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Numerous social commentators have noted how the pandemic has hit the least powerful and prosperous parts of the population the hardest.\u00a0 Infections, hospitalizations, and deaths have been disproportionally high among the poor, people of color, recent immigrants, Native Americans, and the elderly.<\/p>\n
The pandemic has also underscored the worst places to work and live, with the pejorative \u201cworst\u201d referring to the way certain places weigh heavily on the body, mind, and spirit.\u00a0 These places are not only individualized but also organized into types and categories.\u00a0 I nominate three types of places as the worst in the United States:\u00a0 prisons, nursing homes, and food processing plants.<\/p>\n
Media accounts have reported at length on how COVID-19 has ravaged prison populations, but prisons were undesirable places long before the virus arrived.\u00a0 The nation has in general abandoned any commitment to rehabilitate inmates, and prisons have deteriorated into demeaning, dangerous warehouses.\u00a0 Diseases and medical problems are four to ten times as common as they are in the general population, and the Prison Policy Initiative and Wisconsin Department of Corrections estimate that 42% of the state\u2019s inmates suffer from one or more mental illnesses.\u00a0\u00a0 According to the prominent sociologist Jonathan Simon, most of the nation considers prison inmates to be \u201ctoxic waste\u201d of a human variety and thinks of the people who run the prisons as engaged in \u201cwaste management.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nursing homes have been the places in which 40% of COVID-19 fatalities have occurred, and some of the most excruciating pandemic scenes have involved distraught friends and relatives saying goodbye to confused and dying residents through tightly-sealed windows. Roughly 75% of nursing homes are for-profit enterprises, usually corporately owned and managed.\u00a0 Residents in these for-profit nursing homes have over the years endured insufficient staffing and flawed infection control practices born of incessant cost-control and profit-seeking.\u00a0 As if the concomitant deprivation and loss of dignity were not enough, residents also face the possibility of physical and financial abuse, both of which have been widely documented.<\/p>\n
Food processing plants include but are not limited to often-discussed meatpackers, and individual Wisconsin meatpackers in Green Bay and Kenosha have had literally hundreds of their workers test positive for the virus.\u00a0 More generally, food processing plants are sites of lousy, manual factory work.\u00a0 The crowding, unsanitary conditions, and degrading supervision in many plants have contributed to the spread of infections as well as to an exploitative and frustrating work experience.\u00a0 Dignity can be found in all work, we like to say, but the workers in food processing plants are perennially hard-pressed to take anything from their labor other than minimum-wage paychecks.<\/p>\n
Prisons, nursing homes, and food processing plants are the \u201cworst\u201d not only because they are unhealthy and harmful places but also because they are fundamentally inhumane and anti-humanistic.\u00a0 Indeed, these places induce and accentuate severe alienation among those who live and work in them.<\/p>\n
This alienation is multi-faceted.\u00a0 With good reason, inmates, residents, and workers are estranged from the social practices that dominate prisons, nursing homes, and food processing plants, respectively.\u00a0 They are also alienated from the societally marginalized people who make up most of those who live and work alongside them.\u00a0 And, most tragically, the inmates, residents, and workers are alienated from themselves.<\/p>\n
After, all, people in prisons, nursing homes, and food processing plants do not really want to be in them.\u00a0 The convicted move into their cells because the criminal justice processing system has assigned them to prison.\u00a0 The elderly reside in nursing homes because home-care is unavailable, Medicaid might pay the tab, and there is nowhere else to go. Recent immigrants and impoverished people of color, trying to get by from month to month, take jobs in meatpacking plants because they are the best jobs they can find.<\/p>\n
Most of those who live and work in prisons, nursing homes, and food processing plants also realize they have little likelihood of developing personally or of finding greater meaning and purpose in their lives.\u00a0 Their residences and workplaces do not proffer a wider, richer range of possibilities.\u00a0 Prisons, nursing homes, and food processing plants, in other words, are existential death traps.\u00a0 What does it say about a society that systematically produces, sustains, and expands \u201cplaces\u201d like these?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Numerous social commentators have noted how the pandemic has hit the least powerful and prosperous parts of the population the hardest.\u00a0 Infections, hospitalizations, and deaths have been disproportionally high among the poor, people of color, recent immigrants, Native Americans, and the elderly. The pandemic has also underscored the worst places to work and live, with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,60,66,33,120,119,122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criminal-justice","category-health-care","category-human-rights","category-labor-employment-law","category-poverty-law","category-prisoner-rights","category-public","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29494"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29498,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29494\/revisions\/29498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}