prisonabolitionblog

[prisonabolitionblog]

Welcome

Hello everyone, my name is Sophie. I am passionate about human rights issues and social justice; and I want to create a conversation around the prison complex in American society. The prison system and institution is inherently oppressive and abusive. The violations of prisoners’ human rights are atrocious and the epidemic needs to be addressed. Today, there are approximately 2.3 million people incarcerated and exploited by the criminal justice system, which makes the United States the largest prison population in the world. In addition, compared to other prisons around the world, we have some of the worst conditions and some of the least regard for human rights. Especially since COVID-19, we have witnessed more abusive and dangerous conditions than ever before. I am going to delve into how prison abolition needs to be advocated for instead of prison reform. An institution like prisons cannot just be reformed, it runs too deep to put a bandaid fix over it. You can make the conditions better, sure, but does that solve the problem? No. Prisons are a human rights crisis that is a form of modern slavery, you can’t and should not want to reform slavery. The call to abolition of the prison system is a call to abolish slavery. Prisons are a punitive system that focuses purely on punishment instead of crime control and reduction. Recessive rates are high, as most ex-prisoners end up back in prison. Prisons are not solving our crimes, they are contributing to them. I am going to explore four key topics surrounding the overuse of prisons: Racism within the prison system, the relationship of capitalism and mass incarceration, the avoidance of confronting social issues that lead to crime, and abolition versus reform.

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Racism Within the Prison and Criminal Justice System

[prisonabolitionblog]

Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

Michelle Alexander

[prisonabolitionblog]

Michelle Alexander is a sensational lawyer and author who wrote The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, her book is an exceptional break down of modern-day slavery and it’s relationship with the criminal justice system. Jim Crow occurred in the 19th and 20th century are these were state laws that legalized racial segregation and enabled slavery. Many white Americans consider that slavery ended with the 13th amendment; however, the 13th amendment simply redesigned the appearance of slavery into what became the Jim Crow laws. Alexander highlights how racism and Jim Crow have evolved into mass incarceration, a modern version of racialized inequality. Alexander’s exceptional theories and digestible perspectives shed light on the racial disparities that are currently occurring in the United States. The 13th amendment created a loophole to endorse and continue enslaving BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color) through the criminal justice system. The prison system has a leading role in modern American enslavement. Prisons are repressive, oppressive, and abusive. Prisons within themselves are a horrible violation of humans rights but they also belong to a carceral system that inhibits oppression. Human rights and constitutional rights are stolen from felons, creating a climate of high recessive rates. 

The prison system is a vortex of repeated deviant offenses that are constructed by the rich one percent and are dispersed to working-class people. The conditions felons, especially black folx, are put in are inhumane and create more violence than it prevents. Prisons do not address crime because white supremacy is the foundation of American values and white Americans benefit from the oppression of incarcerated BIPOC. Our criminal justice system is racist and the general population of white Americans enables mass incarceration by voting for politicians that support prisons. The United States government never had the intention of giving freedom to BIPOC, they clearly wanted another way to continue profiting off the labor and oppression of people of color.

[prisonabolitionblog]

...critiques of the prison industrial complex undertaken by abolitionist activists and scholars are very much linked to critiques of the global persistence of racism. Antiracist and other social justice movements are incomplete with attention to the politics of imprisonment.

Angela Y. Davis

[prisonabolitionblog]

Global racism is the epicenter of most political issues in the world. Global racism should be centered in your mind when having these important conversations, especially when discussing systematic oppression within prisons. Remember that prisons are universal, it is not exclusive to just the United States, however, we are the most heinous when it comes to our carceral systems. Angela Davis is one of my all-time favorite scholars, an academic and a Black Panther member, she is a brilliant and accessible educator that I will quote a lot in my blog, her insights are crucial to abolitionist perspectives. Davis makes a connection between politics and prisons which I think slips the minds of many people who are new to this conversation. It is within the political hemisphere to encourage the use of prisons and push the white political agenda in America; especially a political agenda that supports white supremacy and the oppression of BIPOC. Just like our founding father’s ownership of plantations, many present congressmen have large sums of money invested in prisons. In fact, many private prisons are owned by the same few people, it is an industry. Since black people are unequivocally imprisoned at a higher percentage, it is clearly within the US government’s agenda to subjugate and imprison black folx. Ending prisons is one step towards reconciling white supremacy and addressing historical atrocities.

[prisonabolitionblog]

So herein lies the paradox and predicament of young black men labeled criminals. A war has been declared on them, and they have been rounded up for engaging in precisely the same crimes that go largely ignored in middle-and upper-class white communities—possession.

Michelle Alexander 

[prisonabolitionblog]

I love this quote because Michelle Alexander focalizes the racial discrimination in our criminal justice system, white folks commit just as many crimes, if not more. White crime is underlooked and forgiven within our society especially since the white elites are running the political agenda in America. White elites are committing crimes of human trafficking, money laundry, tax fraud, war crimes, and so much more; the laws in place within our society are set up to subjugate the working-class people and BIPOC. White communities are extremely under policed compared to inner cities and minority communities. Our criminal justice system and police are looking for a specific group of people to imprison and it is all correlated with racial oppression and enabling slavery. The prison systems are racially motivated because the foundation of America is built on the exploitation of BIPOC, it has only become modernized in the sense of how it is performed: plantations to prisons.

[prisonabolitionblog]

Capitalism's Relationship to The Prison System

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The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison. There are thus real and often quite complicated connections between the deindustrialization of the economy—a process that reached its peak during the 1980s—and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began to spiral during the Reagan-Bush era. However, the demand for more prisons was represented to the public in simplistic terms. More prisons were needed because there was more crime. Yet many scholars have demonstrated that by the time the prison construction boom began, official crime statistics were already falling.

Angela Y. Davis

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Let’s delve into prisons for profit because capitalism is an essential component to understand the oppressive prison institution. The United States of America’s lack of interest in improving society’s inequalities that lead to the highest incarceration rate in the world is purposeful. The ruling class, who owns all of the private prisons, wants one thing and one thing only: money. It does not matter if that profit is coming from exploited slave labor or oppressive isolation of human beings; the ONLY thing that matters is capital. They throw someone in a cell to make a profit is far more important to the politicians of America than actually solving crime. You are poorly mistaken to believe prisons are here to prevent crime. Angela Davis makes that crystal clear, mass incarceration is a money maker. Capitalism is the engine of America, everything is constructed to function off the exploitation of working-class people and mainly BIPOC. The substantial overuse of prisons is due to the ruling class’s monopolized criminal justice system that is designed like a modernized plantation. Prisons have very little correlation with crime reduction, they are not serving the purpose that the general American public believes. The prison system is rigged to send people of color to prison and make sure when/if they get released that they will end up right back there. It is the cyclical cynicism of capitalism.

[prisonabolitionblog]

In 1996, a New York investment firm sounded the call: ‘While arrest and convictions are steadily on the rise, profits are to be made — profits from crime. Get in on the ground floor of this booming industry now.’ So what does it mean when locking people up becomes a profitable industry? For one, corporations and wealthy people will use their influence in the government to make sure that arrests and convictions continue to increase. And if the state gains more power the more people are afraid of crime and the more the police, the courts, and the prisons expand, then the government is likely to go along with it, or even lead the charge. In the prison-industrial complex, crime leads to profit and increased state power, so criminals become a resource to be mined. And because capitalism is based on growth, the number of people who are branded criminals, and turned into prisoners, must constantly increase. The way it works, prisons and police will never solve or even substantially decrease crime because their jobs depend on it. On the contrary, the police, the courts, and the prison system will work to perpetuate crime.

Patrick Lincoln & Peter Gelderloos

[prisonabolitionblog]

There is a lot to unpack in this quote. Let’s start with the investment firm’s call to profit off of slave labor. Politicians view the working-class people as commodities; we are objectified. Our government and white-collar workers are one and the same, they work for the same agenda. The rich construct what is considered deviant, there is a reason people like Donald Trump get away with tax fraud. Society does not emphasize enough that prisoners are people. Humans are being put in cement blocks like the abused animals in zoos. Convicted civilians are deprived of human rights such as socialization, privacy, and above all equality. For example, someone gets convicted for marijuana distribution and is labeled a criminal, however, this is the only employment opportunity available to this person. Should this person starve themselves to abide by the law or should they find any form of capital to maintain quality of life? The United States criminal justice system makes survival punishable. Most convicted felons are non-violent offenders yet, society has a notion that the majority of convicts are dangerous to society so they must be locked away in a cement block. We then force these prisoners to spend their day’s mass-producing commodities and necessities that society will use and buy while they suffer. Once someone is branded a criminal they lose the right to vote, employment opportunities, social welfare programs, housing, healthcare, basically all of their human rights are taken. Convicted felon’s recessive rate is high because there are zero opportunities for them to integrate economically and socially back into society. Capitalism can only sustain itself through exploitation otherwise the whole economic system would collapse. Instead, the wealthy ruling class would rather lock up disenfranchised individuals within our society, portray them as the enemy, destroy their quality of life, and extract their labor until their very last breath.

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The Avoidance of Confronting Societal Issues That Leads to Crime

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The prison, therefore, functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs—it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.

Angela Y. Davis

[prisonabolitionblog]

Capitalism is embedded in our criminal justice system. It becomes apparent that the goal of this system is not to prevent crime, it is to punish and reproduce. America’s criminal justice system is punitive, not a rehabilitative one which implies that the goal is not to end crime; it is to reproduce it and continue to punish to sustain capitalism. Without prisons, a massive chunk of the ruling class’s wealth will disappear. So instead of addressing crime, our society is constructed to reproduce it. Drug trafficking, sexual violence, gang violence, and stealing are a few examples of crimes that occur due to the neglect of resources and equality. Drug trafficking is a form of employment especially within communities that are deprived of resources. During the war on drugs the government pushed drugs into impoverished black communities with one goal: get them hooked on drugs and lock em up. Americans have a racist conception of drug usage in this country, while people judge the crack epidemic no one tends to pay any attention to white Wall Street elites snorting cocaine, which is crack but in a different form. There is barely any funding for healthcare initiatives to prevent drug usage. There is a lack of funding in creating employment opportunities for the poor working class folx. America specializes in increasing military funding, police funding, tax breaks for the rich, but they fail miserably in sustaining good quality of life for the working-class people. People are placed within environments with no positive outlets and they are forced to adapt in order to survive. When people try to survive in their environment, America’s criminal justice system is patiently waiting to subjugate, oppress, and imprison. Make no mistake, there is no freedom for the working-class people, you are a tool for the rich to get richer. You make one slip up and your whole life, journey, and the world will never be the same.

[prisonabolitionblog]

Many offenders are tracked for prison at early ages, labeled as criminals in their teen years, and then shuttled from their decrepit, underfunded inner-city schools to brand-new, high-tech prisons.

 Michelle Alexander