How does the U.S. criminal justice system create and maintain racial hierarchy through mass incarceration?
How does the current system of mass incarceration in the United States mirror earlier systems of racialized social control?
What is needed to end mass incarceration and permanently eliminate racial caste in the United States?
What would a society without the need for prisons look like?
A. Some Facts about Race and Mass Incarceration
1. We imprison more people than any other country.
2. The U.S. has over 2.4 million behind bars, an increase of over 500% in the past thirty years
3. We have 5% of the world’s population; 25% of its prisoners
4. People of color represents 60% of people in cages
5. One in eight black men in their twenties are locked up on any given day
6. Lifetime likelihood of a white man being incarcerated: 1 in 17
7. Lifetime likelihood of a black man being incarcerated: 1 in 3
8. Black men are 6.5% of US population and 40.2% of incarcerated population
9. 75% of people in state prison for drug conviction are people of color although blacks and whites see and use drugs at roughly the same rate. In NYS, 94% of those imprisoned for a drug offense are people of color.
10. The number of drug offenders in state prison has increased thirteen-fold since 1980
11. 5.3 million Americans are denied their right to vote
12. Over the past two decades, state spending on prisons grew six times the spending of higher education
B. The Ideological Work that Prisons Do (Are Prisons Obsolete, p.16)
C. Similarities of Prisons to Slavery (27)
1. Convict leasing system + debt peonage sharecropping as continuation of slavery.
2. The 13th Amendment does not abolish slavery as such but only one kind of slavery.
3. Imputing Crime to Color - criminalizing black behaviors to supply black bodies for exploitation - Court House replaces the Lynch mob
4. Nixon: the drug problem as a crime problem versus mental health problem
5. Tough on Crime Democrats: TheClinton/Biden 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill - Truth in Sentencing Law, Mandatory Minimum serving 85% sentences, doing away with parole in the Federal System, 100,000 new police, Militarization of Local Police Departments, Ends Pell Grants for Prison Ed
D. Development of Modern Prisons as Human Alternative to Capital Punishment and Public Torture (48)
1. Protestant Reformers and “penitentiaries” - the morally dubious status of solitary confinement.
2. Women don’t need prisons, their husbands punish them.
3. Rise of the Supermax and “F-Type” Prisons - replace reform with “incapacitation” - exported by the US, king of the global incarceration system.
If the original moral argument for prisons has been refuted (the rehabilitative function of solitary confinement), then are prisons morally and socially obsolete?
E. Women in Prison
“Most Invisible Population:” the single most vulnerable, most traumatized, and most at risk demographic in the country: Incarcerated Women of Color, the fastest growing segment of the US prison population. From 1997 to 2007 the number of women in prison has increased by 832%.
Sexual violence as a tool of repression (strip search)
F. Prison-Industrial Complex (vs. prison system) (84)
1. The PIC as reproducing the conditions of its own expansion, creating a syndrome of self-perpetuation
2. Connection of capitalism, racism and incarceration - neoliberal destruction of social welfare nets, undermining economic democracy, desperation creating justification for incarceration; 3. Connections between criminalization of young blacks, immigrants and global capitalism. Immigration as caused by the ‘homelessness of global capital.
3. Private prison companies are striking deals with states that contain clauses guaranteeing high prison occupancy rates–sometimes 100 percent. This means that states agree to supply prison corporations with a steady flow of residents–whether or not that level of criminal activity exists. [ITPI Report 2013]
4. The federal prison industry produces 100 percent of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens. Along with war supplies, prison workers supply 98 percent of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93 percent of paints and paintbrushes; 92 percent of stove assembly; 46 percent of body armor; 36 percent of home appliances; 30 percent of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21 percent of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies, and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people. [http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/21694-shocking-facts-about-americas-for-profit-prison-industry]
We are not looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment - demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health care system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.
Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?
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