A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.
That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.
For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.
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.
How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.
William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published, last fall, is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice. He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of post-Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison time; “zero tolerance” policing, which added to the group; mandatory-sentencing laws, which prevented judges from exercising judgment. But his search for the ultimate cause leads deeper, all the way to the Bill of Rights. In a society where Constitution worship is still a requisite on right and left alike, Stuntz startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system—much inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson, he points out, may have helped shape while his protégé Madison was writing ours.
The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” was designed to protect cruel punishments—flogging and branding—that were not at that time unusual.
The obsession with due process and the cult of brutal prisons, the argument goes, share an essential impersonality. The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people. That’s why America is famous both for its process-driven judicial system (“The bastard got off on a technicality,” the cop-show detective fumes) and for the harshness and inhumanity of its prisons. Though all industrialized societies started sending more people to prison and fewer to the gallows in the eighteenth century, it was in Enlightenment-inspired America that the taste for long-term, profoundly depersonalized punishment became most aggravated. The inhumanity of American prisons was as much a theme for Dickens, visiting America in 1842, as the cynicism of American lawyers. His shock when he saw the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia—a “model” prison, at the time the most expensive public building ever constructed in the country, where every prisoner was kept in silent, separate confinement—still resonates:
I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers. . . . I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.
Not roused up to stay—that was the point. Once the procedure ends, the penalty begins, and, as long as the cruelty is routine, our civil responsibility toward the punished is over. We lock men up and forget about their existence. For Dickens, even the corrupt but communal debtors’ prisons of old London were better than this. “Don’t take it personally!”—that remains the slogan above the gate to the American prison Inferno. Nor is this merely a historian’s vision. Conrad Black, at the high end, has a scary and persuasive picture of how his counsel, the judge, and the prosecutors all merrily congratulated each other on their combined professional excellence just before sending him off to the hoosegow for several years. If a millionaire feels that way, imagine how the ordinary culprit must feel.
In place of abstraction, Stuntz argues for the saving grace of humane discretion. Basically, he thinks, we should go into court with an understanding of what a crime is and what justice is like, and then let common sense and compassion and specific circumstance take over. There’s a lovely scene in “The Castle,” the Australian movie about a family fighting eminent-domain eviction, where its hapless lawyer, asked in court to point to the specific part of the Australian constitution that the eviction violates, says desperately, “It’s . . . just the vibe of the thing.” For Stuntz, justice ought to be just the vibe of the thing—not one procedural error caught or one fact worked around. The criminal law should once again be more like the common law, with judges and juries not merely finding fact but making law on the basis of universal principles of fairness, circumstance, and seriousness, and crafting penalties to the exigencies of the crime.
The other argument—the Southern argument—is that this story puts too bright a face on the truth. The reality of American prisons, this argument runs, has nothing to do with the knots of procedural justice or the perversions of Enlightenment-era ideals. Prisons today operate less in the rehabilitative mode of the Northern reformers “than in a retributive mode that has long been practiced and promoted in the South,” Perkinson, an American-studies professor, writes. “American prisons trace their lineage not only back to Pennsylvania penitentiaries but to Texas slave plantations.” White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. “The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,” the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of “formal control” (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of “invisible control.” Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander’s grim conclusion: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.”
Northern impersonality and Southern revenge converge on a common American theme: a growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:
Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.
Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.
Yet a spectre haunts all these accounts, North and South, whether process gone mad or penal colony writ large. It is that the epidemic of imprisonment seems to track the dramatic decline in crime over the same period. The more bad guys there are in prison, it appears, the less crime there has been in the streets. The real background to the prison boom, which shows up only sporadically in the prison literature, is the crime wave that preceded and overlapped it.
For those too young to recall the big-city crime wave of the sixties and seventies, it may seem like mere bogeyman history. For those whose entire childhood and adolescence were set against it, it is the crucial trauma in recent American life and explains much else that happened in the same period. It was the condition of the Upper West Side of Manhattan under liberal rule, far more than what had happened to Eastern Europe under socialism, that made neo-con polemics look persuasive. There really was, as Stuntz himself says, a liberal consensus on crime (“Wherever the line is between a merciful justice system and one that abandons all serious effort at crime control, the nation had crossed it”), and it really did have bad effects.
Yet if, in 1980, someone had predicted that by 2012 New York City would have a crime rate so low that violent crime would have largely disappeared as a subject of conversation, he would have seemed not so much hopeful as crazy. Thirty years ago, crime was supposed to be a permanent feature of the city, produced by an alienated underclass of super-predators; now it isn’t.
Something good happened to change it, and you might have supposed that the change would be an opportunity for celebration and optimism. Instead, we mostly content ourselves with grudging and sardonic references to the silly side of gentrification, along with a few all-purpose explanations, like broken-window policing. This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that don’t.
So what is the relation between mass incarceration and the decrease in crime? Certainly, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many experts became persuaded that there was no way to make bad people better; all you could do was warehouse them, for longer or shorter periods. The best research seemed to show, depressingly, that nothing works—that rehabilitation was a ruse. Then, in 1983, inmates at the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois, murdered two guards. Inmates had been (very occasionally) killing guards for a long time, but the timing of the murders, and the fact that they took place in a climate already prepared to believe that even ordinary humanity was wasted on the criminal classes, meant that the entire prison was put on permanent lockdown. A century and a half after absolute solitary first appeared in American prisons, it was reintroduced. Those terrible numbers began to grow.
And then, a decade later, crime started falling: across the country by a standard measure of about forty per cent; in New York City by as much as eighty per cent. By 2010, the crime rate in New York had seen its greatest decline since the Second World War; in 2002, there were fewer murders in Manhattan than there had been in any year since 1900. In social science, a cause sought is usually a muddle found; in life as we experience it, a crisis resolved is causality established. If a pill cures a headache, we do not ask too often if the headache might have gone away by itself.
All this ought to make the publication of Franklin E. Zimring’s new book, “The City That Became Safe,” a very big event. Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law, has spent years crunching the numbers of what happened in New York in the context of what happened in the rest of America. One thing he teaches us is how little we know. The forty per cent drop across the continent—indeed, there was a decline throughout the Western world— took place for reasons that are as mysterious in suburban Ottawa as they are in the South Bronx. Zimring shows that the usual explanations—including demographic shifts—simply can’t account for what must be accounted for. This makes the international decline look slightly eerie: blackbirds drop from the sky, plagues slacken and end, and there seems no absolute reason that societies leap from one state to another over time. Trends and fashions and fads and pure contingencies happen in other parts of our social existence; it may be that there are fashions and cycles in criminal behavior, too, for reasons that are just as arbitrary.
But the additional forty per cent drop in crime that seems peculiar to New York finally succumbs to Zimring’s analysis. The change didn’t come from resolving the deep pathologies that the right fixated on—from jailing super predators, driving down the number of unwed mothers, altering welfare culture. Nor were there cures for the underlying causes pointed to by the left: injustice, discrimination, poverty. Nor were there any “Presto!” effects arising from secret patterns of increased abortions or the like. The city didn’t get much richer; it didn’t get much poorer. There was no significant change in the ethnic makeup or the average wealth or educational levels of New Yorkers as violent crime more or less vanished. “Broken windows” or “turnstile jumping” policing, that is, cracking down on small visible offenses in order to create an atmosphere that refused to license crime, seems to have had a negligible effect; there was, Zimring writes, a great difference between the slogans and the substance of the time. (Arrests for “visible” nonviolent crime—e.g., street prostitution and public gambling—mostly went down through the period.)
Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime. In the nineties, the N.Y.P.D. began to control crime not by fighting minor crimes in safe places but by putting lots of cops in places where lots of crimes happened—“hot-spot policing.” The cops also began an aggressive, controversial program of “stop and frisk”—“designed to catch the sharks, not the dolphins,” as Jack Maple, one of its originators, described it—that involved what’s called pejoratively “profiling.” This was not so much racial, since in any given neighborhood all the suspects were likely to be of the same race or color, as social, involving the thousand small clues that policemen recognized already. Minority communities, Zimring emphasizes, paid a disproportionate price in kids stopped and frisked, and detained, but they also earned a disproportionate gain in crime reduced. “The poor pay more and get more” is Zimring’s way of putting it. He believes that a “light” program of stop-and-frisk could be less alienating and just as effective, and that by bringing down urban crime stop-and-frisk had the net effect of greatly reducing the number of poor minority kids in prison for long stretches.
Zimring insists, plausibly, that he is offering a radical and optimistic rewriting of theories of what crime is and where criminals are, not least because it disconnects crime and minorities. “In 1961, twenty six percent of New York City’s population was minority African American or Hispanic. Now, half of New York’s population is—and what that does in an enormously hopeful way is to destroy the rude assumptions of supply side criminology,” he says. By “supply side criminology,” he means the conservative theory of crime that claimed that social circumstances produced a certain net amount of crime waiting to be expressed; if you stopped it here, it broke out there. The only way to stop crime was to lock up all the potential criminals. In truth, criminal activity seems like most other human choices—a question of contingent occasions and opportunity. Crime is not the consequence of a set number of criminals; criminals are the consequence of a set number of opportunities to commit crimes. Close down the open drug market in Washington Square, and it does not automatically migrate to Tompkins Square Park. It just stops, or the dealers go indoors, where dealing goes on but violent crime does not.
And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.
One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.
Social trends deeper and less visible to us may appear as future historians analyze what went on. Something other than policing may explain things—just as the coming of cheap credit cards and state lotteries probably did as much to weaken the Mafia’s Five Families in New York, who had depended on loan sharking and numbers running, as the F.B.I. could. It is at least possible, for instance, that the coming of the mobile phone helped drive drug dealing indoors, in ways that helped drive down crime. It may be that the real value of hot spot and stop-and-frisk was that it provided a single game plan that the police believed in; as military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan. But one thing is sure: social epidemics, of crime or of punishment, can be cured more quickly than we might hope with simpler and more superficial mechanisms than we imagine. Throwing a Band-Aid over a bad wound is actually a decent strategy, if the Band-Aid helps the wound to heal itself.
hich leads, further, to one piece of radical common sense: since prison plays at best a small role in stopping even violent crime, very few people, rich or poor, should be in prison for a nonviolent crime. Neither the streets nor the society is made safer by having marijuana users or peddlers locked up, let alone with the horrific sentences now dispensed so easily. For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five years? It seems likely that anyone for whom those sanctions aren’t sufficient is someone for whom no sanctions are ever going to be sufficient. Zimring’s research shows clearly that, if crime drops on the street, criminals coming out of prison stop committing crimes. What matters is the incidence of crime in the world, and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some “lesson learned” in prison.
At the same time, the ugly side of stop-and-frisk can be alleviated. To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets—to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent, that the obvious thing to do is not to enforce the law less but to change it now. Dr. Johnson said once that manners make law, and that when manners alter, the law must, too. It’s obvious that marijuana is now an almost universally accepted drug in America: it is not only used casually (which has been true for decades) but also talked about casually on television and in the movies (which has not). One need only watch any stoner movie to see that the perceived risks of smoking dope are not that you’ll get arrested but that you’ll get in trouble with a rival frat or look like an idiot to women. The decriminalization of marijuana would help end the epidemic of imprisonment.
The rate of incarceration in most other rich, free countries, whatever the differences in their histories, is remarkably steady. In countries with Napoleonic justice or common law or some mixture of the two, in countries with adversarial systems and in those with magisterial ones, whether the country once had brutal plantation-style penal colonies, as France did, or was once itself a brutal plantation-style penal colony, like Australia, the natural rate of incarceration seems to hover right around a hundred men per hundred thousand people. (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get lower in rich, homogeneous countries—just that it never gets much higher in countries otherwise like our own.) It seems that one man in every thousand once in a while does a truly bad thing. All other things being equal, the point of a justice system should be to identify that thousandth guy, find a way to keep him from harming other people, and give everyone else a break.
Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime.
“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!” King Lear cries out on the heath in his moment of vision. “Take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” “This” changes; in Shakespeare’s time, it was flat-out peasant poverty that starved some and drove others as mad as poor Tom. In Dickens’s and Hugo’s time, it was the industrial revolution that drove kids to mines. But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life, and in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change it—which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order. In every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away. Prisons are our this. We need take more care.
We must answer Trump's neofascism with a democracy and an economy that work for all
I’m sorry to intrude on your holiday week with this, but I want you to be prepared for what’s to come next week.
January 6 will be the first anniversary of one of the most shameful days in American history. On that date in 2021, the United States Capitol was attacked by thousands of armed loyalists to Donald Trump, some intent on killing members of Congress. Roughly 140 officers were injured in the attack. Five people died that day.
But even now, almost a year later, Americans remain confused and divided about the significance of what occurred. Let me offer four basic truths:
1. Trump incited the attack on the Capitol.
For weeks before the attack, Trump had been urging his supporters to come to Washington for a “Save America March” on January 6, when Congress was to ceremonially count the electoral votes of Joe Biden’s win. Without any basis in fact or law (60 federal courts as well as the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security concluded that there was no evidence of substantial fraud), Trump repeatedly asserted he had won the 2020 election and Biden had lost it.
“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Trump tweeted on December 19. Then on December 26: “See you in Washington, DC, on January 6th. Don’t miss it. Information to follow.” On December 30: “JANUARY SIXTH, SEE YOU IN DC!” On January 1: “The BIG Protest Rally in Washington, D.C. will take place at 11:00 A.M. on January 6th. Locational details to follow. StopTheSteal!”
At a rally just before the violence, Trump repeated his falsehoods about how the election was stolen. “We will never give up,” he said. “We will never concede. It will never happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore.”
He told the crowd that Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back, respectful of everyone — “including bad people.”
But, he said, “we’re going to have to fight much harder…. We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong…. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."
He then told the crowd that “different rules” applied to them. “When you catch somebody in a fraud, you are allowed to go by very different rules. So I hope Mike [Pence] has the courage to do what he has to do, and I hope he doesn’t listen to the RINOs [Republicans in Name Only] and the stupid people that he’s listening to.”
Then he dispatched the crowd to the Capitol as the electoral count was about to start. The attack on the Capitol came immediately after.
2. The events of January 6 capped two months during which Trump sought to reverse the outcome of the election.
Shortly after the election, Trump summoned to the White House Republican lawmakers from Pennsylvania and Michigan, to inquire about how they might alter the election results. He even called two local canvassing board officials in Wayne County, Michigan’s most populous county and one that overwhelmingly favored Biden.
He phoned Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes,” according to a recording of that conversation, adding “the people of Georgia are angry, the people of the country are angry. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”
He suggested that Georgia’s secretary of state would be criminally prosecuted if he did not do as Trump told him. “You know what they did and you’re not reporting it. You know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”
He pressed the acting US attorney general and deputy attorney general to declare the election fraudulent. When the deputy said the department had found no evidence of widespread fraud and warned that it had no power to change the outcome of the election, Trump replied “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” and to Trump’s congressional allies.
Trump and his allies continued to harangue the attorney general and top Justice Department officials nearly every day until January 6. Trump plotted with an assistant attorney general to oust the acting attorney general and pressure lawmakers in Georgia to overturn the state’s election results. But Trump ultimately decided against it after top department leaders pledged to resign en masse.
Presumably, more details of Trump’s attempted coup will emerge after the House Select Committee on January 6 gathers more evidence and deposes more witnesses.
3. Trump’s attempted coup continues to this day.
Trump still refuses to concede the election and continues to assert it was stolen. He presides over a network of loyalists and allies who have sought to overturn the election (and erode public confidence in it) by mounting partisan state “audits” and escalating attacks on state election officials. When asked recently about the fraudulent claims and increasingly incendiary rhetoric, a Trump spokeswoman said that the former president “supports any patriotic American who dedicates their time and effort to exposing the rigged 2020 Presidential Election.”
Last week, Trump announced he will be hosting a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on January 6.
“Remember,” he said in the announcement “the insurrection took place on November 3rd. It was the completely unarmed protest of the rigged election that took place on January 6th." (Reminder: they were armed.) Trump then referred to the House investigation: "Why isn't the Unselect Committee of highly partisan political hacks investigating the CAUSE of the January 6th protest, which was the rigged Presidential Election of 2020?"
He went on to castigate "Rinos," presumably referring to his opponents within the party, such as Republican Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who sit on the January 6 committee. "In many ways a Rino is worse than a Radical Left Democrat," Trump said, "because you don't know where they are coming from and you have no idea how bad they really are for our Country.” He added, “the good news is there are fewer and fewer RINOs left as we elect strong Patriots who love America.”
Trump has endorsed a primary challenger to Cheney, while Kinzinger will leave Congress at the next election. Trump and other Republicans have also moved to punish 13 House Republicans who bucked party leadership and voted for a bipartisan infrastructure bill in November.
4. All of this reveals an underlying problem in America.
Trump and his co-conspirators must be held accountable, of course. Hopefully, the Select Committee’s report will be used by the Justice Department in criminal prosecutions of Trump and his accomplices.
But this in itself will not solve the underlying problem. A belligerent and narcissistic authoritarian has gained a powerful hold over a large portion of America. As many as 60 percent of Republican voters continue to believe his lies. Many remain intensely loyal. The Republican party is close to becoming a cult whose central animating idea is that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
Trump has had help, of course. Fox News hosts and Facebook groups have promoted and amplified his ravings for their own purposes. Republicans in Congress and in the states have played along.
But even with this help, Trump’s attempted coup could not have gotten this far without something more basic: A substantial portion of the American population feels an anger and despair that has made them susceptible to Trump’s swagger and lies.
It is too simplistic to attribute this solely to racism or xenophobia. America has harbored white supremacist and anti-immigrant sentiments since its founding. The despair Trump has channeled is more closely connected to a profound loss of identity, dignity and purpose, especially among Americans who have been left behind – without college degrees, without good jobs, in places that have been economically abandoned and disdained by much of the rest of the country.
The wages of these Americans have not risen in forty years, adjusted for inflation, even though the economy is now three times larger than it was four decades ago. The norm of upward mobility has been shattered for these Americans. Through their eyes, the entire American system is now rigged against them.
This part of America yearns for a strongman to deliver it from despair. Trump has filled that void. To be sure, he’s filled it with bombast, lies, paranoia, and neofascism. But he has filled it nonetheless. The challenge ahead is to fill it with a democracy and economy that work for everyone. Unless we understand and respond to this fundamental truth, we will miss the true meaning of January 6.
**
Do you agree? If not, what do you think is the real meaning of January 6?
Early Thursday morning at her home in Perth, Australia, Virginia Giuffre woke up to her husband shaking the bed, saying, “Wake up! You’ve got to wake up! She’s guilty.” As she opened her eyes, she was shocked to learn that Ghislaine Maxwell had been convicted of sex-trafficking charges and could face up to 65 years in prison for recruiting, grooming, and abusing girls alongside Jeffrey Epstein. “It’s a bittersweet emotion because I have been fighting for long,” Giuffre said. “But it’s definitely a relief to know that she’s off the streets.”
After Epstein died in 2019, victims like Giuffre were robbed of the chance to face him in court. While defense lawyers used this to their advantage, painting Maxwell as a scapegoat for a dead man’s sins throughout the trial, Giuffre sees the British socialite as the even bigger culprit. “She’s more evil than Epstein,” she told me. “What Ghislaine did to so many of us is unforgivable.”
Giuffre is the most well-known victim in this case, and though she was not called to testify, her presence loomed over the proceedings (her name was mentioned almost 250 times and photos of her as a teenager were shown in court). The now-38-year-old says Maxwell recruited her in 2000 by dangling an opportunity to become Epstein’s professional masseuse. Giuffre, who was working as a locker attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago spa, jumped at the opportunity. But once the 16-year-old arrived at the pink mansion in Palm Beach, it became clear she would be forced into sex with both Epstein and Maxwell, according to Giuffre’s depositions from a 2015 lawsuit. (In her own deposition for the case, Maxwell claimed Giuffre has “lied repeatedly, often and is just an awful fantasist.”) She had spent her childhood in and out of foster care, being trafficked and sexually assaulted on the streets, and figured “this is what life must be about.”
For the next few years, she says she was ensnared in a trafficking ring, enduring repeated abuse from Epstein and Maxwell along with their powerful associates, including Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz (both men deny these claims and have not faced any charges). She escaped in 2002, when Epstein sent her on a trip to Thailand to bring home his latest trafficking recruit. There, Giuffre met a man she married ten days later, and moved to his home in Australia to start a family (when she delivered the news to Epstein, he responded, “Have a nice life,” and hung up). Her new chapter was interrupted five years later, in 2007, when she was pulled into an FBI investigation that ultimately ended in a plea deal with little jail time for Epstein. Since then, fighting for justice has consumed Giuffre; she’s publicly told her story and remains tangled in ongoing lawsuits against Maxwell, Dershowitz, and Prince Andrew. She spoke with the Cut about the first meaningful criminal conviction in the trafficking scheme that haunts her to this day.
You just woke up to some very powerful news. How are you feeling?
I have been dreaming of this day for the last ten years, not knowing that it was going to come. Since the trial started, I’ve been having sleepless nights, wanting to get inside of the jurors’ minds. I am grateful they saw Maxwell for who she is.
It’s a bittersweet emotion because I have been fighting for so long. It’s definitely not over. There are so many more people involved with this. It doesn’t stop with Maxwell. But it’s definitely a relief to know that she’s off the streets. And that no matter how rich or how connected you are, that you can still be held accountable.
What happened after your husband delivered the verdict?
I was shaken awake to him saying, “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!” I said, “I need a cup of coffee.” And then I jumped out of bed. My middle son had just woken up, and I just was so excited to tell him. My kids have seen me go through hell and back. He gave me the biggest hug and was like, “Mom, you did it!” and that was a melting moment for me, my kid being proud. I’m very happy. I’m still very shaken. I think it takes time to heal, and this justice is part of the process. Now I can start really working past Maxwell and thinking about the others who need to be held accountable.
What’s it been like watching this trial unfold from afar?
I’ve been coping as well as I possibly can being on the other side of the world. I upped my therapy sessions. I, um … couldn’t help but think about it all the time, every day. I would go to bed thinking about it. I would wake up in the middle of the night and start Googling “Ghislaine Maxwell” to see if there had been any progress. And then trying to go back to sleep with all those things in your mind, I just … I feel like some days I was just hanging on by a thread.
I dream about Epstein and Maxwell a lot. Sometimes they’re abusing me; other times we could be at a movie theater. It ranges, but I always wake up wishing I didn’t have to live so much in the past.
Sounds like you haven’t been getting much rest.
I’ve endured worse than this before, but the case is a big deal to me. This is someone who abused me from a young age, someone who used their womanly abilities to make me feel comfortable. It wasn’t like some old rich dude pulled up on the side of the road and asked if I wanted to give him a massage. I had this lady at Mar-a-Lago with this prim and proper accent ask me if I wanted to have an interview.
Right, Ghislaine bucked the stereotypes of a typical predator, which made her easier to trust.
The deceit hurts even more because I fell naïvely into her trap. I mean, she is poised. She looks sophisticated. She didn’t raise any hairs on the back of my head. I was just a locker-room attendant at Mar-a-Lago who wanted to be a masseuse. Ghislaine comes to me with this amazing deal, saying, “Oh my God, you’re perfect. You’re exactly who we’ve been looking for!” I told her I have no experience in massage therapy and she’s like, “Don’t worry about that, we’ll get you educated. You’ll become a real massage therapist, you’ll travel the world. You’ll make the money.” I mean, you tell that to any 16-year-old and they’re going to jump at it. And I did. That very first night at his mansion, the abuse started to happen. The shade just went over my eyes again and I thought, This is what life must be about. Mar-a-Lago was supposed to be a new beginning for me.
Tell me more about that. I know you met Ghislaine at a time when you were trying to pick up the pieces.
Epstein and Maxwell took a part of my childhood that I’ll never get back. I was enrolled in classes and getting my GED. I had a job and was done with living on the streets. I really just wanted something as normal as possible. I’d gone through so much abuse already, you’d think I would have had an amazing radar for these types of predators. But Ghislaine connected with me on a different level. She saw me reading a book about massage therapy and was able to nab me in that way. The thing about predators is they seek the vulnerable, find out what they want, and promise them a dream. That’s how they work. Cages and chains come in all different shapes and sizes. I wasn’t tied to a radiator or anything, like you’ve seen in movies. My shackles were Epstein and Ghislaine’s wealth and the powerful people they knew. Epstein told me he owned the Palm Beach police department. It was all just really scary.
Let’s talk about your decision to tell your story publicly, first in the Daily Mail in 2011 and in other places over the past decade.
It was a massive change. I was scared in the beginning, you know? I wondered, Am I doing the right thing by my family, speaking out? What’s the cause and effect here? But I knew the pros outweighed the cons. I couldn’t be a good mom while knowing Ghislaine and Epstein were still out there doing exactly what they’ve always done.
I know you’ve said the choice to speak out was prompted by the birth of your daughter in 2010.
I don’t want my little girl growing up in a world that is so vicious. She’s nearly 12 and she’s drop-dead gorgeous. Social media has made life so much easier for pedophiles. Epstein had a pyramid scheme, which really worked for him. It wasn’t dirty old men bringing girls over. These girls and women were not told what was going on. Then you get there and you’re stuck in it and, you know … [she puts her head in her hand.]
Tell me about what made you so emotional.
It’s not just my little girl, it’s about all the little girls. And boys. It’s a scary world we’re living in right now. I trust my daughter, but I have to go through her phone at least once a week and sit down with her and ask, “Who are you talking to? What are you guys talking about?” I’m probably extra-cautious. My kids tell me that I am.
You also have two teenage sons. What impact has your story had on your kids’ lives?
All of my family has been affected. They see what I’ve talked about. They have friends that Google my name and say, “Oh my God, is this your mom?” It’s a lot for them to carry. But now they’re teenagers. They’re at that prime era in life where I think it’s important to teach them about sex trafficking, what signs to look out for. And so I’m open with them. I let them watch one of my interviews.
Which one?
60 Minutes Australia. The show did a really good job. I’ve been speaking out for ten years, and in the beginning, the media was like, Well, this is just a story about glitz and glamour, and flying high in the sky and meeting people. It was like, “Wait a second, you guys forgot to talk about the abuse.” They didn’t know how to tell the story.
It sounds like you’ve really made an effort to educate your kids about your experience.
I put it out there. I can sit here and talk to you, basically any adult when it comes to what I’ve been through. But with my kids, it’s such a delicate matter. And I treat it as such. I don’t want them going through life constantly looking over their shoulder thinking, Well, it happened to my mom, so it can happen to me. But I do want them to be aware that the world is a big place, and it’s easy to get trapped.
The defense unsuccessfully tried to make the case that Maxwell was being scapegoated for Epstein’s crimes. How did you view her role?
She was the devil’s right-hand man. She made these appointments for him, she actively went out there and scouted for new girls. She was part of the sexual encounters at times. To paint herself as just the “house manager” is a load of crock.
You’re describing how Ghislaine was also sexually abusive, in addition to the recruiting and grooming she did. Was she as damaging as Epstein?
She’s definitely worse than Epstein. She used that charm, that wit, that smile to come off as somebody you want to trust. Epstein did a whole bunch of really bad stuff, acting on his sick urges. One victim said it perfectly: Jeffrey had to ejaculate like you and I have to breathe. It’s organic to him [in a deposition, the accuser claimed Epstein said he needed “three orgasms a day” and that it “was biological, like eating”]. But Ghislaine facilitated it. She was the one out there bringing the girls in for him and participating in some of the sexual events. She’s worse to me, more evil than Epstein. What Ghislaine did to so many of us, it’s unforgivable.
When Epstein died in 2019, you spoke about mourning your “ability to hold him accountable.” Now Ghislaine has been convicted, but what does justice look like for you? Is this enough?
After Epstein passed, Judge Berman [a federal judge who was overseeing the sex-trafficking case] allowed us victims to come in and speak about what we’d been through in impact statements. It was a very freeing moment for me. I immediately became good friends with the other women; they’re my survivor sisters. We use WhatsApp at least a few times a week to keep in touch.
But let’s just say, it wasn’t just Jeffrey and Ghislaine who participated in this. Justice to me looks like holding all of these people involved in the sex ring, those who greased its wheels, named and shamed. I’m sick of carrying around that shame. That shame doesn’t belong to me. I think justice comes in many forms, and one area I want to change is the statute of limitations.
I know you’ve started an organization called Speak Out, Act, Reclaim (SOAR), focused on helping survivors and eventually legal reform. What are you working on?
I can’t tell you how many times a day I get messages from people who say, “This is happening to me. I don’t know what to do. But I know you have gone through this.” I’m not in therapy or anything like that, so I just point them in the right direction.
But there’s a lot of confusion out there. People say, “I want to speak out, but what’s going to come from it if I can’t hold them accountable?” That’s why fighting the statute of limitations means so much to me [right now, it’s a matter of state law, with some taking effect only a few years after a sex crime]. When you rape somebody, when you traffic somebody, you’re not just sexually abusing them. You’re taking a part of them that they will never get back. You’re creating scars that don’t heal. There’s no statute of limitations for murder. If I could change those laws, I could wipe my brow, dust my hands off, and feel like I made a difference.
What’s it been like to be so consumed by this advocacy, which is deeply tied to your trauma? How are you taking care of yourself? I hear you have a French bulldog named Juno.
[She lifts Juno onto her lap.] I’m exercising and I’m doing yoga and taking my dog to the beach. I’m doing as many things to clear my mind as possible so that I can be sharp and be focused when it matters. Juno’s the love of my life; we don’t go anywhere without each other.
I’m just tired, because I’ve been fighting for so long. But I’ve still got that fight in me. What I’m going through right now is going to help somebody out there one day, and that’s my goal. That’s my focus, by telling my story over and over again.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Beads add hardly any extra weight to fishing gear and could save thousands of lives, it is claimed
Simple plastic beads could save the lives of some of the thousands of porpoises and other cetaceans that get caught in fishing nets each year, scientists say.
Harbour porpoises use echolocation to find their prey and for orientation. However, their acoustic signals cannot pick up the mesh of a gillnet, and as a result they often become trapped.
Daniel Stepputtis, a marine biologist at the Thünen Institute of Baltic Sea Fisheries in Rostock, Germany, says a porpoise will notice floats and leadlines, “but when it detects two obstacles with a few metres of space in between, it obviously thinks ‘I can pass through there’.”
Stepputtis and his colleagues have come up with an elegant new concept to make the nets visible to aquatic mammals using echolocation. They fit the nets with transparent beads made of acrylic glass. The material has approximately the same density as water, so it adds hardly any extra weight to the fishing gear. But when it is hit by biosonar, the polymer sends back an extraordinarily strong echo, warning animals that there is something ahead.
The first trials of the technology, conducted off the Danish island of Funen in the western Baltic, have shown promise. Harbour porpoises hunting in the area kept clear of a bead-equipped net. Researchers recorded the acoustic signals of the animals, which should give more insight into their exact behavioural responses.
The method may have some limitations, though. The scientists conducted another series of tests in the Black Sea, where a turbot fishery produces a very large bycatch of harbour porpoises. Sometimes more than a dozen are killed in a day, says Stepputtis. The researchers carried out 10 hauls each with a standard gillnet and a net fitted with the beads. Five porpoises were killed in the standard nets and two in the modified nets.
Stepputtis suggests the entangled animals might have been asleep. Dormant porpoises keep on swimming but only occasionally switch on their biosonar. For this reason, Stepputtis and colleagues are also using a new acoustic alerting device that emits synthetic porpoise warning signals. In field trials, the device reduced bycatch by almost 80%.
The polymer beads can be adapted for optimal resonance at the frequencies that different species use. Stepputtis says it should be able to be adapted for all species that use echolocation, including the Amazon river dolphin. Combining the two concepts has the potential to save thousands of animals, the scientists say.
Every year millions of dolphins, turtles, seabirds and other marine fauna die in various kinds of fishing gears. Experts estimate the total annual toll for whale species amounts to about 300,000.
As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden was on the right path when he said that, “The federal government should not use private facilities for any detention, including detention of undocumented immigrants.”
The corporate profit motive has no place in decisions about locking people up, and after taking office in January, Biden ordered the Department of Justice to phase out federal private prisons, banning the renewal of contracts operated for the Bureau of Prisons and the U.S. Marshals Service.
However, progress has been spotty, with some contracts extended while federal agencies and local governments negotiate to keep jails privatized. And, notably, the executive order didn’t even attempt to address privately operated Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, which are under the Department of Homeland Security.
Private prisons are responsible for less than 10% of the total U.S. prison and jail population, but they hold nearly 80% of people in immigration detention. To detain migrants on such a scale is bad enough — there have been widespread human-rights violations and scores of deaths in immigration detention centers. Handing over the system to profit-driven corporations aggravates the issue, as private prisons are known to shortchange immigrants on basic necessities and subject them to forced labor, among other violations.
Even worse, ICE is opening private detention facilities in recently shuttered federal private prisons. In September, ICE announced that it was reopening the former Bureau of Prisons private site in Moshannon Valley, Pennsylvania. Similarly, reports have emerged that local governments and private prison corporations are in talks to convert additional Justice Department private prisons to ICE detention centers in Tennessee and in Leavenworth, Kansas, with little to no transparency.
Extensions have been negotiated for existing ICE contracts with private detention centers, including at GEO Group’s Broward Transitional Center in Florida and Management … Training Corp.’s Otero County Processing Center in New Mexico.
The Biden administration also has continued to intervene on behalf of the private prison corporations in litigation started against California’s AB 32, a law banning private detention in that state.
Biden has fallen far short of that campaign rhetoric about ending all private detention in federal systems. But it is not too late to change course. The order governing Justice Department prisons should be strictly enforced. The Biden administration should also join states such as California that are banning for-profit incarceration.
And on the immigration front, the government needs to rethink detention altogether, not just privately run centers.
Advocates and those directly affected by the system have been clear: Detention puts people’s lives and well-being at great risk, exacerbates humanitarian crises, violates principles of human rights and is cruel and unnecessary.
The criminalization of migration and the incarceration of migrants must end. Biden should phase out the use of detention in the immigration system and extend the executive order to prevent new and extended contracts for immigration detention centers as well as Justice Department prisons.
Instead of detaining individuals as they await decisions about their immigration status, the federal government should implement community-based programs that have been found to be far more humane and less expensive.
Candidate Biden seemed to recognize that it’s deeply wrong to profit from mass incarceration. President Biden should take action.
Jai Gillard, a freshman at Santa Fe High School in Texas, leaves a message on a cross, one of 10 placed in front of the school in honor of the eight students and two teachers killed by a 17-year-old classmate on May 18, 2018, three months after Parkland. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty)
Shootings, and the grief and trauma that follow, are concentrated in lower-income, mostly Black and Latino communities
When I ask parents, siblings and children what they want Guardian readers to know about their family member lost to gun violence, each one emphatically tells me their relative didn’t deserve what happened to them. They tell me their loved ones adored animals, loved kids – that they were just special. The people I speak with, especially parents, want the world to know their sons and daughters weren’t stereotypes.
This desire for posthumous exoneration isn’t anything new, but the pleas sounded especially urgent in 2021.
2021 was a brutal year for gun violence in the US, where communities across the country experienced a heartbreaking increase in homicides and shootings. The rise started in 2020, when homicides rose by 30% from the year before, the highest single year increase since the FBI began tracking crime data in 1960. The increase amounted to an estimated 5,000 additional deaths. The majority of victims were killed with guns. The full data for 2021 is not yet available, but the rise appears to have continued in 2021, with homicides in cities such as Oakland, Portland and Detroit continuing to climb.
These dramatic increases have led to intense and divisive conversations about why people shoot others and the role police and prosecutors play in preventing injuries and death. It was discouraging to watch conversations about people losing their lives morph into political fodder and an excuse to push debunked “tough on crime narratives”.
Reporting on gun violence this year reinforced that most Americans don’t understand that the deadly and traumatic toll of this violence isn’t spread equally across the country.
Shootings, as well as the grief and trauma that come with it, are concentrated in lower-income, mostly Black and Latino communities in California, New Jersey, Louisiana and other states. No group feels the impact more disparately than young Black men.
The stories that have struck and saddened me the most were those of children and teenagers who don’t get to make it out of adolescence alive or free of the scars that gun violence leaves on your heart, mind, and spirit. I continue to grieve the losses of Shamara Young, a 15 year-old who was gunned down after getting a fresh set of braids, Jasper Wu, a toddler who died while riding in a car seat and Demetrius-Fleming Davis, who, at 18, was shot while riding in a truck with friends. Communities are still reeling from these tragedies while new slayings force their way into our collective conscience. Just this month a 12year-old was killed and a nine year-old was wounded during a shooting in Wilmington, the next day a teenager was killed in Boyle Heights.
Speaking with families and community members highlighted how gun violence incidents have ripple effects that extend far beyond what most people consider or what most news media covers. People may have read a local news story about a shooting, seen a vigil the day after a shooting or passed by a commemoration on the anniversary of a death. But few have heard about the day-to-day struggles that make the burden of gun violence so heavy to carry – making funeral arrangements or traversing the same streets your child was killed on to go to work – a burden that is exponentially more devastating when somebody is killed young, violently and in their own community.
So many mothers I’ve spoken with on this beat told me about the physical consequences of having a child shot and killed. They are on anti-depressants, can’t go back to work, are fearful for their remaining children’s lives, are trying to muster the strength to go on and make their family work now that a huge chunk has been ripped from them. “I already know where my health is going and I’m not scared,” Sonya Mitchell, whose 23-year-old son Daimon “Dada” Ferguson was shot and killed, told me this summer. “I wanna stay here for my daughters and grandkids, but my heart’s too broken. I used to have a hella life, but I just don’t anymore.”
“The death of my son doesn’t affect just me, it affects so many other Black women who I’ve seen suffer, mothers who are my friends and we all buried our sons,” she added. “We have to be there for each other because no one knows this pain but us.”
The pain of losing a loved one to gun violence affects the entire family unit and community at large. Younger siblings, family and friends of people who have been killed, they all live with the repercussions of gun violence in all of these different ways.
But as consistently as there’s been community gun violence, there are dedicated residents who swoop in to help entire neighborhoods heal. I spoke with Tashante McCoy in Stockton and Jasmine Hardison in Oakland, who embrace and support people in their homes and organize events to bring joy, awareness and healing in their communities. DeWanda Joseph in Richmond holds weekly meetings for people who still don’t know how or why their child was killed and are losing faith in the justice system’s ability to get answers.
Reporting on gun violence before and during the pandemic made me realize how many systems– governmental and community-based alike – need to be in place and ready to respond to these traumatic situations. The many interactions someone has after a loved one is murdered can either compound trauma or start that healing process. And most people don’t get to see that unless they have been impacted by gun violence or work with those who are.
The Nicaraguan government has seized the former embassy and diplomatic offices of Taiwan, saying they belong to China.
President Daniel Ortega’s government broke off relations with Taiwan this month, saying it would recognize only the mainland government.
Before departing, Taiwanese diplomats attempted to donate the properties to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Managua.
But Ortega’s government said late Sunday that any such donation would be invalid and that the building in an upscale Managua neighborhood belongs to China.
The Attorney General’s Office said in a statement that the attempted donation was a “manuever and subterfuge to take what doesn’t belong to them.”
Taiwan’s Foreign Relations Ministry condemned the “gravely illegal actions of the Ortega regime,” saying the Nicaraguan government had violated standard procedures by giving Taiwanese diplomats just two weeks to get out of the country.
It said Taiwan “also condemns the arbitrary obstruction by the Nicaraguan government of the symbolic sale of its property to the Nicaraguan Catholic church.”
Msgr. Carlos Avilés, vicar of the archdiocese of Managua, told the La Prensa newspaper that a Taiwanese diplomat had offered the church the property, saying, “I told him there was no problem, but the transfer was still in the legal process.”
The Central American country said in early December it would officially recognize only China, which claims self-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory.
“There is only one China,” the Nicaraguan government said in a statement announcing the change. “The People’s Republic of China is the only legitimate government that represents all China, and Taiwan is an inalienable part of the Chinese territory.”
The move increased Taiwan’s diplomatic isolation on the international stage, even as the island has stepped up official exchanges with countries such as Lithuania and Slovakia, which do not formally recognize Taiwan as a country. Now, Taiwan has 14 formal diplomatic allies remaining.
China has been poaching Taiwan’s diplomatic allies over the last few years, reducing the number of countries that recognize the democratic island as a sovereign nation. China is against Taiwan representing itself in global forums or in diplomacy. The Solomon Islands chose to recognize China in 2019, cutting diplomatic ties with Taiwan.
Taiwan depicts itself as a defender of democracy; Ortega was reelected in November in what the White House called a “pantomime election.”
“The arbitrary imprisonment of nearly 40 opposition figures since May, including seven potential presidential candidates, and the blocking of political parties from participation rigged the outcome well before election day,” President Biden said in a statement in November.
Nicaragua established diplomatic relations with Taiwan in the 1990s, when President Violeta Chamorro assumed power after defeating Ortega’s Sandinista movement at the polls. Ortega, who was elected back to power in 2007, had maintained ties with Taipei until now.
From abandoned wells to refineries, hydraulic fracturing and man-made earthquakes, the destruction has poisoned air, land and water. Now the Ponca Tribe is fighting back.
When Earl “Trey” Howe III returned home here after four years of military service, the first thing he noticed was the smell.
Howe grew up in and around Ponca City, the site of the Phillips 66 refinery, one of the oldest and largest crude oil refineries and tank farms in the country. The smell from the plant—a sulfur-rich odor somewhere between rotten eggs and freshly paved asphalt—was so constant, he’d never even noticed it.
But now, it seemed to follow him everywhere.
“Depending on which way the wind is blowing, I’ll get a stronger whiff on some days than others,” Howe, 51, the former chairman of the Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, said. “It’s overpowering sometimes.”
A soft-spoken, 6’4” father of three, Howe lives just a few blocks from the refinery, in the house where his grandparents once lived. Sometimes at night the flares, which burn off excess hydrocarbons that can not be easily recovered or recycled, are so bright and so loud—the whoosh of flames sounds like a jet engine—they can be seen and heard from miles away.
“You could feel it more than hear it,” Howe said of a recent flaring that shook the ground and left him wondering if he and his family should evacuate. It was “like I was sitting next to a bomb.”
Ponca City takes its name from the Ponca Tribe, a Native American tribe that lives nearby. For more than a century, the region, in north central Oklahoma, has been ravaged by the environmental degradation associated with oil and gas development.
From abandoned oil and gas wells to refineries, tank farms and hydraulic fracturing, the pollution and destruction—including damage from thousands of man-made earthquakes—have exacted a heavy toll on the region’s air, land, water and people.
In many ways, Ponca City and its 24,000, predominantly white inhabitants are well off. Its schools, library, sports centers, parks and concert hall would be the envy of most small towns in America.
But interviews with local residents, historical records, legal depositions and internal government reports tell of a sacrifice zone, where oil rights were first taken from the Ponca Tribe and then exploited by the oil and gas industry with little thought given to environmental protection.
The resulting development has left homes enveloped in toxic fumes, black slime oozing from basements, emissions of fine particulate matter that can damage the heart and lungs and walls cracked from earthquakes induced by injecting wastewater from hydraulic fracking deep underground. In one case, the fumes were so overpowering a family was forced to leave their home for several years.
Groundwater contamination from what is now the Phillips 66 refinery led to one of the largest environmental settlements in U.S. history, with the company buying and razing an entire neighborhood in the early 1990s.
But the contamination wasn’t entirely eliminated: Over the last 20 years, the refinery’s owners have bought out and leveled dozens of additional homes, for unstated reasons. But through a review of county property records and well-monitoring data provided by state regulators, Inside Climate News has found that the location of the houses closely tracks unsafe levels of benzene and other contaminants in groundwater, a fact that has not previously been reported. And Phillips 66 has continued to remove contaminants like petroleum oil, gasoline or diesel fuel from extraction wells near the neighborhood.
Bernardo Fallas, director of corporate communications for Phillips 66 said the company conducts its operations in a manner that protects human health, the community and the environment.
In White Eagle, the headquarters of the Ponca Tribe, several miles downstream, where the Arkansas River and Salt Fork of the Arkansas River meet, the pollution has been especially damaging. Children once swam in the waters while people fished from its banks. In recent years fish have washed up dead along the shoreline, killed by a still-unidentified pollutant. Water from private wells in the community are no longer fit for drinking, gardens are contaminated with pollution and inhalers are as common as cell phones.
“We’re being killed as surely as when they brought us the smallpox blankets, and wrapped us in poison,” said Casey Camp-Horinek, a tribal elder and official environmental ambassador for the Ponca Tribe. “We’re being wrapped in a poison that kills the air, the water and the Earth, and that kills my people.”
‘We Have to Find a Way Forward’
The degradation in and around Ponca City is emblematic of the systemic, long-term devastation of the environment that a group of lawyers and advocates are pushing to make an international crime. The campaign aims to treat “ecocide” in the same way as genocide or crimes against humanity, offenses that are prosecuted by the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
Criminalizing ecocide is likely to take years, if it succeeds at all, and even then, many challenges would remain. The law could only be applied to future crimes, and the United States is not a member of the international court, so the impact of its petroleum industry might remain outside the law.
But the Ponca Tribe isn’t waiting on legal wrangling half-a-world away. The tribe is seeking protection under a parallel effort known as the rights of nature, a legal movement that has sprung up in countries around the globe in recent decades, seeking to grant legal rights to rivers, forests and wildlife.
In 2018, the Ponca Nation became the first tribe in the United States to sign into law a rights of nature resolution, and the tribe is now working on an additional rule that would give added protection to the rivers that run through their community.
“We have to find a way forward,” Camp-Horinek said.
The rights of nature approach, she said, more closely aligns with an Indigenous understanding of the environment, in which human beings are a part of nature, not separate from it. “We are nature protecting itself,” she said.
The legal standing of the rights of nature remains unclear. So far, no U.S. court has upheld a rights of nature law, and courts that have ruled on whether rights of nature can be enforced have all said they cannot. As more Indigenous and other communities pass rules on the rights of nature, however, that could change.
If courts do rule in favor of the rights of nature, the implications for oil and gas companies operating near the Ponca Tribe could be significant. The tribe’s 2018 resolution includes a provision that, if a corporation is found guilty of an offense related to the rights of nature, the chairman of the board of the corporation will be held liable, with a maximum sentence of a year in prison and a $5,000 fine per day for each offense.
Such protections may be needed now more than ever.
Although a landmark, 2020 U.S. Supreme Court ruling delivered greater tribal sovereignty for Native communities in Oklahoma, state efforts to fight the ruling could jeopardize what limited environmental regulations currently exist on Indigenous lands.
“It has messed with our ability for the Clean Water Act to be successfully implemented and for the Clean Air Act to be successfully implemented,” Camp-Horinek, a leader of the rights of nature movement for the tribe and for tribes globally, said. “So we are using the rights of the river as a possible way to protect the Ponca people.”
‘I Hope I Don’t Have to Move’
On a drive around the southern edge of Ponca City, Howe, a member of Ponca’s tribal council or “business committee,” brings his silver Ford Explorer to a stop next to a culvert, where a small stream flows out of the Phillips 66 refinery on its way to the Arkansas River.
“Me and my friends would ride our bicycles down here,” he says, pointing to the now fenced-off drainage ditch where he used to bike as a kid.
“It’d be grayish and sometimes, reflecting off the light, you could see a rainbow of colors,” Howe said of the water.
The creek flows through what used to be a thriving, low-income, Indigenous, Black, Hispanic and white community with its own grocery store, church and school.
The school closed in the late 1970s, after dozens of students began fainting from fumes from the nearby refinery.
In 1989, residents from the neighborhood sued Conoco, the owner of the refinery at the time, after black slime began oozing into their basements. The residents claimed unusually high rates of cancer, respiratory problems, birth defects, skin rashes and other illnesses they believed were linked to an underground spill from a tank or pipes at the refinery. They pointed to Conoco’s own water samples that showed elevated levels of benzene in the groundwater.
As part of the settlement, Conoco agreed to buy and either tear down or relocate about 400 homes near the refinery, although the company never admitted fault for any adverse health effects. All that remains of the community that was once there is the brick archway entrance to the school.
But ConocoPhillips and the subsequent owner of the refinery, Phillips 66, have torn down more than three dozen other houses since then in a residential neighborhood east of the refinery. The buyouts track closely with areas where the concentration of benzene in the groundwater exceeds the EPA’s maximum contaminant level (MCL) of 0.005 milligrams per liter, according to a map from 2014 that is part of the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality’s permit for the refinery. Benzene occurs naturally in crude oil and is produced during the refining of gasoline. Long-term exposure has been associated with leukemia.
Phillips 66 also has continued to remove tens of thousands of gallons of “light nonaqueous phase liquid”—contaminants such as petroleum oil, gasoline or diesel fuel—from extraction wells near that site in recent years, according to data from the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality.
Fallas, the Phillips 66 corporate communications director, acknowledged the continuing purchases and the fact that the company has continued to remediate pollution.
“Since the early 1990s, Phillips 66 (then Conoco and ConocoPhillips) has worked cooperatively with state regulators to continue remediation and monitoring of groundwater beneath and surrounding the Ponca City Refinery,” Fallas said.
He added, “As part of our state permitting requirements, impacted groundwater is drawn back to the refinery for recovery and treatment. Phillips 66 has purchased and continues to purchase property near the refinery that meets certain criteria to increase the buffer zone between the community and the refinery.”
Overall pollution levels in the area have gone down over the past 20 years, Erin Hatfield, communications director for the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality, said, but added,”That said, a number of wells are still over the MCL for benzene.”
Howe lives only a few blocks from the most recent buyouts.
He said he worries that the underground spill that resulted in the mass-buyout in the 1990s may now be spreading into his neighborhood.
“I hope I don’t have to move,” he said.
A House From Hell
A few blocks from Howe’s home and a block from the most recent spot where Phillips 66 is buying out houses sits one of the most extreme examples of the fallout from the region’s more than 100 years of oil and gas development. In 2013, Chris and Sherry Walls and their four children had to flee from their home after the local gas company discovered the house was enveloped in a cloud of methane gas.
The Walls spent three years living out of hotels and rental properties before the Oklahoma Corporation Commission installed a ventilation system designed to suck gas from beneath the house and vent it above their rooftop. The Walls returned home soon after, but the ventilation system only made matters worse, so the family stopped using it.
Still grieving from the death of one of their sons, wracked with debt exacerbated by the constant moves and unable to find the source of the leak, Chris Walls may have found it to be more than he could take. On June 18, 2017, Father’s Day, Sherry found her husband’s body hanging in their garage.
“I think our house had a lot to do with it,” she said.
Four years after her husband’s death, Sherry Walls and her daughter Diamond are living in a house still enveloped by gas. An internal Oklahoma Corporation Commission report from 2018, viewed by Inside Climate News, concluded there is a “possible well location on the Walls property or even under the house.” Gas wells were drilled in the neighborhood around 1910 and are among an estimated 25,000 to 100,000 “orphaned” wells in the state, for which the operator is unknown or no longer exists.
Walls said the Ponca City mayor and Phillips 66 had offered to relocate her to a new house, but it was smaller than her current home, she said, and she declined. Ponca City officials did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Sharon Wilson, a gas imaging specialist with Earthworks, an environmental advocacy organization based in Washington, visited Walls’ home in 2017, soon after Chris Walls died. Using a thermal camera, she looked at the images and was appalled not only by the volume of gas she saw billowing from the ventilation system but the gas she smelled as she stood outside the home.
“I don’ t know how they can live there,” Wilson said. “The state should have done something about it a long time ago. It’s a failure of the regulatory agency.”
Oklahoma Corporation Commission spokesman Matt Skinner said the ventilation system that his agency installed solved the problem.
“It worked perfectly,” Skinner said. “We literally moved, if not heaven, the earth and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to [get to] a place where it wasn’t seeping gas,” Skinner said.
“The Corporation Commission’s Oil and Gas Division, along with all the people who have worked on this situation, are very disappointed that the extraction remediation effort fell short of our goal,” the report stated. “It is apparent that efforts at the surface to divert the stray gas are—futile.”
This Will Bring ‘Bad Medicine’
In 1908, not long after the last land run in the newly formed state of Oklahoma and the year Henry Ford unveiled the Model T, an oil prospector from the East arrived on the Cherokee Strip. E.W. Marland, a wildcatter and lawyer who had already made and lost an oil fortune in Pennsylvania, spent the next three years drilling dry wells, while living on credit at the Arcade hotel in Ponca City.
An amateur practitioner of the emerging field of geology, Marland took an interest in a hillside southwest of town that he believed to be a geologic dome, a cap under which might lie a vast reservoir of oil.
The land belonged to Willie Cries for War, a member of the Ponca Tribe, which the U.S. Army had forced from its ancestral homelands in Nebraska to what is now Oklahoma some 30 years before.
The outcrop where Marland wanted to drill was a sacred site for the Ponca, offering commanding views towards their homeland in the north and the confluence of the Salt Fork and Arkansas Rivers to the southeast, a reminder of their earlier home, where the Niobrara and Missouri Rivers meet. The hilltop also was a tribal cemetery, where bodies were placed on top of wooden scaffolds, rather than buried underground.
Drilling into the hilltop was out of the question. But, with the help of some local ranchers—who, depending on the historical account, were either benevolent protectors of the Ponca or vultures who preyed on them at every turn—Marland gained permission to drill a short distance downslope from the cemetery.
When the well came in as a gusher, White Eagle, one of the last Ponca chiefs, warned that it would bring “bad medicine” for him, his people and for Marland, the oil baron later recalled.
“He said this will all come back to impact all of us,” Camp-Horinek said. “And we’re living in that time.”
After Marland struck oil, Cries for War, who was 19 at the time, was well compensated in royalty payments for the lease he signed, enough for him to live well in his younger years. He bought a large house and several vehicles, and hired a cook, maid and driver.
But Cries for War was the exception among the Ponca. The Miller brothers—the ranchers who helped Marland negotiate the lease—bought or leased tens of thousands of acres from the Ponca, including the mineral rights that went with the land. In return, the ranchers, owners of the 101 Ranch, often paid no more than a sack or flour or potatoes and a few scraps of meat, according to “The Real Wild West: The 101 Ranch and the Creation of the American West,” by historian Michael Wallis.
In 1920, a federal grand jury indicted the Miller brothers on what ultimately grew to 49 criminal counts, charging them with defrauding the Ponca of large tracts of land. The brothers pled guilty to illegally acquiring Indian land valued at more than $380,000, although the ruling was later overturned in a federal appeals court.
“It always bothered me to see the Miller Brothers played up as heroes when they defrauded Indians of land greater in value than train and bank robberies committed by the Daltons, Doolins, James and other bandits combined,” Ferdie Deering, a longtime columnist for the Daily Oklahoman and editor for the Farmer-Stockman magazine, later wrote.
‘Downstream From All That Waste’
Sitting in his print shop in the village of White Eagle, Howe recalled how his great uncle, Willie Cries for War, once sucked stingers out of his neck after he’d been stung by bees.
Howe, whose black-rimmed glasses end in neon green at the temples, remembers Cries for War as a penniless elder, his money long gone, living in a spare bedroom of his grandparents’ home.
The oil well drilled on land that used to belong to his great uncle was the beginning of what became the Conoco and later the ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66 empire. Marland, the oil-man who talked Cries for War into allowing drilling on his land, became one of the richest men in the world, building a “palace on the prairie” in Ponca City, from which he played the role of a British nobleman, hosting fox hunts and polo matches for the city’s more affluent white community.
In 1918, Marland built an oil refinery, the Phillips 66 refinery in Ponca City, a few blocks from where Howe now lives. Soon after opening, the refinery began to dump its petroleum waste into the Arkansas River.
For the Ponca Tribe, based several miles downstream in the village of White Eagle, that was the beginning of the contamination of their drinking water supply. Though the tribe recently built a new water supply system, many in the community fear it, too, is contaminated and they rely primarily on bottled water.
“Conoco flourished and continues to flourish at the expense of those downstream from it,” Howe said. “And instead of making things right for the tribe that began their oil production—we should have been one of the wealthiest tribes in not just Oklahoma but the country—we’re downstream from all that waste.”
As a member of the Ponca City Chamber of Commerce board of directors, Howe tries to build better relations between the predominantly white community and the Ponca Nation. Growing up Indigenous in and around Ponca City, he said, he often felt invisible. As a child, he excelled at basketball and could dunk by his sophomore year of high school, but he was overlooked for Ponca City’s varsity squad, something he attributes to being the only Indigenous kid on the team.
Howe is a prominent figure in the region, a former chief of police for White Eagle and the current police commissioner for the neighboring Otoe–Missouria Tribe. But when he does errands in Ponca City, he said, people—from gas station attendants to the staff of the Lowe’s home improvement store—often look past him to help a white person standing behind him.
Ben Waters, Trey’s grandfather on his mother’s side, worked for the refinery, helping to weld many of the large oil tanks across the sprawling, nearly four-square mile facility. Earl Howe Senior, his grandfather on his dad’s side, had cancer though he didn’t die from it. All three of his grandfather’s brothers and Trey’s father, Earl Howe Junior, died from cancer.
Howe doesn’t use fancy terms like “genocide” or “ecocide,” but he wonders, nonetheless, if the refinery was to blame for so many deaths.
“There are a lot of other tribal members who died from cancer,” Howe said. “I don’t know if any of those are a direct link, but I think there’s an abnormal rate of cancer that could be related to that.”
‘This is Bad, Bad Stuff Going On Here’
If the fumes and contaminated water were not enough of a threat in the region, until recently a fine black powder routinely covered the cars, lawns, clothing and pets of the people who lived just south of Ponca City.
Just past the Ponca City city limits on highway 177, a petrochemical plant operated by the Continental Carbon Company manufactures carbon black, an incredibly fine powder made from low value, heavy oil by-products at the Phillips 66 refinery just to the north.
Carbon black is used to strengthen tires and as a pigment in inks. It is also a potential carcinogen that can penetrate deep inside human lungs.
“The particles are so fine that if you tossed them in the air and didn’t have any wind, they would stay airborne for two days,” Camp-Horinek said.
In the early 2000s, tribal members living near the plant raised the issue with Camp-Horinek’s brother, Carter Camp, an Indigenous rights advocate and former leader of the American Indian Movement. In a push for greater tribal sovereignty, he helped lead a months-long armed standoff with federal agents at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota in 1973, for which he spent three years in prison.
“They came to my brother Carter, and said, ‘Look, this is bad, bad, bad stuff going on here. Our children are being born with cancer. We’re dying from what it’s doing to us,’” Camp- Horinek said.
The Camp family and other members of the Ponca Tribe decided to take on Continental Carbon. They teamed up with a workers union inside the plant and sent a delegation to the parent company’s headquarters in Taiwan, where they held a hunger strike to protest the lax environmental controls at the Ponca City plant.
Without admitting any fault, Continental Carbon agreed to a $10.5 million settlement with the Ponca Tribe in 2009 that included tearing down 11 nearby houses and providing relocation funding for those who had lived there.
A row of driveways along the highway that give way to a field of grass and shade trees are all that remain of what were once low-income homes for families.
“I’m not happy with it,” Camp-Horinek said. “Because what they did not do is stop Continental Carbon from operating in the same manner as they always have. It’s still going on and they did not get further medical care for all of the people that were impacted by it.”
In 2015, the company entered into a consent decree with the EPA and the Department of Justice to invest $98 million in pollution controls at the Ponca City plant, and similar carbon black plants in Alabama and Texas.
In 2018, the Trump administration granted the company an extension, giving the Oklahoma plant until April of this year to begin pollution controls to reduce emissions of particulate matter, nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides.
Dennis Hetu, president of Continental Carbon, said the additional pollution controls at the company’s Ponca City plant are now complete.
”The consent decree said I had to have it up and running this year and it’s up and running,” he said.
However, an EPA spokeswoman said installation of the pollution controls have not in fact been completed at the Ponca City plant.
“Technical issues associated with the installation of controls and Winter Storm Uri have caused delays,” the spokeswoman said, referring to the ice and snow storm that caused widespread power outages in Texas in February.
‘If You Can Imagine Being That Child’
Fighting for environmental protection and for the rights of Indigenous people in the face of extreme adversity is in many ways, a part of the Ponca DNA, Camp-Horinek’s, in particular.
On a blazing hot August afternoon in the Clyde Warrior Memorial building in White Eagle, a building named after a Ponca youth leader and prominent civil rights activist in the 1960s, Camp-Horinek recounts how her people came to live in Oklahoma. It was a forced relocation that, as she described it, her people should not have even survived.
“My grandfather was around 6 years old at that time, when they came into our village site and rounded us up like cowboys would herd cattle, at the point of a gun, with bayonets at our backs,” Camp-Horinek, 73, said. “They forced us to leave our homes without our food, without our hunting equipment, without our cooking equipment, without our seeds and walk nearly 700 miles.”
After arriving in what is now Oklahoma in 1877, one in every three members of the Ponca Tribe soon died from starvation and disease.
