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IntroDuCtIon empowerment or Incarceration: reclaiming hope and Justice from a Punishing Democracy Stephen John Hartnett Stacked atop one another on the same page on the same day, juxtaposed clues to a catastrophe, two New York Times articles illustrate some of America’s obsessions , fears, and blind spots regarding crime, violence, and punishment. The top story tells the tale of Gilberta Estrada, a twenty-five-year-old Mexican immigrant who hanged herself and her four children. Recently separated from her long-time partner, working the morning shift at a Wendy’s, living in a trailer park outside Dallas, raising four children by herself, and “struggling with depression,” Estrada’s days were difficult. Then something snapped one night, as Estrada took her eight-month-old baby and her two-, three-, and five-year-old daughters and strung them and herself up by their necks in a closet. The infant survived, but Estrada and her three older daughters died, leaving Sheriff Larry Fowler stunned: “It’s horrendous” he said, thus casting the event in the gothic genre wherein human actions are inexplicable, monstrous , bizarre, and macabre. From one perspective, Fowler is correct, for this group murder and suicide is “horrendous” and defies explanation: Estrada’s actions are the stuff of dark and mysterious forces, they gesture toward the worst capacities of humans to inflict violence upon themselves and others. From another perspective, however, Fowler is wrong, for the circumstances leading to Estrada’s violence are painfully typical. Consider the array of Estrada ’s all-too-familiar tribulations: She was struggling to hold together a broken family, escape a life of poverty, survive a dead-end job, raise four children in a state with infamously bad family support services, prosper in a state rife with racism, and live with a debilitating health condition that was not being treated. No partner, no money, no prospects, no support, no justice, no health care. We cannot reduce these circumstances to some crude formula that produces violence, for most poor and even desperate people do not commit crimes, let alone hang themselves and their children. But we cannot settle 2 for Sheriff Fowler’s characterization of Estrada’s actions as “horrendous,” for they are more than that: They are indicative of the near-total breakdown of what Americans once called community, they illustrate the consequences of decades of mean-spirited public policy, they demonstrate how the intersection of neoliberal economics, racism, gender inequity, failing schools, and just plain bad luck leaves millions of our neighbors in grueling positions, struggling on the fringes of a society that notices them only when they get busted for dealing drugs, hang their children, or fight for the kinds of political rights and human services that the middle class takes for granted.1 Indeed, the second New York Times article, sitting just below the news about Estrada, chronicles the aftermath of the 2007 May Day riot in Los Angeles, at which between 500 and 600 police officers attacked a crowd of 6,000 Angelinos , mostly people of color, who had assembled peaceably in MacArthur Park to rally in support of immigrants’ rights. When folks like Estrada participate in the public sphere, doing what democracy asks them to do, they are physically beaten by police trained to see gatherings of poor people of color not as a movement but as a gang, not as a celebration of democracy but as a threat to law and order. In response to this mêlée, Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton fired some of his top officers and instituted new training programs for others. Nevertheless, if you consider the history of the Los Angeles police, including their performance in the so-called Zoot Suit riots in 1943, their response to the Watts uprising in 1965, their implication in the Tijuana/L.A. cocaine cartels of the 1980s, their violations of human rights in the Ramparts scandals of the late 1980s and early 1990s, their handling of the Rodney King affair in 1991, and their most recent attacks on Angelino activists, then it is hard not to conclude that Bratton is not engaging in systematic institutional transformation so much as another round of crisis management. For the past seventy-five years, rogue elements within the L.A. police have been among the most brutal and lawbreaking gangs in the land— does anyone really think that Bratton’s public relations band-aid is going to change that fact?2 These two stories prompt a series of questions...

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