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HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- Raymond Bell can't go anywhere without spotting designer dupes, fake electronics or other counterfeit goods.

"It almost becomes a negative thing," said Bell, a supervisory officer with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. "When you're around somebody you like or something and you don't want to tell them, 'Hey, that's fake.'"

Imagine this: a counterfeit good for nearly every man, woman, and child in the state of Florida. In Fiscal Year 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seized a staggering 23 million counterfeit goods, a figure that speaks volumes.

Intellectual property rights are a priority trade issue for CBP, as the implications extend beyond economic impact to touch American consumers, global communities, and the very health of our planet.

McALLEN, Texas (Border Report) — The State of Texas on Thursday appealed a federal judge’s ruling that will allow federal Border Patrol agents to take down border barriers that the state put along the Rio Grande in places like Eagle Pass and El Paso.

Texas truck inspections add to delays at Eagle Pass’ only open bridge

Today, President Biden is traveling to Brownsville, Texas to meet with U.S. Border Patrol agents, law enforcement, frontline personnel, and local leaders to discuss the urgent need to pass the Senate bipartisan border security agreement. President Biden has repeatedly said he is willing to work in a bipartisan way to secure the border and fix our broken immigration system. Over several months, his Administration negotiated with a bipartisan group of Senators to release a bill that includes the toughest and fairest reforms to secure the border we have had in decades. It would make our country safer, make our border more secure, and treat people fairly and humanely while preserving legal immigration, consistent with our nation’s values. The bill received support from the Border Patrol Union, the Chamber of Commerce, the South Texas Alliance of Cities, and the Wall Street Journal – but Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republicans have decided to play politics at the expense of border security.

The democratic peace — the idea that democracies rarely fight one another — has been called “the closest thing we have to an empirical law in the study of international relations.” Yet, some contend that this relationship is spurious and suggest alternative explanations. Unfortunately, in the absence of randomized experiments, we can never rule out the possible existence of such confounding biases. Rather than commonly used regression-based approaches, we apply a nonparametric sensitivity analysis. We show that overturning the positive association between democracy and peace would require a confounder that is 47 times more prevalent in democratic dyads than in other dyads. To put this number in context, the relationship between democracy and peace is at least five times as robust as that between smoking and lung cancer. To explain away the democratic peace, therefore, scholars must find far more powerful confounders than already those identified in the literature.

The risk of war by miscalculation is a popular scholarly subject and a frequent concern of policymakers. Theories of war by miscalculation assume either ignorance by decisionmakers, bad faith by policy participants (usually the military), or a mechanistic series of exchanges that obviate the need for policymakers to display judgment and responsibility. Yet historians struggle to produce evidence that political leaders were either ignorant of the risks they were choosing or emasculated from any ability to affect the course of events. Theories of accidental war are, as Geoffrey Blainey has said, “a description masquerading as an explanation.”[1] Instead of explaining historical events, the myth of accidental war provides an intricate puzzle for intellectuals, a justification for moralists to fear military subversion of political decisionmakers, and an evasion of culpability for those decisionmakers.

The debate is not esoteric—it has urgent policy applications. U.S. policy regarding Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been heavily influenced by U.S. President Joe Biden and his administration’s concerns about “a third world war.”[2] Russia violated the sovereignty and the internationally recognized territory of Ukraine, despite its commitment to respect Ukraine’s security in the 1995 Budapest Memorandum. Failing to achieve its political objectives on the battlefield, Russian strategy shifted to targeting civilian dwellings, destroying infrastructure, and committing mass atrocities. All of these actions violate Russia’s international commitments and overtly challenge the Biden administration’s leadership of the rules-based international order, as well as its pledge to “stand against human rights abuses wherever they occur.”[3]

Today, when we talk about global order, we often lament the divisions inside the United Nations Security Council. This year marks the 50th anniversary of important unity: when the U.N. Security Council unanimously recommended German membership in the United Nations. The German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany both entered the U.N. in September 1973.

Germany today is the U.N.’s fourth-largest financial contributor and has been elected to six different Security Council rotations. Germany, along with Namibia, is currently facilitating consultations for the U.N.’s 2024 “Summit of the Future,” to consider how the multilateral system should address old and new challenges.

Playing with Wild Cards Without doubt, simulations -- including nonstandard ones -- can aid planning. The question is: To what end? And to what effect? Exploring "wild cards" in order to identify warning signs or to define limits is one thing; using them to establish force structure or modernization requirements, quite another. Especially suspect would be using scenarios that are detached from declared US interests to define current requirements; this would put the military "cart" before the political "horse." Another, broader concern is how the effusion of improbable conflict scenarios affects public policy discourse overall. Conflict scenarios, both wild and tame, can gain more credibility in the telling than they deserve. Cognitive researcher Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini calls this the "Othello effect," referring to the trail of plausible but false suppositions that led Othello to murder his wife, Desdemona. Even the most farfetched scenarios comprise a number of steps or links each of which may seem plausible or even probable given the one that came before. Although the likelihood of the scenario dwindles with each step, the residual impression is one of plausibility. Omitted are the many branches at each step that would lead to a neutral or even positive outcome. The resulting snapshots, although numerous, offer a highly-selective view of what the future may hold. And the fact that only the negative outcomes are articulated and exercised can distort the general public impression of risk. Living with Uncertainty There is no escape from uncertainty, but there is relief from uncertainty hysteria. It begins with recognizing that instability has boundaries -- just as turbulence in physical systems has discernable onset points and parameters. The turbulence of a river, for instance, corresponds to flow and to the contours of the river's bed and banks. It occurs in patches and not randomly. The weather also is a chaotic system that resists precise long-range forecasting, but allows useful prediction of broader trends and limits. Despite uncertainty, statements of probability matter. They indicate the weight of evidence -- or whether there is any evidence at all. The uncertainty hawks would flood our concern with a horde of dangers that pass their permissive test of "non-zero probability." However, by lowering the threshold of alarm, they establish an impossible standard of defense sufficiency: absolute and certain military security. Given finite resources and competing ends, something less will have to do. Strategic wisdom begins with the setting of priorities -- and priorities demand strict attention to what appears likely and what does not.

Third is no great power conflict –

The problem of the second method is that it is very difficult to "calculate" politically unacceptable losses. If the risk of terrorism is defined in traditional terms by probability and potential loss, then the focus on dramatic terror attacks leads to the marginalization of probabilities. The reason is that even the highest degree of improbability becomes irrelevant as the measure of loss goes to infinity. ^o The mathematical calculation of the risk of terrorism thus tends to overestimate and to dramatize the danger. This has consequences beyond the actual risk assessment for the formulation and execution of "risk policies": If one factor of the risk calculation approaches infinity (e.g., if a case of nuclear terrorism is envisaged), then there is no balanced measure for antiterrorist efforts, and risk management as a rational endeavor breaks down. Under the historical condition of bipolarity, the "ultimate" threat with nuclear weapons could be balanced by a similar counterthreat, and new equilibria could be achieved, albeit on higher levels of nuclear overkill. Under the new condition of uncertainty, no such rational balancing is possible since knowledge about actors, their motives and capabilities, is largely absent. The second form of security policy that emerges when the deterrence model collapses mirrors the "social probability" approach. It represents a logic of catastrophe. In contrast to risk management framed in line with logical probability theory, the logic of catastrophe does not attempt to provide means of absorbing uncertainty. Rather, it takes uncertainty as constitutive for the logic itself; uncertainty is a crucial precondition for catastrophes. In particular, catastrophes happen at once, without a warning, but with major implications for the world polity. In this category, we find the impact of meteorites. Mars attacks, the tsunami in South East Asia, and 9/11. To conceive of terrorism as catastrophe has consequences for the formulation of an adequate security policy. Since catastrophes hap-pen irrespectively of human activity or inactivity, no political action could possibly prevent them. Of course, there are precautions that can be taken, but the framing of terrorist attack as a catastrophe points to spatial and temporal characteristics that are beyond "rationality." Thus, political decision makers are exempted from the responsibility to provide security—as long as they at least try to preempt an attack. Interestingly enough, 9/11 was framed as catastrophe in various commissions dealing with the question of who was responsible and whether it could have been prevented. This makes clear that under the condition of uncertainty, there are no objective criteria that could serve as an anchor for measuring dangers and assessing the quality of political responses. For ex- ample, as much as one might object to certain measures by the US administration, it is almost impossible to "measure" the success of countermeasures. Of course, there might be a subjective assessment of specific shortcomings or failures, but there is no "common" currency to evaluate them. As a consequence, the framework of the security dilemma fails to capture the basic uncertainties. Pushing the door open for the security paradox, the main problem of security analysis then becomes the question how to integrate dangers in risk assessments and security policies about which simply nothing is known. In the mid 1990s, a Rand study entitled "New Challenges for Defense Planning" addressed this issue arguing that "most striking is the fact that we do not even know who or what will constitute the most serious future threat, "^i In order to cope with this challenge it would be essential, another Rand researcher wrote, to break free from the "tyranny" of plausible scenario planning. The decisive step would be to create "discontinuous scenarios ... in which there is no plausible audit trail or storyline from current events"52 These nonstandard scenarios were later called "wild cards" and became important in the current US strategic discourse. They justified the transformation from a threat-based toward a capability- based defense planning strategy.53 The problem with this kind of risk assessment is, however, that even the most absurd scenarios can gain plausibility. By constructing a chain of potentialities, improbable events are linked and brought into the realm of the possible, if not even the probable. "Although the likelihood of the scenario dwindles with each step, the residual impression is one of plausibility. "54 This so-called Othello effect has been effective in the dawn of the recent war in Iraq. The connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda that the US government tried to prove was disputed from the very beginning. False evidence was again and again presented and refuted, but this did not prevent the administration from presenting as the main rationale for war the improbable yet possible connection between Iraq and the terrorist network and the improbable yet possible proliferation of an improbable yet possible nuclear weapon into the hands of Bin Laden. As Donald Rumsfeld famously said: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." This sentence indicates that under the condition of genuine uncertainty, different evidence criteria prevail than in situations where security problems can be assessed with relative certainty.

It may have once been the case that being attacked by another country was a major threat to the lives of ordinary people. It may also be true that there are still some pretty serious dangers out there associated with the spread of nuclear weapons. For the most part, however, most of what you've been told about national security and all the big threats which can supposedly kill you is one big con designed to distract you from the things that can really hurt you, such as the poverty, inequality and structural violence of capitalism, global warming, and the manufacture and proliferation of weapons - among others. The facts are simple and irrefutable: you're far more likely to die from lack of health care provision than you are from terrorism; from stress and overwork than Iranian or North Korean nuclear missiles; from lack of road safety than from illegal immigrants; from mental illness and suicide than from computer hackers; from domestic violence than from asylum seekers; from the misuse of legal medicines and alcohol abuse than from international drug lords. And yet, politicians and the servile media spend most of their time talking about the threats posed by terrorism, immigration, asylum seekers, the international drug trade, the nuclear programmes of Iran and North Korea, computer hackers, animal rights activism, the threat of China, and a host of other issues which are all about as equally unlikely to affect the health and well-being of you and your family. Along with this obsessive and perennial discussion of so-called 'national security issues', the state spends truly vast sums on security measures which have virtually no impact on the actual risk of dying from these threats, and then engages in massive displays of 'security theatre' designed to show just how seriously the state takes these threats - such as the x-ray machines and security measures in every public building, surveillance cameras everywhere, missile launchers in urban areas, drones in Afghanistan, armed police in airports, and a thousand other things. This display is meant to convince you that these threats are really, really serious. And while all this is going on, the rulers of society are hoping that you won't notice that increasing social and economic inequality in society leads to increased ill health for a growing underclass; that suicide and crime always rise when unemployment rises; that workplaces remain highly dangerous and kill and maim hundreds of people per year; that there are preventable diseases which plague the poorer sections of society; that domestic violence kills and injures thousands of women and children annually; and that globally, poverty and preventable disease kills tens of millions of people needlessly every year. In other words, they are hoping that you won't notice how much structural violence there is in the world. More than this, they are hoping that you won't notice that while literally trillions of dollars are spent on military weapons, foreign wars and security theatre (which also arguably do nothing to make any us any safer, and may even make us marginally less safe), that domestic violence programmes struggle to provide even minimal support for women and children at risk of serious harm from their partners; that underfunded mental health programmes mean long waiting lists to receive basic care for at-risk individuals; that drug and alcohol rehabilitation programmes lack the funding to match the demand for help; that welfare measures aimed at reducing inequality have been inadequate for decades; that health and safety measures at many workplaces remain insufficiently resourced; and that measures to tackle global warming and developing alternative energy remain hopelessly inadequate. Of course, none of this is surprising. Politicians are a part of the system; they don't want to change it. For them, all the insecurity, death and ill-health caused by capitalist inequality are a price worth paying to keep the basic social structures as they are. A more egalitarian society based on equality, solidarity, and other non-materialist values would not suit their interests, or the special interests of the lobby groups they are indebted to. It is also true that dealing with economic and social inequality, improving public health, changing international structures of inequality, restructuring the military-industrial complex, and making the necessary economic and political changes to deal with global warming will be extremely difficult and will require long-term commitment and determination. For politicians looking towards the next election, it is clearly much easier to paint immigrants as a threat to social order or pontificate about the ongoing danger of terrorists. It is also more exciting for the media than stories about how poor people and people of colour are discriminated against and suffer worse health as a consequence. Viewed from this vantage point, national security is one massive confidence trick - misdirection on an epic scale. Its primary function is to distract you from the structures and inequalities in society which are the real threat to the health and wellbeing of you and your family, and to convince you to be permanently afraid so that you will acquiesce to all the security measures which keep you under state control and keep the military-industrial complex ticking along. Keep this in mind next time you hear a politician talking about the threat of uncontrolled immigration, the risk posed by asylum seekers or the threat of Iran, or the need to expand counter-terrorism powers. The question is: when politicians are talking about national security, what is that they don't want you to think and talk about? What exactly is the misdirection they are engaged in? The truth is, if you think that terrorists or immigrants or asylum seekers or Iran are a greater threat to your safety than the capitalist system, you have been well and truly conned, my friend. Don't believe the hype: you're much more likely to die from any one of several forms of structural violence in society than you are from immigrants or terrorism. Somehow, we need to challenge the politicians on this fact.

Within hip-hop culture, rap music is the most popular vehicle of freedom of expression for black African Americans to project their voices; artists such as Kendrick Lamar, Childish Gambino and Jay-Z dominate popular culture as some of the top rap artists, utilising their music to incorporate subliminal messages regarding black oppression as a liberating and politically progressive form of popular culture. However, the issue of rap music as an oppositional phenomenon lies within the relationship between rap artists and patriarchal capitalist structures. Hip-hop may be considered counteractive by utilising rap music to oppose the hegemonic frameworks of white America, yet it is simultaneously dependent on this very framework that it resists in order to reach success.

Rap music has become a primary distributor in capitalist production and consumption. Contemporary discourse on rap recognises rap’s dependence on dominant culture of capitalist production and consumerism. African Americans constitute the majority of hip-hop culture such as rap artists, dancers, producers and DJ’s, and have become dependent on white dominated America as its primary distributor and consumer.

Not long ago, I was having lunch in a KFC in Harlem, sitting near eight African-American boys, aged about 14. Since 1) it was 1:30 on a school day, 2) they were carrying book bags, and 3) they seemed to be in no hurry, I assumed they were skipping school. They were extremely loud and unruly, tossing food at one another and leaving it on the floor.

Black people ran the restaurant and made up the bulk of the customers, but it was hard to see much healthy “black community” here. After repeatedly warning the boys to stop throwing food and keep quiet, the manager finally told them to leave. The kids ignored her. Only after she called a male security guard did they start slowly making their way out, tauntingly circling the restaurant before ambling off. These teens clearly weren’t monsters, but they seemed to consider themselves exempt from public norms of behavior—as if they had begun to check out of mainstream society.

Vizoso and Byrnes 23 (Julia Choucair Vizoso was editor in chief of the online journal, Sada. Her research interests include Middle Eastern politics, authoritarianism, and identity politics. She is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Yale University. Chris Byrnes joined RPX, where he served as a patent-risk advisor and patent-litigation insurance-claim manager. He has advised clients of all size czs on hundreds of patent litigations involving non-practicing entities (i.e., “patent trolls”) and worked closely on several of RPX's headlining transactions (e.g., a nine-figure deal in 2020 with Intellectual Ventures). In 2016, Chris co-founded Corporate Accountability Lab (CAL), a human rights non-profit organization, to experiment with new ways in which IP commoning and international trade laws could be used by communities and IP producers as tools for collective liberation., Abolitionist creativity How intellectual property can hack digital power, 9 February 2023, https://www.tni.org/en/article/abolitionist-creativity//ATW)

Plot #1: Protest as copyrighted performance

The challenges for abolitionist thought are made visible when we focus on abolitionist logics refusing to frame problematic situations within a national scale. This refusal manifests itself in multiple forms, such as in the idea that criminal legal systems are disempowering and de-autonomizing individuals and communities, whose needs and interests are negated or neglected. What abolitionist thought has failed to articulate thus far is an adequate sociology or philosophy of political community or identity that can do without penal norms. Is a political community possible without claims to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within some necessarily clearly demarcated space (Weber, 1921 [1946, 78])?

This is not a challenge for abolitionism established from an anarchistic perspective, which obviously contests the need for a political community in the first place. Still, whether anarchistic or not, abolitionists usually advocate for responses to problematic situations as advanced by the individuals and communities involved, leaving unresolved the question of the borders of communities. The face-to-face model of conflict typically used by abolitionism, largely inspired by Christie (1977) and Hulsman (1986), implies a conception of community-as-tribe that might not always be adequate for many problematic situations that are seen as a legitimate realm of intervention by criminal legal systems, such as those involving state actors and corporate ‘moral persons’. Problems highlighted by the mobilization of the PIC or the critique of global carceralization, such as a capitalism (Davis, 2003), racism (Sudbury, 2005) and sovereign exceptionality (Larsen, Piché, 2009), clearly affects communities larger than those constituted through nationality (Carrier, Piché, 2015).

Meanwhile, the Left is divided over how to imagine and advocate for our goals. Prison abolitionism has gathered steam among some activists, although it shows little sign of winning over the wider public. With evangelical zeal, abolitionists insist that we must choose between abolition and reform, while discounting reform as a viable option. The history of the prison system, they say, is a history of reform — and look where that has gotten us. I have tried to show here what’s wrong with this argument. Iit is remarkably innocent of history. In fact, the history of reform was interrupted some time around 1973 and what we have had instead for the past five decades is a history of counter-reform. The unconscionable conditions we see today are not inevitable byproducts of the prison; they are the results of the punitive turn. Abolitionists base their approach on an analogy between the prison system and chattel slavery. This is a strained analogy at best, and it only appears convincing in light of the oversized and unusually cruel American penal system. Slavery was an institution for the extraction of unfree labor over a person’s (and his or her children’s) lifetime; the prison is an institution that imposes unfreedom for a set period of time as punishment for serious infractions — historically with the express bargain that at least theoretically the lawbreaker was to be improved and reintegrated into society. The better analogy might be with other disciplinary institutions, which also to varying degrees curb freedoms in the name of personal and social good: the school, the hospital, the psychiatric institution. Abolitionists usually respond to the obvious criticism — “but every country has prisons” — by citing Angela Davis’s polemical work, Are Prisons Obsolete? Slavery, too, was once universal, they point out; it required the abolitionists’ utopian vision to put an end to that unjust institution. But this, too, misstates history. By the time American abolitionism got fully underway in the 1830s, much of Europe and parts of Latin American had already partially or wholly abolished slavery. The Haitian Revolution had dealt the institution a major blow, and slavery was imploding in parts of the Caribbean. A world without slavery was scarcely unthinkable. The same cannot be said of prisons: all signs suggest that the public — and not only in the United States — believes that prisons are legitimate. Abolitionist arguments usually gesture at restorative justice, imagining that some sorts of community institutions will oversee non-penal forms of restitution. But here, we are very far out on a limb. Such models might more or less work in small-scale, face-to-face indigenous or religious communities. But, in modern cities, it is implausible to think that families, kinship networks, neighborhood organizations, and the like can adjudicate reconciliation in a fair, consistent manner. In short, abolitionism promises a heaven-on-earth that will never come to pass. What we really need to do is fight for measures that have already proven humane, effective, and consistent with social and criminal justice. Consider Finland. In the 1950s, it had high crime rates and a punitive penal system with high incarceration rates and terrible prison conditions. In these regards Finland then was much like the United States today. After decades of humanitarian and social-democratic reforms, the country now has less than one-tenth the rate of incarceration as the United States. Its prisons resemble dormitories with high-quality health care, counseling services, and educational opportunities. Not coincidentally, its prison system does not breed anger, resentment, and recidivism. Finland’s system aligns with that of other Nordic and Northern European nations, all of whom remained continuously on the path of reform. There, small-scale penal institutions are insulated from public opinion, with its periodic rages against lawbreakers, and prioritize genuine criminological expertise. They have expressly rehabilitative aims, working not only to punish but also to repair the person and restore him to society. Penalties top out at around twenty years, consistent with the finding that longer sentences have neither a rehabilitative nor a deterring effect. Many Scandinavian prisons have no walls and allow prisoners to leave during the day for jobs or shopping. Bedrooms have windows, not bars. Kitchens and common areas resemble Ikea displays. Rather than call for the complete abolition of prisons — a policy unlikely to win broad public support — the American left should fight to introduce these conditions into our penal system. We should strive not for pie-in-the-sky imaginings but for working models already achieved in Scandinavian and other social democracies. We should demand dramatically better prison conditions, the release of nonviolent first offenders under other forms of supervision, discretionary parole for violent offenders who provide evidence of rehabilitation, decriminalization of simple drug possession, and a broad revision of sentencing laws. Such demands would attract support from a number of prominent social movements, creating a strong base from which we can begin to build a stronger, universal safety net. Institutions become “obsolete” only when more effective and more progressive alternatives become available. The poorhouse disappeared when its functions were replaced by social security, public assistance, health care clinics, and mental and psychiatric hospitals. We see no such emergent institutions on the horizon today that might render prisons a thing of the past. What we see instead are examples of criminal justice systems that have continued reforming, modulating, humanizing, shrinking, and decentralizing the functions of the prison. Creating just such a correctional system, based on genuinely rehabilitative goals consistent with our view of social justice, should be a main task of socialists today.

(Liat, “The Tension between Abolition and Reform,” The End of Prisons. Reflections from the Decarceration Movement, 2013)

When a system is abolished there is a danger that other systems with the same goals would arise to fill the void left by the abolished system. Famed sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, in his book Black Reconstruction (1999 [1935]), discusses abolition not as a mere negative process, one of tearing down. It isultimately about creating new institutions. Du Bois was very insistent that in order to abolish slavery in modern times, new democratic institutions have to be established and maintained. Because that did not occur, slavery found a new home in Jim Crow, convict lease systems, second class education and mass incarceration. Thus, the abolition of slavery was only successful on the negative aspect, but no new institutions were created to successfully incorpo-rate black people into the existing social order. Prisons today have thrived precisely because of the lack of such resources that Du Bois was arguing for. Prisons today can’t be abolished until such equality-ensuring mechanisms are in place (Davis, 2005). Being free of chains is only the beginning.

(Liat, “The Tension between Abolition and Reform,” The End of Prisons. Reflections from the Decarceration Movement, 2013)

Closure of repressive institutions, such as mental hospitals and prisons, can be conceptualized as a necessary but not sufficient action on the road to aboli-tion. The most important element in institutional closure is to ensure that peo- ple do not end up re-incarcerated in other formats such as group homes or other institutional placements (Blatt et al., 1977). In this sense the effective-ness of deinstitutionalization as a movement is in ensuring community living, with all needed supports, not merely in the closure of the institution, which is only a first step. This ideological stance may create a dilemma. Should propo-nents of deinstitutionalization wait until there are sufficient community place-ments before advocating for institutional closure? Or, should they go ahead regardless, on the principle that no one should live in an institution at any time? This is the very dilemma posed by Mathiesen in regards to abolition in general. Taylor (1995/6) suggests that in such cases one should ask which path would lead to the least harm done to the fewest people. Such questioning, he believes, would lead one to realize that institutional living is unjustifiable under any circumstances, even if community settings are imperfect at the present time. The mere closure of prisons and large state psychiatric institutions does not necessarily entail a radical change in policy, attitudes, or the lived experiences of those incarcerated. Penal abolitionist Ruth Morris reflects on her experiences within the prison abolition movement in Canada and the United States: My objection to prisons is to something much more oppressive than closed buildings, or even locks and keys. It’s important to think this out, because otherwise we delude ourselves about building alternatives when actually we are creating their very spirit in the community, destroying people just as effectively as any building with locks can possibly do.(1989, p. 141)In this light, closure in itself is still embedded within the same circuits of power that created such institutions, unless there is an epistemic shift in the way community, punishment, dis/ability and segregation are conceptualized. Therefore, closure of prisons and institutions is only one step on the way to achieve a shift in perspective. Closure of large institutions has not led to free-dom for all disabled people, nor has it resulted in the radical acceptance of the fact of difference amongst us.

(Angela Y., “The Challenge of Prison Abolition: A Conversation,” History Is A Weapon, )

Angela: The seemingly unbreakable link between prison reform and prison development -- referred to by Foucault in his analysis of prison history -- has created a situation in which progress in prison reform has tended to render the prison more impermeable to change and has resulted in bigger, and what are considered "better," prisons. The most difficult question for advocates of prison abolition is how to establish a balance between reforms that are clearly necessary to safeguard the lives of prisoners and those strategies designed to promote the eventual abolition of prisons as the dominant mode of punishment. In other words, I do not think that there is a strict dividing line between reform and abolition. For example, it would be utterly absurd for a radical prison activist to refuse to support the demand for better health care inside Valley State, California's largest women's prison, under the pretext that such reforms would make the prison a more viable institution. Demands for improved health care, including protection from sexual abuse and challenges to the myriad ways in which prisons violate prisoners' human rights, can be integrated into an abolitionist context that elaborates specific decarceration strategies and helps to develop a popular discourse on the need to shift resources from punishment to education, housing, health care, and other public resources and services.

These themes of his work — uplifting Black entertainers, helping them own their power through statements that are sometimes political — make Knight’s own quest to copyright-protect his work as a Black artist something of a political act itself. “Copyright ownership is essential for Black creators to ensure authentic representation and to protect cultural output,” says Terrica Carrington, vp legal policy and copyright counsel at the Copyright Alliance. And on a cultural level, it could be paradigm-shifting. “There is this notion throughout much of the Black community that the law can only be used as a tool to exploit people, and there’s this notion that copyright is inherently racist and biased,” says Howard University’s Mtima. “And that’s just not true. A lot of the law is not targeted in any particular way; people get confused with discriminatory practices in certain industries. JaQuel is demonstrating, ‘Well, if the law is inherently against me, how is it that I’m able to use it to my advantage?’ ”

This underscores that, as Professor Vats has observed, intellectual property standards are built on racial scripts, and that such gaps can — and frequently do — operate to deny ownership on the basis of race, or at least in a manner largely aligned with race. But the point I want to stress is that whether in the halls of WIPO, national capitals around the world seeking to address protection of folklore/traditional cultural expression, or as reflected in the Blurred Lines case, the relevant “racial script” that operates to the disadvantage of people of color relates to limitations on the scope of protection, and not to an excess thereof. This is not to suggest that issues of access and use do not pose special challenges for communities of color — only to highlight that an accurate narrative concerning race and intellectual property is complex, and involves, in large part, the failure to provide adequate protection to cultural productions.