Domenico da Piacenza – Prexonera

Niccolo Seligmann, lirone NiccoloSeligmann.com Patreon.com/NiccoloSeligmann    / niccoloseligmann   For more content like this, subscribe to my YouTube channel, and get exclusive content by joining my Patreon community! ❤ I'm spending this morning in public for only the third time since March, camped out in front of a Covid-19 testing site. I showed up three hours before they open to get a good spot in line. I imagine this must be like Black Friday, but without the giddy anticipation of sharing love, gifts, and time with family. Simply being out in public—past the mailbox at the end of my long, rural driveway—is causing me levels of anxiety I didn't have in the Before Time. The title of this piece, "Prexonera" ("Imprisoned Woman") gives me a lot to think about as I wait for this Urgent Care to open. My quarantine has been a form of house arrest since March, and my mental ankle bracelet is beeping like crazy right now as I shrink into my own body, trying to back away from people and not touch anything. Of course, 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭 American prisons are a different story, where the purpose is maximum trauma and state-sanctioned racial violence, not just "keeping ____ out of 'society'." Who, and how, is this supposed to help? In my experience, house arrest has done a great job of keeping me out of society, but it certainly hasn't improved my mental health or ability to function socially. If house arrest and ankle bracelets are good enough for keeping white-collar criminals out of society, thus performing the function of prisons, as many of us are experiencing in quarantine, then why does society need prisons? Can the quarantine experience become an entry point for "Blue Lives Matter" enthusiasts to feel empathy with incarcerated people? How can the Left use this opportunity for collective empathy to normalize prison/police abolition among communities for whom prison is otherwise an abstract concept reserved for the people most "othered?" As I listen to "Prexonera," I hear hope for a future based on this empathy, hope for freedom—tangible, meaningful, and lasting freedom—for those imprisoned by structural racism and abusive relationships, or by steel bars and barbed wire.