Prison advocacy

I am so tempted to say today is the day the world ends.. But while half of me is in despair, the other half says rise up and overcome. We have had bad presidents before, this is nothing new and I shouldn't be so surprised by my country. We will get through this, friends. We shall overcome.

Resistance. I cannot push this enough. Resist when the government argues against basic human rights. Resist ignorance. Resist hate. Resist believing that you are disposable! You matter and you have the right to life, to education, to your own body, to vote, to ANY job, to health care, to treatment, to shelter/food/and clothing, to wear what you want, to love who you want, to live where you want, to speak how you want, etc.

One movement happening globally is the abolition of the prison system.

This is particularly important in America due to the way the prisons have replaced slavery for black lives.

This is especially important as we enter into this new presidency in America which would love nothing more than to privatize more prisons. Welcome to the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC)

Our current system of incarceration as the actual punishment of crimes came to be around the time of the American Revolution when we decided to replace the old capital and corporal punishment system. Before becoming the actual punishment, imprisonment was just the time spent detained while waiting for the capital/corporal punishment. At that time the punishment was largely public, serving to warn the wider population not to do what the criminal did. These punishments included lashing/whipping, amputations, branding and other forms of torture, exile, being buried alive, burned, hung, etc. The change in the penitentiary system was an attempt to be more humane. Punishment became imprisonment by the belief that if people were given the chance to think about what they had done, they would be reformed.

Prison sentencing, then "was always computed in terms of time." (Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?) This was also during the Age of Reason and the time when "the value of labor began to be calculated in terms of time and therefore compensated in another quantifiable way, by money. The computability of state punishment in terms of time -days, months, years- resonates with the role of labor-time as the basis for computing the value of capitalist commodities." (Davis) This gives birth to modern day sentencing for criminal acts.

In 1777, John Howard was the guy for penal reform in England. He led the drive for imprisonment based on the need for time for "religious self-reflection and self-reform." Many years later in the 1980s, John Bender published a study that the three main goals are: "maintenance of order within a largely urban labor force, salvation of the soul, and rationalization of personality." (Davis) Then between 1787 and 1791, philosopher Jeremy Bentham published the prison model that America mainly uses today. He "claimed that criminals could only internalize productive labor habits if they were under constant surveillance." In order to be constantly watched, Bentham laid out what a prison might look like. - all prisoners would live in single cells and the cell would face a guard tower that allowed the warden to see them at all times, but they could not see the warden or other prisoners. He felt that if they were under the impression they were always being watched then they would be their best selves. This was first brought to Pennsylvania where prisoners in "total isolation in single cells where prisoners lived, ate, worked, read the Bible (if indeed they were literate), and supposedly reflected and repented." It was then adapted in New York by allowing prisoners to work together, but they still were not allowed to talk to one another. (Davis)

The system is very old and although the intentions were good, we have seen how solitary confinement is a quick path to insanity. Charles Dickens wrote about this poor attempt at being more humane, saying "I am only more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in it which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body... because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear." He later said that this punishment does not release better citizens back into the world, but rather brings them back into society "morally unhealthy and diseased." This only gets worse when we realize that there are more mentally ill citizens in prison than there are in actual mental health facilities in this country.

We now have super-maximum prisons where prisoners have 23 hours of solitary confinement. You might say, 'yes but these are only meant for the most dangerous citizens!', but that is not reality. The most abuse comes from "temporary containment" as people wait to be transfered where they are "supposed" to go, wait on bail, or wait for court. Lets not even mention all the people who are innocent and behind bars in this country.

The Prison Industrial Complex thus has been born. This has changed the goals of our system from being a transformation to being a means of profit. The PIC is closely intertwined with the military industrial complex and together they "generate huge profits from processes of social destruction" and "the transformation of imprisoned bodies -and they are in their majority bodies of color- into sources of profit who consume and also often produce all kinds of commodities, devours public funds, which might otherwise be available for social programs such as education, housing, childcare, recreation, and drug programs." (Davis)

The PIC must guarantee that prisons will remain full. How could you guarantee such a thing?

Well, hopefully I have made it quite clear in earlier posts that America has done a fine job of establishing communities ripe for sending people to prison. America has also done quite a great job at putting people in prison for very minor things. It's almost guaranteed that every single person in America has broken the law so there is surely no shortage. Have you changed lanes while driving without turning on your signal? Have you jaywalked recently? Have you walked outside with your pants sagging a little too low? Played your music a little too loud? Driven with a broken taillight? Such stupid things are exactly what bring, mainly black lives, to the prison system. This isn't new for people of color, though. All the way back in 1883, Frederick Douglass wrote about the way the South tended to "impute crime to color." Wow, not much has changed.

(Yes there are certainly a lot of other things that bring black lives to prison, but before you go ranting and raving about that again, try to recall just how America has put black lives into those positions and then blamed them for it. Instead of continuing to blame them, lets try to work towards reconciliation.)

Steven Donziger rightly points out that "for the supply of prisoners to grow, criminal justice policies must ensure a sufficient number of incarcerated Americans regardless of whether crime is rising or the incarceration is necessary." (The Real War on Crime: Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission)

After the War on Drugs was proclaimed and the Crime bill was passed, prisons sprang up like wildfire all over the country. People were being sentenced to longer terms and this made way for the rise of the PIC in the 21st century. "Longer prison terms mean greater profit, but the larger point is that the profit motive promotes the expansion of imprisonment." Mary Ann Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World

The CCA and Wackenhut control almost all of the private prison market in the world. You can find a map of the CCA prisons in America here. The documentary The 13th does an amazing job at showing how the CCA works with other organizations, like ALEC, that politically pursue their own interests. "ALEC is a political lobbying group.. they write laws and give them to Republicans... Stand Your Ground was written by ALEC." This law allowed George Zimmerman to get away with killing Trayvon Martin.

"This means that in the era of the prison industrial complex, activists must pose hard questions about the relationship between global capitalism and the spread of U.S.-style prisons throughout the world." Angela Y. Davis.

The movement, then, against the PIC is a lot like the Black Lives Matter movement. They are "antiracist, anticapitalist, antisexist, and antihomophobic" because they too believe that we cannot be free unless ALL are free.

Davis says the "major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system."

We must call for:

"less violent conditions

the end to state sexual assault

improved physical and mental health care

access to drug programs

better educational work opportunities

unionization of prison labor

more connections with families and communities

shorter or alternative sentencing

and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, no more prison construction, and and abolitionist strategies that question the place of the prison in our future" (Davis)

We must accept that there is not a one-system approach that will suit as an alternative system of punishment. We must also accept that we are not looking for similar substitutes like house arrest with ankle bracelets. What we want is decarceration. Lets "try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment - demilitarization of schools,

revitalization of education at all levels,

a health system that provides free physicals and mental care to all,

and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation." (Davis)

We must make education a priority. Davis explains how schools are the "most powerful alternative to jails and prisons," so lets turn all schools into "places that encourage the joy of learning" and make them "vehicles for decarceration." Health care is also a priority, especially making sure care is available to the poor and those who suffer from mental and emotional illnesses. It is also a priority to "address racism, male domination, homophobia, class bias." We must decriminalize drug use and offer alternatives to tackle the problems of drugs that are outside the criminal justice system. We must defend immigrant rights and the rights of women. Lets push for alternatives that include "job and living wage programs, alternatives to the disestablished welfare program, community based recreation, and many more." (Davis)

Scholar Herman Bianchi suggests moving from criminal law to reparative law. He says, "The lawbreaker is thus no longer and evil-minded man or women, but simply a debtor, a liable person whose human duty is to take responsibility for his or her acts, and to assume the duty of repair."

We have a long way to go and a lot to do.. but I believe in us and I believe there are too many lives on the line to sit back and do nothing.