[b]»[I]f the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier’s and Bellamy’s and Morris’s utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specific and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?«
William James - The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life[/b]

Ursula Le Guin’s story, »The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (variations on a theme by William James) « opens on an idyllic scene - a utopian community celebrating its contentment and prosperity on a perfect day. There is no plot or character development. Le Guin simply describes a scene of perfect beauty, tranquility and joy. But the secret to this utopia is not in the lush fields, the village’s prosperity or the villager’s conviviality. Their perfect world is secured by the fate of a child that the villagers have locked in a squalid, dark cellar. » It could be a boy or girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten […] It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festering sores as it sits in its own excrement continually […] It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect… they all know it’s there, all the people of Omelas[…] Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.¹

The people of Omelas are not necessarily complacent. Many feel »disgust« at the child’s fate; there is »anger«, »outrage«, »impotence« ; »they would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do.«² If the child were released, »all the prosperity and beauty and delight ... would wither and be destroyed.« So they rationalize; the child is »too degraded«, »too uncouth«, imprisoned too long to be freed; it would miss its prison, the » darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in… «.³ And thus, they gradually come to terms with their own happiness and at first, deny, then forget, its hideous source – their public secret.

[b]Public Secrets[/b]
We all accept that there are secrets that are kept from the public, but then there are »public secrets« - secrets that we choose to keep safe from ourselves – secrets that allow us to clutch at our own version of happiness, security, power, and pleasure.

Le Guin’s story is frequently referred to in discussions of utilitarian theories of justice. The justice of the nation-state often depends on its citizen’s willingness to not acknowledge that which is generally known. The figure of the scapegoat, from Dostoyevsky, to James, to Le Guin, is, in philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s language, a »bare-life«. According to Agamben, the state can only assert its power and affirm itself by separating »naked life or biological life from its »forms-of-life« or social and political agency - reducing the subject to a biological entity: a bare life preserved only as an expression of sovereign power. The child is »bare-life « – its abject misery, its life of »lonely torture » magically and hideously, guaranteeing the utopian state. »Omelas«, Le Guin explains, is an anagram for Salem, Oregon – which stands for Anytown, USA.⁴

In the United States the »war on poverty«, launched in the 60’s, has been displaced by what amounts to a multi-pronged war on the poor deployed through the »war on crime«, the »war on terror« and the »war on drugs« - each in its own way a war on the racial and economic other. Wars are supposed to be fought over liberty, justice, sovereignty, and the fundamental rights of both citizens and human beings. But in the age of multi-national capital, false consciousness is masked by many self-deceptive and self-contradictory conflicts. The injustices perpetrated by the institutional agents of these wars, the criminal justice system and the Prison Industrial Complex, are »public secrets«.

When faced with massive sociological phenomena such as racism, poverty, addiction and abuse, it is easy to slip into denial. This is the ideological work that the prison does. It allows us to avoid the ethical by relying on the juridical. The majority of prisoners in the US are raised in poverty and have struggled with addiction and mental health disorders. Their lives are damaged by abuse, neglect and state violence before their first encounter with the criminal justice system.
For poor persons of color, the de facto violation of their human rights – to economic security, personal safety, education, housing, privacy, adequate medical care – leads to crimes of poverty, frequent engagement with regimes of enforcement, and subsequent high rates of incarceration.

[b]» … I know you could probably find so many people like me… who at one point or another before they ever committed a crime, said, »Help!« I can think of numerous times. When the cops would pick me up and take me home when I was a teenager, I said, »Help. I’m being abused here.« There are so many different stories, but there is always a point - where somebody said, »I need help«, and they didn’t get it.« (Misty Rojo - interview at Central California Women’s Facility 2/20/04).[/b]

[b]»I’m saying that people do commit wrong - I know that. I know that, but the majority of the women that are in here - it was survival - just survival - you know - for whatever reason they had to survive like that - they haven’t done anything horrific - they haven’t been on TV or anything like that - they’re just nobodies - that have committed a nobody’s crime and ended up in a nobody’s prison, ok, its stupid - they had a »rock« in their hand so they’re doing 25 to life - come on - what is the point of taking a mother, a woman, somebody’s child and putting them away because they had a nickel rock - when you really look at it and you go to everybody’s cases, three percent of the people here should really be - helped - not so much as locked up but helped because there is definitely something wrong - they need professional help. « (Zundre Johnson – interview at Central California Women’s Facility 2/20/04).[/b]

Incarceration means political disenfranchisement, vulnerability and invisibility. The U.S. now incarcerates more than 2,300,000 of its citizens. 3.1% of all U.S. adults, or 1 in 32, are in jail, in prison, or on parole. Almost 1,300,000 women are incarcerated for non-violent offenses. In the state of California alone there are currently 33 adult prisons, 13 adult community correctional facilities, and eight juvenile facilities that house more than 165,000 adult prisoners and nearly 3,200 juvenile prisoners.

The twin prisons of Valley State Prison (VSP) and Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF), literally across the farm road from each other, house the largest concentration of incarcerated women in the world – more than 7,000 women within a few square miles. Eight women live in each small cell, originally built to hold four. In this claustrophobic environment every day is filled with bickering, screaming, fear, hatred, violence against and among prisoners. There is no privacy, no solitude. Inmates must endure frequent and pointless »lockdowns«, strip searches and body cavity searches that may be performed by male guards on the slightest pretext. Medical malpractice and neglect often turns short-time into a sentence of death. Addiction and mental illness are ignored or mistreated while guards smuggle in illicit drugs to be sold or traded for sexual favors. Guards openly humiliate and denigrate women. Sexual and emotional abuse is common and resistance guarantees retaliation. For example, when one inmate was brave enough to report a sexual assault on her by a guard the incident was »investigated« and a disciplinary action was issued against her. Her telephone privileges were rescinded, cutting her off from her family, and effectively preventing her from seeking legal help outside the prison for the assault she suffered inside. Dostoyevsky wrote, »The degree of civilization a society exhibits is best determined by how it treats its prisoners.«

[b]Secret Publics[/b]
The term »nation-state« is derived from »nascita« – meaning »nativity»« or birth. The trinity of nation–state–territory is founded on the principle of nativity or birth as pre-requisite for citizenship and justification of sovereignty. The poor, the addict, the refugee, the undocumented worker, the immigrant, the racial other, and the prisoner produce a fundamental »bio-political fracture«- they fall outside the circle of »nascita« – and thus bring the originary fiction of sovereignty into crisis.⁵ These figures – regarded as marginal – have become, as Giorgio Agamben says, »the decisive factor of the modern nation-state by breaking the nexus between human being and citizen.«⁶ Outside the status of citizen, the human being is subject to the rule of the state without enjoying its protections.

Like the »final solution«, the prison industrial complex (successor to the institution of slavery) attempts to resolve this crisis by disenfranchising, de-nationalizing, de-subjectifying, enslaving and essentially »disappearing« the unassimilable and unrepresentable other – the secret publics of the third world within the first world.

The prisoner is de-subjectified - in every sense of the word »subject« - political, psychological, and philosophical. She is denied agency, stripped of her individuality, subjected to cruel and inhumane treatment, and quite literally objectified. Regardless of the severity of their sentence, no matter how minor their legal infraction, prisoners are reduced from political life to pure biological life - kept alive, but barely, and for what? To represent state power – to both absorb and reflect state violence – to prove that the state has the power to force a human being to live under any conditions.

In California a prisoner’s body actually becomes the property of the state. A prisoner who attempts suicide unsuccessfully can actually be charged with destruction of state property.

[b]»They will charge you if you self-abuse, you are destroying state property….There’s no acknowledgement that it’s your body, it’s state property«. (Jane Dorotik - interview at CCWF 2/24/05.)

»So…your body does belong to the state. Yeah. We do. We belong to the state. I do for now. If I cut myself—if I over-medicated myself. You know… But if they do it, it’s okay, because you’re their property. I’m their property. Do as you will, do as you want, I belong to them«. (Genea Scott - interview at CCWF 2/24/05)[/b]

[b]Atrocities and utopias[/b]
Essentially de-subjectified by law, a prisoner’s life becomes »bare-life« – a status that is tautologous with the deprivation of their human rights. Prisoners are thus made ideologically acceptable victims of mal-treatment, neglect and abuse. Poverty, blackness, and alien-ness are effectively criminalized. The poor person of color can be pushed outside the law and polity and thus reduced to an existence »that can be ignored, neglected, or extinguished with impunity precisely because it is the law that renders it expendable«.⁷ This is a form of legal genocide – a monumental, nationally sanctioned atrocity comprised of countless individual and personal atrocities. This is generally known but unacknowledged – a public secret traded in the balance against the »security« and sovereignty of the state and a false image of safety and well-being in middle class and corporate America. In her introduction to »Are Women Human?«, Catherine MacKinnon sums up, with razor-sharp precision, how denial and resignation normalize the atrocious and render its victims less than human.

»Before atrocities are recognized as such, they are authoritatively regarded as either too extraordinary to be believable or too ordinary to be atrocious. If the events are socially considered unusual, the fact that they happened is denied in specific instances; if they are regarded as usual the fact that they are violating is denied: if it’s happening, it’s not so bad, and if it’s really bad, it isn’t happening... While disbelief and associated impunity rein, the violated are – systemically and effectively speaking – rendered not fully human legally or socially. «⁸

The injustices of the justice system, the pervasive network of monopolies and human rights abuses of the prison industrial complex – are extremely well documented yet largely »unrecognized«. Everyone knows, and knows they know, but just as in »Omelas« , they can’t imagine how things could be otherwise.

Le Guin lets us know that the utopian existence of »Omelas« » is not entirely unmediated. There is sympathy for the child: »…their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives…. They know that they, like the child, are not free... It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. «⁹

Indeed the citizens of the utopian state of Omelas are not free, they are responsible to »the terrible justice of reality«. In his recent essay on the »Politics of Utopia« for the »New Left Review«, Frederick Jameson similarly describes a globalized world split into two. »In one of these worlds the disintegration of the social is so absolute – misery, poverty, unemployment, starvation, squalor, violence, and death – that the intricately elaborated social schemes of utopian thinkers become as frivolous as they are irrelevant. In the other, unparalleled wealth, computerized production, scientific and medical discoveries unimaginable a century ago as well as an endless variety of commercial and cultural pleasures, seem to have rendered utopian fantasy and speculation as boring and antiquated as pre-technological narratives of space flight.«¹⁰

Is this utopia-resistant split the cybernetic regulator that maintains the steady state of our social and political systems? According to Jameson the fundamental premise of systems as such is that the one thing that cannot be challenged or changed is the system itself. The function of a utopian imaginary is to »reveal the ideological closure of the system in which we are somehow trapped … and thus prompt us to make the most radical demands we can possibly make on our own system« »¹¹ - demands that would transform »the system« beyond recognition and engender »a society structurally distinct from this one in every conceivable way... «¹²

When the adolescent boys and girls of Omelas come of age they are forced to cross over from innocence. They are taken down into the cellar, where the secret of the abject child is revealed to them. Some of them do not go home to weep and then gradually accept and forget. Some of them walk away. They walk alone to a place that Le Guin cannot describe – »a place even less imaginable than the city of happiness.«

Does our pleasure and complacence depend on the existence of suffering and oppression at the prison? Can we walk away? Can we imagine a system in which »justice« » is not just a source of corporate profit? Can we imagine a society in which race and class are not the primary determinants of punishment?¹³

Like the people of Omelas – we are not free. None of us can really be safe until all of us are safe. No citizen can honestly claim their inalienable rights until all people can share in them.

Five years ago, posing as a legal advocate, I walked through a metal detector and into the Central California Womens’ Facility, It changed my life. The stories I heard inside challenged my most basic perceptions - of justice, of freedom and of responsibility. These stories form the basis of »Public Secrets« http://publicsecret.net. I hope you will follow this link, and walk with me across the boundary between inside and outside, bare-life and human-life, toward a world without prisons.

 

 

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