Implicit Bias from The Panopticon by Melissa Finn

Some are asking: what is criminal justice?
Like many private things
It is something being constantly re-framed
Can’t wear it on your sleeve
Application of the rule of law, after all
Is exceptionally coded
Rulings are a slinky moving
Up and down
The staircases of class
It’s a particular education
Approach
A science
A way to preconceive
A way to amass

It creates power to impose
Punitive methods, political tactics
It’s a matrix of bodily control
Built on rules, expectations, didactics
Of right and wrong

Technologies of tentacled presence
Systems of surveillance blinded by cortisol


Octothorp BlackLivesMatter
Penal systems are [sic]

“Justice” from implicit bias
Octothwart, barrage of state violence

If it isn’t time for transforming

Octothorp BlackLivesMatter
Penal systems are [sic]

“Justice” from implicit bias
Octothwart, barrage of state violence

There are not enough positions adopting


Penitentiaries enable labor
War labor, labor to empower the poor for war
Nations of slaves traded for market labor
Eyes for everything, except birthing labor

Feeling nothing, robot people, public servants
Punish the disenfranchised, single mothers
All women whose mere voices
Create furor and wanton domestic terror

Forced labor once with bloodied whips
Now corrective detentions, economies of prisons
Built on economies of confined bodies
Rehabilitated to pay for system's inadequacies

Fixations on bodies, fixations on bodies
OCD forces upon them, their utility, docility
Mark-ability, market-ability
Their distribution. Submission polity

Torture, performance. Determining
What can be discharged in their corp by a corp
Or discharged from it, the corp and the corp
The body is power’s provisioning

Body feeds production when subjected
And applied through which violence enacted
Ideologies are justified, glorified
Homo sacer gets sanctified

Society doesn’t need terror
To create a social and political order
Subtle, coercive means work, they’re clever
Don’t tell the marginal, they know heretofore

Octothorp BlackLivesMatter
Penal systems are [sic]

“Justice” from implicit bias
Octothwart, barrage of state violence

If it isn’t time for transforming

Octothorp BlackLivesMatter
Penal systems are [sic]

“Justice” from implicit bias
Octothwart, barrage of state violence

There are not enough positions adopting

The philosophers
They call this the political technologies of the body
This technology is not continuous
Not always linear
Not always systematic

It’s a mix of things, bits of things
That come together
To create a toolbox
An apparatus of capture
A micro-physics of control
Continuously validated

By external stimuli
By the owners of the bodies, co-opted
And body management investors
Seeking multi-form grip looseners
Inspiration pulled
Right from the bowels of society

To re-create multi-vocal
Disciplinary control
Well-aware of exactly its myriad of vulnerabilities

At multiple sites of confrontation
At multiple risks of differentiation
That threaten an inversion
Of status quo power relations management

There is no fowl swoop
To reverse historic cements
Of what is common sense
Except with a chisel

Dogged episodes of chipping
That, in time
Create cumulative effects and real listening

Octothorp BlackLivesMatter
Penal systems are [sic]

“Justice” from implicit bias
Octothwart, barrage of state violence

If it isn’t time for transforming

Octothorp BlackLivesMatter
Penal systems are [sic]

“Justice” from implicit bias
Octothwart, barrage of state violence

There are not enough positions adopting

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