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Why is the rate of incarceration in Louisiana so high? How do we critique the way prisons are part of infrastructural solutions to anthropocenic instabilities? As Angela Davis writes, “prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.” One way of imagining and building a vision of an anti-carceral future is practiced in the Solitary Gardens project here in New Orleans: 

The Solitary Gardens are constructed from the byproducts of sugarcane, cotton, tobacco and indigo- the largest chattel slave crops- which we grow on-site, exposing the illusion that slavery was abolished in the United States. The Solitary Gardens utilize the tools of prison abolition, permaculture, contemplative practices, and transformative justice to facilitate exchanges between persons subjected to solitary confinement and volunteer proxies on the “outside.” The beds are “gardened” by prisoners, known as Solitary Gardeners, through written exchanges, growing calendars and design templates. As the garden beds mature, the prison architecture is overpowered by plant life, proving that nature—like hope, love, and imagination—will ultimately triumph over the harm humans impose on ourselves and on the planet.

"Nature" here is constructed in a very particularistic way: as a redemptive force to harness in opposition to the wider oppressive system the architecture of a solitary confinement cell is a part of. It takes a lot of intellectual and political work to construct a counter-hegemonic nature, in other words. Gardeners in this setting strive toward a cultivation of relations antithetical to the isolationist, anti-collective sociality prisons (and in general, a society in which prisons are a permanent feature of crisis resolution) foster.

My interest in NOLA anthropocenics pivots on water, and particularly the ways in which capitalist regimes of value and waste specify, appropriate, and/or externalize forms of water. My research is concerned with water crises more generally, and geographically situated in Flint, Michigan. I thought I could best illustrate these interests with a sampling of photographs from a summer visit to NOLA back in 2017. At the time, four major confederate monuments around the city had just been taken down. For supplemental reading, I'm including an essay from political theorist Adolph Reed Jr. (who grew up in NOLA) that meditates on the long anti-racist struggle that led to this possibility, and flags the wider set of interventions that are urgently required to abolish the landscape of white supremacy. 

Flooded street after heavy rains due to failures of city pumping infrastructure.

A headline from the same week in the local press.

Some statues are gone but other monuments remain (this one is annotated).

A Starbucks in Lakeview remembering Katrina--the line signifies the height of the water at the time.

Reading:

Adolph Reed Jr., “Monumental Rubbish” https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/06/25/monumental-rubbish-statues-torn-down-what-next-new-orleans

P.S. In case the photos don't show up in the post I'm attaching them in a PDF document as well! 

1) “The logic of state soverignty in the control of migration clearly prevailed over the universality of the principle of the right to life.”

2) “By analogy with the therapeutic mesasures applied at the end of life for patients suffering from illness deemed incurable, we can describe the measures and procedures devised to allow foreign patients without residence rights to stay in France, receive treatment, and have their living costs paid, as a compassion protocol.”

3) “Precisely because he or she is illegally resident, the sick immigrant may undertake medical tests or seek treatment under a different name, so that the cost of treatment is coverd, or simply to avoid being denounced and deported.”

1)            Personal trauma: this includes not only the direct, immediate effects of the disaster but also the long-term mental and physical effects from the disaster.

2)            Way of life disrupted “disaster capitalism”: the next part of the syndrome includes business taking advantage of the situation for profits; the main case being private companies profiting off of federal funding to rebuild the homes and lives of the citizens who were affected.

3)            Displacement: the well-off are able to relocated after the disaster has ended but for those less fortunate, there permanent effects are worse, and there is little they can do to relocated to their homes and communities after the superficial aspect of the disaster have ended.

The assessments that patients take are not visible to the public so I can not elaborate on it. This is what is quoted from the company’s website about the “Easy Clinical Screenings”:

“Patients take digital, gamified mental health assessments conveniently on their mobile device to learn their actual diagnosis and become more self aware. Providers can deploy customized assessment questions specific to each patient. Patients can see their charted progress over time. Assessments are reimbursable by insurers.”