The New Yorker: Why Nobody Sh*ts In Jail by Keith Gessen

“But there simply cannot be any rule, or any carceral logic, or any arguments whatsoever, for filthy toilets. And sitting there, with the stench from our filthy toilet filling the room, and with the filth in our filthy sink making me less eager than I ought to have been to drink from it, despite being thirsty, I became angry—really, honestly, for the first time. I thought for the first time, with genuine venom, of the hypocrite mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire, who shut down the Occupy Wall Street encampment for reasons of “health and safety” but has not deemed it worthwhile to make sure that the toilets in facilities that he has control of meet even the most minimal standards of health and safety, such that, while I watched, about forty men, eating a total of a hundred meals, over the course of a day and a half, refused to perform a single bowel movement. This was its own form of civil disobedience, I suppose, and if I’d had my wits about me maybe I could have organized a meeting of all the inmates at Bloomberg’s residence, on East Seventy-ninth Street, so that we could all take a giant shit on his front stoop."


"As Elijah made to leave, an officer approached him. An argument ensued. It ended with the officer tackling Elijah onto the group of people sitting behind him. A number of other officers jumped in. Seconds later, Elijah was pulled up to his feet, away from the group, looking dazed, his shirt ripped. This was ugly. The officer who tackled Elijah was an athlete, you could see it in his neck and shoulders, and a grown man; Elijah is a skinny kid. It was also the case that Elijah was one of the few black people at our protest that day; the officer was white."


"Here is another statistic: Over the course of the thirty-two hours we were held at the Tombs, about twenty-five non-protesters cycled through our cell. In any case, out of those twenty-five inmates on their way to hearings, just one was white. One was Asian. A few—maybe three or four—were Hispanic. The rest were black. Is it really possible that non-whites commit ninety-six per cent of all crimes in Manhattan? I don’t know. Perhaps, outside of Wall Street, whites are just very law-abiding. And most of the crimes appeared to be drug-related—perhaps white people don’t do drugs."