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You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.

Angela Y. Davis

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Group Discussion: 

1) The future of the PIC is headed toward a system where convicted criminals will be confined to their homes in the form of an advanced house arrest system. How do you conceive this kind of system? How does this present economic opportunity to private corporations? How will this change the visibility of the justice system?

2) What are the most productive first steps for breaking the PIC?  What alternatives are there to the PIC?  

3) Considering alternatives, what issues may arise and how can we prevent them?  How can we prevent alternative forms of justice (community policing, accountability) from turning into something similar to the PIC?  What would that look like and what work would have to be done?

4) Prison reform efforts primarily focus on men, are there ways in which the PIC leaves women or non-binary individuals especially vulnerable?

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CASES

Following suit of groups and organizations such as INCITE!, a group of women, gender non-conforming, and trans people of color working to end violence against women of color through education and grassroots organizing, generationFIVE, a group working to end child sexual abuse within five generations via transformative justice and meaningful community response, and CARA, the Coalition Against Rape and Abuse, a group committed to providing support for survivors through advocacy and community, we are all actively learning and trying to understand what it means to fully immerse ourselves in and participate in the practices of transformative justice. Especially in the case of violent crimes, crimes that we have been taught can only be punished and never forgiven, we lose touch of what accountability and community healing can and should mean. By participating in a penal system that cyclically perpetuates more violence onto aggressors and assigns monetary value to the trauma victims endure, we tend to traumatize the victims more and have no lasting effect when it comes to lessening the violence that caused said trauma in the first place.

For many identities, it can be all but impossible to find solace in the criminal justice system. Therefore, it is important to learn about and understand alternatives that can be, and should be, available to us. Participating in various forms of transformative justice and community healing, ultimately, will help us understand what creates violence, how to deescalate and prevent future violence, and how to effectively hold ourselves accountable for our collective actions.

Learning and understanding the frameworks that make transformative justice possible is just the first step to making them sustainable. In the next few paragraphs, we have collected and conflated various examples and case studies in which different groups and organizations are attempting to implement transformative justice into their everyday practices. Through these examples, we hope to spread awareness about this work so that other groups and organizations can eventually utilize this sort of progressive thinking.

In Mimi E. Kim’s “Moving Beyond Critique: Creative Interventions and Reconstructions of Community Accountability”, Kim recalls the summer of 2006. We are introduced to a Korean cultural community center in Oakland, California, in which a drumming teacher sexually assaulted one of the students. Instead of calling the authorities, bringing in the police, and sentencing him to institutional punishment, the community center hosted

a set of sexual assault awareness workshops for center members…an immediate telephone call to the head of the Korean drumming institution…The person who had committed the violation went through an extensive process with the group’s leaders and members (Kim 15)

Though it was a challenge, the community center worked to “take collective responsibility for ending the conditions that perpetuate violence, including collusion through silence” (15). They made the conscious decision to not involve the police, and in an ideological sense, the majority of the responsibility was put on the man who committed the sexual assault to hold himself accountable. Instead of pushing for punishment, the center mandated that everyone involved in the community was to participate in workshops and facilitated discussions to prevent violence from occurring again.

In another work by Kim, “Alternative Interventions to Intimate Violence: Defining Political and Pragmatic Challenges”, she discusses an incident in which an immigrant woman was assaulted by her former employer. As an Asian-American immigrant, not being able to find trust in the police is a given, so instead, she found herself seeking assistance at a local community-based intervention group. She expressed that in order to feel closure, she wanted to confront her assailant. The organization then assisted her in doing so by providing an advocate to accompany the woman during this confrontation, as well as having multiple role-play scenarios to prepare her for this confrontation. After the confrontation, her assailant admitted guilt and apologized, and the woman felt wholly relieved. Later on, Mimi discusses how various indigenous communities, specifically Native Hawaiians and the Maori in New Zealand work to educate each other and how the violence placed upon them by settler colonialism incites violence within their groups. Since they cannot depend on state institutions to protect them, they work together to resolve conflicts without continuing a cycle of violence.

        In “Restorative Justice in Domestic Violence Cases”, author Roni Elias describes a multiple times in which in transformative justice, community accountability, and education tactics have been implemented. He cites 21 cases of intimate partner violence cases in South Africa in which the couples completed a series of counseling sessions. He mentions a variety of indigenous groups of people, from North America, Australia, and New Zealand, all whom have more than enough reason to believe that the penal system is not on their side, utilizing peacemaking circles. Elias also mentions the Reintegrative Shaming Experiments in Canberra, Australia—a series of experiments in which police officers assigned cases randomly to court or counseling. Much like the 21 cases in South Africa and the peacemaking circles of indigenous peoples, the participants in these examples conveyed feelings of closure, understanding, and progress—much more than we can say about people’s experiences within the penal system.

Sources:

Moving beyond critique – http://www.jstor.org/stable/41478931

Mimi Kim - http://www.creative-interventions.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Ptacek-ed-Restorative-Justice-book-Kim-Alternative-Interventions-article-PublicVersion1.pdf

GenerationFIVE - http://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Generation5_Principles_of_Transformative_Justice.pdf

CARA - http://www.solidarity-us.org/files/Implementing%20Grassroots%20Accountability%20Strategies.pdf

Roni Elias - http://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1091&context=jsj

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Resources

While this project serves to readjust our conceptions of justice and the way we approach punishment within this conception, we recognize that revolutions do not happen overnight. Thus, we’ve compiled this list brief list of resources as a tool to help people navigate the criminal justice system as it exists now in hopes that they may avoid the PIC altogether, at least as prisoners .

Sylvia Rivera Law Project: The Sylvia Law Project is centered around anti-violence and anti-racist justice here in New York.

Their Mission: The Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) works to guarantee that all people are free to self-determine their gender identity and expression, regardless of income or race, and without facing harassment, discrimination, or violence. SRLP is a collective organization founded on the understanding that gender self-determination is inextricably intertwined with racial, social and economic justice. Therefore, we seek to increase the political voice and visibility of low-income people and people of color who are transgender, intersex, or gender non-conforming. SRLP works to improve access to respectful and affirming social, health, and legal services for our communities. We believe that in order to create meaningful political participation and leadership, we must have access to basic means of survival and safety from violence. https://srlp.org/

Safe Outside the System: Safe outside the system is an Audre Lorde Project collective working toward anti-violence for disenfranchised communities

“The Safe OUTside the System (SOS) Collective is an anti-violence program led by and for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit, Trans, and Gender Non Conforming people of color. We are devoted to challenging hate and police violence by using community based strategies rather than relying on the police.”

The WomanHOOD Project: The WomanHOOD project works to celebrate womanhood through racial and gender justice by hosting after school programs for young women of color in the Bronx, assigning mentors and facilitating workshops

http://www.thewomanhoodproject.org/about-us  

VOLS or the Volunteers of Legal Service

http://www.volsprobono.org/about-us

Their Mission: We leverage the good will, resources, and talents of New York City's leading law firms to provide pro bono legal assistance to low-income New Yorkers.

Through our projects, VOLS' staff and volunteer attorneys help all kinds of New Yorkers solve difficult legal problems that have significant consequences for them and for their families. We help mothers in prison maintain visitation with their children. We provide senior citizens with advance health care directives and other essential life-planning documents. We help immigrant high school students resolve immigration issues so that they can work legally and/or attend college. We help children with asthma by forcing landlords to eradicate mold and to repair crumbling plaster.

We strive to provide pro bono legal assistance when and where it will be most accessible to our clients, in settings familiar to them, instead of requiring people in desperate need to come to us. We do this by working closely with hospitals, schools, senior centers, and other community organizations, and integrating pro bono legal assistance into the array of services these organizations already provide.

Legal Aid Society

Their mission: The Legal Aid Society is a private, not-for-profit legal services organization, the oldest and largest in the nation, dedicated since 1876 to providing quality legal representation to low-income New Yorkers. It is dedicated to one simple but powerful belief: that no New Yorker should be denied access to justice because of poverty.

The Legal Aid Society is a private, not-for-profit organization, providing free legal services to indigent clients in New York City in three major practice areas: civil legal work, criminal defense and juvenile rights. The Society handles nearly 275,000 cases annually with a staff of more than 800 lawyers and 600 para-professionals and support staff in 25 locations throughout the five boroughs. In addition to direct representation, the Society brings impact litigation on behalf of thousands of clients, including immigrants, survivors of domestic violence, children in foster care, homeless children and adults, disabled New Yorkers and the incarcerated. Leading law firms and corporate law departments are represented on its Board of Directors and hundreds of volunteer lawyers participate in the Society's pro bono program, one of the largest in the country, and serve as co-counsel on important class action litigation and law reform cases. ( NYC Pro Bono Center)

The New York State Bar Association is kind of a hub for New York lawyers with all kinds of different events and information but you can find advocacy groups and pro bono help there too.

http://www.nysba.org/

Legal Services NYC is a community based organization that works closely with all five boroughs in New York fighting poverty and social injustice

“Legal Services NYC fights poverty and seeks racial, social, and economic justice for low-income New Yorkers. For nearly 50 years, we have challenged systemic injustice and helped clients meet basic needs for housing, access to high-quality education, health care, family stability, and income and economic security. LSNYC is the largest civil legal services provider in the country, with deep roots in all of the communities we serve. Our neighborhood-based offices and outreach sites across all five boroughs help more than 80,000 New Yorkers annually.”

ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union)

https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights

Though the ACLU has a pretty troublesome case history, defending hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the ACLU offers Know Your Rights tips in a relatively palatable and easy-to-read format in anticipation of confrontation with the police. These tips serve to preserve civilian rights and dignity since they are so often threatened in everyday life. There are separate guides for issues dealing with everything from stop and frisks to undocumented immigrants and LGBTQ rights.

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Alternatives?

What we must also remember is that we are all deeply embedded in the logic that allows the prison industrial complex to thrive. Choosing to reject retribution when we are wronged in our daily lives is also part of this struggle for progress.

The prison-industrial complex has spread across our country and our planet, so it is more essential than ever for us to conceive of justice beyond incarceration. Luckily for us, alternatives ideas already exist and have been tested.

Take, for example, theories of Islamic jurisprudence in the pre-colonial era. Prisons were not viewed as solutions to the problem. They removed people from God’s community. What was just was decided by judges, but also by the victims or the victims’ families. Retribution was an option, but forgiveness was recommended. This idea of justice focused on what would heal the pain in the community and help victims, but also worked to reorient offenders back into society. Additionally, the law was not deemed equally applicable to all situations. If a person was starving and stole food, they were acting because their situation was already unjust. This was acknowledged as a pivotal piece of information. Crimes were not considered in a vacuum. The existed to preserve the community, not punish individuals, so circumstances mattered.

While this is in no way an endorsement of Islamic law specifically, we do support the idea of justice that places the victim’s needs first and allows for reconciliation. Stripping individuals of their freedoms in order to claim justice is done and the society preserved doesn’t heal anyone. It doesn’t decrease crime. It does reinforce dangerous and tragic racial and socio-economic hierarchies.

The ultimate destruction of the prison-industrial complex would come through complete prison abolition. As Angela Davis writes, in Are Prisons Obsolete?, abolition requires us to “envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment - demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance” (107). Abolition is a social project that requires far more than just closing down prisons. It calls for a complete cultural shift that must address racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other biases.   

However, these changes will be difficult to accomplish and may take generations. While the end goal must stay in sight, below are a list of reforms that we recommend, and that can weaken the authority of the prison-industrial complex.

We must end the use of prisons to punish individuals for non-violent crimes such as drug possession and usage. We call for the decriminalization of all drugs. Substance abuse is a public health problem, not a criminal problem.

Additionally, we must end the criminalization of undocumented immigrants. Seeking a better life is not a crime.

We must reform discipline in our schools. If children learn at a young age that the just response to not following the rules is separation and restraint the hold the prison industrial complex has on our society will continue.

What we must also remember is that we are all deeply embedded in the logic that allows the prison industrial complex to thrive. Choosing to reject retribution when we are wronged in our daily lives is also part of this struggle for progress.

Sources

Davis, Angela Y. Are prisons obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2010.

Ammar, Nawal H. "Restorative Justice in Islam: Theory and Practice." In Spiritual Roots of Restorative Justice, edited by Michael Hadley, 161-80. New York, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001.

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Prison is a wound we keep tucked in those parts of the country that can’t afford to turn it away, who need its jobs or revenue, who must endure the quiet violence of its physical presence—its “Don’t Pick Up Hitchhikers” warning signs, its barbed fences—the same way a place must endure the removal of its mountaintops and the plundering of its seams: because a powerful rhetoric insists we can only be delivered from our old scars by tolerating new ones.

Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays

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Slavery and the prison Industrial Complex - Angela Davis

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Purpose of Punishment?

PUNITIVE?   REFORM?   POWER?   PROFIT?

How does the state’s revenue get used?  Where is capital going to flow? 

FOLLOW THE MONEY $$$: The prison “profits” is that the state subsidizes salaries for the prison guards, which they calculate by the number of prisoners. The state and sometimes private companies receive money from the initial construction of the prison, having consumers of 30 catering services (food), and consumers of utilities (electric companies).  

THEY HIDE (literally - remember invisibility issue??) social problems like poverty and under/unemployment. 

RAW MATERIAL: Prisons are also low rise because crime - as resource - is infinite in the sense that “crime” is just an act and is left up to interpretation by the law.   Keeping a growing prison industry means having people become the raw materials for the industry. Harsher and longer sentences provide those raw materials. In other words, the prison industry must produce the need for its services.

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In seeking to understand this gendered difference in the perception of prisoners, it should be kept in mind that as the prison emerged and evolved as the major form of public punishment, women continued to be routinely subjected to forms of punishment that have not been acknowledged as such. For example, women have been incarcerated in psychiatric institutions in greater proportions than in prisons ...deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane. Regimes that reflect this assumption continue to inform the women’s prison. Psychiatric drugs continue to be distributed far more extensively to imprisoned women than to their male counterparts.

Angela Y. Davis

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What are we about?

The prison industrial complex is destroying the lives of millions, and has become ingrained in the composition of our society. This system divides and dehumanizes people. Prison often becomes a lifelong stigma, and therefore is a punishment that, in most cases, vastly exceeds the crimes committed. However, the larger issue is in how we view other human beings in our society. We tend to see people as either guilty or innocent. We place each other in an unfair moral dichotomy that doesn’t allow for the realities of the lived experience. This dichotomy is behind prisons, but also police brutality, lack of care for the homeless, and many other ills of our culture.  

As a society, our response to perceived wrongs is typically to take some form of punitive action. This sends millions of Americans to prison each year, millions of American children to detentions, and millions of dollars in fines into the coffers of the criminal justice system.  

OUR MISSION: Our project will integrate written pieces with music and photography to create a multimedia experience that combines our thoughts with actions taken in our own community. Through this blog we would like to explore alternative ways of administering, or even perceiving, justice.

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Prisons are about as isolated as you can get and still stay on the planet

Mumai Abu Jamal

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INVISIBILITY OF PRISONS: Another factor is the invisibility of prisons, which enables them to function without very much public scrutiny (1). Prisons are not places the majority of the public drive by past work, they are hardly institutions we see monthly, let alone yearly. Prisons are strategically placed away from cities, away from prisoner’s homes and families, and increasingly in rural areas that have been desperate for stable economies since the economic recessions and deindustrialization of the late 1970’s and 1980’s.  As scholar activist Ruth Gilmore describes, the expansion of prisons is largely a geographical solution to socio-economic problems (2). In this sense, prisons become hidden enclaves of state violence. The prison houses social problems like poverty and unemployment, as well as health problems which can be seen as mentally ill patients in jails and prison outnumber those in psychiatric hospitals (3).

(1) Davis, Angela Yvonne. “Are Prisons Obsolete?”. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. (2) Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. From Military Keynesianism to Post Keynesian Militarism: Finance Capital, Land, Labor, and Opposition in the Rising California Prison State. Rutgers U., New Brunswick, 1998.  (3) Davis, “Are Prisons Obsolete?”, 2003.

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But Really - What is it? And why the Heck does it Exist?

Prisons are places that disproportionately house the poor, the working class, and people of color of this country.  What has been deemed ‘the prison industrial complex’ has been said to serve a number of purposes:

a financial project for the state and private companies

a permanent counterrevolution, a place to house surplus labor populations

a place to punish ‘criminals’ or a means to create a “safer” society

However, it functions in part because American culture encourages and normalizes its presence.  

The prison industrial complex is more than political and economic - it is a cultural phenomenon.

The policy of mass incarceration does not reflect the public’s natural inkling to crime but an artificially stimulated fear.  The 1980’s was rich with visual, written, spoken and cultural discourses that implicitly and explicitly buttressed the need for incarceration, read crime control and public safety, on a large scale (1).

COLORBLIND: Political rhetoric and administration of Ronald Reagan reflect the need to re-inscribe social and economic problems created by the state as the result of bad individual choices and morals. The shift from ideas and policies focusing on social democracy (New Deal politics) to individual choices (Neo-Conservative politics) reflected a new racial common sense, as well as a class and gender one within the state’s newly announced public role. This ideological shift held that racism did not exist or was in fact a disappearing feature of American life—i.e. colorblind.  Because one’s race and class are often connected, the large number of prisoners is justified in the rhetoric of individual choice (2).

The massive prison buildup and thus prison population has happened law after law, media story after media story, reform after reform, and campaign after campaign promising lower crime rates.  Mass incarceration’s gradual appearance may partly contribute to a sort of public acquiescence, but it does not necessarily explain the public’s active endorsement of these laws and more prisons.

(1)  Parenti, Christian. Lockdown America : Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis. London ; New York: Verso, 1999.

(2)  Rodriguez, Dylan. Forced Passages : Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

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What is the P.I.C.?

THE SHORT ANSWER: The prison industrial complex (PIC) is a term used to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problem.

THE SHORTER ANSWER: The PIC helps and maintains the authority of people who get their power through racial, economic and other privileges.

MAINTAINED BY: 

creating mass media images that keep alive stereotypes of people of color, poor people, queer people, immigrants, youth, and other oppressed communities as criminal, delinquent, or deviant 

earning huge profits for private companies that deal with prisons and police forces 

helping earn political gains for “tough on crime” politicians 

increasing influence of prison guard and police unions 

eliminating social and political dissent by oppressed communities that make demands for self-determination and reorganization of power in the US

THE LONGER ANSWER:

The history of the prison industrial complex is rooted in the legacy of slavery. After slavery was abolished, Black criminals were sent to prison camps where they were forced to do free labor, innovating the system of slave labor and legitimizing it. The PIC has overlapping interests socially, politically, and economically. 

Basically, it rounds up all of the already marginalized members of society, locks them up, and if they're ever released, confines them in a more marginalized status that follows them through the rest of their life. "The raw material of the prison-industrial complex is its inmates: the poor, the homeless, and the mentally ill; drug dealers, drug addicts, alcoholics, and a wide assortment of violent sociopaths" (1) in this group of the pathologized, Black men are particularly targeted in this system. 

Essentially, the PIC is an opportunity for companies to capitalize on the criminal justice system while making marginalized identities invisible under the guise on a "tough on crime" political discourse which would supposedly benefit the larger society. What is most important in understanding the prison industrial complex is the combination of special interests that has given prison construction in the US a seemingly unstoppable momentum, creating an unbreakable cycle of oppression. And even more important is the lack of visibility in this system that has very visible consequences for its victims. 

Politicians, both liberal and conservative, commonly use the fear of crime to gain votes; while in impoverished rural areas, prisons have become a cornerstone of economic development. This prospect of economic commerce leads us to the role of private companies. These corporations consider the roughly $35 billion spent each year on corrections not as a burden on American taxpayers but as a lucrative market, with little or no regard to the human lives that are forever changed in this system. Finally,  government official fiefdoms have expanded along with the inmate population in the issue of property politics.

“The United States has developed a prison-industrial complex—a set of bureaucratic, political, and economic interests that encourage increased spending on imprisonment, regardless of the actual need. The prison-industrial complex is not a conspiracy, guiding the nation's criminal-justice policy behind closed doors.  It is the combination of special interests that has given prison construction in the US a seemingly unstoppable momentum, creating an unbreakable cycle of oppression” (1)

It is composed of:

politicians who have used the fear of crime to gain votes; impoverished rural areas where prisons have become a cornerstone of economic development;

private companies that regard the roughly $35 billion spent each year on corrections not as a burden on American taxpayers but as a lucrative market;

and government officials whose fiefdoms have expanded along with the inmate population.

The rate of violent crime in the US has decreased by about 20 percent, while the number of people in prison or jail has risen by 50 percent since 1991 (1).

(1) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/the-prison-industrial-complex/304669/