On “real suffering”: The heartless cruelty of eviction in India and beyond

October 28, 2024 by Leave a Comment

“… the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering…. the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

According to a recent report, “Over 17 million people across India live under the constant threat of eviction and displacement. These threats stem from various causes, including slum clearance drives, infrastructure projects, environmental conservation efforts, disaster relief measures, court orders and tourism development, among others. This means that nearly one in every 100 people in India faces the fear of being forcibly evicted or displaced by the government … In recent years, government action targeting people’s homes—particularly those from the most marginalised groups—has only deepened the anxiety these communities are already experiencing.”

That anxiety those communities are already experiencing is also called real suffering, and it’s intensifying and spreading. According to the Housing and Land Rights Network’s most recent report, in 2023, at least 515,752 people living in India suffered eviction. That’s the highest number in the last seven recorded years.  At least 107,449 homes were destroyed. To get a sense of the “movement of history”, in 2022, around 46,371 houses were demolished and at least 222,686 people were forcibly removed. That’s around 129 homes destroyed every single day, and 25 people evicted every single hour, 24 hours a day, day in day out. In 2023, at least 107,449 homes were destroyed, and at least 515,752 people were evicted. That’s 294 homes destroyed daily, and 58 people evicted every single hour. Somewhere someone is contemplating these soulless conditions, looks ups and, with a sigh, calls it progress. Development.

If you doubt that somewhere-someone formulation, remember that “in 2022 and 2023, the highest percentage of people (58.7 per cent) – were evicted under the guise of ‘slum’ clearance/‘encroachment’ removal/‘city beautification’ initiatives.” Beautification. From the corporate – state heights, there is beauty and beautification in the landscapes of real suffering.

Who are those living with real suffering? The “most marginalised groups”: “Forced evictions, displacement, and inadequate resettlement disproportionately affect women and children. In the aftermath of an eviction, challenges faced by women are multifold and include loss of livelihoods and access to food, breakdown of social structures and support systems, debilitating health impacts, and increased vulnerability to gender-based violence. Incidents of home demolition and eviction also adversely impact their economic and social vulnerabilities and exacerbate pre-existing and intersectional challenges faced by them in accessing their rights to housing, land, health, work, water, sanitation, privacy, and security. For children, the immediate and long-term impacts of forced evictions are acute and include psychological trauma, mental illness, fear, insecurity, anxiety, loss of education, loss of health, and increased vulnerability to sexual abuse and violence.”

None of that is surprising, nor is it accidental. The production of precariousness and vulnerability is baked into the politics of eviction. In many countries – the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, for example – advocates and governments, local and national, are discussing restricting or outlawing so-called “no fault” evictions. That would be a good idea. But what exactly is fault? What is fault in a world in which, by conservative estimates, one in every 100 people lives with the terror of being evicted soon, in which that terror is considered a corollary of urban development, even beautification that the poors must simply suffer and live with? Though India’s numbers are impressive, they are not outliers. Eviction filing rates and evictions are skyrocketing and reaching historical heights across the so-called developed and democratic world. What then is democracy, what is development, that drowns out the sigh of the oppressed, crushes the heart, extinguishes the soul, and criminalizes any expression of real suffering or protest against real suffering?

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: George Grosz, Eviction (Per Gerichtsbeschluss entlassen) / MoMA)

 

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Oregon: If working people can’t afford to stay in the housing, it’s not affordable housing

September 27, 2024 by Leave a Comment

Martha Rosler, Housing Is a Human Right, short animation produced by The Public Art Fund, “Messages to the Public,” 1989

What exactly is affordable housing? There’s much discussion these days, and finally, concerning an affordable housing crisis, the lack of affordable housing, the vast and growing numbers of households, families, individuals and communities living and struggling with housing insecurity, paying more than 30% of monthly income on household expenses and/or expecting to be evicted or foreclosed on within the next two months. So, what does affordability actually mean? This question came roaring to the surface in a new study, Eviction in Oregon’s Subsidized Affordable Housing, which looked at eviction filings and evictions from January 2019 to December 2023. On one hand, eviction filings against residents of subsidized affordable housing made up a relatively small fraction of all eviction filings in Oregon. However, once the eviction case was filed, subsidized tenants were more likely to get an eviction judgment. The vast majority of these filings were for non-payment. The vast majority of non- or late payment was because, simply, the tenants, the residents of supposedly affordable housing, could no longer afford the affordable housing. As a concept, policy, and lived reality, what then is affordable housing?

As in most areas, the majority of evictions are filed by a small number of entities. In this instance, as in so many other places, third-party corporate management companies were responsible for a disproportionate number of evictions. As noted in the report, “The difference in eviction filing patterns between third-party managers and internal managers … can be attributed to variations in their lease enforcement strategies …. While third-party managers commonly operate under compliance-oriented lease enforcement policies similar to the private sector, internal managers from the housing authority tend to adopt strategies designed to promote housing stability among low-income households.” In other words, internal managers, managers committed to affordable housing rather than profit, create leases, policies and practices that recognize various difficulties residents might encounter and find or create financial and social services to support those residents.

For many, once the filing occurs, the damage is done. Many algorithms used by landlords, and especially corporate landlords, don’t differentiate between eviction filing and eviction, and so, irrespective of the court’s decision, having an eviction filed can have long-lasting catastrophic impact. Securing “affordable housing” shouldn’t condemn a person and family to a lifetime of trauma.

The word “afford” originally meant to promote the well-being of a person or thing. Affordable meant that which enhanced and promote a person’s well-being. At some point, affordable shifted to mean that which one could reasonably purchase. What if affordable housing meant the enhancement and promotion of people’s and individual’s well-being? At the very least, publicly supported and subsidized affordable housing should be based on the value of dignity and well-being. If working people can’t afford to stay in the housing, it’s not affordable housing.

 

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Martha Rosler / Housing Is a Human Right, March 1989)

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In Vancouver, why is the rent too damn high? (Hint: it’s not inflation or market changes)

August 27, 2024 by Leave a Comment

 

Like most cities, Vancouver is an expensive place to live in. Located in British Columbia, Vancouver is the third largest metro area in Canada. According to a recent report, Vancouver is also the third least affordable housing market in the world, after Hong Kong and Sydney, Australia. For each of the last 16 years, Vancouver has been the first, second or third least affordable major market. That’s some distinction. According to the report, Vancouver’s housing market is “impossibly unaffordable”. Impossibly … and in fact.

What happens in Vancouver does not stay in Vancouver: “Troublingly, impossibly unaffordable housing in the Vancouver market has also has spread to smaller BC markets in British Columbia …. From 2015 to 2023, housing affordability worsened by the equivalent of 2.5 years of median household income in smaller markets outside Vancouver, an even greater loss than the 1.2 years in the Vancouver market itself.” Troubling, indeed.

An equally recent report from British Columbia’s Office of the Human Rights Commissioner, noted the depth, breadth and centrality of the impossibly unaffordable housing crisis: “The collision of market forces with inadequate social supports has pushed thousands of B.C. residents into homelessness and left many more on the brink.” Unsurprisingly, homelessness and severe housing insecurity target women and children, Indigenous people, people of color, people living with disabilities, low-income people. According to the Commissioner, “In our research unaffordable, inaccessible and inappropriate housing quickly and unsurprisingly rose to the top of the human rights issues facing British Columbians.” Unsurprisingly.

Another unsurprising report, from BC Housing, the provincial housing agency,  considers the workings of two public agencies, Shelter Aid for Elderly Renters Program, SAFER, and the Rental Assistance Program. SAFER launched in 1977, the Rental Assistance Program started in 2006. The report found that both programs have done a fairly decent job until recently, but rapidly rising rents have threatened that success: “While SAFER and RAP help to make housing more affordable, a significant affordability gap for many SAFER and RAP recipients exists. …. Recipients of both programs are in danger of entering into homelessness or seeking affordable options that may result in living in unsuitable or unsafe housing should rents continue to increase …. The impact of these programs has declined over time as housing costs have increased dramatically across the province.”

Vancouver is impossibly unaffordable; unaffordable, inaccessible and inappropriate housing is the key human rights issue; and previously fairly successful assistance programs are now endangered, all thanks to rapidly rising rents. What is to be done? While all the authors of all the reports are committed to housing justice, to equal access to safe and dignified housing as a human right, they also all fall prey to the Great Market Forces Fallacy. Consider this statement, from the last report’s conclusion: “There is no doubt that both SAFER and RAP are helping to achieve greater affordability for many recipients …. However, the rent ceilings and the lack of indexing to inflation or market changes was readily identified by all as a barrier to affordability. For some, the lack of change in benefits has resulted in them being priced out of the rental market in their desired community. It has also limited their ability to move out of less desirable housing. The stress of possible evictions is high due to the inability of the benefit to adequately contribute to new rents should the household be required to move.” Clearly and unsurprisingly, recipients need subsidies to match rising rents. But then what? Rents are not rising because of inflation. Rents are rising because landlords, increasingly corporate landlords, are able and more than willing to raise rents precipitously. As long as homes are part of a “real estate market”, as long as public and social housing in considered an afterthought, as long as landlords are lords of the land, rents will continue to rise … rapidly.

In the late 1880s, looking around at the ways in which the new urban real estate market was carving up Manchester, Friedrich Engels noted, “The English bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards its gifts as a business matter, makes a bargain with the poor, saying: `If I spend this much upon benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery. You shall despair as before, but you shall despair unseen, this I require, this I purchase with my subscription of twenty pounds for the infirmary!’” The barrier to affordability is not inflation nor market changes. It’s the unchanging cruelty of the market itself, unsurprisingly, impossibly, troublingly, and everyday.

 

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Visual Capitalist)

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How many women and children in the Kiteezi Landfill collapse

August 15, 2024 by Leave a Comment

The population of Kampala is currently estimated at 4,051,000. In 2014, it was 2,453,000. In twenty years, the city has grown 165%. The city has one garbage dump, the Kiteezi Landfill. It is the largest garbage dump in Uganda and in all of East Africa. It is located in a densely populated, low-income area of Kampala. The Kiteezi Landfill was opened in 1996 and was meant to run until 1996. In 2021, Kampala Capital City Authority-KCCA “began” the process of closing Kiteezi Landfill with a study to inform safe closure. It stayed open. In June 2024, the KCCA Directorate of Public Health and Environment received a report stating that the conditions at the landfill were dangerous and life-threatening: “Significant cracks and waste slides were observed in the north-eastern section of the site, blocking the main drainage channel and causing leachate to flood nearby areas, including a neighborhood farm.Dr. Daniel Ayen Okello, Director of Public Health and Environment at KCCA, noted that the Kiteezi Landfill, a critical waste disposal site for Kampala, is facing severe operational challenges. The landfill, which has been operating beyond its capacity, has developed hazardous conditions threatening both waste management efficiency and community safety.” There was no response. On Friday, August 9, 2024, the Kiteezi Landfill collapsed. As of the latest count, 30 people were killed. That number is expected to rise. Numerous houses adjoining the landfill were submerged in trash. The landslide occurred late at night. Hundreds are missing, hundreds have been displaced. Yesterday, the government announced it was “moving to decommission the Kiteezi Landfill.”  Case closed.

Of course, this was a tragedy foretold. It’s also a tragedy that the world noted, for a blip, and then will move on. Remember the Koshe Landfill in Addis Ababa? Remember the Hulene Landfill in Maputo? “The Kiteezi landfill is on a steep slope in an impoverished part of the city. Women and children who scavenge plastic waste for income frequently gather there, and some homes have been built close to the landfill.” Who will remember; who will care?

 

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Photo Credit: Travel Uganda)

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The feudalism of eviction records

August 13, 2024 by Leave a Comment

“But without the feudal lord, there would be no land from which we could harvest the grain!”

When is success a failure? When is a victory a loss? In eviction proceedings. Consider this: “Tenants in Massachusetts who struggle to find housing due to a prior eviction may now get the chance to have those records sealed. The Legislature’s newly passed housing bond bill includes a provision that would allow tenants to petition a court to seal their eviction record in cases such as a no-fault eviction, a dismissed case, or a case the tenant won. Currently, there is no eviction sealing in Massachusetts.” Consider this: “Dayton Municipal Court has launched a new process to seal eviction case records …. Tenants can now submit applications to the Dayton Municipal Court to have their eviction cases sealed. Renters can file an application 60 days after their cases were dismissed or after the court made a judgment in their favor.”  People received an eviction notice, went to court, won or had the case dismissed, and the so-called Scarlet E of eviction still attaches to their names. People were evicted through no fault of their own, and the Scarlet E still attaches to their names. What’s the name for the system in which such abusive treatment is considered just, normal and acceptable? Feudalism.

While this situation has existed in the United States, and especially in the metropolitan areas, since the invention of the commodification of housing, in very recent years it has intensified and worsened considerably, thanks in large part to two phenomena: the entry of corporate investors and hedge funds into the rental real estate market and landlords’ increasing reliance on apps to determine a prospective tenant’s credit worthiness. Corporate investor and hedge fund landlords tend to file evictions much more readily than individual landlords, and most apps don’t distinguish between eviction filing and writs of eviction, or actual evictions. But then again, why would they, when the courts haven’t? Again, court records don’t distinguish between judgments against tenants and judgments for tenants. They’re all `evictions’.

Consider this, from a recent study of the collateral consequences of eviction court filings in Pennsylvania, “Eviction filings had far-reaching collateral costs for tenants and their families, often impacting their well-being and stability for years after the filing. Records stemming from eviction filings, even when tenants’ cases were resolved with a neutral or favorable outcome, negatively impacted the quality and trajectory of their lives …. Despite the court not formally evicting tenants, landlords still had the power to displace them. Though participants in this study did not receive eviction orders in court, the majority said they were forced to move after their eviction filing for reasons beyond their control …. Tenants with eviction records encountered punitive rental screening practices that prolonged housing instability and limited their housing options. 8 in 10 participants said that their eviction filing limited their future housing options. 65% of those who moved said a prospective landlord asked about their eviction record, and over half reported that a landlord explicitly denied their application because of their filing. Unsuccessful rental applications amounted to hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of dollars in excess costs to tenants.” Again, an eviction record is not a record of an eviction, it is a record of an eviction filing, irrespective of the outcome.

How does it make sense to turn renters’ success into failure, victory into loss, to brand ever more people with a Scarlet E that leaves them vulnerable to both super-exploitation and homelessness? Consider this, “In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capital class in course of formation; but, above all, those moments when great masses are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and `unattached’ proletarians on the labour-market. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process.” That’s Karl Marx, in “Primitive Accumulation”, the final section of Capital, Volume One. The surge in eviction filings is no surprise nor is it merely a function of the dislocations of the pandemic nor of the earlier housing crisis. It’s part of the production of the new proletariat, a new proletariat that is disproportionately Black and Latina women.  When corporate investors and hedge funds entered into the rental real estate market, what happened, pretty much overnight? Mass expropriation, dislocation, removal and criminalization. Today as it was hundreds of years ago, it’s the basis of the whole process. Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your records.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Medium)

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From Mexico to the United States to the United Kingdom and beyond, there is no justice in women’s prisons

August 3, 2024 by Leave a Comment

 

For over a year now, the news media have covered a class action lawsuit concerning the Federal Correctional Institution, Dublin, which argued that the women incarcerated at FCI-Dublin were routinely subjected to sexual violence, harassment, intimidation and other forms of brutality. This lawsuit is only one of over 60 that have been filed against FCI-Dublin since 2021, all claiming a pattern of sexual violence in the institution. In April, FCI-Dublin was shut down, and the women were moved to other institutions all over the country. What if it’s the same everywhere?

Thanks to a recent, and some would say consequential, election, the government of the United Kingdom changed hands from Tory to Labour. The Labour government has “discovered” that the prisons are a toxic mess. This week, UK Ministry of Justice published its latest Safety in Custody report, looking at deaths up to June 2024, self-harm up to March 2024: “In the most recent quarter, self-harm incidents were up 8% to 19,418, and the rate was up 9% (a 2% increase in male establishments and a 29% increase in female establishments) …. The rate is more than eight times higher in female establishments than male establishments …. The rate of assault was 71% higher in female establishments than male establishments.” Why are the rates so high in women’s prisons, and particularly so much higher than in men’s prisons? Nadia spent five months in a women’s prison, which she described as “walking onto the set of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest … Many of the girls there should not be in prison, they need proper help.” The majority of incidents of self-harm and of assault in women’s prisons are not as violent or severe as those in men’s prisons, but the numbers and rates are higher. What does that tell you? As in FCI-Dublin, the response has been to describe the situation as “a failure”. There was no failure, there was, and is, refusal.

In May, it was reported that the number of deaths by suicide in the Cefereso 16 CPS Femenil de Morelos, the women’s prison in Morelos, had increased by so much that all cases from then on would be investigated by the Fiscalía General de la República, the Attorney General of Mexico. In July, it was reported that almost half the women held in prisons are remand prisoners … innocent until proven guilty … or dead. The United Nations finds this situation “particularly preoccupying.”  Again, as in the United States and the United Kingdom, the systematic violence against women is seen as a “failure”. There was no failure. There was simply refusal.

In the global scheme, the women’s prisons of the United States, United Kingdom, and Mexico are not outliers. If anything, they’re viewed as more or less preferable to prisons in many other parts of the world. None of that matters. What matters is justice. Again and again, the State, or the Fourth Estate, “discovers” systemic and systematic violence against women in prisons, jails, detention centers. Each time, shock and dismay are expressed, then “failure” is somberly and solemnly declared, and then … nothing. At best, the individual house of horror is shut down and the women are moved … to another. There is no justice in women’s prisons. There is cruelty in the decision that every act of violence was a sign of failure rather than the system working as it was meant to work, to the detriment and ultimate destruction of women. Otherwise, how else explain the infinite and cyclical  redundancy of discovery? Instead of “repairing” the prisons,  give the women, and the world, “proper help”.

 

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Gothic Arch / The Royal Academy of Arts)

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Cruelty: As eviction rates rise, more children are being listed on eviction proceedings

July 9, 2024 by Leave a Comment

 

             “Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible”
Maggie Smith, Good Bones

Ron Padgett opens his poem “The Absolutely Huge and Incredible Injustice in the World” with a simple question, “Why are we so mean?” That question came to mind recently reading the opening to a news report, “A housing advocate in central Ohio warns that more kids are being listed on eviction proceedings, as eviction rates increase. Though the problem isn’t widespread, it can have huge consequences on the children’s future access to credit and rental housing.” Children are being listed as defendants in eviction cases. While the number of cases is not great, why is there a number at all? And why must we be `convinced’ that this is a terrible thing? Why must we be `persuaded’ that listing a child on an eviction filing will affect and endanger that child’s well-being, possibly for the rest of their life? Why do we require studies to demonstrate that eviction, in fact housing precarity of any sort, has long term detrimental impacts on children? Why are we so mean?

The article under question focuses on Franklin County, in central Ohio. Franklin County is home to Columbus, Ohio, the state capital and the most populous city in Ohio. It’s also the home to Ohio State University. According to the 2020 Census, Franklin County held around 1,280,000 residents, of whom close to 61% are White, and a little close to 23% are Black.

According to Gene Edwards, Franklin County’s Municipal Court Legal Director and magistrate, “Franklin County is experiencing an absolute wave in evictions. We are seeing more evictions come in everyday than we have ever felt in our lives. We are on track this year to exceed 24,000 evictions. That would be setting a record. Last year, we set a record.” According to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, eviction filings in Columbus are up 38% relative to their pre-Covid average. In March of this year, eviction filings were 2% above the pre-Covid average; in April, 36%; in May 62%. Who’s receiving these eviction filings? 32% of renters in Columbus are Black; 53% are White. 49% of those receiving eviction filings were Black; 38% were White. 58% were female. None of this is surprising, but it needs to be said.

In all of this predictable, and predictably dismal, stew, how do children figure, and, more to the point, how do children’s names end up on eviction filings? Study after study, article after article, has documented that the epicenter of the national eviction crisis is single Black women heads of households. While, again, it should be obvious, it needs to be said that “heads of households” means accompanied by children. That’s how children figure in this crisis, today and for decades to come. How do their names appear on eviction filings? The landlord’s attorney adds the children’s names to the eviction notice. Those names are not on the lease, if there is a lease. In many instances, those children were not yet born when the family moved into the unit. Yet somehow they’re now responsible, and they can be held responsible for the rest of their lives.

Evictions can follow a person for life. In a world in which many credit history apps don’t distinguish between eviction filings and evictions, eviction filings can haunt a person forever, irrespective of how the case was adjudicated. As Carlie Boos, Executive Director of the Affordable Housing Alliance of Central Ohio, noted, “It means that you are absolutely going to see children who were, you know, two years old, three years old today. They will grow up, they will get an education. They will go out into the world or they’re going to try and rent their first apartment, and they’re going to be denied, because there’s an eviction record from when they were a baby sitting there”.

Why do we allow, and even encourage, this cruelty? How many studies are needed before we understand that the “eviction crisis” is a war on Black women? How many articles and studies are needed before we address our complicity in the erasure of the futures of a whole generation of Black children, growing up today? Why are we so mean?

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Infographic Source: The New York Times)

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Hathras District `stampede’ … and again we learn nothing

July 2, 2024 by Leave a Comment

 

Mughalgarhi village is in Hathras District in Uttar Pradesh, in northern India. It’s about 220 miles south of the state capital, Lucknow. At some point today, over a hundred people, mostly women and children, were crushed and or suffocated to death at the end of a large gathering. Yet again. And, yet again, the reports insist on describing this horrific and tragic event as a “stampede”. Al Jazeera headline: “Death toll from India stampede rises to 116”. New York Times headline: “Stampede at Religious Gathering in India Kills More Than 100”. ABC News headline: “Stampede at religious event in India kills more than 100, mostly women and children”. Washington Post headline: “More than 100 killed in Indian religious event stampede, officials say”. CBS Newsheadline: “Stampede at religious gathering in India leaves at least 116 people dead”. The rest of the news media reserved “stampede” for the bodies of their respective articles, but the consensus was that a stampede had happened. And yet again that stampede resulted in the deaths of mostly women and children.

Stampedes occur all the time, at least according to the news media. Most recently, stampedes have been reported on in Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, and Gaza. Before, they’ve happened in South Africa, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Côte d’Ivoire, Thailand, the United States, South Korea, El Salvador, Guatemala, France,England, and all points between and beyond. This is a drastically reduced list. Each event was horrific and tragic, but at some level the humanity of the horror and the tragedy is diluted, if not obviated, by the descriptor, stampede.

There was no stampede. There was no surge or rush. There was a place, constructed by hands and tools and design and policy. That place was planned. That people were killed there is either a failure of the plan or built into the plan, but what is clear is that, once again, people, the majority of whom were women and children, were sacrificed by that plan. Again, there was no stampede. As one survivor explained, “There was no way out, and people were falling on each other”. There was no way out. As one member of parliament put it, “Look what happened and how many people have lost their lives. Will anyone be accountable?” Another member of parliament responded, “Every year, these kinds of incidents keep repeating themselves, and we learn nothing”. We learn nothing.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting No. 5 / Tate Modern)

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Our investment in cruelty and despair: Nauru continues

June 14, 2024 by Leave a Comment

 

“I had said I wasn’t going to write no more poems like this
I made a mistake”
Gil Scott-Heron

On Wednesday, the headline read: “What is our future?’: the Nauru detention centre was empty. Now 100 asylum seekers are held there”. We’re ba-a-a-ack! Not haunted by supernatural beings, but rather by our own supposedly democratic natures that insist on greeting those who need help by treating them as just so much garbage, dumping them anywhere but here. In this instance, the anywhere is Nauru. Nauru, which closed for all of two minutes is up and running, and not running again.

At the end of June 2023, Human Rights Watch reported, “Over the weekend, the last refugee held on the island country of Nauru under the Australian government’s abusive offshore processing policy was finally evacuated to Australia. Despite the good news, the Australian government remains committed to its unlawful and expensive policy of offshore processing of asylum seekers. In this year’s budget, the government allocated AU$1.5 billion (US$1 billion) over the next four years to fund offshore operations.” After eleven years, the immigration processing center, which processed almost no one, was finally closed, that place which both Human Rights Watch and Médecins Sans Frontières described as a place of “indefinite despair” and “sustained abuse”, descriptions which were documented and, tragically, repeated year in and year out, from 2011 on. Finally, that particular site of abuse and despair was empty.

Or was it? If Nauru was closed, what was Australia allocating a billion US dollars for? In July 2023, the BBC asked the same question, and their answer, in a word, was deterrence. The fact that researchers have repeatedly found that offshore processing has little to no effect on maritime arrivals. Why would Australia, and Australia is just an example here of an attitude and policy shared by many so-called receiving countries, invest so much money in a policy that doesn’t work? Indefinite despair.

In September, Nauru greeted the first “new” batch of asylum seekers. This month already, 37 have arrived. If history is any indication, they will spend years there. Medical care on Nauru is limited, at best, when there’s any care at all: “There is no dedicated torture and trauma counselling available to asylum seekers, and specialist care – such as ear nose and throat, eye, renal, and hearing specialists – are not available.” Why would someone fleeing “severe persecution” of all sorts need or want torture or trauma counselling?

Since 2013, we’ve written repeatedly about the cruelty and routine torture taking place at Nauru. That’s what a billion US dollars buys, for four years at least, a house of cruelty, a camp of despair. In 2012, Marianne Evers, a trained counsellor and a nurse with more than 40 years’ experience, signed up to work for six weeks at Nauru. She lasted three weeks. In 2013, speaking of Nauru, she said, “I actually liken it to a concentration camp.” Not surprisingly, the Australian government took offense at the likening, “I think invoking concentration camp is a disgrace.” Calling the camp on Nauru Island a “concentration camp” was a disgrace, but the camp itself … was just fine. And it still is.

 

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image credit:  Zarina: Despair from Home Is a Foreign Place / Museum of Modern Art)

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Prison conditions: “We have the resources. We just seem to not have the compassion”

May 17, 2024 by Leave a Comment

 

No hurt I did not feel, no death
That was not mine; mine each last breath
That, crying, met an answering cry
From the compassion that was I.
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Recently, three stories concerning dangerous, often fatal, prison conditions collided. In the United States, incarcerated people in Texas face a brutal summer without air conditioning. Objecting to being “cooked to death”, incarcerated people and supporters have filed a lawsuit, which claims that at least 40 incarcerated people died of heat related causes. In England, Chief Inspector of Prisons Charlie Taylor issued an “urgent notification” about conditions in HMP Wandsworth, England’s second largest prison. Taylor has been Chief Inspector of Prisons for four years. In his report on Wandsworth, Taylor noted he encountered “a degree of despondency he had not come across in his time as chief inspector“. In the past year, seven people died of self-inflicted wounds.  The number and intensity of elf harm cases is rising. The Chief Inspector issued an “urgent notification”, meaning the State has to `improve’ the conditions at Wandsworth. In Mexico, in Morelos, in el Centro Federal de Readaptación Social, a women’s prison, 15 women have died in the past four years. In 2023, eleven women died. The prison claims the deaths were suicides. Public defenders and allies argue that the deaths resulted from violations of the women’s rights to access health care. The National Human Rights Commission recently documented such violations. In response to the situation in Texas prisons, State Representative Carl Sherman, D-DeSoto, commented, “We have the resources. We just seem to not have the compassion to do it.”

We don’t have the compassion. Once, compassion meant “suffering together”. Both parts carried equal weight. One who felt compassion suffered; one who felt compassion was intimately bound with the other. Compassion meant staying with, in suffering. More than sympathy, more than affinity, compassion required continued empathetic solidarity. When it comes to prisons and jails, we have not stayed. More precisely, we have refused to stay with. Over the years, government officials have repeatedly described HMP Wandsworth as a death trap. The reports generate a day, maybe a week, of attention, and then it’s gone. Over the years, Texas prisons have been sued, repeatedly and successfully, for the criminal conditions in which people are held, particularly in the summers. The reports generate a day, maybe a week, of attention, and then it’s gone. Over the years, government officials have criticized el Centro Federal de Readaptación Social for its violations of prisoners’, of women’s, rights. Those reports generate a day, maybe a week, of attention, and then it’s gone.

Marci Marie Simmons, a formerly incarcerated woman and the community outreach coordinator for the Lioness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance, an organization in Texas, said, “The fact is, if we don’t get air conditioning in these facilities now, people are going to die this summer.” People are going to die this summer as they did last. We have the resources. We just seem not to have the compassion.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Michelle Pitcher / Texas Observer)

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