people must keep their civil visibility while in jail or prison.

Moreau’s lawyer declared, “It is a great day for all the prisoners of France … an historical decision!”  Let’s hope it inspires the struggle fight to induce changes in worker protection around the world.

Brigitte Marti, bridgemarti@gmail.com

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Resistances: Where’s the outrage at the forced powerlessness of pregnant women?

February 4, 2013 by 2 Comments

According to a recent study, as described in a post here last month, in the United States, being a person is tricky business if you are pregnant, poor, or a woman of color. That study responds to two sets of interrelated events: [1] the effort to pass laws that give a fetus the constitutional right of a person, thus far passed in 38 states; and [2] the increased number of arrests and incarceration of pregnant women.

The study raises many questions, ranging from the conceptualization of protection, including medical care, based on the socioeconomic status of the pregnant woman, to the concept of fetus personhood. Fetus personhood was embedded in the Roe v Wade decision in its discussion of a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy as “not absolute, and … subject to some limitations…. A State may properly assert important interests in safeguarding health, in maintaining medical standards, and in protecting potential life.”

Pregnant women have been incarcerated with greater frequency because of the establishment of a process that renders them available and appropriate to incarceration. The study identifies that process through the records and examination of the incarceration of pregnant women in the United States between 1973 and 2005. In every case the bases of arrest was the protection of the personhood of the fetus.

Being-pregnant, then, has become being-powerless. At one level, this is not new. In Beggars and Choosers, Rickie Solinger recounts how officials used White pregnant teenagers to fuel the adoption business: “Beginning in the late 1940s, community and government authorities together developed a raft of strategies some quite coercive, to press white unwed mothers to relinquish their babies to deserving couples” (70). Those teenagers were presented as “mentally disturbed” because they failed to have a husband to protect them, “a proof of neurosis,” making them potential bad mothers. The same authorities singled out and removed unwed Black teenage mothers from any public assistance, intensifying their already precarious situation.

In both cases the personhood of the young woman was reduced to being a carrier in which the state had a prevailing interest of control and protection. In this historical context, the Roe v Wade decision allowed the same ambivalence to be developed concerning the personhood of all women, with the invisible hand of the state ready to take over a woman’s right to control her body.

The study emphasizes the responsibility of the perverse effects of this lack of clarity of the woman’s existence as a person with regard to women’s versus fetus’ personhood. These effects created an insidious web of laws, which have led to the mounting incarceration of pregnant women. The fact that 38 states passed feticide or similar laws that have justified the arrest of pregnant women is no accident.

As we saw with Aaron Swartz’s suicide prompted by the violence of the American justice system, no campaign with celebrities and intellectual was organized to defend an individual who tried to defend our rights. In the case of both incarcerated pregnant women and Aaron Swartz, the outcry is limited and will probably remain so, thanks to the combined power of the State and a Civil Society that bends to corporate needs and wishes. Every day in this country, women are imprisoned because they are less important, they have less being-in-the-world, than something called the protection of “potential life.” Where is the outrage?

Brigitte Marti, bridgemarti@gmail.com

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Resistances: Violence against women has many faces

November 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment

November 25th is marked as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. This date was decided upon in the United Nations to remember the assassination of the Mirabal sisters by the Trujillo regime, in the Dominican Republic, November 25, 1960.

This day is to raise awareness of the fact that women around the world are subject to rape and domestic violence and other forms of violence. The secretary general of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon declared: “Millions of women and girls around the world are assaulted, beaten, raped, mutilated or even murdered in what constitutes appalling violations of their human rights. [...] We must fundamentally challenge the culture of discrimination that allows violence to continue. On this International Day, I call on all governments to make good on their pledges to end all forms of violence against women and girls in all parts of the world, and I urge all people to support this important goal.”

Should the European Union support this important goal and challenge the culture of discrimination within its behavior as an institution, as crimes against women are committed in member states? The death of Savita Halappanavar for denied therapeutic abortion in Ireland is only one of numerous cases of women being killed or injured because some States still have laws denying reproductive care to women. Those laws have remained the same sometimes since the 19th century. For instance in Ireland, doctors or nurses who help women who seek an abortion are punishable under the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861 that prescribes a minimum sentence of two years hard labor and can result in a life sentence.

The nomination of Tonio Borg (overtly against women and LGBT’s rights) as the new commissioner for Health will accentuate the impossibility for the European commission to stop state-legitimized violence against women in Member States with anti abortion, restrictive reproduction laws, such as Ireland, Poland,  and Malta. These laws are generalized in many countries from Africa to the Americas, including the United States.

Restrictions for women are economic as well. Where contraceptives are expensive or simply difficult to obtain, abortion services are generally illegal or restricted. Meanwhile, women are in the main still economically dependent.

Having a weak health commission in the Europe Union is no surprise. It results from lobbying from member states that don’t want to see the European convention on human rights and parliamentary resolutions applied to health care and in particular to women’s reproductive health. If women’s reproductive health were seen as a human right, those members who are inconsistent with EU conventions would finally be held accountable.

Violence against women has many faces. Often the violence stems from state denial of services or state practices of humiliated access to important services. In Baltimore, Maryland, for example, as in much of the United States, incarcerated pregnant women travel shackled to medical appointments.  These women are seen in regular hospitals walking among other patients with their guards and shackles.  Their treatment and humiliation is shaped by federal, state or local policies, which even force them to deliver their babies in chains, putting their lives at risk exactly as Savita Halappanavar lost hers.

Brigitte Marti, bridgemarti@gmail.com

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Resistances: Mixing human rights, peace and violence against women

November 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment

This year the European Union received the Nobel Peace Prize. Was it for having the only human rights court in the world with binding judgments? Was it for its Erasmus program that has broken down nationalistic sentiments through education? Or was it for its new take on women’s rights with the nomination of a new commissioner for Health and Consumer Policy—Tonio Borg from Malta—who is notorious for his harsh positions against LGBT and also against women who resort to having an abortion for various reasons (including for malformations of fetus)?

Borg has been the foreign minister of Malta until his recent confirmation by the European Parliament of his nomination by 386 votes in favor and 281 against with 28 abstentions. The former commissioner John Dalli was from Malta as well, and had to resign for collusion with the tobacco industry to influence European decisions on tobacco legislation. This time, the commissioner will be in collusion with the anti women’s rights groups.

This new development highlights the ambivalence of the European Union’s women’s rights approach.

The parliamentary Assembly Resolution 1607 (2008) questions the antiabortion position of some member states: “The Assembly is nonetheless concerned that, in many of these states, numerous conditions are imposed and restrict the effective access to safe, affordable, acceptable and appropriate abortion services. These restrictions have discriminatory effects, since women who are well informed and possess adequate financial means can often obtain legal and safe abortions more easily.”

Article 7.5 insists on the means to address restrictions on access to safe and appropriate abortion services: “7.5. adopt evidence-based appropriate sexual and reproductive health and rights strategies and policies, ensuring continued improvements and expansion of non-judgmental sex and relationships information and education, as well as contraceptive services, through increased investments from the national budgets into improving health systems, reproductive health supplies and information.”

Conservative MEP (Members of European Parliaments) have argued that Borg was right when he declared that the EU had no competence on abortion rights and should not interfere with member States’ affairs on this issue. On the other side, the opposition to Borg’s nomination have insisted, “Access to adequate public health rights, including sexual and reproductive health rights is a basic right”.

Once again the question of human rights is filtered through an individualistic patriarchal lens that distorts the reality of  the lives of women and LGBT’s.

Meanwhile, MEPs from nationalist groups declared the confirmation of Borg was “a victory of common sense over prejudice and intolerance.” How should we understand common sense, prejudice and intolerance? Are these notions associated with refusing sexual and reproductive health services to women, which is tantamount to promoting violence against women?

When President Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize, he approved the drone program and other violent interventions throughout the Muslim world. And now, true to form, the Prize is given to the European Union just as its commission has taken a retrograde step on women’s rights. In this spiral of discourses and praxis of rights and peace, the conservative dominant power legitimizes violence against women who are the majority of the Wretched of the Earth.

Brigitte Marti, bridgemarti@gmail.com

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Resistances: From Paris to Baltimore, our prisons are full but empty of sense

November 21, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The majority left French Senate has rejected the 2013 budget for Social Security presented by the socialist government. Amazingly, right wing and communist senators joined forces to vote the budget down, although not for the same reasons. The Communists opposed the austerity measures arguing that they add up to social injustice whereas the right wing senators would like to have more austerity and reduce the social/health care welfare that is one of the pillars of French society.  Despite this seeming setback, many hope that social security and the French Health Care system will remain a key part of a societal structure of public service.

To understand the reason for this hope, we must turn to the justice department and its rhetoric of welfare and criminalization. The previous ministers of justice under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, inspired by the American approach of “le tout incarceration” (every thing converges into incarceration), had planned to build more prisons. In order to fill these new cells, the Sarkozy’s justice department designed a series of programs, including charging youth as adult; instituting immediate sentencing which often meant no jury and little time for the accused to prepare for trial; and introducing mandatory sentences. In 2007, a bill requiring minimum mandatory sentencing for repeated offenders passed. And so the prisons and jails filled up.  At the same time, under the rule of austerity, a series of welfare programs were cut.

After the election of a socialist president, Francois Hollande, his justice minister, Christiane Taubira, presented a “new penal politics of the government”. She broke with the policies of her immediate predecessors. She sent an official memorandum to all public prosecutors recommending sentencing reduction and favoring alternative sentences. As for repeated offenders she said, “All decisions must be personalized, including for repeated offenses.” She went on to clearly delineate the limits of mandatory sentencing and as well as its ultimate suppression.

Taubira went further and refused the logic of immediate trial, responsible for one third of the 66 748 people incarcerated in France, and asked the public prosecutor to stop using it. Christiane Taubira declared: “Nos prisons sont pleines, mais vides de sens.” “Our prisons are full, but empty of sense.” Her predecessors were eager to send people to jail; their motto was “tough on crime.” In the past 10 years the tally of prisoners increased by 20,000, creating “inhuman conditions” as was noted by the European committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT), which also recommended “a zero tolerance of ill-treatments” by police officers. Christiane Taubira wants to remedy these conditions by quickly reducing the number of people in French prisons recognizing that incapacitating people in over-populated cells only creates more precarious lives.

Meanwhile, in Baltimore the debate about the construction of a new juvenile detention center rages, with no signs of a change in paradigm. Juveniles may be tried as adults, and the majority of women in prisons are single mothers. Meanwhile, welfare support is shrinking. Where is the Commission in Baltimore that will declare zero tolerance of ill treatment of the city’s most vulnerable?

Brigitte Marti, bridgemarti@gmail.com

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