the real cost of prisons

It's fascinating watching the Rockefeller Drug Laws be knocked back a bunch of steps. Drug arrests and arrests of vendors or homeless people in public space are so much of what the NYPD is about. The entire Hudson Valley is covered in prisons, many of which are filled with people being held for absurdly long sentences on drug charges. The bulk of the arrests were made just for possession. Of course those people should be freed.

It has an interesting edge, though, because for the first time in decades, prison populations may shrink, and some prisons may close. Of the three prisons near my home, at least one is filled primarily with drug offenders. Maybe two. (Different people give different reports, and prison websites are useless.) One expert on Democracy Now said whole upstate towns would be closing down when their prison closed. It feels really strange to live in a town that may see collapse because its evil main industry is being challenged.

Reading an entirely different article about Queens County Farm Museum (agriculture in the city, we like that), they make reference to sending animals to slaughter at a slaughterhouse on Long Island that uses prisoners as workers for "job training." More like training your free workers, a.k.a. slaves, to be killers. Crazy!

Things like this shouldn't surprise me. After all, we live in a country where people couldn't figure out where Timothy McVeigh got his killer instinct. Duh, the military! There's nothing quite as brilliant as locking up innocent people and training them to be killers.

Image from the book The Real Cost of Prisons, from PM Press.

connected

Sunny Taylor was born in Tucson, Arizona, my hometown. She lived near Davis Monthan Air Force Base, which was the reason my military family was in Tucson. She was born with a muscle development condition that has her in an electric wheelchair. Many children in the neighborhood are born with disabilities, and people suffer from an increased rate of cancers.

The mostly Latino and Chicana neighborhood's drinking water is toxic because of military waste.

Sunny Taylor is a painter and writer. Her subject matter includes disability, environmental racism, the military's free pass to pollute, and factory farms. She is a disability rights activist, a vegan animal rights activist, an anti-military activist, an environmental and anti-racist activist. Though the media likes to focus on her painting with her mouth and toes, what is much more interesting is how she so easily connects the impacts of war and industry on human and other animal bodies.

I've never been much of a fan of classical oil painting, but Sunaura Taylor has proven that it can still be radical, and very moving. The painting pictured here is "Chicken Truck", from this year, and is a ten and a half foot wide glimpse of hundreds of broken bodies.

altered & improved

For the lowdown on billboard and sign improvements (and gorgeous photos!), see

• California Dept. of Corrections
  
• Billboard Liberation Front
  
• Wooster Collective
  
• Streetsy
  
• Culture Jammers Encyclopedia
  
• I Hate Billboards
  
• that photo site

spotted in harlem

miltary equals slavery, originally uploaded by abovegroundpool.