The Invisible Prisoners - CJ Hunt

Authored By:

Nicola Lazenby

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

-Unknown

Opression is atrocious to all people. This is a point I trust and I sincerely hope I need not prove, it is obvious. Despite this, however, opression has an insidious habit of rooting itself into human culture and politics throughout history. How, then, does it do this? Several ways, but the one I wish to deal with today is through the invisiblization of the opressed. Out of sight out of mind, and when people are out of the sight of the masses they cease to be people to the masses and instead become a void, of absence of anything to look at, an ignored space. And thus within that space, all actions of the state are invisible and thus cannot be objected to. This, we see in the prisons. The Old Fort on Constitution Hill was home to abuse abhorrent to all the most depraved. The very bricks of the place cry out “Murder! Injustice!” And yet the prison operated comfortably for decades, and seemed not remarkable to a fair number of the wealthy white right wing. It was sufficiently unobserved for all to be permissable within its walls. 

It is easy to view this as a product of Apartheid policy, and it most certainly was, but it was also a product of something far more universal, and organ of opression that is often dormant in its power to level horror but nonetheless appears everywhere: the invisibility of prisoners. One does not make a habit of walking the prison halls, nor does one often hear news from the prisons.One rarely knows the location of the nearest prison, the number of people inside, the exact nature of the punitive or rehabilitative action happening within. But this is a dangerous norm to follow. One must remember what this invisiblization of the prison population can lead to. One must keep an ever-ope eye.