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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 9h

🤣

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 9h

For context I study medieval crime and punishment, again, I have made my own bed here

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 9h

I have absolutely brought this upon myself but when I hear from old friends out of the blue it’s shocking how often the opener is “I found this description of a torture chamber and it made me think of you 🥰”

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Reposted by Elise Wang

Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 1d

One of my favorite medieval dudes is a guy named Sir Hugh Eland, a knight who started his career by pillaging his neighbors and ended it as a noble advocate for prison reform (from behind the bars of Nottingham jail).

Medieval story time!

onion person @junlper.beer · 2d

just found out that about a week ago, while george santos has been in solitary confinement, that he wrote that due to the inhuman conditions he is facing he is now pro prison reform. just unreal stuff honestly

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, I paced in circles like a restless ghost.
The windows were frosted, allowing only a faint suggestion of daylight and nightfall, enough to remind me that time was passing, though I had little sense of how.
The shower water was always cold, and my only amenities were the steel toilet and sink fused together in the corner. It was a miserable existence. Yet, as I soon learned, misery can always be deepened
On September 7th, the warden's office saw fit to move me into something far worse, an even smaller cell, no more than seven by nine feet, coated in filth, reeking of neglect, and utterly devoid of natural light or ventilation.
In that suffocating shoebox, there is no room to walk, no hint of the sun, no trace of humanity. The silence is crushing.
The air feels stale. The walls themselves seem to close in. I keep asking myself: will this barbaric confinement ever end? Is this legal under our Constitution, or have I simply been erased from the protections of due process?
Most haunting of all, will I survive it? With no access to my family, no calls, no emails, and with letters that may never leave this building, I live in total darkness, cut off from the world I once fought to serve.
Let me be blunt: I find Warden Kelly's so-called "protection" not only unpalatable, but cruel and unjustifiable. My time here has opened my eyes to a truth far too many ignore: America desperately needs prison reform.

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Reposted by Elise Wang

Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 1d

Remember we're already in a world of Kavanaugh stops based solely on ethnicity. If you are from a targeted group, this can happen to you no matter what your citizenship status is. What if you forget your wallet at home? You could end up in detention for days or worse.

Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · 1d

Do you want to live in a "papers, please" country?

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 1d

Sorry, no happy ending here. But I’ve thought a lot about that letter, and how to weigh my contempt for his sudden conscience with a desire to welcome help from any quarter. I don’t know. But George Santos made me think of my old friend Hugh, a grifter to the end.

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 1d

The king offers him instead a chance to turn approver, or king’s evidence. Sir Hugh takes it, and lives out the rest of his life happily ratting out his compatriots.

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 1d

The king, it turns out, listens! He holds another jail delivery (where everyone is tried and the jail cleared) within a few months. He does not, however, fix the conditions. And like so many consciences found late in life, Sir Hugh’s is short-lived.

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 1d

It’s quite a letter: moving, even. It’s hard not to believe he meant every word, despite his pastime of, err, robbing people for sport and getting away with it. He gives a terrible description of people starving and how their bodies pale and desiccate, how they cry and then stop crying.

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 1d

The jail is full of disease and stale air, he writes, and many people die from the conditions alone. The delays are intolerable: there hasn’t been a trial held here in over a year, and so prisoners just wait, and while they wait they die. If they have no one to bring them food, they die faster.

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 1d

There, Sir Hugh had an epiphany. Jails were terrible, miserable places, and our poor knight was SHOCKED. He broke out his best French and wrote directly to the king (knights could do that) “on behalf of the poor prisoners of the jail of Nottingham.”

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 1d

This time it seemed Hugh was going down for it. He had even gotten his household in on it; his cook was brought up for aiding and abetting. He was sent to Nottingham jail to await trial (jails weren’t usually punishment in that time, they were used to hold people before trial).

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 1d

But at long last, the good people of Doncaster had enough. Sir Hugh was finally charged with robbing his neighbor, Robert de Burton, of gold spoons, necklaces, rings, and cups to the tune of 40 pounds. That’s about the price of keeping, feeding, and supplying a knight’s entire household for a year.

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 1d

Conviction rates were low (12-18% for felony), and Sir Hugh (as you might be able to tell from the whole knight thing) was well-connected, rich, and powerful. So he got off. And off again. And again. He was brought up on charges at least eight (8!) times that I can find.

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 1d

In 1367, he was charged with setting his servants to rob his neighbors’s tenants. He got off, and in retaliation for the charge, he stole 2 goblets from this neighbor’s dining set, worth a pound, or about the price of a work horse.

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 1d

He was born in Doncaster mid-1300s and his favorite thing to do seems to have been robbing his neighbors for sport. He didn’t need to—he was a knight and had plenty of land. He just seems to have done it for the love of the game.

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 1d

One of my favorite medieval dudes is a guy named Sir Hugh Eland, a knight who started his career by pillaging his neighbors and ended it as a noble advocate for prison reform (from behind the bars of Nottingham jail).

Medieval story time!

onion person @junlper.beer · 2d

just found out that about a week ago, while george santos has been in solitary confinement, that he wrote that due to the inhuman conditions he is facing he is now pro prison reform. just unreal stuff honestly

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 2d

Cornelius Vanderbilt is that you

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 2d

Please submit through Concur

🏰meg⚔️ @Birthright Audiobook! @impavid.us · 5d

In honor of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand

I'll go first: Six page commercial lease.

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 2d

I mean also

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 2d

I think you’re right, because they were hoping to give the sacrament to the detained people, so they would have brought the ciborium with them.

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 2d

Sending love

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 2d

A truly surprising amount

Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 3d

I swear I’ll get back to my regularly scheduled medieval content soon but it’s just that I’ve only been a medievalist for about 18 years and I’ve been an immigrant Catholic Chicagoan all my life so actually this IS my area of expertise

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Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 3d

I should point out that I’m lapsed, but as a friend of mine once put it about cradle Catholics, “you can never really leave the church. The farthest you can get is the foyer, and you can still hear the hymns from there.”

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