T
1. Interpretation – Surveillance is to closely watch a person, place or thing for
the purpose of investigation and is distinct from a Search which intrudes on an
expectation of privacy
Hutchins, 2007, Mark, Alameda County District Attorney's Office “Police Surveillance”
http://le.alcoda.org/publications/files/SURVEILLANCE.pdf
Before we begin, a word about terminology. As used in this article, the term “surveillance” means to “closely
watch” a person, place, or thing for the purpose of obtaining information in a criminal
investigation.5 It also includes recording the things that officers see or hear, and gaining access to
public and private places from which they can make their observations. It does not include wiretapping and bugging which,
because of their highly-intrusive nature, are subject to more restrictive rules.6 THE TEST: “Plausible vantage point” Surveillance
becomes a “search”—which requires a warrant—if it reveals sights or sounds that the suspect
reasonably believed would be private.7 As the court explained in People v. Arno, “[T]he test of
validity of the surveillance [turns upon] whether that which is perceived or heard is that which is
conducted with a reasonable expectation of privacy.”8 Thus, a warrant is unnecessary if the suspect knew, or
should have known, there was a reasonable possibility that officers or others might have seen or heard him.9 In the words of the
Supreme Court, “What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth
Amendment protection.”10
2. Violation - Prison body cavity searches are not surveillance.
Anthony Kennedy, Supreme Court Justice 2012, Anthony, Opinion of the Majority,
4/2/12, https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/10-945
The Court’s opinion in Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U. S. 520 (1979) , is the starting point for understanding
how this framework applies to Fourth Amendment challenges. That case addressed a rule
requiring pretrial detainees in any correctional facility run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons “to expose their body
cavities for visual inspection as a part of a strip search conducted after every contact visit with a person from
outside the institution.” Id., at 558. Inmates at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City argued there was no
security justification for these searches. Officers searched guests before they entered the visiting room, and the inmates were under
constant surveillance during the visit. Id., at 577–578 (Marshall, J., dissenting). There had been but one instance in which an inmate
attempted to sneak contraband back into the facility. See id., at 559 (majority opinion). The
Court nonetheless upheld the
search policy. It deferred to the judgment of correctional officials that the inspections served not only to discover but also to
deter the smuggling of weapons, drugs, and other prohibited items inside. Id., at 558. The Court explained that there is
no mechanical way to determine whether intrusions on an inmate’s privacy are reasonable. Id., at
559. The need for a particular search must be balanced against the resulting invasion of personal
rights. Ibid.
Prefer our interpretation
A. Brightline – our interepretation creates a clear and precise limit on the types
of affirmatives that are topical, their interpretation opens up to anything the
government does that might be icky.
B. Limits are necessary for negative preparation and clash, and their
interpretation makes the topic too big. Including searches adds an entirely
different legal regime with different laws, judicial standards, and other issues
for THOUSANDS of different crimes.
Topicality is a Voting Issue.
K
[Perfecting Slavery] The 1AC works towards supplementing the
national project, perfecting an already Anti-black world –the
world of the affirmative is already less desirable then the status
quo as their flawed logic of prison reform only becomes the
language of slaveness and unfreedom
Farley 2005(Perfecting Slavery Anthony P. Farley –Boston College Law School
Associate Professor, Boston College Law School. J.D., Harvard Law School) DDI 2015///
Slavery is with us still. We are haunted by slavery. We are animated by slavery.
White-over-black is slavery and segregation and neosegregation and every situation in
which the distribution of material or spiritual goods follows the colorline. The movement from
slavery to segregation to neosegregation to whatever form of white-over-black it is that may come with post-modernity or
after is not toward freedom. The movement from slavery to segregation to neosegregation is the movement of slavery
perfecting itself. White-over-black is neosegregation. White-over-black is segregation. White-over-black is slavery. All of it
is white-over-black, only white-over-black, and that continually. The story of progress up from slavery is a
lie, the longest lie. The story of progress up from slavery is told juridically in the form of
the rule of law.
Slavery is the rule of law. And slavery is death. The slave perfects itself as a slave when it bows
down before its master of its own free will. That is the moment in which the slave
accomplishes the impossible reconciliation of its freedom with its unfreedom by willing
itself unfree.3 When exactly does this perfection of slavery take place? The slave bows down before its
master when it prays for legal relief, when it prays for equal rights, and while it cultivates
the field of law hoping for an answer.
The slave’s free choice, the slave’s leap of faith, can only be taken under
conditions of legal equality. Only after emancipation and legal equality, only after rights,
can the slave perfect itself as a slave. Bourgeois legality is the condition wherein equals
are said to enter the commons of reason4 or the kingdom of ends5 or the New England town
meeting of the soul to discuss universalizable principles, to discuss equality and freedom. Much is made of these
meetings, these struggles for law, these festivals of the universal. Commons, kingdom,
town meeting, there are many mansions in the house of law, but the law does not forget
its father, as Maria Grahn-Farley observes: The law of slavery has not been forgotten by
the law of segregation; the law of segregation has not been forgotten by the law of neosegregation. The law
guarding the gates of slavery, segregation, and neosegregation has not forgotten its
origin; it remembers its father and its grandfather before that. It knows what master it
serves; it knows what color to count.6 To wake from slavery is to see that everything must
go, every law room,7 every great house, every plantation, all of it, everything. Requests for
equality and freedom will always fail. Why? Because the fact of need itself means that the request will fail.
The request for equality and freedom, for rights, will fail whether the request is granted
or denied. The request is produced through an injury.8 The initial injury is the marking
of bodies for less—less respect, less land, less freedom, less education, less. The mark must be made on
the flesh because that is where we start from. Childhood is where we begin and, under conditions of
hierarchy, that childhood is already marked. The mark organizes, orients, and differentiates our otherwise common flesh.
The mark is race, the mark is gender, the mark is class, the mark is. The mark is all there is to the reality of
those essences—race, gender, class, and so on—that are said to precede existence. The
mark is a system.9 Property and law follow the mark. And so it goes.
There is a pleasure in hierarchy. We begin with an education in our hierarchies. We begin with
childhood and childhood begins with education. To be exact, education begins our childhood.
We are called by race, by gender, by class, and so on. Our education cultivates our
desire in the direction of our hierarchies. If we are successful, we acquire an orientation
that enables us to locate ourselves and our bodies vis-à-vis all the other bodies that
inhabit our institutional spaces. We follow the call and move in the generally expected way. Whiteoverblack is an orientation, a pleasure, a desire that enables us to find our place,
and therefore our way, in our institutional spaces. This is why no one ever need
ask for equality and freedom. This is why the fact of need means that the request
will fail. The request for rights—for equality—will always fail because there are always ambiguities. To be
marked for less, to be marked as less than zero, to be marked as a negative attractor, is to be in the situation of
the slave. The slave is not called. The slave is not free. The slave is called to follow the
calling that is not a calling. The slave is trained to be an object; the slave is trained,
in other words, to not be. The slave is death. Death is the end of ambiguity. To be in
the situation of the slave is to have all the ambiguities organized against you. But there are always ambiguities,
one is always free. How, then, are the ambiguities organized? How is freedom ended? The slave must choose the
end of ambiguity, the end of freedom, objecthood. The slave must freely choose death. This the slave can
only do under conditions of freedom that present it with a choice. The perfect
slave gives up the ghost and commends its everlasting spirit to its master. The
slave’s final and perfect prayer is a legal prayer for equal rights. The texts of law, like the
manifest content of a dream, perhaps of wolves, may tell a certain story or an uncertain story. The certainty or
uncertainty of the story is of absolutely no consequence. The story, the law, the wolves’ table manners,
do not matter. The story, the law, the story of law, the dream of wolves,10
however, represents a disguised or latent wish that does matter. The wish is a
matter of life or death.
The affirmative’s progressive call for legislation to change its the
opposite of radical grassroots action directly trading off with the
challenging of assumptions of white supremacy and policing
that fuel the prison-industrail complex.
Rodriguez ‘8 (Dylan Rodríguez is Professor and Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside,
where he began his teaching career in 2001. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in Ethnic Studies from the University
of California, Berkeley, and earned two B.A. degrees and a Concentration degree from Cornell University. He was
nationally recognized by Diverse magazine as one of its Emerging Scholars of 2006, and has been a Ford Foundation
Predoctoral and Postdoctoral Fellow, Abolition Now! P. 93-100//DN)
We are collectively witnessing, surviving, and working in a time of
unprecedented state-organized human capture and state-produced
physical/social/ psychic alienation, from the 2.5 million imprisoned by the
domestic and global US prison industrial complex to the profound forms of
informal apartheid and proto- apartheid that are being instantiated in cities,
suburbs, and rural areas all over the country. This condition presents a
profound crisis – and political possibility – for people struggling against the
white supremacist state, which continues to institutionalize the social
liquidation and physical evisceration of Black, brown, and aboriginal peoples
nearby and far away. If we are to approach racism, neoliberalism,
militarism/militarization, and US state hegemony and domination in a
legitimately "global" way, it is nothing short of unconscionable to expend
significant political energy protesting American wars elsewhere (e.g. Iraq,
Afghanistan etc.) when there are overlapping, and no less profoundly
oppressive, declarations of and mobilizations for war in our very own, most
intimate and nearby geographies of "home." This time of crisis and
emergency necessitates a critical examination of the political and
institutional logics that structure so much of the US progressive left, and
particularly the "establishment" left that is tethered (for better and worse) to
the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC). I have defined the NPIC elsewhere
as the set of symbiotic relationships that link political and financial
technologies of state and owning class social control with surveillance over
public political discourse, including and especially emergent progressive and
leftist social movements. This definition is most focused on the industrialized
incorporation, accelerated since the 1970s, of pro-state liberal and
progressive campaigns and movements into a spectrum of governmentproctored non-profit organizations. It is in the context of the formation of the
NPIC as a political power structure that I wish to address, with a less-thansubtle sense of alarm, a peculiar and disturbing politics of assumption that
often structures, disciplines, and actively shapes the work of even the most
progressive movements and organizations within the US establishment left
(of which I too am a part, for better and worse): that is, the left's willingness
to fundamentally tolerate – and accompanying unwillingness to abolish – the
institutionalized dehumanization of the contemporary policing and
imprisonment apparatus in its most localized, unremarkable, and hence
"normal" manifestations within the domestic "homeland" of the Homeland
Security state. Behind the din of progressive and liberal reformist struggles
over public policy, civil liberties, and law, and beneath the infrequent
mobilizations of activity to defend against the next onslaught of racist,
classist, ageist, and misogynist crirninalization, there is an unspoken politics
of assumption that takes for granted the mystified permanence of domestic
warfare as a constant production of targeted and massive suffering, guided by
the logic of Black, brown, and indigenous subjection to the expediencies and
essential violence of the American (global) nation-building project. To put it
differently: despite the unprecedented forms of imprisonment, social and
political repression, and violent policing that compose the mosaic of our
historical time, the establishment left (within and perhaps beyond the US)
does not care to envision, much less politically prioritize, the abolition of US
domestic warfare and its structuring white supremacist social logic as its
most urgent task of the present and future. Our non-profit left, in particular,
seems content to engage in desperate (and usually well-intentioned) attempts
to manage the casualties of domestic warfare, foregoing the urgency of an
abolitionist praxis that openly, critically, and radically addresses the moral,
cultural, and political premises of these wars. Not long from now, generations
will emerge from the organic accumulation of rage, suffering, social
alienation, and (we hope) politically principled rebellion against this living
apocalypse and pose to us some rudimentary questions of radical
accountability: How were we able to accommodate, and even culturally and
politically normalize the strategic, explicit, and openly racist technologies of
state violence that effectively socially neutralized and frequently liquidated
entire nearby populations of our people, given that ours are the very same
populations that have historically struggled to survive and overthrow such
"classical" structures of dominance as colonialism, frontier conquest, racial
slavery, and other genocides? In a somewhat more intimate sense, how could
we live with ourselves in this domestic state of emergency, and why did we
seem to generally forfeit the creative possibilities of radically challenging,
dislodging, and transforming the ideological and institutional premises of
this condition of domestic warfare in favor of short-term, "winnable" policy
reforms? (For example, why did we choose to formulate and tolerate a
"progressive" political language that reinforced dominant racist notions of
"criminality" in the process of trying to discredit the legal basis of "Three
Strikes" laws?) What were the fundamental concerns of our progressive
organizations and movements during this time, and were they willing to
comprehend and galvanize an effective, or even viable opposition to the white
supremacist state's terms of engagement (that is, warfare)? 'this radical
accountability reflects a variation on anti- colonial liberation theorist Frantz
Fanon's memorable statement to his own peers, comrades, and nemeses:
Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative
opacity. In the underdeveloped countries preceding generations have
simultaneously resisted the insidious agenda of colonialism and paved the
way for the emergence of the current struggles. Now that we are in the heat of
combat, we must shed the habit of decrying the efforts of our forefathers or
feigning incomprehension at their silence or passiveness.
The emancipatory logic of the 1AC’s prison reform refolds us into the category
of humanism which is inaccessible to the unthought.
Hartman 2003[The Position of the Unthought An interview with Saidiya V Hartman
Conducted by Frank Wilderson Qui Parle, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2003)] DDI15///
Saidiya V Hartman - Well! That's a lot, and a number of things come to mind. I think for me the book is about the problem
of crafting a narrative for the slave as subject, and in terms of positionality, asking, "Who does that
narrative enable?" That's where the whole issue of empathic identification is central for me. Because it just seems that
every attempt to emplot the slave in a narrative ultimately resulted in his or her obliteration,
regardless of whether it was a leftist narrative of political agency - the slave stepping into
someone else's shoes and then becoming a political agent - or whether it was about being able to unveil
the slave's humanity by actually finding oneself in that position. In many ways, what I was trying to do as a
cultural historian was to narrate a certain impossibility, to illuminate those practices that speak
to the limits of most available narratives to explain the position of the enslaved. On one hand,
the slave is the foundation of the national order, and, on the other, the slave occupies the
position of the unthought. So what does it mean to try to bring that position into view without
making it a locus of positive value, or without trying to fill in the void? So much of our political
vocabulary/imaginary/desires have been implicitly integrationist even when we imagine our
claims are more radical. This goes to the second part of the book -that ultimately the metanarrative thrust is
always towards an integration into the national project, and particularly when that project is in
crisis, black people are called upon to affirm it. So certainly it's about more than the desire for
inclusion with in the limited set of possibilities that the national project provides. What then does this
language - the given language of freedom - enable? And once you realize its limits and begin to see
its inexorable investment in certain notions of the subject and subjection, then that language of
freedom no longer becomes that which res cues the slave from his or her former condition, but
the site of the re-elaboration of that condition, rather than its transformation F.W - This is one of the reasons why
your book has been called "pessimistic" by Anita Patterson.3 But it's interesting that she doesn't
say what I said when we first started talking, that it's enabling. I'm assuming that she's white - I
don't know, but it certainly sounds like it. S.VH. - But I think there's a certain integrationist rights
agenda that subjects who are variously positioned on the color line can take up. And that
project is something I consider obscene: the attempt to make the narrative of defeat into an
opportunity for celebration, the desire to look at the ravages and the brutality of the last few
centuries, but to still find a way to feel good about ourselves. That's not my project at all,
though I think it's actually the project of a number of people. Unfortunately, the kind of social
revisionist history undertaken by many leftists in the 1 970s, who were trying to locate the
agency of dominated groups, resulted in celebratory narratives of the oppressed.4 Ultimately, it
bled into this celebration, as if there was a space you could carve out of the terrorizing state
apparatus in order to exist outside its clutches and forge some autonomy. My project is a
different one. And in particular, one of my hidden polemics in the book was an argument against
the notion of hegemony, and how that notion has been taken up in the context of looking at the
status of the slave.
Vote Negative in favor of an unflinching paradigmatic analysis
that forefronts a discussion of criminality in the context of this
years resolution. Blackness as the praxis for our demands
makes civil society lose coherence. The demand of the 1AC is the
only ethical demand.
Wilderson 2007(The Prison Slave as Hegemony's (Silent) Scandal Frank B.
Wilderson III, Wilderson is professor of African American Studies and Drama at the
University of California Irvine. Ph.D. at the University of California Berkley) DDI15///
Fanon writes, "Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is,
obviously, a program of complete disorder. If we take him at his word, then we must accept that no other
body functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository of complete disorder
as the black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Real, for
in its magnetizing of bullets the black body functions as the map of gratuitous violence
through which civil society is possible—namely, those bodies for which violence is, or can
be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Symbolic,
for in America generates no categories for the chromosome of history and no data for the
categories of immigration or sovereignty. It is an experience without analog—a past without a
heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imaginary, for
"whoever says 'rape' says Black" (Fanon), whoever says "prison" says black (Sexton), and
whoever says "AIDS" says black—the "Negro is a phobogenic object." 13
Indeed, it means all those things: a phobogenic object, a past without a heritage, the map
of gratuitous violence, and a program of complete disorder. Whereas this realization is,
and should be, cause for alarm, it should not be cause for lament or, worse, disavowal—
not at least, for a true revolutionary or for a truly revolutionary movement such as prison
abolition. If a social movement is to be neither social-democratic nor Marxist in terms of
structure of political desire, then it should grasp the invitation to assume the
positionality of subjects of social death. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we
must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting whites, as well as civil society's junior
partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years, but few have wanted to learn the steps.
They have been, and remain today—even in the most antiracist movements, such as the
prison abolition movement—invested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional
political desire today is pro-white, but it is usually antiblack, meaning that it will not
dance with death.
Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more dangerous to the United
States. This is not because it raises the specter of an alternative polity (such as socialism or community
control of existing resources), but because its condition of possibility and gesture of
resistance function as a negative dialectic: a politics of refusal and a refusal to
affirm, a 'program of complete disorder." One must embrace its disorder, its
incoherence, and allow oneself to be elaborated by it if, indeed, one's politics are to be underwritten
by a desire to take down this country. If this is not the desire that underwrites one's politics, then
through what strategy of legitimation is the word "prison" being linked to the word
"abolition"? What are this movement's lines of political accountability?
There is nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of
disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder and incoherence is not
anathema in and of itself. No one, for example, has ever been known to say, "Gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a
little sooner, or maybe not come at all." Yet few so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by the disorder
and incoherence of blackness—and the state of political movements in the United States today is marked by this very
Negrophobogenisis: "Gee-whiz, if only black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all." Perhaps there
is something more terrifying about the joy of black than there is in the joy of sex (unless one
is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps coalitions today prefer to remain in-orgasmic in the face of
civil society—with hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. If through this stasis or
paralysis they try to do the work of prison abolition, the work will fail, for it is always work from a position
of coherence (i.e., the worker) on behalf of a position of incoherence of the black subject,
or prison slave. In this way, social formations on the left remain blind to the contradictions
of coalitions between workers and slaves. They remain coalitions operating within the logic of civil society
and function less as revolutionary promises than as crowding out scenarios of black antagonisms, simply feeding our
frustration.
Whereas the positionality of the worker (whether a factory worker demanding a
monetary wage, an immigrant, or a white woman demanding a social wage) gestures
toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the black subject (whether
a prison slave or a prison slave-in-waiting) gestures toward the disconfiguration of civil
society. From the coherence of civil society, the black subject beckons with the
incoherence of civil war, a war that reclaims blackness not as a positive value but as a
politically enabling site, to quote Fanon, of "absolute dereliction." It is a "scandal" that
rends civil society asunder. Civil war, then, becomes the unthought, but never forgotten,
understudy of hegemony. It is a black specter waiting in the wings, an endless
antagonism that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation) but that must,
nonetheless, be pursued to the death.
Our education is best to understand the ontological and
epistemic conditions of the Prison and Middle Passage.
Rejecting our huristics furthers the institution of Trans-Atlantic
slave trade
Rodriguez 2007 [Dylan Rodriguez Forced Passages Chapter Two of
Warfare in the American Homeland, edi. By Joy James (2007) Rodriguez is
an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the
University of California –Riverside] DDI15///
The contemporary regime of the prison encompasses the weaponry of
an institutionalized dehumanization. It also, and necessarily, generates a material
rendition of the non- and sub-human that structurally antagonizes and de-centers the
immediate capacity of the imprisoned subject to simply self-identify. Publishing in 1990 under
the anonymous byline "A Federal Prisoner,' one imprisoned writer offered a schematic view of this complex process,
which is guided by the logic of a totalizing disempowerment and social disaffection:
The first thing a convict feels when he receives an inconceivably long sentence is shock. The shock usually wears
off after about two years, when all his appeals have been denied. He then enters a period of self-hatred because
of what he's done to himself and his family. If he survives that emotion—and some don't—he
begins to swim the rapids of rage, frustration and alienation. When he passes through the
It's not a life one can
look forward to living. The future is totally devoid of 12
The structured violence of self-alienation, which drastically compounds the effect
of formal social alienation, is at the heart of the regime's punitive-carceral logic. Yet it is
precisely because the reproduction of the regime relies on its own incapacity
to decisively "dehumanize" its captives en masse (hence, the persistence of institutional
rapids, he finds himself in the calm waters of impotence, futility and resignation.
measures that pivot on the presumption and projection of the "inmate's" embodiment of disobedience, resistance, and
insurrection) that it generates a philosophy of the captive body that precedes the logic of
enslavement. Thus, the regime's logic of power reaches into the arsenal of a historical
apparatus that was an essential element of the global formation of racial chattel slavery
while simultaneously structuring its own particular technology of violence and bodily
domination. What, then, is the materiality of the archetypal imprisoned body (and subject)
through which the contemporary prison regime has proliferated its diverse and
hierarchically organized apparatuses of racialized and gendered violence, most especially
its technologies of immobilization and bodily disintegration.
I am arguing that a radical genealogy of the prison regime must engage in
historical conversation with the massive human departure of the transatlantic Middle
Passage, an apparatus and regime of capture and forced movement that outlined its own
epochal conception of the non- and subhuman, the prototyping of normative
black punishment in a white new world, and the blue-printing of the abject (and
durably captive) black presence under the rule of Euro-American modernity. The
Middle Passage foreshadows the prison as it routes and enacts chattel slavery,
constituting both a passage into the temporality and geography of enslavement (crystallized
by Patterson's conception of slavery as "natal alienation" and "social death" 13) and a condition of existence
unto itself—in particular, a spatially specified pedagogical production of black slave ontology.
I am especially concerned with the capacity of historically situated white-supremacist
regimes to prototype novel technologies of violence and domination on black bodies—
articulating in this instance through what Eric Williams considers the overarching "economic" logic of a
transcontinental trafficking in enslaved Africans —which in turn may yield technologies
of power that become available to, and constitutive of, larger social and carceral
formations, even centuries later. Thus, while the contemporary prison regime
captures and immobilizes the descendants of slaves and non-slaves alike, I
consider its technology of violence to be inseparable from a genealogy of transatlantic
black/African captivity and punishment.
While the human volume of the Middle Passage has been a subject of empirical and
methodological debate since the publication of Philip Curtin's The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969), a loose
consensus among historians has been attained since the 1999 release of the Cambridge University Press Trans- Atlantic
Slave Trade database. David Eltis, drawing from a rigorous review of previous literature and elaborating from the
Cambridge University data set, suggests a figure of about 11 million "exports of slaves from Africa" between the years 1519
and 1867.15 Eltis, Curtin, Herbert S. Klein, Paul Lovejoy, David Richardson, Joseph Inikori, Stanley Engerman, and
others have further estimated that between 12 percent and 20 percent of the enslaved
perished during the transatlantic transfer, with a total of between 10 million and 15
million of the enslaved eventually reaching the Americas. It is important to note, for the
genealogical relation I am examining here, that the vast majority of the seaborne deaths were the
result of conditions endemic to the abhorrent living conditions of the slave vessels (the
effects of contractible disease and malnutrition, for example, were exacerbated by the conditions of mass incarceration).
Many others committed suicide and infanticide in an attempt to defeat the logic of their gendered biological expropriation
and bodily commodification, while unknown numbers were killed in the process of attempting to overthrow their captors.
The scale of biological death during the Middle Passage was astronomical and clearly
genocidal.
Case
1. No solvency – jails are local and short-term facilities, prisons are long-term
facilities - can’t have spillover from local level to federal level
Bureau of Justice Statistics No Date (“What is the Difference Between Jails and Prisons?”
Part of the US Department of Justice, http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=qa&iid=322)
Jails are locally-operated, short term facilities that hold inmates awaiting trial or sentencing or
both, and inmates sentenced to a term of less than 1 year, typically misdemeanants. Prisons are long
term facilities run by the state or the federal government and typically hold felons and inmates
with sentences of more than 1 year. Definitions may vary by state.
2. No solvency- the nature of prison is inherently sexually violent. The
affirmative focuses on sexual violence while refusing to face the other issues of
sexual violence that occurs inside of prisons. This turns case as the affirmative
leaves these other forms to be ignored and increase while the world feels good
about how they solved for sexual violence in prisons.
Arkels, 2015 Gabriel. Professor of Legal Skills at Northeastern University School of Law.
Regulating Prison Sexual Violence. Northeastern University Law Journal. Vol. 7 No. 1. 71-130.
In this article, I argue that a fundamental tension arises in efforts to curb carceral sexual violence.
Preventing sexual violence requires an expansion of bodily autonomy for prisoners, in that to be
free from sexual violence one must have at least the ability to prevent certain nonconsensual
acts upon the body. Also, sexual self-determination, including not only the freedom to say “no,” but
also to say “yes,” is an integral part of preventing sexual violence.5 And as many women-of-color
feminists and critical theorists have established, freedom from sexual violence requires
redistribution of wealth and power6 and an end to gender, racial, class, sexuality, nationality, and
disability-based subordination.7 However, imprisonment demands major infringements on the
bodily autonomy and self-determination of prisoners that courts, regulators, and legislatures
frequently hesitate to curtail. For example, carceral agencies routinely require their staff and
contractors to perform strip searches, body cavity searches, and nonconsensual medical
interventions on prisoners: acts that have much in common with other forms of sexual violence.
Carceral agencies and their staff control the movements, activities, clothing, sexual expression,
basic hygiene, nutrition, and virtually every other aspect of the biological and social lives of
prisoners.8 As Alice Ristroph argues, incarceration is inherently a sexual punishment, because of
the extent of corporal control that carceral systems exert over prisoners.9 Incarceration cannot
be fully desexualized.10 Carceral mechanisms also aggravate inequitable distribution of wealth
and power, as well as subordination on the basis of race, gender, class, disability, nationality, religion, and
sexuality.11 A reluctance to frankly confront the tension between protection of autonomy and maintenance
of control has diminished possibilities for meaningfully and transparently addressing carceral sexual
violence. In this article, I begin that frank confrontation.
3. No reason officers would listen – just because strip searches out in the open
won’t be legal doesn’t mean they will stop behind closed doors. It’s the aff
burden to prove that guards would follow this policy
4. Plan can’t solve – alt causes and reforms make issues worse through the
system of incarceration. If not through sexual violence, then those who are
targeted will be forced into solitary confinement – can’t work within the system
Lamble 2011 (S. Lamble has been involved in social justice, antipoverty and prisoner solidarity work in Ontario, Canada and London,
England. Lamble currently teaches at Birkbeck Law School, University of London and is a founding member of the Bent Bars Project, a collective which
coordinates a letter writing program for queer, trans and gender-non-conforming prisoners in Britain, “Transforming Carceral Logics: 10 Reasons to
transform the prison industrial complex through queer/trans analysis and action,” Captive Genders pg 243)
Prisons are harmful, violent, and damaging places, especially for∂ queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming folks.∂ Prisons are violent institutions. People in prison and detention experience∂ brutal
human rights abuses, including physical assault, psychological∂ abuse, rape, harassment, and
medical neglect. Aside from these violations,∂ the act of putting people in cages is a form of
violence in itself. Such∂ violence leads to extremely high rates of self-harm and suicide, both in∂
prison and following release.35 These problems are neither exceptional nor∂ occasional; violence is endemic to
prisons It is important to bear in mind that prison violence stems largely∂ from the institutional structure
of incarceration rather than from something∂ supposedly inherent to prisoners themselves.
Against the popular∂ myth that prisons are filled with violent and dangerous people, the vast ∂
majority of people are held in prison for non-violent crimes, especially∂ drug offenses and crimes
of poverty.36 For the small number of people∂ who pose a genuine risk to themselves or others, prisons often make those∂ risks
worse. In other words, prisons are dangerous not because of who is∂ locked inside, but instead prisons
both require and foster violence as part∂ of their punitive function. For this reason, reform efforts
may reduce, but∂ cannot ultimately eliminate, prison violence.∂ The high number of deaths in state custody
speaks to the devastating∂ consequences of imprisonment. Between 1995 and 2007, the British∂ prison-monitoring group Inquest
documented more than 2,500 deaths in∂ police and prison custody.37 Homicide and suicide rates in Canadian prisons∂ are nearly
eight times the rate found in non-institutional settings.38∂ In
the United States between 2001 and 2006, there
were 18,550 adult∂ deaths in state prisons,39 and between 2003 and 2005, there were an
additional∂ 2,002 arrest-related deaths.40 It is extremely rare for state officials∂ to be held
accountable for these deaths. For example, among the deaths∂ that Inquest has documented in Britain, not one police or
prison officer∂ to date has been held criminally responsible