Inequality in the Justice System

In 2009, when Robert H Richard IV, an unemployed heir to the DuPont family fortune, pled guilty to fourth-degree rape of his three-year-old daughter, a judge spared him a justifiable sentence – indeed, only put Richard on probation – because she figured this 1-percenter would “not fare well” in a prison setting.

Details of the case were kept quiet until just the other day, as Richard’s ex-wife filed a new lawsuit accusing him of also sexually abusing their son. Since then, the original verdict has been fueling some angry speculation – shock, horror – that the defendant’s wealth and status may have played a role in his lenient sentencing.

I hate to shatter anyone’s illusions, but inequality defines our criminal justice system just as it defines our society. It always has and it always will until we do something about it, beyond just getting upset at local news stories.

America incarcerates more people than any other country on the planet, with over 2m currently in prison and more than 7m under some form of correctional supervision. The people who make up this outsize correctional population do not typically come from the Delaware trust-fund-creep demographic: more than 60% are racial and ethnic minorities, and the vast majority are poor.

Who’s to say whether that Superior Court judge thought this ongoing disparity – that Robert Richard would have been incarcerated among the anti-Robert Richard – was reason to spare this convicted rapist a prison term. There is an abundance of evidence, however, that both conscious and unconscious bias permeate every aspect of the criminal justice system, from arrests to sentencing and beyond. Unsurprisingly, this bias works in favor of wealthy (and white) defendants, while poor minorities routinely suffer.

In August of last year the Sentencing Project, a non-profit devoted to criminal justice reform, released a comprehensive report on bias in the system (pdf). This is the sentence you need to remember:

The United States in effect operates two distinct criminal justice systems: one for wealthy people and another for poor people and minorities.

At every level, from arrest to trial to sentencing, the report found that poor minorities were treated more harshly than their wealthier counterparts. Minorities are more likely to be stopped by the police, more likely to be arrested when they’re stopped and more likely to face more severe charges than white defendants in similar situations. Because minority defendants are often poor, they are less likely to be able to afford adequate counsel and frequently end up with unduly harsh sentences.

If Robert H Richard IV had been poor and black when he was convicted of raping his toddler, just how long would his long prison term have been? Would he have “fared well” then?

I spoke with Sentencing Project executive director Marc Mauer about Richard and whether the fare-thee-well excuse should have had any influence on a prison term. “A lot of people suffer in prison,” Mauer told me, “but we would like to see decision-makers consider the consequences of their sentencing actions on all defendants, not just on the privileged. If we gave the same consideration about harmful consequences to defendants across the board, it could lead to very different sentencing outcomes.”

Far too often, we give far too little consideration to the consequences of a prison term on the life a poor defendant. At least the public is starting to pay attention to cases like that of Shanesha Taylor, who has been charged with felony child abuse in Scottsdale, Arizona, because she left her two small children alone in a car for a little over an hour to attend a job interview. Taylor was taken straight to jail, where she languished for over a week. Her children were put in the custody of Child Protective Services, where they remain. Obviously leaving two small children unattended in a car was an ill-advised thing to do, but under the circumstances Taylor may simply have exercised the least bad option available to her.

The law enforcement officials who chose to arrest this 35-year-old mother and charge her with a felony may have had little sympathy for the homeless woman’s plight, but ordinary Americans who can relate to Taylor’s struggles are not willing to let this woman become yet another statistic in an unforgiving justice system.

Since Taylor was taken to jail, an online fundraising effort has raised nearly $80,000 from over 2000 small donors to help defray her legal expenses. A church group reportedly posted bail on her behalf, and an online petition to have all charges dropped has already garnered over 5,000 signatures.

I’m not sure why Taylor’s case has attracted this kind of support in particular. It might have been the apple-sized tears spilling down both cheeks in her mug shot, or just that she was trying to dig herself out of some pretty terrible circumstances and Americans love someone who tries. Whatever the reason, it’s encouraging to see the inequality that defines our criminal justice system is getting this kind of attention.

In its devastating report, the Sentencing Project lists 10 concrete measures that would help eliminate some of the more obvious inequalities in the system, from scaling back the war on drugs to eliminating mandatory minimum sentences to abolishing the death penalty. But until we recognize that bias permeates the system at every level – however unconscious or unintended – meaningful change will elude us.

Media attention and Kickstarters aren’t everything, but recognition of a deeper problem isn’t nothing.

by Sadhbh Walshe
First published April 2 2014 The Guardian 

And a song somewhat on the theme “Billy Austin” by Steve Earle

Yesterday we looked at the origins of Karen LaMonte glass work.  Today she wrestles with scaling up her glass dresses.

At UrbanGlass (New York) and Pilchuck, (Washington State) where LaMonte was creating most of her work, there were technical limitations that made it impossible for her to attain her final goal of making a life-sized dress.  So after a year or so of research, LaMonte decided that the only place where these pieces could be realized would be in the Czech Republic.  The casting facilities there were already geared towards large-scale work and had been producing monumental pieces for artists like Libensky ́ and Brychtová.  The only problem was that the Czech aesthetic tended towards complete geometrical abstraction so LaMonte knew that it would be a challenge for them to create detailed figurative molds.

In 1998 LaMonte received a Fulbright Fellowship to go to the Czech Republic to study glass casting with Zdeneˇk Lhotsky ́ at the famous Pelechov studio founded by Jaroslava Brychtová in the 1950s.  LaMonte says of her initial experience, “I was nervous to introduce my dress project to Lhotsky ́ since it differs so greatly from Czech glass, but he was excited by the idea and enthusiastic about the challenge of making such a complicated piece.  The mold makers themselves were even more excited—it was refreshing for them to see something new.”  She started by making a cast of a child’s dress and much to the factory workers surprise wanted to participate in the fabrication process.  This flies in the face of the traditional way of working in the Czech Republic where there is a complete disjunction between the artist/designer and the fabricators.  LaMonte’s interest in learning in detail the casting process from start to finish however, turned out to be quite important as it allowed her to build a relationship with the workers and gave them the impetus to push the envelope of their skills.

Over the next two years LaMonte continued to work with the Pelechov factory and began to work on larger molds.  She used art students, prostitutes and herself as models for the interiors of a series of human-scaled pieces.  These waxes took several months to produce. LaMonte says, “The human body is the single thing that everyone has in common—it is a universal form which speaks to everyone on a personal level.  Scale was extremely important to me—the cast glass pieces are made from found objects in their original state—so the final pieces needed to exist on a human scale so they would possess human presence.”  Once the waxes were created she made castings of the bodies and then added clothing to these forms. She then took waxes of the clothing and made molds of the clothed bodies. Once these were completed she made hollow castings that would articulate the interior and exterior forms.  One concession that LaMonte had to make though, was that the pieces that were larger than three or four feet tall would have to be made in several parts—as even the annealers at Pelechov are not large enough to accommodate anything larger and there would be too high of a risk of mold failure.

The fruits of her labor were realized in 2000 when the first series of dresses that were cast at Pelechov were shown at the Heller Gallery and at Nancy Hoffman Gallery in NewYork.  LaMonte showed several types of pieces: large bas-reliefs and the multipart hollow cast pieces.  In her most recent body of work Dress 4 and 6, 2001 and the smaller Dress 3 and 5, 2001, LaMonte has finally hit her stride.  Over the past two years the factory has been able to learn how to refine the mold-making process and the casting of the pieces to create sculptures that perfectly captured a sense of temporality and the gray area between the recognition of the human form and the complete absence of the appendages, head usually, associated with the body.  As well, LaMonte has been working on a series of prints made by inking dresses that she showed alongside the dress during her last solo exhibition at the Heller Gallery in May, 2001.

See more of Karen LaMonte’s works here

Why is the contemporary art world so interested in garments and adornment?

Clothing has become the primary way in which we identify class and personal style.  Fashion evolutions trace and mirror the political and social changes that we are undergoing in society.  Often the current fashion trends—which oscillate between constriction and liberation—tell us more about how the body is viewed in culture than philosophy, science or politics.  Artists who want to prompt viewers to think about our inner experiences and the ways that we conceal them and who also want to expose power and gender structures have turned to fashion as the primary vehicle to express these dialects.

Paralleling the interest in clothing in the contemporary art world, in the past eight years there has been a resurgence of interest in the glass world in the body and clothing.  One of the artists who has been in the forefront of this movement has been glass sculptor Karen LaMonte.  Since 1995 LaMonte has been working with the clothed body as her primary visual image.  LaMonte’s interest in clothing is twofold.  “I use clothing as a metaphor for identity and human presence.  I believe we have two skins that outline and define who we are.  One of course is our natural skin, but we obscure and conceal it beneath clothing which is a second skin, our social skin.”

At first LaMonte focused on producing a series of glass puppets based on Dante’s Inferno and the characters in the Commedia dell’ Arte.  This coterie of kings, devils and jokers allowed LaMonte to explore the expressiveness of glass in both specificity of technique and abstract form.  To personalize and differentiate each piece LaMonte pinched and deformed the garments of each puppet to mimic the natural folds of clothing.  Later, LaMonte created smaller glass dresses out of recycled bottles and hung them on a miniature clothesline.  These dresses had to be made quickly as the bottles came out of the glory hole, as there was a limited amount of working time before the glass hardened.  These dresses captured the immediacy of the glass blowing gesture but failed to create the look of fabric so LaMonte began to focus on honing her mold making skills.

Her goals in using the mold blowing process was to better represent the texture of the fabrics she was using as inspiration and to increase the scale of the work.  These pieces ranged in height from one to two feet.  The results were doll-like—highly textured empty shells headless and armless that seemed to float in space.

These pieces were closer to what LaMonte had envisioned, but she still wanted to increase the size.

As anyone who has worked in glass knows there it is time consuming and difficult to create large-scale work.  Not only do you need large annealers, great molds and skilled cold-workers, you also need a lot of capital for research and development, as there will be a lot of failure.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden  (with comments by Ira Maine)

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
‘I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,’
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

And now let us have Ira Maine, Poetry Editor take us though this extraordinary poem again.

Auden is in a New York Bar when Hitler invades Poland.  All of the ‘Peace in our time’ preaching has been discovered to be untrue.  For the past ‘low dishonest decade’ the West has been lauding the German economic miracle, whilst turning a blind eye to Hitler’s butchery, ‘the unmentionable odour of death’.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return

‘Accurate scholarship’ not lies, not propagenda, demonstrate why Hitler rose to power.  Born in Linz, Austria, Hitler rose to power (‘a psychopathic God’) as a result of reparations imposed on Germany after World War 1.  Germany was humiliated deliberately, not from a sense of justice, but from the need for revenge.  This was evil and Germany does evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

And now for the Greek lesson; Thucydides, the Greek Historian believed that democracy got in the way of strong leaders.  Military and economic power were all that mattered.  As a result ethics and morality were a waste of time.  ‘…Pain, mismanagement and grief…’ were an inevitable, unavoidable by-product of power.  Thucydides is very much a part of the American Military Academy Curriculum.  Neo-Cons love him.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Both this and the next verse are almost self explanatory.  ‘Euphoric dreams’.  ‘Competitive excuses’ are mean reasons for a neutral country not to get involved, especially in view of ‘the International wrong’.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

People cling to the familiar, ‘Their average day’ and don’t want it to crumble away.  They don’ want to face their own fears, ‘afraid of the night’ we don’t want to confront evil so we turn our heads in the hope it will go away.  We know it is hypocrisy but it is easier than doing something about it.

Equally, Auden is in a Gay Bar, filled with ex-pats, and all terrified of the ‘night’, the unfamiliar surroundings, the War, and the destruction of the familiar.  

Gays have ‘never been happy or good’, because we in the thirties would not allow them to be either.  You could go to jail simply for being a homosexual.  Entrapment was commonplace among the police forces.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

Auden was gay, or queer, as they called it then.  In 1939 on of the pore popular pursuits amongst louts was ‘queer bashing’ so Auden is being quite courageous here.  Nijinsky was the principal dancer with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe in the early years of the 20th Century.  Nijinsky and Diaghilev had an affair.  Nijinsky eventually left to get married.  Incensed, Diaghilev refused to let him rejoin the company.  Briefly, Nijinsky had kids, developed schizophrenia, wrote horrible things about Diaghilev in his diary and never really danced effectively again.

So here’s a plea from a gay man, a man born with ‘the error bred in the bone’, a plea for all gay men and women to be granted the right to live their lives with dignity and love.  ‘Craves what it cannot have’ because he lacks ‘the normal heart’ points up just how terrifying things were for gays in the 1930’s.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
‘I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,’
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

There’s a lot of TS Eliot in this verse, who compared the early morning thousands pouriing over London Bridge into the city to one of Dante’s Circles of Hell.  ‘Who would have thought death had undone so many?’
Or maybe there is more Auden in Eliot than I suspected….

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Now then, here we arrive at the centre, the nub, a last two verses which reach out and choke off Thucydide’s lie, the lie of the enlightenment, the rubbish cult, ‘the romantic lie’ of ‘the indiviual’ which has done so much to destroy societies all over the world.  Basically it comes down to ‘we must love one another or die’

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

What lunacy, what ‘stupor’, seizes us and allows these horrors to occur?  The great majority allow these things to happen because it’s easier than objecting.  Despite this, Auden says, there will always be a life affirming minority, ‘ironic points of light…’wherever the Just exchange their messages…‘    Here and only here will we find the life affirming flame, only here will we find the ethics and morality which are entirely absent from Thucydides thinking.  

This is the second part of a dispatch that was first published on 28 Oct 2010.  The first part was published last week.

 “The most consistent characteristic of civilisations in decay, is a tendency towards standardisation and uniformity”

From Wikipedia (so it must be true): ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’ is a proverb or aphorism. It is thought to have originated with Saint Bernard of Clairvaux who wrote, “L’enfer est plein de bonnes volontés et désirs” (hell is full of good wishes and desires).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPIQKHgbw7w

Somehow the resealing must be part of the “Growth Town” concept as well as the overarching “Closing the Gap” initiative. The road to marginalisation is re-sealed with good intentions…..

Early one recent morning, on my way to work, I saw a man pushing one of those measuring wheels along a Yuendumu re-sealed road. Undoubtedly he was measuring the length of re-sealing so the contractors could present an invoice to whoever within the Closing the Gap organisation chart (that someone has likened to a Spinifex bush) is responsible for paying it.

This man was wearing one of those yellow luminescent glow safety jackets, I was thus able to avoid running him over. Our CDEP gang also wear those jackets, hence(and cross the fingers) no one has run any of them over. The theme for last week’s Dispatch was the rescue of the Chilean 33. Many of the images emanating from Chile featured those yellow luminescent glow safety jackets.

Those yellow luminescent glow safety jackets have spread quicker than smallpox did in the New World.

What was it that historian Arnold Toynbee said?: “The most consistent characteristic of civilisations in decay, is a tendency towards standardisation and uniformity”.

Standardisation and uniformity, like wearing one of those yellow luminescent glow safety jackets, like destroying the bilingual programme at Yuendumu School, like “amalgamating” the Yuendumu Community Government Council into the Alice Springs run Central Desert Shire, like appropriating Yuendumu residences and re-labelling them as “housing stock” under Territory Housing.

At the beginning of the Intervention I saw then Prime Minister Howard on the news during his visit to Ntaria (Hermannsburg) say that “For Aboriginals to have any future at all they’ll have to join the mainstream” …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jwxy4Z27-U

Yeah! Walk up the gangplank of the sinking ship. Do your bit for climate change and that house of cards that is the Global Economy.

John Howard has just written a self-congratulatory book. I’d hoped to have seen the last of John Howard since he got voted out, but there he is smug in his own aura looming out of our TV screens. What a great Australian, even if he says so himself.

“Why hadn’t he helped David Hicks to get out of Guantanamo Bay, as the British and Spaniards had done for their citizens?”, “Because if we had brought him back to Australia we would not have been able to charge him under Australian law, and would have had to let him go free”. A great Australian indeed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVKYXyRnx8w

Dyma ychydig o ganeuon ‘n glws

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG4vhm6Z29U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5CHFf0ut-4

Hyd nes y byddwn yn cwrdd unwaith eto

(decode: Google Translate- Welsh to whatever listed language you fancy)

PS- The denizens of the Porn Capital of Australia must be jealous in that they did not have an Intervention foisted upon them- nor did they get any of those lovely blue “No Alcohol, No Pornography” signs. Gwael rhai bach.

A friend who lives in Canberra has forwarded me the following:

“Another myth and a really big one is that CDEP is funded from welfare, it is not and never has been, since 1977 it has been an Indigenous specific community development and employment program, but its popularity for government was its notional welfare offset (initially unemployment benefits then also some supporting parents pension), so not only was it cheap, but participants were quite correctly classified as employed not unemployed (the ABS does some things right!) in accord with ILO conventions! Mal’s smashing of CDEP in my view was about two main things: bringing people into his IQ regime and smashing community organizations, but the ostensible reason was to create ‘real’ public service jobs! This last aim is also repeated by Macklin, we will get rid of CDEP so that the States and Territories pay proper wages to those who we pay CDEP to do proper jobs. All quite contradictory!!!”

“Contradictory” I think is rather polite, I prefer “oxymoronic” with an emphasis on the “moronic”, or just plain meshuggah.

by Ben Saul, first published in The New York Times 25 March 2014

On a remote, sunny island, some 52 people have been detained for up to nearly five years without trial on secret evidence, with no prospect of release. A series of suicide attempts since 2012 speaks to their profound suffering. One man attempted to hang himself with a bedsheet. Another tried to electrocute himself. Another drank bleach. Another cut himself and used his blood to leave a message on a wall. All remain in detention; the government dismisses them as attention-seekers.

The island is not Cuba, where the United States holds inmates at its prison at Guantánamo Bay, but Australia. Over a decade after 9/11, the long shadow on human rights cast by America’s “war on terror” has extended to one of the world’s most peaceful corners.

The majority of these detainees, most of whom I represent, are deemed security risks by the Australian government and housed in facilities in Villawood, a Sydney suburb, and Maribyrnong, near Melbourne. An estimated 46 are ethnic-Tamil Sri Lankans, most of whom fled to Australia to escape Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war between Tamil separatists and Sinhalese-dominated government forces. Three are Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, where recent clashes between Muslims and Buddhists have caused hundreds of deaths and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. One is a Kuwaiti Bedouin; another is an Afghan of Hazari origin, an ethnic group long victimized by the Taliban.

Last August, the United Nations Human Rights Committee found that the detainees were being illegally held, without proof or judicial protection, in cruel, inhuman or degrading circumstances. A committee report identified some 150 violations of the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Australia accepted in 1980. It set a Feb. 18 deadline for the detainees’ release into Australia, on security conditions as appropriate, which Australia summarily ignored. This flouting of United Nations recommendations is unacceptable: Australia should immediately release the detainees and guarantee them due process under national law.

The United Nations report also criticized Australia’s practice of detaining children, including infants. In 2009, three children under the age of eight were held with their parents at the Villawood facility. The report found that detention had severely impaired the children’s psychological development. The family was finally released last year, after the Australian Security Intelligence Organization revised its assessment.

In making a case for detention, Australia’s immigration department relies on a security assessment of each prisoner, covering everything from espionage to terrorism and people-smuggling. The burden of proof is not high; detention can be upheld even if the A.S.I.O. deems it relatively unlikely that the person under assessment may commit harm. As the organization is not legally required to disclose evidence, little is known about why specific risk designations are upheld. Many detainees do not know the grounds on which they are being held. Because no court or tribunal can independently test the organization’s claims, it is impossible to know whether the detainees are truly dangerous.

The security organization asserts that the Villawood and Maribyrnong prisoners might commit politically motivated acts of violence. In the case of the Tamil detainees, it alleges prior relationships with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the rebel group that carried out attacks and suicide bombings during the Sri Lankan civil war. But few of the detainees fought in that war, and none is alleged to have harmed civilians or committed terrorist acts. Many were nominally associated with the Tigers because they lived in parts of Sri Lanka that fell under Tamil control. One was a civilian lawyer for the Tamils; another dug ditches to shelter civilians. Australia’s immigration department in 2010 and 2011 extraordinarily granted refugee status to all of the detainees; a designation explicitly denied anyone who has committed past acts of terrorism, or who is believed to pose a serious future risk.

Few Australians, it would seem, are troubled by the plight of the detainees. Certainly no sizeable political constituency has expressed concern, perhaps because “boat people” are generally unpopular. But perhaps the larger problem is that, since reporting inside detention centers is restricted, the refugees have largely remained invisible.

Sustained international pressure is therefore essential. Australia cares greatly about its reputation, particularly with democratic peers like Britain, the European Union, Canada, Japan and Indonesia. Even China, Australia’s largest economic partner — and a country whose own human rights record is hardly unblemished — could be a useful lever. During a bilateral human rights dialogue last month, China rebuked Australia’s treatment of the refugees; Australia is sure to come in for even harsher criticism when it appears in July 2015 before the United Nations Human Rights Council.

The International Criminal Court could also consider whether the indefinite detention at Villawood and Maribyrnong amounts to crimes against humanity. The United Nations tribunal report provides ominous evidence of it, and Australia has accepted the court’s jurisdiction. Australian officials might finally take notice if they think they could face prison.

Motivation to accede to United Nations demands may come from yet another source: the United States. Australia regards Washington as its closest ally and has long followed America’s lead on the treatment of detainees. For years, the Bush administration contravened United States Supreme Court rulings on judicial oversight at Guantánamo, where inmates are held indefinitely under laws of war. And the Obama administration has dragged its feet on closing Guantánamo, despite clear evidence of human rights abuses.

But this month, the American military announced the repatriation of an Algerian who had been held at Guantánamo without trial for 12 years. Last month, a United States federal appeals court ruled that the judiciary could hear complaints regarding conditions at the prison. If America is finally moving toward the more humane treatment of detainees, Australia should take note.

Ben Saul is professor of international law at the University of Sydney.

Cecil, Ira and Quentin have exhibited disturbing reactions to the post of Glass Dresses.

Initially Cecil wrote:
“I’ve been unable to find you any suitable postcards, puritanical place that this is.
However at a gathering of ‘The Thirsty Moms’ (they roll over in laughter at the idea one would put a ‘u’ in Mom) I was introduced to the glass work of Karen La Monte.  So impressed by the images was I that I’ve posted some in the blog today.  I’ve attached two, that make my fingers tingle with anticipation, then I think just how hard and cold glass is.  Still the buttocks and breasts look somewhat alluring. It almost seems close to necrophilia.  Disturbing?”  and included these two images

Ira responded with:
“Aha!  One has begun to suspect, despite your protestations to the contrary, that these photos  are cold snaps of some ravishing Ice Maiden whom you are presently attempting to thaw out. I can easily imagine you, rigid and glassy-eyed in the face of this seemingly frigid female, as you coldly go about your overheated seductions.
Splendid glass work, stunningly life-like.  What skill must be involved when you realize how difficult a medium this is to work in.  I don’t suppose there’s the smallest chance, in the dead of night, when all men of good conscience are abed, you might purloin half  a ton of this work and ship it to the Tolmie Market where great fortunes might be made?

UPDATE: She met the actor when both had roles in the 1950 film “Rocky Mountain.” She also appeared in such features as “Tea for Two” and “Ocean’s Eleven.”

today’s post is taken from the site “If it’s Hip, It’s Here”

The awesome cast glass sculptures of artist Karen La Monte will take your breath away.

Her vast collection of impressive artwork includes figurative cast glass impressions of gowns and busts, ceramic drapery studies, drawings, bas-reliefs, sartoriotypes and glass cast hand mirrors with photo-etched steel.

Today, I’m going to share with you many of her amazing life sized (approx 5 feet tall) figurative cast glass gowns. Willowy diaphanous gowns with subtle impressions of the female form stand or recline eerily on their own as they invite you to touch what looks like ghostly satin and silk drapery but is actual glass cast by the capable hands of this Czech republic artist.

LaMonte’s anthropomorphosis of the dress is achieved with the hint of the female form beneath the folds. The essence of femininity and sensuality exudes from the sculptures despite the cold medium.

Her ability to craft such a hard material into sensuous folds, delicate wrinkles, fluid pleats and satin-like textures is truly remarkable.

Her work is so impressive that the reclining dress impression shown below is a recent acquisition by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

artist biography:

Karen LaMonte (right) started using clothing as a metaphor for identity and exploring the human in absentia in her early sculptures of blown glass puppets and marionettes shortly after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1990.

As a young artist working and living in New York, she participated in many gallery and museum exhibitions. An excellent example of her early investigations is Bottle Clothesline (1995) that was part of the traveling museum exhibition ¡Cálido! Contemporary Warm Glass that toured from 1997 through 1998. The Tucson Museum of Art later acquisitioned it for their permanent collection.

She continued probing the disparity between our natural skin and our social skin, clothing which we use to obscure and conceal, to protect the individual and project a persona. It is a ‘vestmentary envelope’ which renders us as social beings.

She received a Fulbright Fellowship in 1999 to make her work in the Czech Republic. Further investigating the idea that clothing draws the body so that it can be culturally seen and articulates it in a socially meaningful form, she began working on sculptures of cast glass dresses. One of the earliest examples of this is Blue Dress now in the collection of the Corning Museum of Glass. During the Fulbright year, she also completed her first large scale sculpture Vestige.

She expanded her inquiry by adding the impression of an absent body to her sculptures. This investigation of the clothing as a divider between public from private space and of transparency and transience, led to a new body of work for which she received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award in 2001.

Also in 2001, her interest in transparency led her to create monotype prints she called Sartoriotypes (sartorial of or relating to tailored clothing, plus type meaning image and impression). These works were installed with the cast glass sculptures in the 2002 exhibition at Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation in Venice, Italy.

In 2004, she began a new body of work using mirrors and photography. The Lark Mirrors and Sleeping Mirrors became an important part of her solo museum exhibitions Vanitas at the Czech Museum of Fine Art in Prague, Czech Republic and Absence Adorned at the Museum of Glass International Center for Contemporary Art in Tacoma, WA.

In 2006, she was awarded a seven month Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts during which she studied the kimono as an investigation into the Japanese use of clothing as social language.

LaMonte also began investigating the use of ceramic in her sculptures at the European Ceramic Work Centre and was the recipient of the Corning Museum of Glass/Kohler Arts Center Joint Residency for working with ceramic and glass.
Recently, her work was exhibited at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, VA and was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

She continues to live and work in the Czech Republic.
all images courtesy of the artist
 See more of her amazing work at Karen LaMonte