{"id":179610,"date":"2021-02-22T12:00:08","date_gmt":"2021-02-22T12:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=179610"},"modified":"2021-02-18T05:03:33","modified_gmt":"2021-02-18T05:03:33","slug":"in-furor-over-poet-with-child-porn-conviction-prison-abolitionists-debate-the-limits-of-mercy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/02\/in-furor-over-poet-with-child-porn-conviction-prison-abolitionists-debate-the-limits-of-mercy\/","title":{"rendered":"In Furor over Poet with Child Porn Conviction, Prison Abolitionists Debate the Limits of Mercy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is <\/em>Poetry magazine \u201cplatforming toxicity\u201d or promoting the \u201cpractice of freedom\u201d?<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Issues of Poetry magazine are displayed at the Newberry Library in Chicago, Ill., on Dec. 16, 2009.
Photo: Zbigniew Bzdak\/Tribune News Service via Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

14 Feb 2021 – <\/em>A bedrock principle of the prison abolitionist movement is that you don\u2019t ask an incarcerated person what they\u2019re in for. It\u2019s more than etiquette. To eschew the identity that the punitive state assigns\u00a0\u2014 which could be false \u2014 is to see someone whole. \u201cEach of us is more than the worst thing we\u2019ve ever done,\u201d says Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson. Even a murderer is somebody\u2019s baby.<\/p>\n

\n

That\u2019s the way guest editors Tara Betts, Joshua Bennett, and Sarah Ross \u2014 poets, abolitionists, and educators behind bars and in the free world \u2014 approached the submissions to \u201cThe Practice of Freedom,\u201d the February 2021 issue of Poetry magazine. The issue features the work of people who are or were incarcerated, their families, and those who work in \u201ccarceral spaces.\u201d The contributors had already been judged and punished; the editors would judge the work, no rap sheet attached, not its makers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

And this is how a poem by Kirk Nesset made it into the pages of Poetry. Nesset, a 63-year-old former Allegheny College English professor, pleaded guilty in 2015\u00a0to possession, receipt, and distribution of child pornography; he was sentenced to 76 months in federal prison\u00a0and\u00a0released this fall. He is now on the sex offender registry in Arizona.<\/p>\n

From the moment the issue came out, sexual violence survivors, victims\u2019 advocates, and assorted feminists began raining angry tweets, blogs, and public statements on Poetry and its publisher, the Poetry Foundation. A Change.org petition demanding that the magazine remove the poem and apologize to \u201cNesset\u2019s voiceless victims, their readers and subscribers, and victims of sexual violence everywhere\u201d gained over 1,600 signatures in a week. By then the story had spread as far as New Delhi<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The editors responded kindly to their critics but did not take the poem down. \u201cI\u2019m heartbroken about hurting anyone or making them revisit their pain,\u201d Betts tweeted<\/a>. \u201cI\u2019m also devastated by policing and prisons and how these are overtly racist and classist systems that protect property over people. What happens when those hurts overlap?\u201d<\/p>\n

Poetry posted several statements, the latest on February 5<\/a>. \u201cIn publishing an issue that included incarcerated writers, we accepted that submissions would come from poets who have harmed others,\u201d it read. But \u201cweighing people\u2019s convictions in editorial decisions for this issue would be antithetical to the discourse around the practices of freedom we are seeking to facilitate.\u201d<\/p>\n

What has been<\/u> interesting about this dispute is that it\u2019s not the usual law-and-order hardliners versus insurgents against the Prison Nation, not the censors versus the\u00a0American Civil Liberties Union or the anti-\u201ccancel culture\u201d right (though there is some of that, here<\/a> and here<\/a>). Rather, the outcry against Poetry reveals ambivalence among folks who are committed to dismantling the Prison Nation.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan @poetrymagazine<\/a> publish murderers? Can they publish carjackers? Rapists?\u201d tweeted<\/a> Reginald Dwayne Betts (no relation to Tara), who participated in a carjacking at 16, was locked up for eight years, and eventually became an award-winning writer, Yale-educated lawyer, and, now, poetry editor of the New York Times. Referring to that job, he asks, \u201cWhat is the line of people that cannot have poems published? \u2026 Please clue me in on what\u2019s impermissible.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd also, I need to know the limits of abolitionist rhetoric. Cause, the same people saying abolition one minute and crying foul the next, I gotta get things right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tara Betts\u2019s tweet communicates that she can tolerate this, the moral tension at the heart of prison abolitionism. Dwayne Betts is asking his comrades to negotiate the terrain together, because it\u2019s slippery.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
The outcry against Poetry reveals ambivalence among folks who are committed to dismantling the Prison Nation.<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n

But militancy defies irresolution. And, as in the criminal legal system itself, sides must be taken, victim or perpetrator. Given the guest editors\u2019 bona fides, some critics have looked for collaborationists. \u201cPOETRY gave Kirk\u2019s submission white male privileges,\u201d writes Teka Lo on her site Public Intellectuals<\/a>,<\/em> which focuses on Black and brown women\u2019s art and politics. \u201cPOETRY knew who he was, and I suspect they probably hid it from the guest editors until the very last moment and then gaslighted them into being OK with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jezebel ignores<\/a> the blind selection and construes Nesset\u2019s inclusion as a prize for criminal conviction, conferred \u201cnot in spite of but because of the fact that he stored hundreds of thousands of images depicting child torture and got caught.\u201d Did he engineer the arrest to gain the street cred to secure the publication? Or was he just doubly lucky?<\/p>\n

The trope of the wily sex offender is ubiquitous. Nesset, who was well-published (four books and a translation) and well-recognized (Pushcart Prize), \u201chas weaponized literary power,\u201d says<\/a>\u00a0writer Sandra Beasley. Novelist Aya de Leon suggests<\/a> that he must have pull, because he\u2019s not that great: \u201cI read the offender\u2019s poem+he tried to front like it was just another middle-class-white-boy-talking-randomly-about nature-type-poem.\u201d<\/p>\n

The general feeling is that Nesset displaced more deserving folks: \u201cPlatforming toxicity when there are so many unheard voices,\u201d says one tweeter<\/a>. That he\u2019s a \u201cwealthy white guy\u201d<\/a> who doesn\u2019t need the money. (Poetry, whose attendant foundation has an endowment of $200 million, pays $10 per line with a minimum of $300 per poem.) Writer-composer Carrie Kahler wants the magazine<\/a> to promote \u201cthe traditionally marginalized.\u201d<\/p>\n

Writes Lo: \u201cKirk Nesset is not a victim of the prison industrial complex, he\u2019s a predator.\u201d He can\u2019t be both.<\/p>\n

Race is used as shorthand for who merits sympathy and who does not. On Twitter, Fig Wellness, the account for a sexual wellness blog,\u00a0charges Poetry<\/a> with \u201cusing the rhetoric of racial [sic] and decarceration to re-platform a powerful white man.\u201d Opponents use the same language to \u201cdeplatform pedophiles,\u201d as Jezebel approvingly puts it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know that the carceral system is an inherently racist, White supremacist system that perpetuates the surveillance, control, and monitoring of communities of color,\u201d reads a post by Persephone\u2019s Daughters<\/a>, a literary site \u201cfor and by\u201d survivors of sexual harm. \u201cWe know that the carceral system punishes and devastates rather than reforms. Literary spaces for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals are crucial.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHowever, ceding\u2014no, not just ceding, but amplifying\u2014the voice of a White male predator at the expense of the voices of incarcerated or formerly incarcerated transgender, non-binary, and female survivors of color is egregious.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kahler implies<\/a> that Nesset\u2019s inclusion is a betrayal of the anti-racist commitments of the editors, two of whom are Black: \u201cThe editors explicitly frame the issue as making a \u2018larger claim about the role of the literary arts in an age of mass incarceration, and the work of prison abolition itself\u2019 and references The New Jim Crow.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, the writers and artists in \u201cThe Practice of Freedom\u201d are as varied as their work. Not all have been imprisoned, and their situations and convictions do not line up neatly with their races, origins, or pronouns. Some are publishing for the first time; some have heaps of awards or fancy degrees. One exhibits artwork at MoMA PS1 and Art Basel; another, released from prison in 2018, is focused on giving her kids hope and \u201cbecoming better than she was yesterday.\u201d One strangled her parents. One killed a teenager and paralyzed her boyfriend in an apparently racially motivated shooting.<\/p>\n

Is the trouble with Nesset his professional success? Is it his whiteness or his reviled fantasies? Popular culture conflates the latter two: On \u201cLaw & Order: SVU,\u201d the pedophile is a pasty white sniveler. In fact, while whites\u00a0constitute the majority arrested for child\u00a0pornography possession, Black\u00a0people get longer federal sentences. African Americans are arrested for rape at three times the rate of whites. Yet in a 2011 analysis of DNA exonerations, 62 percent of the defendants falsely convicted of rape were African American; with Latinos, the percentage rose to 70.<\/p>\n

These disparities reinforce \u201cThe New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness\u201d author Michelle Alexander\u2019s framing of mass incarceration as the new Jim Crow: the latest chapter, after slavery and Reconstruction, of white subjugation and disenfranchisement of African Americans. Her analysis gives powerful narrative and strategic coherence to prison abolitionism. But what happens when the \u201cpredator\u201d of the 1980s, that imaginary ruthless, remorseless young Black gangbanger, morphs in the \u201990s into a beast that looks like Kirk Nesset? Fictional or real, the white \u201csex offender\u201d does not fit into Alexander\u2019s frame.<\/p>\n

In this conversation<\/u>, the word \u201ccommunity\u201d pops up repeatedly, as if by auto-suggest. It often connotes whom we care about, who needs and merits caring about. \u201cWhat\u2019s permissible?\u201d Dwayne Betts asks. The question might be \u201cWho is permissible?\u201d And into what community? As a \u201cpredator,\u201d Nesset is assumed to have forfeited care. Because he is white, because he had a tenured professorship and a literary reputation, his critics cannot conceive of him as marginalized. True, he is still white, so he\u2019s better off than \u201csex offenders\u201d of color. But everybody with that label on\u00a0their forehead is both hyper-monitored and invisible, banished from every community.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
The technologies developed to apprehend and control people with deviant sexual fantasies are integrated into policing at every level, especially in communities of color. But the sex offense legal regime is a rare agenda item at abolitionist gatherings.<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n

Law professor Ira Ellman, co-author of an influential article debunking claims that recidivism among people with sex convictions is extraordinarily high, has posted a counter-petition on Change.org praising Poetry\u2019s stance and putting the debate in context. \u201cThe demand to impose one exclusion after another on people who have already been punished implicitly assumes our right to disappear them from society,\u201d it reads<\/a>. \u201cSuch carceral thinking has led to unjust and damaging policies that have incarcerated millions, and now exclude people from housing, employment, and public spaces, for life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ellman is talking about the sex offender registry, a regime of punishment and exclusion so thorough and permanent that its effect has been called \u201csocial death.\u201d The registry and its restrictions chew up everyone on it\u00a0\u2014 nearly a million Americans \u2014 as well as their families. \u201cCivil<\/a> commitment<\/a>\u201d of those deemed to be \u201csexually violent predators\u201d is indefinite preventive detention. The technologies developed to apprehend and control people with deviant sexual fantasies are integrated into policing at every level, especially in communities of color. But the sex offense legal regime is a rare agenda item at abolitionist gatherings.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, legislation to reduce prison populations and mitigate the crippling consequences of felony conviction, laws concerning everything from shoplifting to voting rights, almost uniformly excludes \u201csex offenders.\u201d There is no public safety rationale for these blanket exceptions, writes Southwestern Law School professor Catherine Carpenter in a 2020 law review article. \u201cWhat knits these unrelated laws together is animus toward the registrant.\u201d But criminal justice reformers have not only failed to resist the \u201cexcept for\u201d clauses;\u00a0they have also actively traded the rights of registrants for popular and legislative support of the bills.<\/p>\n

Of the half<\/u> a million images on Nesset\u2019s hard drive, an unspecified number were the vilest imaginable: babies being brutalized by adults. Nesset told me he never sought any extreme images or intentionally shared files (the peer-to-peer software typically used to download child\u00a0sexual abuse imagery sweeps up vast caches of files with a broad search and allows sharing without the knowledge or permission of the computer owner). He swears he never touched a child sexually and said that when he clicked on those images he found them excruciating.<\/p>\n

The notion behind criminalizing and harshly punishing the possession of child\u00a0sexual abuse imagery is that a victim is re-traumatized at a distance every time new eyes fall on the record of\u00a0their abuse. This idea has been challenged, yet Nesset seems to have absorbed it. \u201cI do believe that the more those little faces and bodies are exposed, the more hurtful it is, and I feel shame and remorse about it,\u201d he said. \u201cI didn\u2019t comprehend the problem then. But I do now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Commenting on Lo\u2019s\u00a0post in Public Intellectuals, an\u00a0incarcerated person at the federal facility in Lompoc, California, corroborates: \u201cI knew Kirk in prison. He was a decent guy and is working to get his life back in order. While in prison he taught creative writing classes and tutored GED students. He knows he did wrong and is trying to rebuild.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next commenter submits that the writer is probably Nesset himself.<\/p>\n

Mercy strains when its object is a \u201csex offender.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it doesn\u2019t have to break. Kent State sociologist Christopher Dum and his colleagues have found that \u201chumanizing poems\u201d by incarcerated people reduce stigma and increase support for post-prison reentry programs. Poetry that evinces \u201cuniversal truths, emotions, experiences of losing, loving,\u201d he told me, \u201creminds us the writer is, like us, a person.\u201d Kirk Nesset\u2019s poem<\/a>, \u201cone place is as good as the next,\u201d does not celebrate pedophilia. It does not recount the depredations of prison life. It speaks, elliptically, of birds and bodegas and human hubris.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Judith Levine<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original – theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

14 Feb 2021 – Is Poetry magazine \u201cplatforming toxicity\u201d or promoting the \u201cpractice of freedom\u201d? A bedrock principle of the prison abolitionist movement is that you don\u2019t ask an incarcerated person what they\u2019re in for. It\u2019s more than etiquette.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":179612,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[276,328,1017,2376,125,651,642,98,868,2377],"class_list":["post-179610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-focus","tag-democracy","tag-freedom","tag-freedom-of-information","tag-freedom-of-speech","tag-freedom-of-the-press","tag-justice","tag-literature","tag-pedophilia","tag-poetry","tag-prison-abolitionist-movement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179610\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}