“Children are going to die in this country needlessly, more and more are going to die because of what’s happening here”

February 19, 2026 by Leave a Comment

Two-month-old Juan Nicolás

“Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”                               Matthew 19:14

On February 17, 2026, PBS New reported, “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced recently it will not review Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine despite late-stage trials showing it was safe and effective.” Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, noted, “This sent chills up the spines of all of us in public health and the vaccine world because it’s so arbitrary.” While an overwhelming majority of the FDA staff favored proceeding with the review, one member, Vinay Prasad, the chief medical and scientific officer and director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, killed the review. Even The Wall Street Journalobjected, in an editorial titled “Vinay Prasad’s Vaccine Kill Shot: Does the White House know the harm he’s doing to public health?” Yes, yes it does. Dr. Osterholm described the harm, “Children are going to die in this country needlessly, more and more are going to die because of what’s happening here”.

While the refusal to review was reversed on February 18, the reasons given were not that the government wanted to avoid the prospect of children dying in this country needlessly. They don’t.

On February 18, 2026, the same day the FDA reversed its decision, the San Antonio Current reported, “Two-month-old ICE detainee Juan Nicolás deported while sick with bronchitis”. Two-month-old Juan Nicolás was being held in the Dilley Immigration Processing Center. Two days earlier, the San Antonio Current reported that two-month-old Juan Nicolás was “choking on his own vomit… and having respiratory issues”. At that point, Juan Nicolás had spent a month, or half of his life, in detention. According to U.S. Representative Joaquin Castro, “His life is in danger.”

On February 17, the San Antonio Current reported that Juan Nicolás was “rushed to the hospital”, where he was diagnosed with bronchitis. Despite that diagnosis, Juan Nicolás was released and rushed back to Dilley.

Juan Nicolás will not die needlessly in this country … because, the following day, he was deported, rushed out of the country. U.S. Representative Joaquin Castro, explained, “After a discussion with their attorney, I have confirmed that Juan, his 16-month old sister, his mom and his dad have been deported. According to their attorney, the family was deported with only the money that they had in their commissary—a total of $190.” According to Univision reporter Lidia Terrazas, the family was “practically abandoned” in Mexico. Problem solved.

Children are going to die in this country needlessly, more and more are going to die because of what’s happening here.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Photo Credit: San Antonio Current / Instagram / Lidia Terrazas)

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“Even in Russia, they don’t treat children like this.”

February 15, 2026 by 1 Comment

A self-portrait Kamilla made while her parents spoke to NBC News.

“Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?”
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

NBC News released a report this week, “‘Even in Russia, they don’t treat children like this’: A family’s nightmare in ICE detention”. The report opens: “Nikita and his wife, Oksana, fled Russia in desperation two years ago, believing America was their only hope of giving their three children a life free of fear and oppression. Instead, those children are growing up behind the razor-wire fences of a South Texas detention center, among hundreds of other families swept up in President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.” What else is there to say, really? Plenty.

The three children are Kirill, 13; Konstantin, 4; Kamilla, 12. The family has been held in Dilley Immigration Processing Center for four months … and counting.

Konstantin was once a social, outgoing child. Now, surrounded by guards, who “are just as tough as the guards at the adult facilities,” and constant sharp noises, Konstantin cries a lot and keeps to himself. Actually, the guards at Dilley are tougher than guards at adult facilities, inasmuch as they are “guarding” children. Other than guards, what precisely are the dangers the children face?

Kirill taught himself to play piano and then attended music school. A bright and talented child … who now “spends most days withdrawn, waking at night with anxiety and panic attacks”.

Kamilla is a dancer who loves to perform. She now has partial hearing loss, “thanks” largely to the conditions at Dilley, which include whatever is worse than substandard health and medical care. She now lives in constant pain, with little or no relief. When her mother made a makeshift headband, to cover and protect the ear, the guards removed it, claiming it was “contraband”. Kamilla cried. Again, what are the guards “guarding”?

With Kamilla’s birthday approaching, she was asked if she had any wishes. She replied she had only one, “To get out of here.”

Kamilla’s case is not an isolated one: “When several children fell ill with stomach ailments at Dilley, medical staff refused to treat them unless they had already vomited at least eight times.” A “medical staff” that refused to treat ill children is not a medical staff. Period.

In January of this year, an 18-month-old at Dilley had dangerously low blood-oxygen levels. The parents knew something was terribly wrong. For weeks, they begged for someone to address the child’s illness. No one did. Finally, after week, she was taken to a regional children’s hospital, where she was treated for treated her for pneumonia, Covid-19, RSV and severe respiratory distress. She stayed in the hospital for a ten days. She was prescribed medication. She was then returned to Dilley, where the “medical staff” refused to administer the drugs.

When “medical care” means refusal to care in any way, when the food is poisonous, when the “education” is such that children stop reading, when pianists go silent and the dancers sit all day, there can be only one wish: “To get out of here” Are we sleeping, while others suffer? Are we sleeping now? Tomorrow, when we wake, if we wake or think we do, what shall we say of today?

 

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: NBC News)

 

COMMENTS:

Mari: wow, this makes me cry. So sad, this is the moment to do something !!

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A Winter of Anguish for Minneapolis Children

February 4, 2026 by Leave a Comment

But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing, grappling with direst fate and recoiling not,

And now to conceive and show to the world what your children en-masse really are.

                                    Walt Whitman, “Long, too long America”

“A Winter of Anguish for Minneapolis Children”. That’s the headline of an article in today’s New York Times, and really … what else is there to say? As the United States approached its nineteenth-century civil war, Walt Whitman asked if we were capable of show the world what our children en-masse really are. Are we? By something like a popular vote, “citizens” of the United States elected a government hell bent on imposing suffering on our children, en-masse.

Whitman ended his brief, five-line poem: “(For who except myself has yet conceiv’d what your children en-masse really are?)” Who indeed.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image: Henri Matisse, “.L’Angoisse qui s’amasse en frappant sous ta gorge…”  – “The Gathering Anguish That Strikes in Your Throat”/ Museum of Modern Art)

 

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If elected, Amanda Burrows would be Vancouver’s first renter and woman mayor

December 18, 2025 by Leave a Comment

Amanda Burrows

Who sets housing policy where you live? Renters? Homeowners? Or both? Does anyone in charge of housing policy in your area really know anything about the experience of facing eviction or, more drastically, of being evicted? Recently, Amanda Burrows announced her candidacy for the mayoral nomination of Vancouver. Burrows is “a prominent social justice advocate in Vancouver” as well as Executive Director of FIRST UNITED, a faith-based community services provider. Vancouver is Canada’s least affordable city. Burrows knows that. As she explained in a recent interview, “I have been evicted before, which is so many people’s stories in this city: being severed from the community and not finding a place to live because there’s barely any vacancy and it’s so expensive. I couldn’t even find a place if I wanted to.”

Burrows explicitly raises the question of renter representation in her campaign. In a world in which global, national and local economies have equated “wealth” and “development” with greater and growing inequality, increasing numbers of people are facing the varied and yet not so varied landscapes of “affordable housing crisis”. Part of that means more and more folks are renting. For example, according to a recent report, in the United States “the share of first-time home buyers dropped to a record low of 21%, while the typical age of first-time buyers climbed to an all-time high of 40 years”. That means many are putting off buying a home, and leaving the rental markets, for over a decade.

In 2022, researchers from Boston University and the University of Georgia published a report, “Who Represents the Renters?” The researchers pored over the data concerning 10,000 local, state and federal officials. Guess what they concluded? “We find that renters are starkly underrepresented by a margin of over 30 percentage points—a gap that persists across a variety of institutional and demographic contexts. Public officials are substantially more likely to own single-family homes that are more valuable than other homes in their neighborhoods. Collectively, these findings suggest deep representation inequalities that disadvantage renters at all levels of government.” 89% of city councilors were homeowners in sample cities where homeownership hovered around 51%. 83% of mayors and 76% of city councilors were homeowners. Finally, the average homeowning officeholder’s property was worth 50% more than the median value in their ZIP code.

The report concludes, “The underrepresentation of renters among elected officials is troubling and affects the kinds of policies discussed on the local and national stages.” Troubling, indeed. The troubling is not about this councilmember or that mayor, but about the composition of the body that decides, and in many instances creates, housing policy, and therefore housing itself. You may or may not live in Canada or the United States, but wherever you live, the question of renters and homeowners pertains. Amanda Burrows may or may not be elected, although I for one wish her well. The question here is the question asked by researchers a few years ago, as by researchers in mid-nineteenth century England: Who sets housing policy where you live? Renters? Homeowners? Or both? Does anyone in charge of housing policy in your area really know anything about the experience of facing eviction or, more drastically, of being evicted? Who speaks, whose voices and experiences are excluded?

Homeownership rates by office category

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Photo Credit: Kate Hyslop / The Tyee) (Infographic: Katherine Levine Einstein, Joseph T. Ornstein & Maxwell Palmer, Who Represents the Renters)

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If we are serious about housing affordability for wage earners

October 29, 2025 by Leave a Comment

“If we are serious about housing affordability for wage earners, we must understand that the market alone will not deliver it.” Patrick Condon

On October 27, England (but not Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) officially enacted the long-awaited Renters’ Rights Act: “Central to the Act is its provision to abolish Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions, under which private landlords have been able to remove tenants even if they have done nothing wrong.” Between July 2024 and June 2025, 11,400 households suffered Section 21 no fault evictions. There is no count of how many people found themselves homeless as a result. As happens so often, the term “households” conceals as much as it reveals, but suffice it so say, tens of thousands of people were given two months to find a place, people who had done nothing wrong and now faced homelessness. Again, “homelessness” covers as much as it conceals. Numbers exist for those in shelters or seeking assistance. No one knows how many moved in with family or friends … “temporarily”.

While the Renters’ Rights Act is a welcome change, and not only because of the abolition of Section 21, some must wonder why it took so much to eliminate no-fault eviction, and why it takes so much to do so in other countries, such as the United States? No fault eviction was always wrong, always a violation of people’s human dignity and human and civil rights, but in a climate in which living on the streets has itself become criminalized, it’s even worse.

The Renters’ Rights Act does more than abolish Section 21. It also bans landlords from refusing tenants that receive benefits or that have children and establishes a new Private Rented Sector Landlord Ombudsman, where renters will be able to register complaints about landlords. Furthermore, landlords will not be able to raise the rent above the “market rate”. Landlords will not be allowed to allegedly respond to “bidding wars” by demanding a rent greater than the advertised one. Finally, landlords will be prohibited from asking for more than one month’s rent upfront from tenants.

This welcome news should have happened long ago. The housing crisis didn’t happen overnight. Renters, housing advocates, homeless service providers and others have long campaigned for these measures and more. Building more, rezoning, controlling landlord behavior, raising wages for low-income workers, regulating the market, controlling land prices and values have to happen together. This has been public knowledge for decades.

Vienna has been investing in and supporting social, aka public, housing for decades, and it’s paid off. While the city’s not paradise, it’s a practical response to unaffordable housing. Or take Melbourne. Until 2021, Melbourne was the second most expensive city in Australia. That’s when the city decided that that was an unacceptable situation. Melbourne built more, and it controlled real estate investing, by taxing real estate investors, taxing platforms like Airbnb, taxing vacant properties and land. Will Melbourne’s success continue? Who knows, the point is that the city recognized the patterns.

At midnight tonight, Vancouver will close public comment on the Vancouver Official Development Plan, a plan described as ambitious, thoughtful and well-crafted in vision and intent, on one hand, and faltering in diagnosis and prescription. In the next week or so, voters in the Netherlands and New York City will make their decisions largely based on candidates’ and parties’ promises, proposal, and plans for affordable housing. Let’s make sure the focus is on the residents, the people, living the crisis, rather than the buildings.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Blandford Fletcher, “Evicted” (1887) / Queensland National Art Gallery)

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To starve, to die, or cause to die

July 31, 2025 by Leave a Comment

“Starving / Help Now / Millions Are Starving in Bible Lands! …”

Today’s headline reads: “Anger Over Starvation in Gaza Leaves Israel Increasingly Isolated”. There’s, finally, been much, or some, discussion among “the powers that be” of Israel’s politics of starvation in Gaza. There’s some anger, some dismay, not enough but some. There’s some disgust, some revulsion, not enough but some. As so often, much of this timidity and “modesty” results in an articulation that is actually a blurring of meaning. Starvation is not hunger. Hunger is ”the uneasy or painful sensation caused by want of food; craving appetite. Also: the exhausted condition caused by want of food.” Hunger is bad, destructive, and a politics and public policy based on hunger is evil. But hunger is not starvation. Starvation, and these definitions all come from the Oxford English Dictionary, or better to starve, means “To die, or cause to die”. When starve is a transitive verb, it means “to cause to die”, that is, to kill, to murder, by refusing access to food. That’s what’s going on in Gaza. Nothing else. Starvation.

Does it matter that children are being starved? Yes. Yes, it does. Does it matter that adults are being starved, adults of all genders? Yes. Yes, it does. Is the world acting as if these deaths and this mass murder actually matters? No. Palestinians are not starving to death. They are being starved. That is a death sentence, for the individuals, families, communities, people and nation. What would you call such a public policy?

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief Artist(s), 1914 – 1918 / Smithsonian Museum)

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Chronicle of a death foretold: Eviction’s `adverse impact’ on parenting college students

June 27, 2025 by Leave a Comment

New America, in collaboration with Princeton’s Eviction Lab, released a brief this week, “Ousted from Opportunity: Eviction’s Adverse Impact on Parenting College Students”. While the report is dire and grim and much of the findings are tragically predictable, it’s still worth consideration, especially this, the last of the major seven findings: “Parenting Students Threatened with Eviction Die at Higher Rates 10 Years Post-Enrollment: Parenting students who were threatened with eviction were more than twice as likely to die over the 10 years immediately following enrollment than parenting students who were not threatened (see Figure 8). Threatened parenting students’ mortality rates were even significantly higher than those of nonparenting students who were threatened with eviction.” What else is there to say? What more do you need to know? People who are parents and attending college have a difficult time, often and even typically. People who are parents and attending college who receive an eviction notice die relatively soon after. What more do you need to know?

The data concerning mortality rates come from a report published this month, “Consequences of Eviction for Parenting and Non-parenting College Students”. The authors found the following: “The mortality rate 10-years post-grad is 290 (200-380) per 100,000 for threatened parenting students compared to 140 (110-160) for non-threatened parenting students; in other words, an eviction filing is associated with a 107% increase in risk of death over the next ten years.” Where will you be in ten years? Where were you ten years ago?

To be clear, this slow-moving massacre does not concern parenting college students who have actually been evicted. This 107% increase in risk of death over the next ten years involves those who have had eviction filings. Who are they? You already know the answers. Parenting students disproportionately come from historically underserved groups. They are more likely to be women, especially women of color, and tend to be older. They are also more frequently first-generation college goers, low-income, and veterans. Student fathers are more likely to be Black than any other racial group. Parenting students have higher rates of food insecurity and are more likely to be working full time. 20% of undergraduate students care for one or more children while enrolled in college. What else is there to say?

The report had seven major findings. Parenting students threatened with eviction tended to be younger than parenting students not threatened by eviction. Parenting students threatened with eviction tend to come from lower-income backgrounds, compared to parents and non-parents who were not threatened with eviction. Black students, whether parenting or not, were far more likely to be threatened with eviction, but Black parenting students are the most at risk. Parenting students who were threatened are much more likely to identify as female, at 81%, compared to 63% of non-threatened parenting students. These are both extraordinarily high percentages. 37% of parenting students who were never threatened with eviction completed a bachelor’s degree, while only 15% of parenting students who were threatened completed a bachelor’s degree. Parenting students threatened with eviction had significantly reduced family income five years post-enrollment.

Parenting students who were threatened with eviction were more than twice as likely to die over the 10 years immediately following enrollment than parenting students who were not threatened

Twenty-two years ago, Achille Mbembe opened his seminal article “Necropolitics”, with these words, “The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides … in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.” Who may live and who must die. A young person receives a notice saying they face eviction. No matter what happens, whether they are evicted or not, within ten years they are dead. What else is there to say? What more do you need to know?

Who may live … and who must die?

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit 1: Day Gleeson and Dennis Thomas, “Title Deed Second Ave.” / hyperallergic)

(Image Credit 2: New America)

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Welcome to the age of the tolerated Intolerable

May 21, 2025 by Leave a Comment

“To regard the lives of those your country is subjugating as being equal to your own would make even one death intolerable.” Owen Jones, 2014

In the past twenty-four hours, the word “intolerable” has figured prominently, a kind of keyword marking this moment. Perhaps what set this off is the joint statement by Canada, France and the United Kingdom, which deplored current Israeli actions in Gaza, adding, “The level of human suffering in Gaza is intolerable.” During his address to the House of Commons, Keir Starmer explained “I would like to say something about the horrific situation in Gaza, where the level of suffering innocent children being bombed again is utterly intolerable.” In an interview on the BBC yesterday, an aid worker, just returned from Gaza, called the withholding of food “simply intolerable.”

While any actions to end the atrocities being committed in Gaza are welcome, the question of timing hovers and with it the meaning of “intolerable”. What makes the situation “intolerable” today, rather than, say, three months ago, when the Israeli blockade of Gaza formally began? A complete blockade of any assistance to a population desperately needing aid and assistance is always meant to starve that population. The Israeli government said as much from the very beginning. For weeks, we’ve seen, read and heard reliable reports of children suffering malnutrition, hunger on their way to dying, or, for the “lucky ones”, “merely” living with the consequences of prolonged starvation for the remainder of their lives, however brief they may be. Wasn’t the situation simply intolerable then?

Intolerable: that which physically, mentally, or morally “cannot be tolerated, borne, or put up with; unendurable, unbearable, insupportable, insufferable.” It doesn’t mean that which no longer can be tolerated; it means that which, in its essence, cannot be tolerated. Again, while the recognition of the intolerable situation is preferrable to the denial, while any action emerging from that recognition is welcome, we live today with the painfully obvious fact of our ongoing, deepening and expanding capacity to tolerate the intolerable and thereby to contribute to the intolerable.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Simon Pemberton / The Guardian)

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Landmark case: In Australia, Raya Meredith leads class action case against strip-searches

May 14, 2025 by Leave a Comment

In 2018, at the Splendour in the Grass music festival in Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia, Raya Meredith was strip-searched. Not that it matters, but nothing illegal was found. In 2022, then-27-year-old Raya Meredith filed a class action suit against the police of New South Wales, arguing that the strip-searches conducted at music festivals from 2016 to 2022 were unlawful and constituted assault, battery, and false imprisonment. Her landmark suit now represents 3,000 people who were strip-searched. That case is currently being heard in court. Today, Raya Meredith’s attorneys explained that the New South Wales police admitted the strip-search was unlawful but “objectively reasonably necessary.” What?

Kylie Nomchong, Raya Meredith’s attorney, responded to that claim, ““We get to the quite outrageous submissions … where the defendant is asking your honour to infer that it was objectively necessary to search the plaintiff’s breasts and genital area,” Nomchong told the court. It is unbelievably offensive to assert, without any evidence whatsoever, that there was some objectively reasonable basis on the part of the searching officer to inspect the plaintiff’s vagina, to ask her to pull out her tampon, to ask her to bare her buttocks and anal area and to bend over and drop her breasts. It’s just offensive.”

Justice Dina Yehia, the presiding judge in the case, agreed with Nomcholeng, “I’m not quite sure I understand those submissions, given the way this matter has proceeded.”

What else is there to say? For the police, the violation of a woman’s body and person was, and continues to be, “objectively reasonably necessary.” The objective and reasonable necessity of the strip-searches is so self-evident that just days before the hearing began, the police withdrew 22 witnesses, mostly police … because it was objectively reasonably necessary for them not to speak under oath.

Raya Meredith’s attorneys note that strip-searches seldom “work”, as in produce any evidence of illegal activity. But police engage in them anyway. So, what’s the point and purpose of strip-search? A study published in 2021, the year before Raya Meredith’s encounter with the police, considered the scale and scope of strip-searches conducted by New South Wales police from 2014 to 2018, As Raya Meredith’s attorneys suggest, most of those searches produced nothing, other than trauma and pain. Nevertheless, the use of strip-searches “at music festivals, at train stations, in police vehicles and at other locations” increased. What did the few strip searches that did produce any evidence of illegal activity show? 96% involved drugs, either possession or distribution: “It can be inferred from these data that the strip search regime is primarily being used for the enforcement of the summary offence of drug possession, rather than the serious indictable offences for which the power to strip search was envisaged.” A War on Drugs was declared, and strip-searches were normalized, naturalized, deemed “objectively reasonably necessary”.

When the State declares War on its population, as in a War on Drugs or a War on Crime, it declares a state of exception. That is, it declares a crisis so grave, so threatening to the State that the elimination, ostensibly temporary, of constitutional rights and protections is reasonably objectively necessary. The police in New South Wales were just following orders.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Roberto Matta, “Nuremberg Judgment” / MoMA)

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Michigan’s special hell for women, the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, belongs to everyone

May 8, 2025 by Leave a Comment

I had said I wasn’t gonna write no more poems like this
Gil Scott-Heron

Michigan has one women’s prison, the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti, and it is a piece of work. On Monday, attorneys representing 20 women filed a $500 million lawsuit, claiming that recorded and recording strip searches constitutes invasion of privacy, intentional abuse, and violation of rights. According to the filing, “Defendants … implemented a policy of recording strip searches that they knew or should have known would trigger trauma responses in a population with high rates of sexual abuse history …. What these women continue to endure is nothing short of horrific. This case exposes a grotesque abuse of power that directly retraumatizes survivors of sexual assault …. This history of problematic strip search practices at WHV demonstrates a recurring pattern.” Since its inception, Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility has a demonstrated recurring pattern of willful, intentional violence against women.

In 2012, Carol Jacobsen, founder and Director of the Michigan Women’s Justice and Clemency Project, noted, “Abu Ghraib has nothing on Huron Valley.” She was describing the irony that Huron Valley was meant to solve the crisis of abuse of women prisoners in the Robert Scott Correctional Facility. As a result of widespread torture and abuse, Scott was closed in 2009, and all the women were moved to Huron Valley, which, according to Carol Jacobsen, was worse than Scott.

In 2014, Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility was investigated for human and civil rights abuses against mentally ill female patients.

In November 2015, a twenty-five-year-old Black woman, Janika Nichole Edmond died, or better was executed, in the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility. Janika Edmond’s story is short and terribly familiar: Janika Edmond lived with mental illness. Once in Michigan’s `criminal justice’ system, her condition deteriorated. She had a history of assaulting prison guards, which resulted in her being sent to solitary, which resulted in her becoming more aggressive. The rate of `incident reports’ skyrocketed. No one did anything. In 2014, Janika Edmond made a rope out of a towel and tried to hang herself. Earlier in 2015, Janika Edmond was found with a razor. She said, repeatedly, that she was “tired of being here” and was hearing voices. Unfortunately, no one on staff heard or listened to Janika Edmond’s voice. The day she died, Janika Edmonds asked for a suicide prevention vest. The guards laughed. Hours later, she lay dead on the floor. “The death report provided by the MDOC [Michigan Department of Corrections] for Edmond shows her presumed cause of death was suicide.” That was no suicide. That was murder at the hands of the State.

In 2019, the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility was sued for “perilous” conditions. According to the lawsuit, “The women have complained about the presence of mold in the facility for years, and continue to do so, but their pleas have been ignored.” Huron Valley “is operating under a state of degradation, filth, and inhumanity, endangering the health and safety of incarcerated women.” One of the attorneys described Huron Valley as “medieval and dungeon-like.” Three weeks ago, six years after the lawsuit was filed, a Michigan community forum heard the following, “The Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility is accused of having severe cases of black mold.”

Six years ago, we wrote, “Michigan’s only women’s prison, the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, is the architecture of shame in the United States of America. Michigan built a special hell for women, the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, and it’s been going on for years and it’s going on now. Have we no shame?” Nine years ago, we wrote, “What happened to Janika Nichole Edmond? Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary, just another Black woman crying out for help, dying in agony, “tired of being here.” In her death, she joins “the most common.” Who cares? Who cares? Who cares?”

How many more lawsuits will it take, how many more tortured and traumatized women, how many more corpses? How often must we discover the brutality of our “caring” before we finally demolish the special hell for women we have constructed not once but every day that we allow it to continue. Michigan’s special hell for women, Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, belongs to each and every one of us.

(by Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Jenny Holzer,  MoMA)

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