What new can be said to communicate the depth of pain, anger, hatred of youth of color when they are continually reminded that authority will consider them a threat, regardless..?That their agency undergoes continual erasure under conditions of surveillance? Such happenings, everyday happenings, should renew commitments to live out and measure our actions against abolition dreams.
When you use the term minority or minorities
in reference to people, you’re telling them that
they’re less than somebody else.
― Gwendolyn Brooks
Writing in 2012 concerning how the private sector profits from the privatization of prisons, Caroline Glesmann and Chris Hartney offered a glimpse at the increased linkage between punishment and immigration in the race to incarcerate and the privatization of prisons. After having presented troubling abuses taken place in private prisons, they turn their attention to immigration detention centers. They said, “The conditions at immigration detention centers operated by for-profits are equally troubling, especially given estimates that about half of all immigrant detainees are held in private facilities.” Sociologist Juanita Cotto-Diaz has pointed out in various of her writings the ways in which how we punish and the conditions of our prisons reflect our society. If we grant Cotto-Diaz position, it is not surprising to see not only the increase of the moneytization of prisons and thus, the outsourcing of the government’s responsibility to its citizens as it pertains to “law and order” but that a hot-button policy issue like immigration is dealt with in the same fashion. In fact, we should question whether, law and order’s effective transubstantiated into “money and dis/order” is roadblocking effective comprehensive reform.
See Cotto-Diaz profile at: (http://www2.binghamton.edu/sociology/people/juanita-cotto.html)
The curious thing about ideological constructions about criminality as activities attached to particular bodies (colored) and not others (white), as how some bodies should be punished and others excuse fo disciplinary technologies find ways to move through cognitive schemas that fuel larger national cognitions. The “cease and desist” pronounced in this image in connection to concerns raised regarding inmates’ living conditions, shows various scenes of soldier’ living conditions in Iraq but no such scene from Tent City Prison in Arizona, punctuated by a “Stop!” The “Stop!” tells critics that soldiers’ are uncomfortable in the field. Does this mean to implied that a we should bow to a heroic understanding of service and, if we don’t like what we see, don’t require such sacrifice? Probably not, but it might be possible.
A more critical question seeks to surface, the question: what does being in servitude and bondage has to do with soldiers’ carrying out their military service? Nothing.
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Elias Ortega-Aponte, Ph.D 
