Category Archives: War On Drugs

The mind tends to wander when the body shelters in place. Lately, mine has been returning to Umberto Ecos The Name of the Rose, a postmodern murder mystery set in a 14th-century Benedictine monastery. The main detective, William of Baskerville, tries desperately to connect wildly disparate dots in order to find some pattern, some overarching meaning, among widespread destruction and death. In the end, he fails. No coherent pattern emerges, only coincidence and confusion alongside a few simple acts of kindness.

How much meaning can and should be found in a pandemic that has strewn indiscriminate fear and loss across the globe? Or better, what kind of meaning should people be looking for? According to the medical doctor and ethicist Lydia Dugdal, our country currently lacks a common existential narrative, a shared story that can illuminate the meaning of widespread suffering and death. I think shes right, with one exceptionthe meaning we find in war.

President Trump has declared COVID-19 the war of our time and decreed himself a wartime president. Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders beat him by a number of days, as each compared confronting this virus to the waging of a war. French president Emmanuel Macron was one of the first and most direct. We are at war, he repeatedly declared when ordering his citizens to stay in their homes.

War language is the language of power. After early forays into glib optimism and empty assurances, politicians are now invoking war to exhibit clear resolve, to demonstrate that they are girding their loins to prepare for battle.

Yet much of the work ahead of us will be the far less unilateral work of patiently waiting out this infectious storm, learning to care for the infected and affected, and grieving the loss of loved ones. There is much that we will need to bear and survive rather than conquer and control. War language may be not only irrelevant to these efforts but also rather counterproductive.

I think of the week immediately following the attacks of 9/11. There was widespread fear and confusion, but there were also countless makeshift memorials, solidarity vigils, and instances of people spontaneously helping strangers. There was an affectionate, palpable patriotism of the most profound kind. It was as if the whole nation were sitting shivah, purposely persisting in our grief while we waited on one another.

That week was incredibly meaningful, whether we were watching images on television or roaming New York like a giant prayer labyrinth. But even if it was pregnant with meaning, none of it meant any one thing. Because we couldnt situate 9/11 within a well-defined framework of understanding, we didnt know what it meant, which became part of the very enigma that we were so devotedly circling around.

And then we declared war. As journalist Chris Hedges puts it, war is a force that gives us meaning. Americans know war; we know how to make sense of things when we are at war. We honor the fallen, pray for soldiers, hang flags, and supplement the national anthem with America the Beautiful, color guards, and flyovers.

President Bushs declaration of war had the almost magical effect of transforming victims into heroes, our passive mourning into active resolution, and our collective dread before God-knows-what into a clear mission to rid the world of evil. There was some collateral damage; for example, most of the international community collected their things and quietly departed. But by and large, to be at war was much more understandable and reassuring than the meaning-soaked yet meaningless grief from which we were emerging.

For the record, I hope that we beat COVID-19, kicking the crap out of each small set of genes enclosed in fatty lipid molecules and armored with protein spikes. At the same time, Im concerned about the collateral damage to our collective character and individual dispositions that might result from using the language of war.

The language of war mostly carries out its mission in garnering collective resolve and justifying the moral righteousness of those engaged in battle. But sometimes it carries out other missions too.

Those who have engaged in warfare know that its easier to kill people if youve first dehumanized them. From Vietnam to the War on Drugs, weve seen this play out through the deliberate use of racial slurs. Trump has insisted on calling the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 the Chinese virus. If attacking a virus depends on its racialization and conquering an enemy requires dehumanization, its a short step to demonizing all Chinese people.

The language of war can also cause us to focus excessively on the future without attending to how were living in the present. Theologian Deanna Thompson was diagnosed with stage IV cancer more than a decade ago. In Glimpsing Resurrection, she writes about how those living with cancer are often cast in the role of warriors, enlisted to do battle with their cancer (whether they like that metaphor or not). She suggests setting aside the war language in order to ask what it would mean to negotiate life with a serious illness, to live well with loss.

Following Thompsons lead, we might ask: What will it mean for our country and world to live well with this pandemic? Will we be patient and kind? Will we be able to truthfully accept and faithfully bear this tragedy, even as we try to conquer it? How will we care for those who cannot be cureda question made painfully difficult by the six or more feet of space that separates the dying from their families? How well will we grieveprivately in our homes, locally in shifts of ten, and collectively as a human race?

Conquering the virus or going down fighting are not the only meaningful stories available to us as we try to make meaning in this pandemic. Christians have a number of scripts for living well with loss. Theyre there in the raw lamentations of Job and the Psalms, in Jesuss difficult concession to death culminating with his cry from the cross, in Ash Wednesdays acceptance of mortality and the self-examination that follows throughout Lent.

For its part, Chinese culture cultivates valley spirit, balancing an aggressive, masculine Yang with supple, feminine Yin. Indeed, according to Daoists, the most powerful action is spontaneous nonaction, or wu weithe way of water, which cuts through rock by yielding so masterfully to it.

In a journal that I have been keeping, I noted the beauty of the first day of spring. The sun came out late in the day, its light dispersing throughout the sky at twilight. It was that time of day when everything becomes more pronounced against the setting sunalmost surreal, as if we were cast in a colorized movie.

There may be more meaning against the horizon of this meaningless pandemic than any of us is able to take in.

A version of this article appears in the print edition under the title At war with a virus?

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Are we really at war with the coronavirus? - The Christian Century

IRVINE Welsh says he is "glad he took loads of drugs" and has "absolutely no regrets" as he insists the world does not have a substance problem.

The Trainspotting author, 61, insists he does not have any regrets over his use of narcotics in the past - and says it enhanced his writing and his career.

And he says drug use is always symptomatic of other problems in society - with susbtances simply used to fill gaps in people's lives.

Welsh gave his forthright opinions writing for newly created lads' mag GHQ - which aims to provide '"edgy" content.

He said: "There's always an antecedent for for any phenomenon in our society. It's no different with drugs and all the baggage it carries.

"When asked about this issue, I'm not really sure that there is a drug problem. Drugs tend to be symptomatic of something else. Every time you have a society in transition, there is an epidemic of some kind.

"Our society is in transition now, as capitalism declines from its industrial high and we move into a world where all the technological development is counterintuitive to profits and paid work. Thus there is a tremendous gap in what people can do to progress their lives. Whenever theres a gap, drugs will always be there to fill it.

"In some respects, we ourselves actually justify the very existence of drugs, which are part and parcel of our humanity. Human life is about work and play, about celebration and festival. This, in turn, equals intoxication, which equals drugs. So drugs are ubiquitous across all types of human society, from native cultures to post capitalist ones, and lionized in all religions.

"It's impossible to conceive of what a world without drugs would even look like - music, art, religion and politics probably wouldn't exist as we know them."

He added: "All I can say is that I'm glad I took loads of drugs, and I've absolutely no regrets personally about it at all. It probably gave me an edge as a writer, helping me expand my consciousness and cultural awareness.

"I had loads of great adventures. But I sailed very close to the wind, and ultimately, I'm also very glad that I knew when to stop. It's a young person's game, and best suited to a life when you have scant concept of your mortality. They simply don't work as well after that, and it all becomes diminishing returns.

"You get very tired and sick and it starts to become hard work, just like having a job. And I already have one.

"But a lot of people don't, so drugs are their job. But you dont want to be working all the time. So like most things in life, maybe it is all about moderation."

The Edinburgh scribbler does feel, though, that the "war on drugs" is necessary and helpful.

He acknowledged anti-drug rhetoric is essential in keeping communities intact, but does have some suggestions for a better approach.

He added: "Anyone thats being honest and who has any critical faculties, will see the widespread hypocrisy with mainstream society and its view on drug use. I think the only thing we need more than drugs is a war against drugs.

"Anti-drug hysteria is one of the strongest drugs around. If you could bottle it and sell it, you probably wouldn't need anything else.

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"Without 'wars' on drugs, terror, black people, cops etc, our communities would probably disintegrate rather than slowly tear themselves apart. All that seems to hold our states, and indeed our culture, together now is a sense of some external threat."

He added: "Something that is always discussed is the gateway and easy access drugs - alcohol and prescription drugs. These aren't just gateways to other drugs, but also potentially dangerous drugs in themselves.

"Most people who f**k themselves up with drugs never get past those legal and readily available ones, because they don't really need to do so.

"Something that really needs to be looked into is a more logical approach to the 'war on drugs'. I personally believe that if the effort and money invested in a more relaxed approach to the drug issue, you could really be onto something. I think you have to take the both the state and criminals out of the drug scene and just leave people alone.

"A lot of places have tried more 'liberal' regimes; Spain, Portugal, Uruguay, some US states, have all adopted different but successful experiments in drug legalisation/ decriminalisation.

"It'll happen across the world one day, as it's completely irrational to have a prohibitionist policy on drugs."

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Irvine Welsh glad he took loads of drugs as he insists society does not have a substance problem - The Scottish Sun

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently reprised his advice from the 2008 financial crisis, when he said never let a good crisis go to waste. Sadly, Donald Trump is the cynical embodiment of that code. Behind the national preoccupation with the pandemic, Trump has escalated his war on U.S. governance and our democracy with his politicization of the intelligence community; his campaign against the federal governments Inspector Generals; and the reversal of President Barack Obamas legacy in the field of environmental sanity. The Congress has been virtually and pathetically silent about these actions.

T.S. Eliots April is the cruelest month has come to life for the intelligence community. Weve witnessed the removal of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI); the inspector general (IG) for the entire intelligence community; and the acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). The office of the DNI currently has no official with confirmation from the U.S. Senate, a blatant circumscription of the congressional power of advice and consent. The DNI was removed, moreover, for allowing his deputy to brief the congressional intelligence committees on Russian interference in U.S. elections; the IG was removed for forwarding a whistleblower complaint from an analyst from the Central lntelligence Agency as the law required; and the director of NCTC, an intelligence professional with several decades of experience, was replaced by a Trump loyalist.

Ironically, several weeks after the firing of the DNI, the Senate intelligence committee chaired by Senator Richard Burr (R/NC) released a bipartisan report that confirmed Trumps Russia hoax was anything but. Indeed, it appears that Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin share the goal of subverting Americans belief in our democracy. The Senate committees report corroborated the assessment of the intelligence community, which the report termed coherent and well-constructed.

Nevertheless, Attorney General William Barr continues to malign the origins of the Russia investigation and the intelligence communitys assessment, appointing the leading federal prosecutor in Connecticut to conduct acriminal investigation(emphasis added) of the CIA, which is without precedent. Barr and the special prosecutor traveled to Europe to encourage the testimony of European intelligence professionals against their CIA counterparts, which could lead to less sharing of sensitive intelligence with the United States.

On the basis of my 24 years as a CIA intelligence analyst, I can testify to the important of intelligence sharing from foreign liaison. In certain categories of intelligence, particularly those areas that concern terrorism and proliferation of weaponry, it is extremely difficult to operate without foreign liaison and intelligence sharing. Barr mindlessly has put that secret exchange at risk for no good reason other than serving the presidents paranoia.

There is typically tension between the president and the CIA, but there has never been such a wholesale presidential attack on intelligence. President John F. Kennedy demanded the resignation of CIA director Allen Dulles for the failure and embarrassment of the Bay of Pigs; President Richard Nixon fired CIA director Richard Helms for failing to cooperate in the Watergate coverup and then installed James Schlesinger to politicize the intelligence on the Vietnam War; President Ronald Reagan appointed William Casey to politicize the intelligence on the Soviet Union in order to have an intelligence justification for unneeded increases in the defense budget; and President George W. Bush made Rep. Porter Goss the CIA director to politicize intelligence and used Vice President Dick Cheney to orchestrate the CIAs cherry picking of intelligence to make the spurious case for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But Donald Trump has outdone all of them in pursuing personal loyalty from the entire intelligence community and in compromising the legitimate role of oversight of the intelligence community.

Trump has vilified intelligence officials and analysts who disagree with him as extremely passive and naive. Attorney General Barr has encouraged Trump to view the intelligence community of using its powers to surveil and abuse the Trump campaign. Before he was inaugurated, Trump compared intelligence professionals to German Nazis. And not long after he was inaugurated, Trump accepted President Putins word that Moscow played no role in meddling in the 2016 presidential election. He has denounced current reporting on continued Russian interference as disinformation.

Trumps attack on intelligence and the intelligence community included the censorship of the DNIs annual global threat assessment to the congress, which should have taken place in January. For the past ten years, the DNIs global threat assessment has highlighted the vulnerability of the United States to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability. Admiral Dennis Blair made this part of his assessment in 2009, General James Clapper did the same throughout the Obama administrations, and as recently as 2019 Senator Dan Coats made the same strategic warning. But, as Steven Aftergood pointed out in his newsletter for the Federation of American Scientists, the annual threat testimony to Congress was canceled, possibly to avoid conflict between intelligence testimony and White House messaging.

Trumps abrupt firing of one of the governments leading experts on vaccines, Rick Bright, the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, similarly points to the difficulty of telling truth to power. Bright was opposed to one of Trumps pet rocks, investing in malaria drugs as a treatment for Covid-19. At a press conference last week, Trump said that he had never heard of Bright, which is just as alarming as the firing.

As for Trumps own intelligence, he paraded his IQ in front of a national television audience last week when he incoherently suggested exposing Covid-19 patients to disinfectants or strong light: Suppose that we hit the body with tremendous, whether its ultraviolet or just very powerful light? Then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in one minute. Is there a way we can do something like that by infection inside, or almost a cleaning? It would be interesting to check that. The manufacturer for Lysol, a disinfectant spray and cleaning product, immediately issued a warning against Trumps medical bulletin.

In the final analysis, the only protection against politicization is not in the system or process of intelligence, but in the courage and integrity of intelligence analysts themselves. But analysts require independent leadership at the top, and Trumps appointment of weak CIA directors (Mike Pompeo and Gina Haspel) points to no moral compass at the top of the intelligence ladder. Pompeo has moved on to become the worst secretary of state in U.S. history, while Haspels pathetic defense of her leading role in the CIAs torture and abuse program at her confirmation hearings makes her a poor candidate for telling truth to power. By maligning the entire intelligence community, Trump has not made Americans safer, and has compromised the possibility for a legitimate debate on intelligence actions abroad. The rebuilding process at the CIA and the other 16 intelligence agencies and departments will be difficult and prolonged.

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Trump Takes His War on Intelligence to a New Level - CounterPunch

If youre groping to understand the disorganization and ineptitude of Americas response to coronavirus, you might find it helpful to know theres a single word that captures the situation perfectly. That word is: normal.

The sad truth is that weve faced many crises in our history, and we almost always make a hash of them. We start with inertia, bestir ourselves to hubris, move on to bungling, and spice everything with venality. Situated far from the worlds troubles, we are invariably drugged by complacency and handicapped by federalism, the system that gives us so many levels of government to get in each others way.

Unpreparedness is a signal feature of almost every American crisis, from the Revolutionary War right up to our recent stunning lack of ventilators and masks.

In 1812, for example, Secretary of War William Eustis predicted that we needed only to send some officers into Canada and residents of the British territory would rally round our standard. In fact, American overconfidence, unreadiness and disorganization led to successive fiascoes culminating in the burning of the fledgling nations capital.

In the Civil War, a crisis if there ever was one, the Union cause was imperiled by timid generals, bad equipment, scarce supplies and rampant fraud. When World War II broke out in Europe in 1939, the United States had the worlds 18th largest army, behind even that of Portugal. In one notorious set of military training exercises, many U.S. soldiers were armed with broomsticks, yet 12 managed to get themselves killed and 200 injured despite the absence of any real enemy. The attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941, came as a surprise.

The picture is just as bleak in civilian crises. John M. Barry, whose books include The Great Influenza about the 1918 pandemic, states flatly that, In the United States, national and local government and public health authorities badly mishandled the epidemic. The federal government, embarked on the crusade of the Great War, suppressed news of the outbreak as part of a draconian crackdown on dissent. Local officials participated in the deception, contributing to the growth of suspicion and breakdown of mutual aid. As the epidemic exploded, Barry tells us, officials almost daily assured the public that the worst was over.

A decade later Uncle Sam met the Great Depression with bewilderment and battled it for years with earnest ineffectuality. A bungling Federal Reserve raised interest rates when it should have lowered them and failed to backstop banks against devastating runs. FDR tried lots of things, but overall fiscal policy oscillated perversely and may have done little to shorten the nations ordeal.

The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, aside from a fleeting sense of unity, produced costly and inconclusive wars. And things have rarely turned out well when the government has declared war in some crisis that is not a military conflict, as in the war on drugs.

The good news is that, in our biggest crises, things usually come out right at the end, though not without a lot of unnecessary suffering and waste. With luck and leadership, we usually manage to mobilize our vast national resources and creativity to vanquish whatever has beset us.

Great crises, however mishandled initially, have also been the occasion for overdue changes. The Depression gave us Social Security, modern securities regulation and a wised-up Fed (itself the belated offspring of the Panic of 1907). The Second World War resulted in the Marshall Plan and helped propel us down the road to equality for black people, women and others. Our latest crisis may finally force us to universalize health care and find a way to rein in its costs. We might also agree that there are good reasons not to move so much manufacturing overseas. As Warren Buffett likes to say, it is never a good idea to bet against America.

Of course, in the direst crises of the past we were often blessed with great leaders including Washington, Lincoln and FDR. Donald Trump is something else again. But if we remain true to form, our fumbling will enable the virus to persist right up until Election Day and eventually outlast his presidency.

Daniel Akst, a former columnist and editor at the Los Angeles Times, is a writer in New Yorks Hudson Valley.

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Commentary: Yes, our coronavirus response has been a mess. But thats how the US always responds to crises - West Hawaii Today

Tameca Cole/Die Jim CrowTameca Cole: Locked in a Dark Calm, 2016

Incarceration has reshaped my family and my hometown in southwest Ohio. Countless relatives have been arrested and detained; some have been convicted and sentenced, while others have been held indefinitely and then let go. One cousin was held in a county jail for several months without any charges ever being filed. Some of us have been profiled by police and falsely accused of crimes. Others have been convicted of serious crimes and sentenced to long periods in prison. The same month that I graduated from college, two of my closest cousins were convicted and sentenced for involvement in the death of another young man from our community. There has never been a time in my life when prison didnt hover as a real and present threat over us.

I originally started working on Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarcerationa survey and analysis of visual art and creative practices among incarcerated artists, as well as art that responds to mass incarceration, which accompanies an exhibition that was scheduled to open at MoMA PS1 on April 5, but has been delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemicas a way to deal with the grief about so many of my relatives, neighbors, and childhood friends who were spending years, decades, or life sentences in prison. It was also an effort to connect with others who are separated from their loved ones by prisons, parole, policed streets, and other forms of institutional and quotidian violence.

My family lived in a mill town that had experienced the woes of factories closing. The unionized manufacturing positions that had sustained our working-class and lower-middle-class black community for a couple of generations were no longer available. Studies of mass incarceration and the carceral state offer insightful explanations and historical accounts of what many of us witnessed and experienced in our communities: the mass removal of family members, neighbors, and friends, along with the permanent stigma on imprisoned people and their families.

As I came of age, in the 1980s and early 1990s, people around me, mainly young black men but also older women and men, were being shipped off to prison at such a frequency that their sudden disappearance and long-term absence became the norm. Boys my age who went to elementary and junior high school with my cousins and me were there and then gone, some never to return. They became invisible to us and hard to reach because of all the mechanisms the carceral state uses to separate imprisoned people from their families and communities. We had no words to describe the utter devastation, the despair.

Investigations of prisons from historical, legal, economic, and many other perspectives have analyzed the range of causes and implications of the rise in prison populations. Attacks on the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the War on Drugs, adverse consequences of the War on Poverty, the War on Terror, deindustrialization, neoliberal policies, law-and-order policing, segregated and punitive education, unemployment, the criminalization of poverty, austerity measures, and longstanding discrimination against nonwhite, queer, and gender-nonconforming peopleall contributed to an increase in the US prison population of more than 500 percent since the 1970s. This confluence of circumstances has resulted in the United States having the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with almost 2.3 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 1,852 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,163 local jails, and eighty Indian Country jails, as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and state psychiatric hospitals.

In popular entertainment, journalism, and documentaries, images of life behind bars fascinate, horrify, and titillate. They also offer a familiarity with prison as a cornerstone institution of modern life, but one that the majority of people never enter. The nonincarcerated public comes to recognize prison and the people in prison almost exclusively through a set of rehearsed images created by the state and by nonincarcerated image-makersimages like arrest photos, mug shots, the minimal furnishings of the prison cell, fortress-like walls, barbed wire, bars, metal doors, and the executioners chair. About this familiarity with the visual representation of prisons, Angela Davis writes:

The prison is one of the most important features of our image environment. This has caused us to take the existence of prisons for granted. The prison has become a key ingredient of our common sense. It is there, all around us.

As prisons made more and more people invisible in the communities they came from, images were employed in communities like mine to justify mass incarceration. Pictorial representation was an essential tool used to support tough crime policies and punitive sentencing. Hostile and dehumanizing images, such as wanted posters, arrest photographs, crime-scene images, and mug shots circulated constantly in local and national media, and reinforced the practices of aggressive policing and dominant notions of black criminality. Stories circulated of the rampant devastation of the crack era, portraying young street dealers as monsters.

Opening our local newspaper was often cause for pain and embarrassment, as photographs of people we knew seen in handcuffs were all too common. Often, these were images of black children and teenagers, infamously referred to as superpredators in the 1990s by journalists and politicians, most notably Hilary Clinton. One of the best-known, most egregious examples was the portrayal of the so-called Central Park Five, now known as the Exonerated Fivefive black and Latino teenage boys who were falsely accused and convicted of raping a white womanas a wolf pack.

At the same time, there were other images being produced about mass incarcerationimages that rarely made the news and had little or no public circulation. They offered different stories about and interpretations of prisons and their impact. These were not journalistic, scholarly, or legal documents. They were a diverse assortment of artworks and illustrations that came from inside the prisons themselves: studio photos, handmade greeting cards, drawings, and other pieces of art made by incarcerated people.

Incarcerated relatives sent home graphite drawings and birthday cards designed by artists in prison. Some prisons permitted us to take photographs together when we visited our relatives and friends. The visiting rooms where we sat with our imprisoned relatives and friends often displayed paintings, miniatures, and sculptures made by incarcerated people. These objects were not new forms of prison art, but as the size of the prison population boomed, the visual culture of mass incarceration grew along with it.

I began what would become Marking Time by displaying photos of incarcerated relatives around my apartment, partly as an attempt to work through my own discomfort with the pictures of them in prison, and to bring their presence into my daily life. At first, I was afraid that it would be too emotionally challenging for my family and me if I focused on a project about incarceration and the visual. But after a first presentation at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in 2012at which I spoke about my incarcerated relatives and the visual records of their incarceration: family photos, cards, drawings, and paintings on bedsheetssomething unexpected happened, something that would continue to happen over the years of lecturing and doing research on prison art.

People came up to me afterward to describe how they were directly impacted by prisons, how they had been incarcerated themselves or had loved ones in prison. They described the shame and emotional difficulty of talking about these experiences in public. Some shared photos and art that came from prison. This is how the project grewby word of mouth and by connecting with others. I began to build community around our collective pain and survival, the many millions of families affected by incarceration, the many millions held captive by prisons and other carceral institutions. Under the grief and rage was a sense of solidarity with others who shared the experience of watching their communities devastated by the various tentacles of what we call mass incarceration, the impact of which goes far beyond prisons.

Marking Time grew out of nine years of researching and archiving, and draws on multiple sources: interviews, site visits, personal collections, institutional archives, family narratives, and the growing scholarship in critical prison studies, black cultural theory, and visual culture. I have traveled to several states to meet formerly and currently incarcerated artists. I have interviewed more than seventy people, including imprisoned artists, teachers, nonprofit administrators, prison staff, activists, and the loved ones and relatives of imprisoned people.

Marking Time is about both the centrality of prisons in contemporary art and culture and the robust world of art-making inside US prisons. I set out to engage the politics of this art-making in prisons, and, more expansively, art as politics in an era of extensive human caging and under other forms of carceral power. How has the colossal reach of the prison industrial complex shaped contemporary art institutions and art-making? And how does visual art help to reveal the depth of devastation caused by our nations punishment system?

In Ronnie Goodmans 2008 painting San Quentin Arts in Corrections Art Studio, the artist is alone at work in a studio. The self-portrait shows him inside a cavernous space of multistoried walls and beamed ceilings. We see him in profile, from the knees up, dressed all in blue and bent slightly forward, studying a print. On the walls, dwarfing him and above his reach, are portraits, landscape paintings, and still-life renditions. The details of the workspacethe light, the height, and the open floor planall suggest an idyllic scene for the creation of art. Indeed, Goodmans painting references and inserts itself into a long tradition of documenting the artist at work in a studio, art class, museum, or other institutional setting, such as Samuel Morses Gallery of the Louvre (18311833) and Kerry James Marshalls Untitled (Studio) (2014).

Goodman made the painting while he was incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison and a participant in the Arts in Corrections workshop run by the William James Association, a nonprofit organization that provides art classes in prisons throughout California. The prison studio, in Goodmans painting, is a space of imaginative possibility, as well as a place constrained by his incarceration and the layered history of the carceral state. His painting is a reflection on the conditions under which art is made within prisons, while also reimagining the space. It foregrounds how art emerges in relation to institutions, whether ones commonly associated with art, like ateliers, conservatories, museums, and galleries, or sites like primary schools, subway stations, public streets, and even prisons.

Goodmans work is an example of what I call carceral aesthetics, ways of envisioning and crafting art that reflects the conditions of imprisonment. Every year, incarcerated people create millions of paintings, drawings, sculptures, greeting cards, collages, and other visual materials that circulate inside prisons; between incarcerated people and their loved ones; in private collections of people in prison, prison staff, teachers, and others; and more recently in public domains and institutions like museums, libraries, hospitals, and universities. The majority of art-making in prisons takes place in cells and prison hobby shops, where incarcerated people improvise and experiment with numerous constraints.

One of the challenges of writing about this has been that many of the artists, whether currently or formerly incarcerated, do not have possession of their art, nor any documentation of their work, nor knowledge of how and where their art has circulated. For reasons that have to do with the inequality and exploitation that incarcerated people suffer, art made in prison may be sent to relatives, traded with fellow prisoners, sold or gifted to prison staff, donated to nonprofit organizations, and sometimes made for private clients. There are people I interviewed who described their work and practices to me but had nothing to show.

Art made by people in prison can even be lucrative for some institutions, and art workshops and education can function as ways of managing people held captive so that they do not challenge prison authority. At Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola, prison art is sold at the biannual rodeo show, bringing in significant profit to the institution, with a percentage for the incarcerated people, who can use it toward commissary or send it home to relatives.

Art made in prisons is commonly described under the rubric of outsider art or folk art. Other studies have focused on art programs and workshops based on models of art therapy, which grow out of the disciplines of psychology, education, and criminology and which promote exploring creative outlets as forms of healing and rehabilitating people. My main concern about a rehabilitative framework is that in its primary focus on changing the individual, it does not offer an analysis or critique of how the carceral state relies on producing criminal subjects. My engagement with art is through an abolitionist perspective, and while I do not write about prison art as necessarily therapeutic or rehabilitative, I do acknowledge and respect that many incarcerated artists use and understand art-making as part of their healing and coping inside prisons.

Prison art practices resist the isolation, exploitation, and dehumanization of carceral facilities. They reconstitute what productivity and labor mean in states of captivity, as many of these works entail laborious, time-consuming, and immersive practices and planning. Art-making in prison is also important to consider as part of the larger contemporary art world, although prison art rarely appears in public galleries or museums. But like art made in other arenas, prison art exists in relation to economies, power structures governing resources and access, and discourses that legitimate certain works as art and others as craft, material object, historical artifact, or trash. And visual art, the focus of Marking Time, is of course just one form in a broader world of cultural production in prisons, including literature, music, and theater.

Prison art can shift how we think about art collections and art collectors. The primary collectors of art made in prison are other imprisoned people and their loved ones. Substantial collections exist inside cells, storage units, and classrooms of carceral facilities. Prison staff are also collectors of art made inside. Employees of prisons often deliberate with incarcerated people to make art on their behalf and agree on rates within the prison economy, deals made off the books and between people occupying very different positions of power. For this reason, commission and negotiation are fraught terms to describe arrangements in which unfree artists are asked by people who hold authority over their livelihood to make art in exchange for money, goods, or special treatment.

Generally, when discussing artists, I do not state why an artist was sentenced and imprisoned, unless the artist has requested that I include this information or these details are primary to their story as they tell it. I am not invested in categories of guilt and innocence, which are perilous because they can reproduce carceral logic. My intention is not to play into binaries about good versus bad prisoners, innocent versus guilty people, or those who are deserving of sympathy and recognition versus those who are not. At the same time, not to acknowledge the claims of innocence and eventual exoneration or release of some would be to betray these artists who have entrusted me with their stories and art.

At least four of the artists in my book identify as being wrongfully convicted. Two of them have, in fact, been exonerated by the Ohio Innocence Project, and two were released for time served, negotiated by their attorneys. For each of these artists, their imprisonment for crimes they did not commit propelled their art-making and their political consciousness and critique of prisons, so I speak of their wrongful conviction, exoneration, or release in this context.

I credit my methodology in creating Marking Time to the practices of care and collective survival among black women from whom I have learned my entire life. I recall the Sunday visits with my mom, when I was a young child, to see my uncle, who was locked away in a prison thirty minutes from our hometown. Looking through files after my grandmother died, I was struck by how many times she had borrowed on the surety of her modest home in order to bail out a relative.

My aunt Sharon and cousin Cassandra also exemplified a steadfast commitment over the twenty-one years they spent visiting and supporting their son and brother Allen during his imprisonment. What that entailed for them was laborious, and financially and emotionally taxing. Their care, to which I cannot do justice in these few sentences, included paying monthly phone bills, which sometimes amounted to thousands of dollars because of the exorbitant rates charged by prison phone vendors; ordering an endless array of goods for Allen, again from exploitive vendors; hiring attorneys to review his case; helping to support his daughter, who was only a couple of months old when he went to prison; and journeying at least monthly to wherever he was housed to sit in a prison visiting room across from him. They did it together. They supported each other. They listened to each other and cried when they needed to. This is the foundation of the contemporary movement that is working not only to end mass incarceration, but to do away with prisons and caging entirely.

Adapted from Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, published by Harvard University Press.On April 28 at 8PM, a conversation between Nicole R. Fleetwood, poet and scholar Fred Moten, and artists Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter and Jesse Krimes will be hosted on Zoom to celebrate the books publication. The exhibition by the same name will be rescheduled when MoMA PS1 reopens.

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Creation in Confinement: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration - The New York Review of Books

When President Donald Trump declared a national emergency last month, as the coronavirus outbreak worsened, he deployed language familiar and perhaps oddly comforting to many Americans. Designating himself a wartime president, Trump likened the countrys COVID-19 response to the U.S.s mobilization during World War II. Every generation of Americans has been called to make shared sacrifices for the good of the nation, Trump insisted.

This rhetorical maneuver reflected the long American history of declaring war on any conceivable enemy whether physical, abstract, domestic or foreign. But as familiar and ubiquitous as war might be for many Americans, at least figuratively, that same history also shows that it is a poor framework through which to understand complex social problems such as poverty and public-health emergencies like the novel coronavirus or drug addiction.

War has been a permanent condition and the governing metaphor for American life since at least the Second World War. Instead of reining in its military and defense infrastructure at the end of the war and the beginning of what is ironically known as the postwar period the U.S. opted to go in the opposite direction, bolstering the national security state in the hopes of thwarting the perceived Soviet and Communist threat. A massive expansion of federal power, the National Security Act of 1947 formed the skeleton of our modern national defense apparatus. The Act established the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council (NSC), a cabinet-level body that would help formulate military and foreign policy on the presidents behalf.

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Drafted and circulated in 1950, the councils NSC-68 report cast the young Cold War in stark, severe terms. It declared that the cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake and argued that Americans must be willing to give up some of the benefits which they have come to associate with their freedoms. In other words, though World War II had ended in victory, Americans would continue seeing the world through a wartime lens and indefinitely so.

In many ways, the assumptions underlying NSC-68 would guide U.S. foreign policy through the end of the Cold War and beyond. Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus the end of the Cold War, the U.S. [f]reed from major challengers remained committed to military action, although it often couched these interventions in terms of human rights.

It is therefore no surprise that Americans have long understood challenges far from the battlefield (such as COVID-19) through the lens of war. Beyond the actual experience of war as combat, as historian Michael Sherry has shown, the United States obsession with war has meant imagining many things in terms of it from President Lyndon B. Johnson depicting incidents of urban unrest as a war within our own boundaries to President Richard Nixon declaring a war on cancer in 1971 (as the Vietnam War raged), from LBJs War on Poverty to Pat Buchanans war for the soul of America (i.e., the culture wars) to the interlocking wars on crime and drugs. The band Wilco lamented this war fetish in their 2001 song War on War, in which frontman Jeff Tweedy sings that, in such a conflict, Youre gonna lose.

Americans know war, theologian Stanley Hauerwas notes, and when we are frightened ironically war makes us feel safe. Michael Sherry concurs building on the work of the late historian Marilyn B. Young when he calls the United States a nation deeply wedded to and defined by war, though maddeningly reluctant to admit it.

Still, real war remains distant and abstract for the overwhelming majority of Americans. As scholar Andrew Bacevich indicated in 2011, approximately half of 1 percent of our citizens bear the burden of service and sacrifice meaning 99.5% of Americans are not personally attached to the military or the national security state. The physical and emotional distance separating most Americans from the battlefield allows them to glorify war while knowing nothing of its unspeakable horrors or the sacrifice it entails.

War is destructive, violent and annihilative. But the nations commitment to war (both as reality and metaphor) has a tendency to take other policy approaches off the table. What has been called the troopification of everything generates financial and political support for any activity conducted under the umbrella of war. And so Americas over-reliance on the blunt, imprecise instrument of war hinders its ability to respond to myriad other problems, from public-health emergencies to chronic issues such as hunger. The infrastructure needed to address such concerns doesnt mesh well with war. Its use as a rhetorical and framing device within our present crisis therefore represents a dismal failure of imagination.

Most damningly, perhaps, Americas recent wars whether directed at targets physical, abstract, domestic or foreign have mostly failed. The United States excels at war, Sherry observes, though no longer at winning it. In just the past 50 years or so, the U.S. has failed to win the War in Vietnam, the war on cancer (despite many notable achievements in research and treatment), the War on Poverty (although LBJs campaign slashed poverty rates), the war on crime (which did much to terrorize and imprison poor and working-class black and brown people but little to actually curtail crime), the war on drugs (given the persistent reality of drug addiction) and the seemingly endless global war on terror.

This track record does not bode well for the nations war against COVID-19. We need an efficient, coherent public-health response coordinated by a competent federal government. What we dont need is another war.

Paul M. Renfro is an Assistant Professor of History at Florida State University and the author of Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2020).

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War Has Been the Governing Metaphor for Decades of American Life. This Pandemic Exposes Its Weaknesses - TIME

In "How to Fix a Drug Scandal," a new four-part Netflix docuseries, documentary filmmaker Erin Lee Carr presents the stories of Massachusetts drug lab chemists Annie Dookhan and Sonja Farak, and how the discovery of their respective misconduct led to the largest mass dismissal of criminal convictions in U.S. history.

Farak had been using the drugs that came through her lab in Amherst, filling out test results while high, while Dookhan had fabricated thousands of test results in her Boston lab, revealing major holes in a neglected legal system designed to streamline the "war on drugs."

Over the last decade, Carr has become something of an expert on the art of true crime. She is a master of dissecting the kinds of stories that seem made for splashy, gossipy rag, pulling at the dominant narratives which are often those easiest to tell and consume, built on familiar tropes and formulas and also, our collective hunger for them.

Carr's documentary, "Thought Crimes: The Case of The Cannibal Cop," dug into the case of Gilberto Valle, an ex-NYPD cop who was convicted of conspiracy to kidnap after his wife found that Valle had spent time detailing plans to kidnap, rape, and cannibalize several women on a number of fetish websites.

In 2017, she released "Mommy Dead and Dearest" about the death of Dee Dee Blanchard at the hands of her daughter Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who was a victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and Gypsy's boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn. Her 2019 documentary "I Love You, Now Die" delved into the death of Conrad Roy, who was prompted via text by his girlfriend, Michelle Carter to kill herself.

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Carr spoke with Salon about the making of "How to Fix a Drug Scandal," how she chooses her documentary subjects, and what it looks like to film with "radical empathy" in mind.

One of the things I really appreciate about your documentaries is that you take stories that are kind of prime for sensational headlines "Thought Crimes," "Mommy Dead and Dearest," "I Love You, Now Die" and you really dig into the people and sometimes policies behind them. How do you determine if a story is one that you want to pursue for a documentary?

This is actually the number onequestion I get asked, because it's very clear in all the work that it's the same person doing it, but they involve different systemic issues. So the easiest way I can explain it is sort of the most straightforward: Is it about a woman? Is there a complicating factor? Are there layers to it which means are there other stories within it? And is it watchable and fun?

And finally, is it going to be hard to get people to watch this?

You know, Sheila Nevins, who I first started making films with, she would talk to me about how this is sort of like television; there's a commercial reality to this in that you don't want to ever make a boring cold open.

You literally have 90 seconds to draw the audience in and they are going to decide if they want to watch it enough just based on that 90 seconds. So like, do your thing.

What drew you to the stories of Sonja Farak and Annie Dookhan?

You know as a sober person, and as an "out"sober person, there was something that so resonated with me about the deception of addiction. You're at work surrounded by all of these substances, and the purest substances the best of the best, you know? I don't think this is a very popular thought, but like, I would have done it. I think it's hearkening back to Adam and Eve. Like if the apple is right there and there are no cameras, you're going to take a bite of the apple.

Some people say they would never do that, that it would never cross their minds to do that, and alright, good for you. But I'm somebody that doesn't feel that way.

So I really wanted to have a series that talks about addiction, talks about temptation, talked about mental health, and continued those conversations in a way where it really looks at all aspects of it. But then you also had so many people that really set issues with the people [Farak and Dookhan's findings] convicted. Like, "They had drugs, they're guilty,"and I don't agree with that either. So it's really understanding it all from a human perspective.

And I think that definitely leads into my next question. You've talked before in interviews about how "radical empathy" is a guiding approach in your filmmaking. How did you practice that in creating "How to Fix a Drug Scandal?"

Well, I think that Annie Dookhan and Sonja Farak and the prosecutors, to some extent, can all be very one-dimensional villains; and I think with Annie Dookhan and Sonja Farak, specifically, I tried to see them as individuals versus villains, and really tried to stratify the line between those things.

I think it's often really about sort of caring about these people and knowing, "I am not a narrative filmmaker right now."I am making films about people's realities, what happened and it has to be thetruth, it has to be second source verified, I cannot make any of this stuff up.

So when I sit with the fact that somebody who's going to watch this and have opinions about Sonja, am I going to be able to sleep at night? Did I do the right thing? Did I three-dimensionalize her?

And I think "radical empathy"has been this phrase that I have carried around with me, but I don't give it to everybody. I did not do that with Larry Nasser, for example. I did not believe in terms of "At the Heart of Gold"that I could humanize him because that would be giving the movie over to him. So that's sort of my internal question with myself. If I have radical empathy, should that not lend itself to everybody? I think I'm sort of figuring that out as a filmmaker and as a human being as I go along.

Well, and I think that ties into how this story was structured. I thought it was interesting how, early in the first episode, we established that we were going to be recreating Sonja Farak's grand jury testimony using unsealed court transcripts. How did you come to the decision to structure the series in that way?

God, Ashlie it was rough. So you're sitting there and you have an entire binder full of grand jury transcripts. They have previously been sealed. They are literally the confession, the core part of this story.

And then you're faced up against the fact that people hate recreations and you cannot get the person who said these things to say any of these things. So my producing partner Will Cohen said, "You can do transcript-on-screen, you can do animation, you can do an actor."At one point, I really wanted Edie Falco to read it because she's out about recovery, and I was like, "That's a great idea."But then it was like, "No, that's not going to work that will be very slotted in."

So I was really having to push myself as a director and be like, "Okay, I need to make these transcripts come alive and the best way to do that is to recreate it, and if I'm going to do that, I'm going to really try to work as seamlessly as possible as getting that inside the narrative without being jarring."

And I remember I was sitting with my family and I was showing them "How to Fix a Drug Scandal,"and they were like, "Wow, it's really crazy that the woman would reenact that,"and my first thought was, "Were they too similar looking?"

But I had wanted it to be sort of seamless; and according to Twitter, according to critics, it's working. It's what you need to get through that story, and I have no apologies for it.

Right, well, and Sonja and Annie's convictions ultimately led to the largest mass dismissal of criminal convictions in U.S. history, which is absolutely staggering. What was it personally like investigating a story that impacted so many people?

It's interesting because as a filmmaker, I knew that thousands of people were impacted by it, and I thought that I would have my pick of who I could talk to; and what I recognized was the opposite. People that had prior drug convictions were incredibly distrustful of the system. Sometimes they would get on the phone, sometimes they would not, and a bunch of times we just ran into this brick wall of them saying, "I just can't do it. I don't trust that this will do anything for me."Stepping away from the filmmaker perspective, it's incredible to see what hell two chemists had wrought.

And to me, it was also really about examining post-release, like when you get out of jail what happens? When you're trying to get your convictions lifted because there's so much ripple effect. Can you apply for food stamps? Can you apply for affordable housing? Can you vote? What does your life look like then? And I think it was about showing all of these things that are sometimes really hard to get audience members to care a ton about.

But inside the show, you can really see it through Rolando Penate and Rafael Rodriguez.

"How to Fix a Drug Scandal" is now streaming on Netflix.

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"I would have done it": Filmmaker on indentifying with the "How to Fix a Drug Scandal" perpetrators - Salon

Apr 18th 2020

This article appeared in The Economist on December 21st 1918

IT is evident that any financial damage inflicted on the country by the war can best be repaired if every individual works to the fullest extent of his productive power. Productive power, however, depends on physical and moral efficiency, and war statistics have shown that the ordinary Briton falls lamentably short of even a lenient standard of physical fitness. The recruiting figures can be used for industrial purposes, for if a man is not fit for fighting he is not fit for full normal industrial productivity. The country has lately been told that - (1) the standard of physical efficiency is lower in England than in France, Germany, or any other of the great belligerent countries; (2) if adequate attention had been paid to health this country would have been able to put a million more men into the fighting line, and the war could have been won speedily without the combing of essential industries. The present shortage of fuel and food should be recognised by every householder in the country as attributable in some measure to the low standard of health and fitness which we have been content to accept; (3) only one-third of the men of military age (the period when the maximum of physical strength can be expected) examined under the National Service Ministry were found to be Grade I. To give this last fact its full value, it is well to state the official definition of Grade I. A Grade I man is one who attains to a normal standard of health and strength, and is capable of enduring physical exertion suitable to his age. He must not suffer from any organic disease, and must have no grave physical disability or deformity. The Grade I man, therefore, is not a superman: he is merely normal. The remaining two-thirds are sub-normal. These latter, as citizens and workers, not only fall short of their full productivity, but have to spend money on drugs and medical assistance to keep at work. Some idea of the loss to the country in their lack of full productivity can be gauged by the instantaneous effect on supplies of a strike or of two or three days jubilation on the part of the miners. A corresponding estimate of what must be spent on keeping them at work could be reckoned from the Army figures of the sums spent in treatment and maintenance of men fallen sick who entered the Army in cate- gories lower than Grade I.

It will always be difficult, however, to give satisfactory figures in evidence of the economic value of health to the State, because health is dependent on such an extricable tangle of causes. At the present time, moreover, very few people have thought it worthwhile to investigate the matter, but certain factories under the control of the Ministry of Munitions have made a start, and their results, while still very incomplete, serve as an indication of what may be expected and of the difficulties to be encountered.

The experience of these factories is that, roughly speaking, 5% of available time is lost through ill-health, and that of this amount 80% is attributable to general sickness and 20% to accidents. But some of the accidents are occasioned by nervousness and lack of control arising from a low tone of health on the part of the worker, and, on the other hand, some of the sickness recorded may have originated in an accident. Evidence more tangible is offered by the influenza records noted during the summer epidemic (not the recent one), which show that about 36 hours a head of the munition-making population was lost, involving a loss to the community equivalent to that of about four working days.*

It will always be difficult...to give satisfactory figures in evidence of the economic value of health to the State

Another suggestive field for computation is afforded by actuarial figures showing that the average expectation of life is not more than 53 years. Still further interesting investigations could be made into the profits made by druggists and the number of men employed in that trade.

But this is not all. If the country is losing by not getting the full productivity of men and women who are still able to do something and earn a living, what of the others who can earn nothing but who must, nevertheless, be maintained at a dead loss?

In 1914 there were 17.0 per thousand of the population receiving Poor Law relief. The Poor Law expenditure was nearly 15 millions, or 4s. per head of the population. These figures do not include hospitals, nor Old Age Pensions (a large proportion of which formerly appeared under Poor Law expenditure). An instance of such non-productive expenditure was recently recorded by the Newton Abbot Guardians, who stated that a man had died under their care upon whom they had had to spend a sum well over 1,000. Not only was this man non-productive, but he was using up a portion of the national income as well as the attention and time of the highly and expensively-trained people who were looking after him, and whose energies could have been employed to more useful account.

It may be argued that pauperism is not sickness, but the experience of the Guardians is that 50% of the relief they dispense is for actual sickness. A large proportion of the remainder is given to cases who have come to the Guardians in the first instance for help in sickness, and who have thenceforth relied on them for further relief.

It is incontestable that a thorough reform of national health will require a large expenditure; but expenditure upon it, if well and judiciously made, will pay as handsomely as a business proposition. As an offset against the money required must be placed a reduction in the Poor Law, in National Insurance, and in the cost of hospitals. Of the latter there are 2,634 in existence, exclusive of tuberculosis sanatoria, convalescent homes, nursing homes, hospitals for chronic cases, and sanatoria attached to schools and institutions.

What practical steps, then, must be taken to build a nation strong in nerve and sinew? To continue to devote unremitting care to those who have been crippled by the evils of our social system is merely to pay the penalty for past slackness. It must be done, but it is not progressive work.

The health work initiated by the Public Health Act of 1875, at present administered by the Local Government Board through the local authorities, must be developed and co-ordinated. It aims at preventing disease, and includes, amongst other activities, sanitation, factory and nuisance inspection, notification of certain diseases, instruction in health habits, inspection of food, notification of births, registration of midwives and of foster-mothers, provision of maternity homes, dental clinics, venereal disease clinics, compulsory disinfection after infectious diseases, provision of public wash-houses and cleansing stations.

What practical steps...must be taken to build a nation strong in nerve and sinew?

Further developments in preventing disease are foreshadowed by the work of the Medical Research Committee, whose report (1917-18) has recently been published. This committee gave warning of the pandemic of influenzal pneumonia; they investigated T.N.T. poisoning to such good effect that only one girl worker was affected by it this year. They have studied dysentery and malarial infections with an equally good result, and they advised a treatment for cardiac complaints which has saved the State in one hospital alone a sum of 50,000, an amount closely equivalent to that of the whole of the Medical Research Fund which the committee are privileged to administer.

But it is not enough to cure disease, nor to labour at preventing it. Our aim must be to establish a standard of positive good health, and this goes to the very root of those vexed questions - housing, wages, and hours of work. The National Service records, fragmentary as they are, serve as a basis for inquiry. This department state that they found the fittest section of the population to be the young miners. Their work is hard physically, but they earn wages sufficiently good to allow of their working short hours. They eat good food, and their recreation of coursing gives them the open air they need without any further physical effort.

War must be waged on such conditions by State and employer alike. The employer has already learnt that output depends on the physical efficiency of his workers, and he is ready to do his share in his own interest if for no better reason. Decent conditions of work, fair pay, and good housing will do much, but not everything. We come back, as almost always, to education, and the individual's views and ideals. Until we all know how to be healthy and strong, and recognise that unless we are so we cannot pull our weight in the boat, and that pulling our weight in the boat ought to be one of our chief objects in life, a low standard of health and efficiency will continue to be a drag on the nation's productive power.

*British Medical Journal, November 23rd.

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The Economics of Health (1918) - The Economist

Don Winslow is one of America's most widely read and acclaimed crimewriters. His work has been adapted for major Hollywood movies and TV series.

In his bestselling books "The Cartel" (2015), "The Force" (2017), and "The Border" (2019), Winslow has taken the mystery, action, grittiness, moral dilemmas, and authenticity that typifies the best of crime fiction as a genre and combined it with epic storytelling and complex characters against the backdrop of America's failed war on drugs.

Winslow's new book "Broken" is a collection of six short novels focusingon the tragedies and triumphs, and day-to-day lives of people cops, bounty hunters, drug addicts, drug dealers, detectives, their loved ones, friends, and community who are criminals, those trying to stop them, and the human rubble left along America's "criminal highway."

Winslow is also a very outspoken truth-teller about the criminality, cruelty and inhumanity of Donald Trump and his regime.

In theconversation below, Winslow explains how Donald Trump embodies everything wrong with American masculinityand shares his observation thatthe coronavirus pandemic is a perfect metaphor for the pain and harm being caused to the American people and the world by Trump and his movement.

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Winslow also reflects on the obligations of the artist in a time of crisis and why he has chosen to be so vocal about Trump and his regime's many crimes against human decency and democracy.

You can also listen to my conversation with Don Winslowon my podcast "The Truth Report"or through the player embedded below.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Could you have imagined all that has happened with Donald Trump being president? If it was fiction no reasonable person wouldbelieve it.

No, you can't make this up. It's the problem with writing fiction right now. Every day you get up, and the headlines have outpaced anything you could reasonably imagine. It's discouraging. To me the coronavirus feels like the physical manifestation of some sort of metaphysical infection that we have had during the last three years at least with Donald Trump and this situation. Now Trump and all that has come from him feels almost feels like it's finally physically manifestedin the form of the virus. Now we have to see how we are all going to get through this intact.

America issick society. The sickness is so omnipresentthat too many people have become used to it as being "normal."Your description of the coronavirus as being both physical and metaphysical is such a perfect encapsulation of the Age of Trump.

I'm really beginning to come to that conclusion. It feels like in a weird way that we must get through the coronavirus in order to get past it and what it represents. It is all like the fever breaking and you go through the sweats and the shakes and the bones hurting and all that comes with getting through the illness.

And there is of course the surreal aspect of it all, with Trump's religious leaders telling people to lick the floors of churches to prove that the virus does not exist, or still telling the congregation to come to church and then they inevitably get sick from the coronavirus. Trump leads a cult. It is all a manifestation of how sick American society really is.

The first thing I do in the mornings is I usually look at five or six newspapers online. For the last few days, I almost haven't wanted to. I almost have to force myself to follow my routine. Each day's headlines are always worse than yesterday's. And then we read this ridiculous stuff about peoplelicking the floors of churches and other madness, and then one has to ask themselves, "Is this who we are as a people? As Americans? What is going on?"

In terms of a narrative and the traditional Western storytelling form, there is no climax with the Age of Trump. There is no end, just one horrible thing after another without pause. One must wonder what that lack of closure is doing to the emotional and intellectual lives of the American people.

In my trilogy about America's drug wars I intentionally abandoned the three-act structure in exchange for a five-act structure, which is the classic structure of tragedy. That is what this moment feels like to me. It is a tragedy.

A person cannot continue to support Donald Trump and still be an introspective and decent human being. To support Donald Trump is to abandon being a human being who actually thinks deeply about right and wrong. To support Donald Trump is to be a party to and support all the horrible and cruel things he does.

I don't want to just recite the whole "Greatest Generation" trope about World War II but I live in a very rural area, and it's mostly Republicans. I'm the Democrat who gets sent out to talk to my Republican neighbors when a school bond issue or some related matter comes up.

For some reason they like me. I can tell them, "Hey, we need to get these school bonds funded." They respect me, and we can work together. I have never had an issue with the 70- and 80-year-olds. They are rock-ribbed, conservative ranchers who wear cowboy hats and boots. They get it. If I go to them and I say, "Hey, we need this.I need you to vote this way because the kids need this for their educations," then they are on board. It is the 50- and 60-year-olds who are not supportive. Their response is, "Yeah, if it was good enough for me, it's good enough for them." I tell them, "That's funny because your own dad doesn't think so."

Would you even be able to properly write Donald Trump as a character in one of your books?

I don't think so. But he appears in another form in a book of mine called "The Border."But really it is impossible to write a parody of a parody. It just can't be done. Here's this guy Donald Trump in the midst of this coronavirus crisis with people dying, worried, and scared. What does Trump talk about? How it cost him billions of dollars to become president. What? Gilbert and Sullivan couldn't write lyrics for this guy. So no, I'll take a pass on it. Thank you.

We fiction writers are all struggling right now about how to write anything about and in this era. Our stories for the most part are set right now. We have to describe this moment in this era somehow. It is very difficult to do. As a writer it is easy to find yourself wandering into sarcasm, which means there will be more irony than you might otherwise want.

In America we truly are living a caricature of reality with Trump as president. What type of art do you think this moment is going to produce?

I don't think anyone's going to write anything really good about it this moment for another 10 years. We need perspective on it. I don't think that there's much in terms of novels anyway or films that are going to be done because it is so very immediate. Everything that is happening is simply too close. We also don't know the truth and all the facts about what Donald Trump has done. That reflects a broader problem with contemporary culture:with the 24/7 news cycle everything is so fast. The first story is usually wrong. To fully grapple with Donald Trump and that has happened and is happening needs time. We will also need more time before anything approaching art is made in response to Trump and this moment.

What is the obligation of the artist in a time of crisis?

I do not think that there's a responsibility to speak out. Let me just stick with my own genre. I think it's perfectly okay to write what is just a good suspense novel that entertains people and maybe to a certain extent informs the reader. That is perfectly appropriate. I kind of got into speaking about politics simply because of what I was writing about. I never intended to be a political person and I never intended to be terribly outspoken. Frankly, it goes against my personality. My inclinations tend towards being an introvert.

But in the 22 years of doing my drug trilogy, I felt that if I didn't speak out then I was almost being some type of voyeur on the genuine suffering of the people being hurt by the drug wars.

If I knew, which I do, that the war on drugs is both futile and counterproductive and wrong, then at a certain point it was incumbent on me to step outside of the novel and say it. If I knew that Trump's wall along the U.S.-Mexico border was a cruel travesty in terms of solving the heroin epidemic, the opioid crisis, then at some point I needed to step outside of saying it in a novel and say it in public. That was necessary for me to do but I don't think it is necessarily a responsibility that every artist has.

I was thinking about the border wall and how Trump and Stephen Miller and other people who share their values talk about nonwhite migrants, refugees, and immigrants. Driven by bigotry and racism, itis very easy for some people to disparage and hate people that they never met and don't know.

It frustrates me terribly when I hear people from the Northeast claim to be experts on the border, and they've maybe come down for an hour or two and gotten the standard tour. I live very close to the border. I know the people who live here. They're my friends. They're my neighbors. They went to school with my kid. We're on committees together. They're, for the most part, really fine people. It infuriates me when I hear Donald Trump call them "rapists" and "murderers" and blame them for bringing diseases into the country, including the coronavirus.

I believe that very few people, regardless of their political persuasion, could physically, in person, see somebody suffering or dying in person and not do something to help them. That's on the micro level. On the macro level though, we talk about "illegal immigrants" and "wetbacks" and use other such language and then it is very easy for people to become indifferent and cruel.

I wrote "The Border" to get beneath the headlines in these discussions about immigration. Let's live with an immigrant, albeit through fiction, for a few hundred pages. Let's not talk about the opioid crisis. Let's live with a young woman who is a heroin addict. Let's live with a cop on that beat. Let's try to see what is happening from that individual level. That makes a huge difference. To be able to do that is one of the great opportunities provided by fiction as a genre because we can create a story in our heads and hearts and then bring the reader close that world and feelings.

There are many ways to create that type of connection with the reader. The technique that I choose is to see life through the eyes of the people in my stories. And that does require a certain amount of empathy. It requires sitting down and talking to people. It really requires sitting down and listening to people which is something by the way that we as writers need to remind ourselves to do.

As human beings we share a common humanity. While fortunately I have not suffered in the way that the people in "The Border" or my other books have suffered because of the war on drugs, we do all have common human experiences. We've all suffered loss,we've all suffered fear, we've all felt hope, we've all felt disappointment, and I think that we can relate on those levels.

One of the throughlines in your books are questions of masculinity and violence, and the relationships that men have with one another as fathers, sons, brothers, and comrades. When I see Donald Trump, I don't see a "bad man" ora real tough guy. I see a man pretending to be tough, a wannabe mafia boss.

All the real tough guys I know are either dead or in jail. Very often these Hollywood wannabe tough guys have made a gangster movie andthey think they are the character in real life. They are not. Donald Trump wants to be a badass and clearly is not. Growing up, my intuition is that Donald Trump didn't have any friends or other people to tell him that, "Hey, you're being a jerk." It appears that Donald Trump did not have anyone to help define him as a person and help him learn boundaries and correct behavior.

Trump's wannabe tough guy swagger and machismo bullying and posturing is part of his appeal. Again, it reveals a sickness in American society. Specifically, a crisis in American masculinity.

Much of this is in fact a crisis in masculinity. Donald Trump represents most of what I don't like about men. Donald Trump represents men at our worst with all that macho posturing and other nonsense.

In the research for your books you have encountered some real bad men, legitimately tough and dangerous people. What were they like?

They are each different. They remind me of the famous Tolstoy observation that, "All happy families are the same, and all unhappy families are different."That is true of the real bad guys.

I have sat across a table from multiple murderers who can be as charming as anyone you've ever had dinner with, and yet you look in their eyes and you definitely see it. Others are just cold businesspeople. To them, violence is unfortunate but necessary. Others are very quiet. Those ones are the really serious guys. Some are sociopaths or psychopaths and others are just muted. What you typically don't see though with these types of real bad men is the macho posturing because they have no need to do it.

As the clich goes, is all writing therapeutic?

No. Not for me. That's not the deal that I have with the reader. The reader doesn't care and shouldn't care about Don Winslow's feelings. The purpose of my books is not for me to bare my soul. The purpose of my books is hopefully to tell a really good story in a good way and to maybe give people some information that they didn't have. I also hope that after finishing one of my books that the readers see the world in a different way than they had before.

How did writing become your vocation?

I've always wanted to be a writer. I felt that ways since I was a little kid. I grew up around great storytellers. My dad was a sailor and one of the great raconteurs of all time. He and his buddies had seen the world and could tell such amazing stories.

I used to sit, literally, at their feet hiding under the table. They'd pretend not to know I was there while they're drinking beer and telling great old stories. And the stories got better every year. My mom was a librarian, so I grew up around books. My dad was a tremendous reader, so I always thought thatI wanted to read and write for a living. But at some point, we often experience a crisis of confidence. I remember thinking to myself, that "No.I am not good enough to write for a living. I don't have the talent to do that." I needed to make a living, so I did that by trying to do things that were more interesting as opposed to less interesting and I was lucky enough to get some of those gigs.

I remember this vividly. I was in Africa on a safari photographic safaris to be clear sick with dysentery and a malaria relapse and thinking to myself, "You better do this thing,man.You better just stop thinking about it, stop talking about it and really do it."And I'd heard Joseph Wambaugh say that when he was a Los Angeles homicide cop which he was for many years he really wanted to be a writer. So, he decided to write 10 pages a day. I said to myself, "Well, I can't write 10 but I can do five." I did it every day for the next three years until I had my first book. All the other things I did for money were just ways of evading what I really wanted to do which is to be a professional writer.

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Author Don Winslow: Trump's administration feels like it's "manifested itself" as the coronavirus - Salon

By Omar Jimenez, CNN

(CNN) -- Chicago's Cook County Jail once had a population of roughly 10,000 detainees and was often cited for overcrowding.

Now that number is down to around 4,200, an all-time low, according to the Cook County Sheriff's Office. One significant reason is the ongoing

Years of reform, including changes in bail requirements, cut the jail's initial population swell almost entirely in half.

Then, in the past month alone, another 1,300 inmates have been released as the offices of the Cook County Sheriff, Public Defender and State's Attorney focused on releasing those awaiting trial and low-level nonviolent offenders.

"On cases we agree on, we've gone into court together and asked for a release. On cases where we disagree, we go before a judge and present our evidence for the courts," said Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx. "We've been able to reduce the jail population in the course of four weeks by almost 25 percent."

It's among the many tactics the largest single-site jail in the US has been pushed to explore as population control became increasingly significant amid the ongoing pandemic.

"We want to make sure that we're creating conditions whereby people who don't need to be there aren't there and the people who are there have optimal conditions for their health and safety," Foxx said.

The coronavirus pandemic has been hard on jails around the country but especially so on Cook County's. Their confirmed coronavirus cases grew from just a few in late March to a number in the hundreds by the beginning of April. At one point it was the largest known source for coronavirus infections in the country.

In a statement, Cook County Health wrote to CNN, "Controlling the spread in a jail or other residential facility poses unique challenges."

The statement continued, "Many of our patients arrive at the jail with pre-existing conditions. Many have multiple conditions. And many of them are over the age of 60."

While more than 150 detainees are recovering after previous positive diagnoses, at least three detainees have died after testing positive for Covid-19. The pandemic has meant re-evaluating health practices as part of a process the Sheriff's Office said began back in January.

"Hundreds of gallons of bleach and disinfectant is distributed throughout the jail weekly as well as masks and other protective gear," wrote the Cook County Sheriff's Office to CNN in a statement. "We've proactively single celled the majority of the jail population and maximized social distancing to the extent it is possible in a correctional facility, including preparing and opening previously closed detention areas."

A recent federal court order also required the Sheriff's Office to provide masks to all detainees who were quarantined, starting on April 12.

"Now for the people who are not infected, how do we make sure that we keep maintaining that?" asked Sheriff Tom Dart in a previous interview with CNN. "Boy that's tricky."

Among their solutions, creating a quarantine bootcamp at a separate site where those that are infected, or suspected to be, are taken to stay separately from the jail's general population.

Cook County's jail population is nearly 75% black and more than 60% of all coronavirus deaths in Chicago are black, despite blacks making up just about 30% of the population.

The outbreak at the jail adds to an alarmingly fast-growing reality.

"These are the exact same populations that have been hardest hit by gun violence and hardest hit by the war on drugs and make up the overwhelming population of the people who utilize our criminal justice system," said Foxx.

"The things that we're seeing show up in the healthcare crisis that we're seeing are the exact same conditions."

It's part of why Chicago's Department of Public Health put in place an order to enhance the data sharing between hospitals in the city to include demographics, in an attempt to better understand the true scope of the pandemic's ongoing devastation.

"We can't separate the criminal justice system from the issues that lead people to become involved whether that's healthcare disparities, education disparities, poverty [or] economic disinvestment," said Foxx.

The-CNN-Wire & 2020 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved.

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Chicago's biggest jail released a fourth of its population over coronavirus fears - ABC 57 News