Gunillocentrism – web diary of a freelance journalist

This is a six year old article, but well worth checking out (if you read Swedish):
ETC – Välkommen till frihetens land (Dan Josefsson).

Some of the many points:
– USA’s prison population is relatively (percentage of entire population) ten times as high as that of Sweden and five times as high as that of, for example the UK.
– The unemployment rate would be considerably higher in the USA if the inmates – now forced to slavery work – would be counted.
– The prison industry in the USA has exploded at the same time – since the 70’s – that criminality has in fact gone down.
– A third of all young black men in US ghettos are or have been in jail.
– No less than 4 million Americans (1,8 million of them black) have lost their voting right because of a criminal record.
– The money spent on each inmate per year could well finance one year’s education at Harvard.
– In the 50’s, sociologists actually thought that prisons could be abolished in the USA one day.

The writer, Dan Josefsson, also gives plenty of examples of how unfairly the “three strikes – you’re out”-law hits. (If you can’t read Swedish, check out this article for one of them: Los Angeles CityBeat.)
He quotes the Berkeley professor Loïc Wacquant, who belives that the prisons are merely USA”s way of denying black people their rights – i e the urban ghettos, where African Americans rioted in the 60’s, have only been moved into the correctional facilities. Most of the “ordinary Americans” that are interviewed in the article have ridiculuosly hard views on how inmates should be treated, for example that they should be executed immediately or have their hands chopped off.

I learned a lot from Dan Josefsson’s article and will do some research to see what has happened since 1999 when he wrote it. Even if I haven’t come further into Californian prisons than to the reception area (of Twin Towers in Los Angeles in December 2004 and California Institution for Women in Corona in May this year) what I have seen and heard makes sense when I read this. Let’s hope I get to write something about it somewhere.

/Gunilla

This spring I have travelled exclusively a) to Stockholm b) within the USA (Washington*2, New Mexico/Texas, Indianapolis, Los Angeles – Denver on Friday).
The unique exception of a trip to another country is Mexico – where I’ve been twice, but only a couple of hours per visit…in a bordertown. So it hardly counts.

As you all know, I want to do _fieldwork_ and not sit in New York all the time.

What a luxury problem.

Well, luckily, New York is a constant around-the-world-trip in itself – and I have friends who travel and fill me in with little reports from where they are, not to mention friends who _live_ in places such as Rio de Janeiro, Ulaanbaatar, Paris, Shanghai, and Höör.

I just had an e-mail from my friend N, who is making a quick stop in Almaty/Kazakhstan on her way to Dusjanbe/Tajikistan. Here are her first impressions of Almaty:

“it is very funny here, from what i can tell in my jetlagged haze from just the walk over. russia
meets china meets the alps or something. the chinese influence is much more than
i expected, esp. the people! they all look chinese, ethnically speaking. guess
what, all the beggars are from tajikistan—that is the only way most kazakhs
know about tajiks. anyway, i am on my way to dushanbe in about ten
hours….about to mail my parents and then do some sightseeing (not sure what
there is to see, but hope to see it). it really reminds me, aesthetically (the
shops, street layout etc.) of kosovo, not surprisingly. not quite as ‘third
world’ as i had been lead to believe. (at least not compared to places like
india or indonesia).”

You may not think it’s exciting with Central Asian cities looking like they were in Kosovo…but I do! And I look forward to more reports from N. She will be in Tajikistan over the summer.
I was once invited to come hang out with her – but she realized, probably wisely, that it may not be a good idea to have a nosey journalist around.

But she will do PhD fieldwork and research in Tajikistan for years to come, so she can’t stop me from coming in the future!

/Gunilla