“I know that’s right” & lemony laurel (Taken with Instagram at Virtue Feed & Grain)

newyorker:

The Caging of America; Why do we lock up so many people?

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

- In this week’s issue, Adam Gopnik writes about mass incarceration and criminal justice in America: http://nyr.kr/A75iOm

Photograph by Steve Liss.

Flowers for my bday from Schmax! (Taken with instagram)

Taken with Instagram at Alexandria, VA

Taken with Instagram at Old Town Alexandria Waterfront

Taken with Instagram at Old Town Alexandria Waterfront

black-wolves:

city mornings (by scott w. h. young)

ajfaultlines:

no-hope-with-dope:

A student is punched in the face by a police officer in Chile. Students in Chile are demanding a new framework for education. (Reuters / VICTOR RUIZ CABALLERO)

See our new Fault Lines episode about this issue tonight at 2230 GMT/ 5:30p EST on Al Jazeera English. You can watch online. 

Taken with instagram

Taken with instagram

Taken with instagram

Taken with Instagram at The Cliff at Cupecoy Beach