CI: The Ubiquity, the Banality of Mediated Policing & Punishment

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† Criminal InJustice is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Kay Whitlock, co-author of Queer (In)Justice, is contributing editor of CI. Criminal Injustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm.

 

The Ubiquity, the Banality of Mediated Policing & Punishment
by nancy a heitzeg

“Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.” ― Hannah Arendt

One of the many benefits of rarely watching TV is this: when you do turn it on, you are shocked anew by the uninterrupted routinization of policing and punishment, shook awake from the otherwise somnambulist gaze.

Certainly we have come to expect, with few questions, the demonization of  “criminals”, the fueled fear of crime,  the glorification of police, prosecutors, and prison as “appropriate” punishment. We have come to expect too the racialized framing that deems a 100+ Gun/9 Dead shootout with police in Waco a Kerfuffle, a mere “melee“, while 1 burned CVS amidst Baltimore protests constitutes a riot. This is the overt script for the “news”, the text of “reality” police and prison shows – LockUp, Jail and Cops –  the fodder for the serial glorification of Blue Bloods, Walter White(ness) and Dirty Harry/Die Hard/Mad Max marathons, and the premise of endless incarnations of Law and Order, CSI, and more.

Perhaps most insidiously, policing, punishment and prison pervades as subtext and unexamined backdrop. Our fears are subverted into twisted humor, often as prison rape jokes that float through even children’s programming, and are also used to sell us an array of consumer products. Here, most recently imagine my surprise at this — in the age of #Ferguson/#Baltimore/#Everywhere and any number of untold deaths by Taser – Dollar Shave Club razors.

Beyond the billions in profit churned  –  yes this too is part of the prison industrial complex — this cultural hegemony normalizes policing and prison as part of the everyday landscape. It is routine; it is to be expected. Policing, punishment and prisons are such blatantly recurrent elements of cultural commodfication that they are embedded as normative within our psyches and collective subconscious.

The hyper-visible atrocities  are, in effect, rendered completely invisible. They are so Everywhere that they are Nowhere at all.

And how do you dismantle a system of excessive repression that many can no longer even see?

 

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  • Pingback: Critical Mass Progress | CI: The #Police in Your Heads()

  • The ansr to my question most likeley involves ” disruptive intelligence”
    by Whitlock and Bronski http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/30022-how-hate-lets-us-off-the-hook

    Lewis Hyde uses the phrase “disruptive intelligence” in Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art,
    an exploration of trickster-like mythologies and cultural expression.
    He argues that tricksters using disruptive insight are boundary
    violators and cultural agents who rip the lid off and expose “inflated
    righteousness” to show the cruelties often hidden within. Even as it
    exposes hypocrisy contradictions, disruptive insight opens up space for
    new possibility.
    It’s the significance of this energy that interests us. “Disruptive
    intelligence” is, by its nature, elusive. It resists description, taking
    any number of forms depending on the reality of what it is disrupting.
    This chapter went through numerous revisions because we kept giving
    perfectly good examples that, precisely because they were concrete,
    limited the enormous scope of the idea. Disruptive intelligence’s energy
    does not derive from cogent political argument and organizing alone.
    Basically, it can be anything – a book, poem, direct question, gesture,
    glance, protest sign, slogan, ironic stance – that pulls the reader,
    listener, audience, person on the street out of their often-passive
    embrace of the accepted reality.
    See Considering Hatewe