Timothée Bârrus/ I Keep Bumping Into Concrete Walls

I am so over people thumping their religious chests as they exclaim that they are advocates of family values and that they value children. The hypocrisy is astounding. The statistics paint a different picture of a culture that infects children and throws them away. America doesn’t simply deal with kids with serious problems, it trashes them and locks the prison door behind them.

Prison is where many of them become infected with HIV.

HIV that will now cost the price the market bears for antiretrovirals for the rest of the infected person’s life.

Forty states have now passed laws that prosecute juveniles as adults.

There are 23,000 cases of HIV in American prison systems. One percent of the American public is incarcerated.

HIV transmission in prison is eight times the rate of HIV transmission outside of prison.

There are many urban jail settings that allow condoms, but only two state prison systems actively distribute them. Most states cite security concerns although no state has been able to document that such concerns are valid. Eighty percent of newly diagnosed cases of post-prison (such as parole) HIV infection occurred in prison.

93% of all male juveniles imprisoned with adults are raped.

Prisoners are not encouraged to get tested once they are released from the prison system yet twenty percent of released prisoners are eventually diagnosed with HIV. If we wanted to construct an HIV pool of infection, we have no further to look than at the draconian prison system as it exists in America. Any juvenile incarcerated in any part of the system in the States, is immediately at-risk for HIV.

HIV itself is being institutionally used as a vehicle of punishment by a system of indifference to the ubiquitous transmission of HIV where the subgroup bearing the most risk and the most positive diagnosis rate are teenage boys.

What “families” value isn’t children. There is no evidence to indicate such a misinformed idea, and there is a lot of evidence to suggest otherwise.

I have seen lots and lots of photographic essays that document life in prison. But I have never seen one with a focus on HIV as it affects a juvenile prison population. The status quo is one of institutional secrecy, stigma, and sexual violence. Some photographer with balls and the ability to worm his way into the system to document it is sorely needed. It will never happen. 1.) The prisons won’t allow it. 2.) It would be a lot of work for very little and very probably no return. 3.) Selling such a collection of photos would be just about impossible because no editor will even look at them. 4.) Why bother.

The problem is too big and too fraught with controversy (condoms in prison is still a controversy) to make it worth any photographers time and resources.

Kids’ lives are at stake.

The reality is that no one gives a flying fuck. America does not value families. It values class.

Here’s the thing: you take a kid who is being abused at home, and the kid runs away. Running away is a crime. Kids go to jail for breaking what is called the juvenile code. The kid is abused at home, runs away, and is arrested for running away at which point he is incarcerated by judges whose job is to punish.

There are more rapes in juvenile holding facilities than in state prisons. The more you push for the kid to be punished, you have taken a kid who was being abused and now you have almost guaranteed that he will leave the system with HIV.

When is enough abuse enough.

If you look at the history of the different states’ juvenile justice codes, it becomes clear that ALL of them are directly fundamentally evolved from historical British jurisprudence that was about a white male’s PROPERTY, and that property was to include livestock, children, and the wife.

If you want young men to stop sexualizing who they are, then you need to start constructing a culture in which they can actualize themselves without having to sell themselves. 

It’s the market economy you love, remember. 

Why are they selling themselves. 

It’s all they have. They are surviving as best they can. 

If you don’t want to see images of sexualized children, then you need to start creating a culture in which children are not defined by sexual contexts. Get it. 

Probably not. 

Let me put it another way. If children are going to stop selling themselves as sexual commodities, then the people who constitute the DEMAND for the PRODUCT will have to eliminate the DEMAND. Don’t put it on the kid and don’t put it on me. 

Put it where it belongs because it belongs with you.

"Selling Jeans"

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