The effects of unchecked criminalization: Teen charged with felony for science experiment

By Sesali Bowen | Published: May 1, 2013

When we talk about the criminalization of communities and people of color, especially African Americans and Latinos in America, we often talk about the criminal justice system in America that disproportionately targets those communities.Schools are often the major accomplices in making this system run with the school to prison pipeline. Nothing exemplifies this more than what is happening to 16 year old Kiera Wilmot in Florida. According to the Miami New Times,

 ”7 a.m. on Monday, the 16 year-old mixed some common household chemicals in a small 8 oz water bottle on the grounds of Bartow High School in Bartow, Florida. The reaction caused a small explosion that caused the top to pop up and produced some smoke. No one was hurt and no damage was caused.
…Wilmot told police that she was merely conducting a science experiment. Though her teachers knew nothing of the specific project, her principal seems to agree.
‘She made a bad choice. Honestly, I don’t think she meant to ever hurt anyone,’ principal Ron Pritchard told the station. ‘She wanted to see what would happen [when the chemicals mixed] and was shocked by what it did. Her mother is shocked, too.’“

This sounds like a harmless instance of experimentation gone wrong. No harm, no foul right? Even the principle thinks it was simply a poor decision. A week of detention, maybe even suspension, was in order no doubt. So why did it go down like this?

“After the explosion Wilmot was taken into custody by a school resources officer and charged with possession/discharge of a weapon on school grounds and discharging a destructive device. She will be tried as an adult.
She was then taken to a juvenile assessment center. She was also expelled from school and will be forced to complete her diploma through an expulsion program.”

The school released the following statement:

“Anytime a student makes a bad choice it is disappointing to us. Unfortunately, the incident that occurred at Bartow High School yesterday was a serious breach of conduct. In order to maintain a safe and orderly learning environment, we simply must uphold our code of conduct rules. We urge our parents to join us in conveying the message that there are consequences to actions. We will not compromise the safety and security of our students and staff.”

I call bullshit. This is not about the “safety and security” of students and staff at Bartow High School. This was about setting an example, at the expense of Wilmot, and sending a message that even (mis)perceived threats will be dealt with swiftly and harshly. The unfortunate truth is that in America, those perceptions are heavily tied up in notions of race, class, and gender.

Those perceptions may have helped them come to the conclusion that Wilmot’s concoction was indeed a weapon. The code of conduct clearly states that “intention” is a factor in whether or not there has been a breach of that specific rule. But somehow the principal managed to defend the girls intentions but still expel and have her arrested.

Is the perceived threat to the safety of her classmates and teachers also the reason why Wilmot is being tried as an adult with a felony? A student with good grades and no behavioral problems to speak of should be followed with a felony because she was curious about a chemical reaction? She has been ushered into the criminal justice system with this decision. Access to employment, education, housing, etc. will all be limited to Wilmot with a felony on her record.

As a graduate of a Chicago Public School I am very familiar with teachers not being interested in nurturing the minds of students. Instead, they create a mindless generation that simply does what they’re told, no questions asked, all in the interest of maintaining an orderly “classroom”. Sending students to prisons is the solution for those who can’t be “controlled”. I have witnessed the policing that happens when school staff and administration fears its students, of color. Let me be clear, zero tolerance policies are not about keeping schools safe. They exist to keep school administrators from being held accountable for the environment they create in their institution and making contextual judgement calls.

Guatemalan Victims Still Haunted by US Syphilis Study

The Devil's Experiments
By RORY CARROLL

Marta Orellana says she was playing with friends at the orphanage when the summons sounded: "Orellana to the infirmary. Orellana to the infirmary."

Waiting for her were several doctors she had never seen before. Tall men with fair complexions who spoke what she guessed was English, plus a Guatemalan doctor. They had syringes and little bottles.

They ordered her to lie down and open her legs. Embarrassed, she locked her knees together and shook her head. The Guatemalan medic slapped her cheek and she began to cry. "I did what I was told," she recalls.

Today the nine-year-old girl is a rheumy-eyed 74-year-old great-grandmother, but the anguish of that moment endures. It was how it all began: the pain, the humiliation, the mystery.

It was 1946 and orphans in Guatemala City, along with prisoners, military conscripts and prostitutes, had been selected for a medical experiment which would torment many, and remain secret, for more than six decades.

The US, worried about GIs returning home with sexual diseases, infected an estimated 1,500 Guatemalans with syphilis, gonorrhea and chancroid to test an early antibiotic, penicillin.

"They never told me what they were doing, never gave me a chance to say no," Orellana said this week, seated in her ramshackle Guatemala City home. "I've lived almost my whole life without knowing the truth. May God forgive them."

The US government admitted to the experiment in October when the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and the health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, issued a joint statement apologising for "such reprehensible research" under the guise of public health. Barack Obama phoned his Guatemalan counterpart, Alvaro Colom, to say sorry too.

Susan Reverby, a professor at Wellesley College in the US, uncovered the experiment while researching the Tuskegee syphilis study in which hundreds of African American men were left untreated for 40 years from the 1930s.

The Guatemalan study went further by deliberately infecting its subjects. Not only did it violate the hippocratic oath to do no harm but it echoed Nazi crimes exposed around the same time at the Nuremberg trials.

The victims remained largely unknown but the Guardian has interviewed the families of the three survivors identified so far by Guatemala. They chronicled lives blighted by illness, neglect and unanswered questions.

"My father didn't know how to read and they treated him like an animal," said Benjamin Ramos, 57, the son of Federico, 87, a former soldier. "This was the devil's experiment."

Mateo Gudiel, 57, said his father, Manuel, 87, another ex-conscript, has syphilis-linked infections, dementia and headaches. "Some of this has been passed on to me, my siblings and our children." Children can inherit congenital syphilis.

More than half of the subjects were low-ranking soldiers delivered by their superiors to US physicians working from a military base in the capital. The Americans initially arranged for infected prostitutes to have sex with prisoners before discovering it was more "efficient" to inject soldiers, psychiatric patients and orphans with the bacterium.

Guatemala's official inquiry, headed by its vice-president, is due to publish its report in June. "What impacted me the most was how little value was given to these human lives. They were seen as things to be experimented on," said Carlos Mejia, a member of the inquiry and head of the Guatemalan College of Physicians.

The US scientists treated 87% of those infected with syphilis and lost track of the other 13%. Of those treated about a tenth suffered recurrences.

The US medical establishment, including the surgeon-general, keenly followed the study even though John Cutler, who led the Guatemala team, acknowledged ethical violations in a 1947 letter, saying: "Unless the law winks occasionally, you have no progress in medicine."

His supervisor, RC Arnold, urged discretion. "If some goody organisation got wind of the work there would be a lot of smoke." In the end the study yielded no useful information and was buried.

Guatemalan co-operation was won by offering cigarettes to subjects and material to resource-starved institutions. Psychiatric patients who could not give their own names were registered under nicknames such as the "mute of St Marcos".

It is unclear what, if anything, was promised to the Sisters of Charity in return for supplying orphans to the tall men in white coats who visited each week from 1946-48.

"They didn't tell me why they singled me out," said Orellana, who was four when sent to the institution after her parents died. After the initial gynaecological probing, when she assumes she was infected, she was given penicillin weekly. "My body hurt and I was sleepy, I didn't want to play." At least 10 other girls were also picked for the study, she added.

The treatment failed – but even as an adult, when she worked as a maid and in factories, doctors would say only that she had "bad blood", leaving her ailments a mystery. A "loving and patient" husband helped her overcome intimacy issues. She has five children, 20 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

When the US finally owned up to the scandal in 2010 Orellana, near crippled from a stroke but still lucid, was mesmerised. She tested positive for syphilis, said Rudy Zuniga, a lawyer who is representing alleged victims in a class action in the US. Only a handful of the original 1,500 may still be alive but there could be dozens if not hundreds of infected children and grandchildren, he said.

Pablo Werner, a human rights lawyer who is investigating the case, doubted Guatemala would accept responsibility let alone pay compensation for its complicity in the experiment. "Our judicial system is not famous for speed or fairness. Even if the Guatemalan doctors who participated in this are dead their families still have connections," he said.

With the few survivors ailing, their Guatemalan and US lawyers hope to negotiate speedy compensation with US officials at a meeting due in August, said Zuniga. If that fails the case will go to a Washington district court and could last years.

For Orellana the resolution of her life's mystery, published in local media, has come with a catch. The criminal gangs which plague Guatemala City think she received a huge payout and are making threats, demanding a cut.

Why Our 21st Century Slave Society Can't Last

We're the slave masters of energy-driven gadgets that replace human labor. But don't count on it sticking around.
By Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee
Posted on May 30, 2011

"A low-energy policy allows for a wide choice of lifestyles and cultures. If, on the other hand, a society opts for high energy consumption, its social relations must be dictated by technocracy and will be equally degrading whether labeled capitalist or socialist." -- Radical Catholic Theologian Ivan Illich

In 2009 a British family living in a four-bedroom house became the subject of a subversive energy experiment about modern slavery.

While the foursome flicked on gadgets one Sunday with the abandon of Roman patricians, an army of volunteers (The Human Power Station) furiously pedalled 100 bicycles next door to generate the needed energy.

The unsuspecting family, of course, had no idea they had been unplugged from a power grid fueled largely by fossil fuels.

At the end of the day the slave masters literally dropped their jaws when a BBC television crew introduced them to the exhausted slaves that boiled their tea. (Get this: it took 24 peddlers to heat the oven and 11 cyclists to make two slices of toast.)

At the end of the experiment many of the cyclists collapsed. Several couldn't walk for days. The peddlers actually consumed more energy in food than they generated by peddling.

The experiment crudely illustrated the global state of North American energy consumption (just imagine an empty yet well-lit house powered by 100 hungry cyclists). It also convinced one of the experiment's designers, Tom Siddall of Electric Pedals, that "volunteer slavery" (hordes of sweating cyclists) or old fashioned shackled labour will power the future. "I have no doubt that slavery will return as the world's energy resources get increasingly scarce."

Oil removes the toil

Now most people don't regard oil, say, as an energy slave or a liquid replacement for human muscle, but they probably should. Thanks to petroleum, every North American now behaves, thinks and often looks like an obese and overbearing 19th century slave owner.

Oil slaves, of course, are more portable and versatile than human muscle and now order our world. They grow and deliver food; transport friends and goods; and energize fields and cities. Every laptop computer arrives impregnated with 240 kilograms of oil. Like any good slave, oil removes the toil.

How many slaves for you?

How many energy slaves does a typical Canadian have at his or her disposal? Dave Hughes, perhaps Canada's premier energy analyst and the nation's former coal specialist at Natural Resources Canada, has done the math and we are not an emancipated people.

Hughes calculates that one barrel of crude (non-renewable sunshine captured in plants over the past 500 million years or so) contains approximately six gigajoules (six billion joules) or about 1,700 kilowatts of energy.

Now a healthy individual can pump out enough juice to light a 100-watt bulb or (360,000 joules) an hour. With weekends and holidays off and a sensible eight-hour day, Hughes figures that it might takes one person 8.6 years on a bicycle (or treadmill) to produce the energy now stored in one barrel of oil.

(Of course we could work those slaves 12 hours a day, seven days a week with no holidays, argues Hughes. In that case a barrel is equivalent to 3.8 years of human labor. But this columnist favours a more humane treatment.)

Given that the average Canadian now consumes 24.7 barrels of oil a year with scarcely a blink of the eye, every citizen employs about 204 virtual slaves. That's a spectacular amount of power for any mortal to wield and much more than any Roman or Egyptian household ever commanded. Or five times more than average 19th century U.S. plantation owners.

Oil slaves fueled human population

What worries Hughes and many other energy analysts is that cheap energy slaves have created a formidable global dilemma. Before the Fossil Fuel Age (it started with coal burning around 1700), humans numbered less than one billion for their entire evolutionary existence on this planet.

After coal and then the discovery of oil in the 1850s, Homo sapiens exploded to an astounding population of 7 billion in just 170 years. And non-renewable energy slaves paved the way. Oil, in other words, was a powerful Viagra for the species (with unwieldy erections and other side-effects).

Oil also broke all previous energy thresholds. While human population grew 5.4 times since 1850, per capita energy consumption exploded at a rate of 8.5 times. In fact total energy consumption jumped 45 times.

These extraordinary changes gave peasants vicarious lifestyles once only enjoyed by minor kings and queens. In 1850, the average Tom, Dick or Harry claimed but 2.2 fossil fuels slaves thanks primarily to machines powered by coal, says Hughes. But by 2009, each member of the average human family crowded their household with 93.8 slaves thanks to the combined work of oil, gas and coal. (Add wood, hydro and nuclear energy and another 17.6 diligent slaves must fit in the door.)

Unsustainable

Given the realities of peak oil (the end of cheap slaves and the advent of extremely brutal substitutes) and the fact that China and India now want more petroleum slaves too, that level of consumption or slavery can't be sustained. In fact Hughes warns that the world of the petroleum slave owner can only get smaller. He calls it "the Energy Sustainability Dilemma."

This indelicate dilemma will be ugliest for those who employ the most slaves. Right now the average Canadian lives as extravagantly as the feverish English master of a large Caribbean sugar plantation. In fact Canadians typically boss around five times more slaves than the global average.

"Your average Canadian consumes five times the world average per capital consumption, seven times the per capita consumption in China and 29 times the per capita consumption in India," calculates Hughes.

(For the record the new and leaner slave masters of Shanghai or Tianjin burn but 2.4 barrels of oil a year which puts 20 coolies at their beck and call.)

"Maybe we have been even less cognizant of the services provided by fossil fuels than people did from their slaves," reflects Hughes. "Slavery, after all was in your face. Now it's all about filling up the tank."

In his thoughtful 1973 essay, "Energy and Equity," the radical Catholic theologian Ivan Illich questioned whether "the well-being of a society can be measured by the number of years its members have gone to school and by the number of energy slaves they have thereby learned to command."

While most people worried about the scarcity of fodder for these slaves, Illich asked whether free men really needed so many slaves in the first place.

The iconoclast concluded that each and every human being was entitled to a certain amount of energy, but beyond a certain threshold, people lost both their freedom and humanity as slave owners typically do.

Even if nonpolluting slaves were feasible and abundant, Illich reckoned "that the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving."

He then dropped a Promethean question that most economists, philosophers, environmentalists and energy analysts avoid: can a society be progressively hooked on a larger numbers of energy slaves and remain autonomous?

It remains civilization's central question.