Joshua B. Hoe interviews Eyal Press about his book “Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequity in America”
Full Episode
My Guest: Eyal Press
Eyal Press is an author and a journalist based in New York. He was the recipient of a James Aronson award for social justice journalism, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, and Cullman and Puffin foundation fellowships. He is a contributor to the The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the author of Beautiful Souls, Absolute Convictions, and the book “Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America.”
Watch The Interview on YouTube
Now you can listen to Episode 115 of the Decarceration Nation Podcast here or from your favorite podcast app or watch the interview on YouTube.
Notes from Episode 115 Eyal Press
The title of the book comes from the Essay “Good People and Dirty Work” by Everett C. Hughes.
The book that Eyal recommended was Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Nicole Fleetwood
Full Transcript:
Joshua B. Hoe
Hello and welcome to Episode 115 of the DecarcerationNation podcast, a podcast about radically reimagining America’s criminal justice system. I’m Josh Hoe, and among other things, I’m formerly incarcerated; a freelance writer; a criminal justice reform advocate; a policy analyst; and the author of the book Writing Your Own Best Story: Addiction and Living Hope.
Today’s episode is my interview with Eyal Press about his book, Dirty Work, Essential Jobs and The Hidden Toll of Inequality in America. Eyal Press press is an author and a journalist based in New York. He was a recipient of the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, he has received an Andrew Carnegie fellowship, a Cullman Center fellowship at the New York Public Library, and a Puffin Foundation fellowship at Type Media Center. He was the recipient of a James Aronson Award for social justice journalism, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, and Coleman and Puffin Foundation Fellowships. He is a contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the author of Beautiful Souls, Absolute Convictions, and the book we’ll be discussing today, Dirty Work.Welcome to the DecarcerationNation podcast, Eyal Press.
Eyal Press
Thank you so much for having me.
Joshua B. Hoe
Yeah, my pleasure. I always ask the same first question, and it’s kind of the comic book origin story question. How did you get from wherever you started, to where you were writing books about the jobs we demand get done but have no desire to take responsibility for?
Eyal Press
Hmm. Well, I thought that in college, I was a history major, and I thought of pursuing a career as a historian. But between the steps needed to do that, and my mid-20s, I fell in love with journalism, and decided I really wanted to take a crack at writing for magazines, and wound up at first just writing for whoever would publish me. And I think that’s generally what it takes for years, and doing odd jobs, to pay the rent in the meantime, and then gradually got the opportunity to write a couple of books. And here I am today, having just published my third, which as you mentioned, is titled Dirty Work. And it’s about work. It’s about jobs that are hidden from view, but I think are sort of central to the way we live.
Josh Hoe
Is there anything along the journey that kind of sent you in a particular direction of the kind of work that you’d like to write about? What led you to the books you started to write?
Eyal Press
I think I always knew I wanted to do in-depth long-form journalism that focused on issues of social justice. And interestingly, when I started out, which was kind of the mid to late 90s, that was not a very promising career path in American journalism. I think that this was post-Cold War, triumphalist America, it was the Clinton era. But in many ways, it felt like the Reagan era still, and America was, I think, celebrating itself as the model that the rest of the world should live up to. And I saw it very differently because I grew up in Buffalo, New York, and I saw the good jobs leave, and a lot of inequality and poverty, deindustrialization, Rust Belt, and I always felt that as a journalist, I would want to cover the more forgotten stories and the more forgotten people in this country. And I think today we have an open conversation about inequality that is maybe 20 years overdue.
Josh Hoe
Yeah, I definitely agree with you there. To turn to the book, one of the central questions of post-World War Two philosophy has been, how did so many people in Germany, how could they have participated in or supported the Holocaust? Your use of the term “dirty work” is based on the Everett Hughes lecture dealing with this topic. Can you talk more about what his argument was and how this kind of worked into how you got to where you got in the book?
Eyal Press
Sure. Everett Hughes is the starting point of my book. He was a sociologist, as you mentioned, who taught at the University of Chicago and was very influential and had some very, very famous students; among them Erving Goffman might well be the most influential sociologist of the 20th century. Hughes is a little less well-known today. But he wrote this fascinating essay called Good People and Dirty Work. And it really is the point of departure for my book. It was based on time he spent in postwar Germany. And he went there actually, just to teach, it was Frankfurt, and it was 1948. So just a couple years after World War Two, and Hughes as he returns to Germany – he’s been there before, it’s clear from his diaries, which I read and drew on – it’s clear he’s been there before and he wants to talk to the folks he knew. And these were not members of the Nazi Party. These were what he refers to in the title of that lecture, as “good people”; they were cosmopolitan, liberal values, open-minded, tolerant. And when he would bring up what happened under the Nazis, the first thing he would hear from these good people is a disavowal, right? As one architect put it, who he visited one night, you know, I’m ashamed for my people, whenever I think about it, whenever, whenever the subject of what the Nazis did, was brought up, but in that same conversation, the architect goes on to say, to tell us, but you know, the Jews, they really were a problem. And something had to be done to settle this problem. And Hughes kind of stops in his tracks at this comment. The architect goes on to talk about how the Jews were taking all the good jobs and how they were gathered in these filthy ghettos. And so you have on the one hand, you know, we have nothing to do with what the Nazis did. And indeed, we’re ashamed of it. On the other hand, the Jews were a problem that needed to be dealt with in some way. And in this essay, Good People and Dirty Work, Hughes extrapolates from that, sort of on the one hand, on the other hand, which by the way, he kept hearing versions of it wasn’t just one conversation, it was over and over. And he proceeds to say that we would like to think of the dirty work that took place under the Nazis, namely, the killing, the genocide, the camps, as something that was done by a rogue group that just was separate from society. But that’s too convenient. The actual, the more troubling thing is that the dirty work was done by people who were, who were agents of the good people, good people like the ones he knew, not because the good people actually approved of the Nazi ideology, but because they were apathetic enough. And because they had acquiesced to this idea. They shared this idea that the Jews were a problem, a kind of outgroup of society, and something had to be done about that problem. And then they didn’t want to ask too many questions after that. And what’s most fascinating to me about this essay is not what it says about Nazi Germany, because, you know, he was himself was not a specialist in post-war Germany. And in some ways, he wasn’t even particularly interested in indicting the Germans, as he said, openly, afterwards, when in these exchanges with other sociologists, he wrote that essay with his fellow North Americans in mind. And what he posited was that in every society, you have a certain amount of dirty work that takes place, it doesn’t have to be as extreme and colossally horrible as what happened under the Nazis. But what’s similar is this dynamic of the relationship between the good people in the dirty work, that these two things are not separate, that, in fact, there are so many unpleasant and unethical activities that go on, to which good people effectively leave it to others to do and don’t want to hear too much about. And that’s the point of, again, the way I take up this essay is by asking, what are the forms of dirty work that happened in this society, and how much of that work has what he has called an “unconscious mandate” from society, from the good people who, on the one hand, you know, are discomforted by it, and on the other hand, don’t want to see it or be asked about it. And in that way, it sort of goes on. 1
Josh Hoe
It’s interesting because the way you put it in the book is that he published it to bring attention to the dangers which lurk in our own midst. And I was kind of curious, I know, it’s not necessarily of the work that’s come out in the open, but in many ways over the last, say, five or six years, probably during the period you’re writing the book, a lot of the things that used to be lurking under the cover of society have started to leak out in a lot of ways, we’ve seen a rise of populism, a rise of some fascist tendencies, a rise of a lot of racism. What was your take on this as you were writing this? I know, you’re mostly talking about the actual thing, about dirty work, but there has to be some relationship. I’m sure that you had to have some thoughts about this as we were going through this historical period.
Eyal Press
Yeah, I mean, I think that it’s a very interesting question I haven’t really been asked before and, and I guess what I would say is that the book I’ve written is addressed to people who I think fall into that “good people” category. In other words, people who are going to read about the dirty work that goes on in industrial slaughterhouses. There’s a section of the book about that, people who are going to read about the dirty work that goes on behind the walls of jails and prisons, people who are going to read about the dirty work of carrying out targeted assassinations in our neverending wars, and at some level are going to feel discomfort, if not quite saying what the architect said, I’m ashamed, at the very least feeling like that is not something I myself would do. And that is not something I approve of. So the book is very much addressed, I think, to that kind of reader. At the same time, you’ve raised an important point, which is that there are people in this country out there who may read about these things and say, I’m not discomforted by that at all. That’s exactly what I was getting at. Yeah, drone strikes, more of it! You know, as Donald Trump said, when he campaigned, we’re not just going to hit the targets, we’re going to get their family members too, and those kinds of lines often drew cheers. You know, there is a real question of, in some sense, is America, one country or several different countries, now uncomfortably pieced together, in which some people are really discomforted by the things I write about in the book, and other people are more discomforted by the idea that someone would have a problem with it. And that’s a valid point to raise. I don’t deal with it in-depth in the book. But it’s a very valid point.
Josh Hoe
Because this is the DecarcerationNation podcast, we’ll probably spend a bit more time talking about the parts of the book that discuss prison. The first occupation it discusses are correctional therapists, and you called the first chapter “Dual Loyalties”. One of the suggestions that some criminal justice reform organizations sometimes put forward is that we should have independent observers inside prisons. But I kind of take what you’ve written as a little bit of a cautionary tale here. Can you talk a little bit about what you discovered?
Eyal Press
Yeah. So the book starts, as you say, with the story of a mental health aide at a prison called the Dade Correctional Institution. Her name is Harriet Krzykowski. And Harriet has never worked in a prison before. She’s pretty scared when she begins, as she openly said to me; she was a woman working in an all-male prison in the mental health ward. This was not a job that was her dream job by any means. She needed a job. It was the one she got, it was post-recession Florida, after the 2008 recession. Her husband didn’t have work at the time. And they had two young children. So she gets this job. And when she goes into it, she’s actually thinking she and the security guards are allies, you know, they’ve got her back. If something bad happens, sure, they’ll protect her. And furthermore, that they’re the good guys here. In her mind, it was kind of that way, you know, good guys and if not bad guys, people she should be wary of and she had a certain wariness towards the incarcerated people, towards folks she felt, you know, she couldn’t entirely trust and didn’t know how closely to work with them. So she was not what some correctional officers refer to as a hugger. This is the sort of derogatory term for correctional psychiatrists who maybe go in with the I’m going to protect the defenseless incarcerated folks against the system; that was not Harriet at all. But as Harriet begins to work at Dade, her views change, and they change really from direct experience. She does come to really care for and feel sympathy for some of the patients in her care. And she also comes to see that they are subject to abuse, that some of them are not getting meals, and they start complaining to her about this, that they’re not getting out in the rec yard, which is the only sunlight that they get. And when she challenges this in the most gentle possible way with an email to her supervisor one day, she immediately experiences retaliation. The guards who she thought would protect her when she’s doing her work started leaving her alone. They start opening the security doors, security gates more slowly for her. They’re basically sending her a message. You know, don’t defy us, don’t report on things you think are wrong, because we run this house. This is our house, not yours. So in terms of your question about independent observers, an independent observer is probably going to be subject to those same – as I said, dual loyalties is the subject, the title of the chapter. Here is someone who on the one hand has the job of taking care of these prisoners with severe mental illnesses, and on the other hand, feels beholden to security for her own protection and safety. And I think that would be the case with an independent observer.
Josh Hoe
The prison part of the book is in a sense anchored by the horrifying story of what happened to Darren Rainey in Florida’s prison system. I want to believe that people would be shocked by this story, but it was widely reported and even ended up as the basis of an episode of Orange is the New Black, and Florida’s system doesn’t seem to have changed much since that event. And it was a particularly brutal crime, probably more brutal than almost anything that people currently incarcerated in that prison were sentenced for. But nobody was held accountable. Can you explain what happened? And kind of that failure to find accountability?
Eyal Press
Absolutely. So as I said, Harriet – we’ll go back to her story – she discovers that there is abuse, she also discovers she shouldn’t say anything about it. And one day, she shows up at work and hears about this guy, Rainey, who she was told had defecated in his cell, and therefore was taken to a hot shower and given a hot shower. And when she first hears this, she thinks that that’s a good thing. But then she hears from the nurses that he collapsed in that shower and died. And again, her first impulse is to think he had a heart attack or something, you know, some kind of health failure. What she learns is that, in fact, this was deliberate, that Rainey was among several prisoners who had been locked in that shower, and the temperature was controlled from the outside; it’s really, it’s really quite horrifying to just think of the premeditated nature of this. So the hose that brings the water into this stall is controlled from the outside by a group of guards. And from what we know, it was 180 degrees, which is basically the temperature of a cup of tea. And Rainey collapses in that shower. We don’t know exactly why; it could have been from the steam, that he was trying to sort of get out of the way, but the steam built up, eventually he falls, he hits the ground floor of the stall, he dies there. And the autopsy photos that we have seen that have been leaked, showed that he suffered severe burns on his arms, back legs, you name it. Harriet, and the rest of the staff learn about this grisly crime. And none of them report it. And again, this speaks to the pressure and the fear that runs a place like that, and that isn’t actually particular to Dade. And I talk in the book about how, you know, regardless of the jail or prison, there is this dynamic of this dual loyalty that exists. And the abuses could be more subtle. But there’s this question of what does a care provider, a caregiver, do in such a situation? Do you stick to medical ethics? Or do you bend those ethics because this is a jail, this is a prison? This is, you know, a violent environment, and the guards are in control. So anyway, I tell that story. It is indeed a shocking case. And yet, it’s a story that if it had been, you know, we only know about that story, because a prisoner leaked the details to the Miami Herald. Otherwise, it might well have been covered over, and I should say that, although I haven’t in my reporting encountered anything quite so graphic again, I recently wrote a story about deaths behind bars that was published in the New Yorker. And in one of the declarations that I read of an incarcerated person in Georgia, this person described being locked inside a steaming shower. And that was so chilling to read, because it just brought all of what I reported on back and made me wonder how little we actually know in terms of what goes on.
Josh Hoe
Yeah, I think we often assume people will care. We talked about this a little bit earlier, if only a light were shined on the abuses, but when the light is shined in that instance; in two DOJ reports on the brutality of Alabama prisons; in many reports on Florida when the Lee Riot happened in South Carolina; the deaths and heat in Mississippi prisons; the 1000s of deaths from COVID and prisons across the country; what’s been happening in the last few weeks in Georgia; we don’t see the kind of response that you might hope for. And, you know, like I said before, there wasn’t a lot of accountability in that instance. What does this say? I mean, we are the agents, you know, we do you say, if the premise of the book is, you know, we empower those situations, in a lot of ways. What does all of this say about us?
Eyal Press
Well, it says a lot. And let’s go back to Everett Hughes for one second because there’s this fascinating passage in that essay he wrote, Good People and Dirty Work, where he talks about occasionally in America, a newspaper will report on a brutality that took place in a prison. And the good people in the town or whoever read it are liable to say, Wow, those guards were predisposed to brutality, what a terrible thing those guards did. And Hughes is troubled by this, he says, Well, okay, but what message has society sent those guards? Is it really something that bothers society? Or is it that society has effectively washed its hands of the situation, and left it to the prison guards to basically be a little bit brutal, but just don’t make it our business? Right, do it behind bars, do it behind closed doors; that was in 1962. Now, let’s fast forward to 2021, where the United States is now home to the world’s largest prison system. And to be sure, there’s been a great deal, thanks to people like yourself, there’s been rising awareness, I think, of the costs of mass incarceration, and a sort of swinging a little bit back of the pendulum. But the fact of the matter is, I think what it says about us as a society still, is that we prefer not to hear too much about the conditions in our jails and prisons, they are still very much out of sight, out of mind. There’s been reform at the margins, but the core issues are still there. And so you know, it’s very much I think, an example of how – I think that the guards at Dade, what was so interesting to me is that Harriet Krzykowski, she did not put the blame on them. She said she came to feel there’s a system here. And there are conditions, she knew a lot of guards who were doing their best and trying to do a good job. She also knows some who were brutal, and who were cruel. But it was not her conclusion, that we should just blame them. Because she said, she came to conclude that the guys in the mental health ward she worked in were what she called throwaway people. They were folks who basically cycled through the criminal justice system and did not have access to adequate mental health care and many other things. And as a consequence, you know, are sort of warehoused in an institution where surprise, surprise, bad things start happening.
Josh Hoe
Another element, I think you’re just raising this, is that when something bad happens in prison, we tend to blame the officers. You know, when something bad happens with police, we tend to blame the officers, when something bad happens with whatever, you know, societal problem, we tend to start talking bad apples. But a lot of the problems are systemic. And we seem almost universally allergic to the idea of talking about systemic problems and dealing with them in any real way. Would you like to talk more about this societal example of what I think psychologists might call transference, and also about the need for systemic discussions, as opposed to singling out individual bad actors?
Eyal Press
Yeah, that’s a great point. And it’s a very important part of the book. So the book isn’t really just about dirty work. It’s also about inequality. It’s about who ends up getting assigned this work, and where it takes place, and who doesn’t end up getting assigned this work and to be very blunt about it, the powerful and the privileged rarely do it, rarely see it, and are rarely held accountable for it. Those in the lower rungs of the social ladder are more likely to both be working in institutions like jails and prisons and industrial slaughterhouses – and also when scandals like the Rainey case arise and are publicized, to be pinned with responsibility for it. And what’s striking to me is, take the Rainey example, the Governor at the time, Rick Scott, the Governor of Florida at the time, he didn’t suffer. He’s now a senator. You know the Head of the Department of Corrections, no one, no one at the top rungs of the pyramid, there was very little accountability. There were a couple of guards who were removed from the facility. And to be sure, they should have been held accountable. This was a sadistic, sadistic act. And it wasn’t a one-time act. And so there’s no question that accountability, that those who carried out these, these deeds deserve to be punished. But we too often single them out and then the system remains intact, and the people at the higher rungs not only aren’t held accountable but sometimes are promoted or benefit from this. The company – the situation in that prison, by the way, was exacerbated by the fact, by privatization, by the fact that Florida had entrusted for-profit companies to run not just the mental health care, but all the healthcare in its prisons. And it’s really fascinating to me because when we think about prison privatization, we so often think about the privately-owned prison.
Josh Hoe
Let me just break-in; I talk all the time about how the bigger problem is prison privatization, not private prisons; that only about 8% of people in American prisons are in private prisons, but 100% of the people in American prisons suffer from prison privatization. So I couldn’t agree with you more. Go ahead. I didn’t mean to interrupt.
Eyal Press
Yeah, that’s great to know. And I’m so glad that you do talk about that. Because to be honest, it was news to me. And yet, as I thought about it, and again, to get to societal responsibility, you know, privatizing these services was seen as a win-win for the people of Florida because it’s cheaper, right. And in fact, the contract that was given to these two companies, Corizon and Wexford, obligated them to spend less, and lo and behold, you started having stories in the papers about people with, you know, serious illnesses, like cancer, being given ibuprofen, or Tylenol, or not taken for surgeries. And so, you know, cost-cutting measures? Well, that is a societal decision. Right? That is a political decision that flows from a lot of very, I would say, deliberate decision-making on the part of people with power, and yet it’s the people at the bottom rungs who end up being villainized. So I think there is a real need to question that.
Josh Hoe
And, you know, it’s been tough for me, since my return from incarceration, but part of your argument is empathy for the correctional officers as a whole. At one point, you mentioned someone calling them the other prisoners. And there were, I mean, from what I can tell from your book, serious human mental health and physical consequences for a lot of them. Is that correct?
Eyal Press
Absolutely. So again, I don’t want to whitewash what those guards did. And nor do I want to suggest that prison guards are not powerful actors in their own rights, who bear responsibility for the decisions they make. But I definitely question the ease with which, I think we have to see these guards as, as our agents, you know, they are doing work under conditions that are, that give rise to brutality and violence, and in fact, I talked at length to a now former, now a retired prison guard, who shared his diary with me. And it was, it was striking to me because, on the one hand, he’s someone who, who openly spoke not mincing words about the fact that some of the fellow officers he knew were brutal, he called them serial bullies, that they really bullied certain prisoners and abused them. But then he also said, the people of Florida get what they pay for; before you condemn them, let’s think about the conditions here. And Florida is the state with the third-largest prison system in the country that spent – at the time I was writing – the second least on mental health services. So you have a prison and jail system that is effectively doing the dirty work for a society that has not funded these mental health services. And lo and behold, the officers who control the environment learn to do so through brutality. And this guard, Bill Curtis said to me, You know, that’s what I learned, I learned that we’re understaffed. We don’t have rehabilitative programs, they outnumber us. The way you control this place is through threats and brutality and fear.
Josh Hoe
You know, one of my constant critiques of press coverage over the years of prisons and of incarceration is that they rarely try to humanize incarcerated people, even in death. And you talk about tracking down Darren’s family, which I thought was really great. Do you think that part of this psychology or what we would call this whole “dirty work” thing is that part of it relies on us having a collective investment in denying humanity to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people? Is that what enables that to happen to some extent?
Eyal Press
I think that that’s at the heart of the section of the book on prisons. It was very important to me to meet Darren Rainey’s family, and I met his brother. And he showed me pictures of Darren as a young man. He showed me the house that they grew up in, I met some of the neighbors who told me they missed seeing Darren around. And, you know, it’s only through encounters like that, it’s only through particular stories, that reporters like myself can push past the invisibility and the stereotypes. And I think that, again, to emphasize, if not for a prisoner who had blown the whistle and leaked the story, Darren Rainey might have died, and no one would have heard about it. But beyond that, the photograph of him that appeared in the Miami Herald was of a man labeled prisoner, schizophrenic, in his prison smocks; in the end, it’s dehumanizing. I mean, it makes of that person something “other” to so many people who, you know, see convicts and prisoners as an “out-group” and use those terms to separate them out. But, you know, from everything I know, Darren Rainey, like so many, winds up in and out of jail, through much of his life, because of the criminalization of poverty and mental illness. He’s someone who does not have access to services that people in wealthy neighborhoods have. He’s someone who struggles to find work and to earn a paycheck. And if we just pull back from the particular to think about the broader structural forces here, we again have to reckon with the fact that jails and prisons are our largest mental health institutions in this country. And so it’s not just Darren Rainey, it’s 10s of 1000s of people every year, who are cycling through these facilities, and whose lives and well-being are sacrificed.
Josh Hoe
We just got past the 20th Anniversary of 911. And in virtually none of the hundreds of hours of discussion on the news networks did I see anyone mourn both the loss of the lives of US citizens and the loss of civilians killed by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, the people taken to dark sites, tortured and later released, the people torture in Abu Ghraib, the people released from Guantanamo Bay, or civilians killed by drone strikes; drone operators are the second form of dirty work that you highlight in the book. What are your thoughts, given that we just passed this milestone? And what should people know about this part of the book?
Eyal Press
I think that again, to return to the main theme, when you talk about dirty work, I define it as something that society depends on and tacitly condones, but doesn’t want to hear too much about. Well think of drone strikes, right? Tacitly condoned, but we don’t want to hear too much about. After the invasion of Iraq, and the collapse in a sense of the scenario that the proponents of that war sold the country, you know, they’ll welcome us and democracy will follow, and so forth. Well, that didn’t work out and you had billions of dollars being spent and soldiers coming home with PTSD or even worse in coffins. America was exhausted by this and popular opinion turned against the wars. And so what did we do at that point? What we did is we continued the wars through more tacit and hidden means, namely, special operation forces, operating without much oversight and scrutiny, and drone strikes on a geographically limitless scale. You know, just basically we carry them out where we think a terrorist is, whether we’re at war with that nation or not. And so that’s the first premise to the drone section; it fits very much with what I’m talking about. On the other hand, you know, I think a lot of listeners might say, Wait, your book is titled Dirty Work. Drones? Aren’t drones precision weapons and precision strikes? And don’t the people at the, who are sort of in the kill chain in these strikes, aren’t they just playing video games? Isn’t this a sort of disembodied, almost clean form of warfare? And I can say more about that. But basically, my conclusion is that that’s something of a myth.
Josh Hoe
Yeah, feel free. I know that you talk about the psychological trauma that a lot of the people who end up doing that work end up feeling, and also this kind of weird disconnect, where they feel like they’re not really soldiers, or at least they’re told they’re not really soldiers in the same way that the people who are in theater feel like they’re soldiers, but still have a lot of the same things they have to work through. Is that correct?
Eyal Press
Absolutely. And so, again, central to my definition of dirty work is that it doesn’t just cause social harm, but it also harms the people who do it, whether through psychic and emotional wounds that they sustain or through just a sense of stigma and devaluing, the sense of being devalued. And if you think about the military, the one derogatory term for people in the drone program is joystick warriors, right? These are not real soldiers, these are people who play Nintendo. And in fact, when the military at one point proposed giving a medal of honor to some people in this program, there were complaints from veterans from conventional soldiers, some of whom said, this is what? This is a Nintendo medal, this isn’t a medal for valor. And yet, what’s so striking is that we as a society have sanctioned this form of warfare that has become popular because it doesn’t, you know, the same risks, of casualties, to our side are not there. But there are actual risks. And they’re different. What I suggest, and what I write about in the section of the book, is the psychic toll that you touched on earlier. Society may not be seeing the strikes and who they hit, and the blown-up buildings and have a feeling that maybe we hit the right target, maybe not, but the people who do this day in and day out, they do see that, and in fact, the studies by the military suggest they are exposed to more graphic violence than conventional soldiers just by virtue of sitting there hour after hour and seeing this, and yet they’re not on the battlefield, right, there’s not the same esprit de corps, there’s not the same camaraderie. And so the psychic impact is a very different one. And through everything we know, and through the stories I tell, are very powerful and potentially damaging.
Josh Hoe
Next, you turn to citizens and immigrants working on the kill floors and meatpacking plants. There’s so much to talk about here. But given everything that has happened with immigration over the last five or six years, and what happened with essential workers at the plants during COVID, this seems to really highlight how we tend to both demonize and count on the same people. And often we both demonize and count on them at the exact same times. So what did you learn from the time you spent with folks working in these plants?
Eyal Press
Yeah, in that section of the book, I spoke mostly to workers at a poultry slaughterhouse in Texas. Most of the people I interviewed were undocumented. Now, some people will say, Well, why are they even in this country, they shouldn’t be doing these jobs. Well, take a look at the meat and poultry industry and who works in it. And how a kind of deliberate recruitment in effect has taken place whereby, as meatpacking became, the line speeds increased, the rates of injury grew, the unions that had pushed for higher wages and better conditions were defeated. And kind of had setbacks and were replaced by non-unionized workers. The industry turned increasingly to a labor force consisting of immigrants, and often undocumented people, and sometimes refugees from wars from other countries. People desperate for work, people easily manipulable and often afraid. And why are they afraid? Well, you know, they want to keep their jobs. They may not speak the language. And furthermore, they’re aware that, as we saw under the Trump administration, there are raids. There was a very big ICE raid on a meatpacking plant in Tennessee. And I can tell you that the echo of that was heard across the country in the meatpacking industry. In fact, I wrote about a plant in Texas, but I spent time in another state, thinking I would write about a plant there. And no one would talk to me, not even under pseudonyms. And that was the first time that had happened to me; that even no names, no identifying information, they still wouldn’t talk. That was the level of fear. And it was related to the fear of being deported or ending up in an immigration detention center.
Josh Hoe
You also talk about the oil industry, in particular, the oil industry after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, eventually you suggest that the industry knows that they can get away with almost anything because America is addicted to cheap oil. It seems odd to me that the externalities never seem to get counted. I know, I personally won a national debate championship in 1990, arguing that we needed to take climate change seriously, that was 1990. And look where we’re at now; what do you want people to know about this form of dirty work?
Eyal Press
I write about a roustabout named Stephen Stone who was on the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico and caused huge environmental devastation and also killed many of his co-workers, Stephen’s co-workers. And one of the most striking and tragic things that Steven underwent afterward, he went to Washington, DC to a congressional hearing with his wife. And they’re there watching the members of Congress talk about this awful spill, and holding up pictures of the victims. But the pictures they held up were not of workers who had died. They were pictures of pelicans and the foul, and then the wildlife that had been affected. And of course, that’s important. It’s not that it isn’t important. But it was just striking, to the folks who were there, the workers and the family members of the workers who had died that, in a sense, the workers were forgotten, right? Because they’re dirty, because they work in this dirty industry, and they’re part of the problem. And, there’s no question that if you work in the oil industry, you are working in an industry that’s causing devastating environmental problems that we all have to contend with. But let’s note that most of the senators, and all of them, I assume, in that room, probably drove to that hearing. Or if they didn’t drive to that hearing, they drove at some point, you know, and put gas into their vehicles and our lifestyles are dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. America burns, I think, roughly a quarter of the world’s fossil fuels. So it’s not lost on people like Stephen Stone that on the one hand, you want to condemn the workers, the roustabouts, and on the other hand, you want your lifestyle, you want your freedom to consume and burn fossil fuels. So as a society, we have definitely not reckoned with that.
Josh Hoe
The last topic you cover in the book is what you call “dirty tack”. It’s kind of like the other end of dirty work. And there are two things that I thought were particularly interesting here. One is this difference that you suggest between holistic versus prescriptive technologies, and the ability to break up work so that people doing the work don’t necessarily understand how it might eventually be deployed. Do you want to talk a little more about that?
Eyal Press
Sure. We’ve seen in the last 5-10 years, a real dramatic shift in the tech industry, which had this aura of virtue surrounding it, pretty much from the 90s on down, as companies were working, bringing out these magical devices that everybody was carrying around enthralled with, and we still are enthralled with those devices. But what we’ve seen from the tech world in more recent years is a real questioning of what this is doing to us, attention spans, to the circulation of propaganda on social media sites that are targeted really to brainwash people, on down to things like programs, and I write about one of them at Google, to supply a search engine that would be featured in China, that would allow the Chinese government to screen out terms like democracy, right, so all these ethical questions start rising. And I think a lot of people in the tech world are now asking themselves, how clean is this industry? How virtuous is it? But one of the differences, which was pointed out to me really by a former Google worker, is that when you’re working in tech, it’s much easier to separate yourself from the task, from the end result of the task, and in that sense, to kind of see what you’re doing is value-neutral, right? You are not the person who designed the spyware that was used to track down dissidents, a story that recently hit the national news – an Israeli company selling spyware that went to governments that (Pegasus) but you know, it’s very easy in the tech world, from what I understand, very few people are actually putting their fingers directly on that, on I’m the person who designed a spyware; it’s segmented out and broken down in such a way that you can diffuse responsibility. And so it becomes much easier to, in a sense, disavow any involvement. I think the second thing that’s different about tech, people in tech – and for that matter, any high-paying profession, any prestigious high-paying profession, where there may be ethical questions that trouble some of the people doing it – is that if you’re working in a white-collar profession that is very well-paid, you have a lot more flexibility and a bigger cushion to shift jobs, right, you’ve got these skills that are very marketable, you may have the ability to move or to buy a home somewhere else or just to take some time away, and use some of the money you earned. These choices are not available to prison guards. These choices are not available to slaughterhouse workers. So dirty work, I think we have to think about it as something that’s shaped by power, by class, by privilege, by race. Those things very much determine who ends up doing it and who doesn’t. But that’s not to say that these ethical questions don’t arise in every profession. And indeed they do.
Josh Hoe
The second thing I wanted to talk about real quickly, is that you raise the idea that soon people might no longer be necessary to doing these jobs, that algorithms and robots might replace the essential dirty worker. You don’t spend too much time on it in the book. But there’s been a decent amount of pushback against the idea that robots will replace human jobs. But what’s interesting here is that these are jobs that need to be done, but we want to pretend we aren’t responsible for them, so what are your thoughts on this potential transition where dirty work becomes automated dirty work, I guess?
Eyal Press
Yeah, I think I think that’s a real possibility. Because I think as you say, the temptation to have, oh, it’s just a machine doing it, it’s an algorithm. It’s not a person. You know, no one individual authorized that. That strike took place in a distant place because a machine detected a threat. And in a similar way, actually, with oil drilling and with fossil fuels, there’s this very real possibility that the high-tech world will make it possible to detect and drill for and find fossil fuels in ways that eliminate the number of roustabouts and drillers and dredgers that are hired to do this kind of work. What won’t go away is the social impact and the potential harm to society. So, you know, I think that that is something to be concerned about. I don’t go into it in-depth, in part because I am in the camp of those who think we’re a little bit overselling the degree to which the future is one in which robots will do it all. You know, in fact, people talk about drone strikes as unmanned aerial vehicles. And one person in the program spoke very heatedly to me about that and said, that’s so wrong. It’s hyper-manned. There are so many eyes on, you know, layers, from the imagery analysts, to the sensor operators, to the pilots, to the commanders to … it’s a chain of human decision-making. And I think that’s probably likely, at least in the immediate future.
Josh Hoe
I feel like the book in some ways is kind of a critique of democracy, or at least the blind spots of democracy, or maybe not blind spots, it might even be that they’re not blind spots, they are spots that we know of, but then ignore; do you see any hope for us? Can we become a democratic society that is empathetic to these people and places? And can we change these darker places in our own political and real world?
Eyal Press
I don’t have a crystal ball. But I am not someone who has a simple black and white view of human nature; I think that it all depends on the incentives. And on what we do collectively, actually, because one of the conclusions of my book is that although we are all implicated in dirty work, in that sense the responsibility for it is shared, the solutions to it are also shared and have to be collective, right? If we want to change, if we don’t want to read about stories like Darren Rainey’s 10 years from now, we need to address the issue of relying on jails and prisons to warehouse the mentally ill. It’s not going to change if one person runs out and helps one person in one particular place. That’s a magnanimous act. It’s an act of compassion, I applaud it. But it won’t change the larger structure of things unless as a society, we’re willing to see these deeper structures and patterns. And so the book is really about those deeper structures. And it’s a call for awareness in a sense of what we’re tolerating, that maybe we really shouldn’t.
Josh Hoe
This season, I’m asking people if there are criminal justice-related books they might recommend to others; do you have any personal favorites?
Eyal Press
I do. I would love to recommend a book called Marking Time by Nicole Fleetwood. Nicole Fleetwood is an American Studies professor, now at NYU, at New York University. But she’s written this wonderful book about the art that is made in jails and prisons by incarcerated people. And it’s nuanced and complex and very much humanizes both the artists and takes seriously the work, and also draws a lot of attention to the constraints that those who create this art live under. So it’s a really important book and one I’d highly recommend.
Josh Hoe
That’s really interesting. I just came back a couple days ago from the opening of an art exhibit. It’s actually six art exhibits at the Broad Museum here in Lansing, that are formerly incarcerated artists …. So that’s really great. That’s a great recommendation.
I always ask the same last question. What did I mess up? What should I have asked but did not?
Eyal Press
I think you did a great job. The one big thing I would say is that,
I was gonna say that the other thing I hope that people will get out of my book is it’s just a set of powerful human stories. And, you know, we’ve talked a lot about really difficult ethical decisions and grim consequences of those decisions. But the people in the book are, to me, people we can learn from, they’re not just people who are caught up in awful systems making decisions that are compromising. There are also people who display courage, at some points, who display their vulnerability – in the case of the drone operators I got to know – and their humanity. And I think that, what I hope, is that the impulse to judge what these folks do is tempered by a sense of, How different would I have acted in that situation? And maybe I shouldn’t just leap to condemn and think about the larger structures that led to this?
Josh Hoe
Are there places where people can find you, or places you would prefer people try to find the book?
Eyal Press
Sure. If you live in or near, a community, or near a community with an independent bookstore, a community bookstore, please get a copy there, if you can. Dirty Work is certainly available on Amazon and can be ordered online. But we need to support community bookstores, especially in this pandemic, which has been so hard for so many small businesses. You can follow me on Twitter, the handle is my name, Eyal Press, the at symbol, and I have a website, www.eyalpress.com. Again, just my name dot com. And I post, talks, journalism I’ve done and information about my books. So thanks very much I and hope to hear from people.
Josh Hoe
Yeah, thanks again Eyal for doing this. It is a real pleasure to have you on the podcast.
And now my take.
We are about to enter into a 2022 election cycle where Republicans are running on tough on crime and Democrats are running to shore up their tough on crime credentials. Meanwhile, there is still no evidence that our current approach to crime, unleashing police to arrest, prosecutors to charge, judges to sentence, and prisons to destroy people, utterly does one damn thing to reduce crime. The causes of crime are only exacerbated by our punishment system. Rather than giving the over 96% of incarcerated people who will one day return to society, hope for a meaningful future, we continue to pile trauma on top of trauma and return people broken and without opportunities or even a safe living space. We spend over $80 billion a year on policing and over $80 billion a year on incarceration. God knows how much crime might have been prevented if we actually took a deep breath, looked at the total disaster the system is in its face, and actually started investing in something, anything that might work better than this absurdity we call a criminal justice system. But despite this, get ready for a full year of politicians tripping over themselves to double down on all these failed ideas, while the press continues to fan the flames of fear of crime. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. I started this podcast in part to be part of building a coalition of people who wouldn’t fall for this nonsense anymore. But sadly, our movement still has a lot more work to do. So make sure and speak out. Stand up. Keep fighting. And don’t listen to this nonsense that we’re about to hear in 2022.
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Thanks so much for listening; see you next time!
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