Does mass incarceration actually ensure “public safety” at all? Theresa Runstedtler and the prison abolition movement think not.
Before Occupy Wall Street, there were prison hunger strikes in Georgia and California. The 40th anniversary of the Attica prison uprisings came and went with some fanfare and much hand-wringing. The execution of Troy Davis stirred up a groundswell of U.S. liberal and left, and even international activism against the death penalty.
Although prisons have been on our radar, much of the public debate about them has centered on questions of harm reduction and cost reduction, as well as concerns about the status of “innocent until proven guilty” in our criminal justice system. However, as Critical Resistance co-founder Ruth Wilson Gilmore has pointed out, we need to move beyond a discussion of prison reform to talk seriously about the possibilities of prison abolition. (Critical Resistance is a grassroots organization that seeks to “build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe.”)
For most people, the very phrase “prison abolition” sounds like a scary prospect – a recipe for anarchy, instability, and violence. But the prison abolition movement is much more focused on trying to envision new ways, other than mass incarceration, to make our communities safer, more sustainable, healthier, and more successful for all.
Let me demystify a few points. Prison abolitionists argue that the U.S. prison system is actually a “prison industrial complex” based on faulty premises about public safety and driven by profit motives. Much like what President Eisenhower called the “military industrial complex” or the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry,” the prison industrial complex (PIC) is made up of a set of mutually beneficial relationships between public and private entities that have a shared interest in expanding the surveillance, policing, and imprisonment of certain kinds of people.
The PIC came together as an imagined solution to a complex set of social, economic, and political “problems” in the late twentieth century – in other words, what to do with the masses of poor and underemployed people (especially people of color). Indeed, it is no accident that the expansion of policing and prisons began at the very same moment that the United States began to deindustrialize, the enactment of civil rights laws made various forms of racial discrimination illegal, the government began to cut back social programs, and the mainstream media became saturated with fearsome tales of (black male) criminals run amok.
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The prison abolition movement is not some dangerous group of vigilantes seeking to immediately throw open the doors of all prisons nor is it a naïve liberal commune isolated from reality. Many of the movement’s activists are from communities negatively affected by heavy policing and high rates of incarceration. They recognize that the abolition of the PIC is a long term goal, but also insist that practical steps (i.e. stopping prison expansion, supporting policies that reduce the prison population, promoting alternatives to mass incarceration) can be taken towards that goal. They ask why we insist on reactively caging people, rather than proactively supporting communities by ensuring their access to necessities such as food, shelter, education, healthcare, and freedom.
They deliberately use the word “abolition” to tie their activism to the earlier social movements against slavery. Nineteenth-century abolitionists called for the eradication of slavery, not its reform. Likewise, prison abolition is based on the idea that the PIC needs to be overturned, not just tweaked. The word “abolition” also gestures to the disproportionate and deliberate impact of the PIC on poor people of color, their families, and their communities.
So, in a nutshell, prison reform (i.e. fixing overcrowding by building more facilities, adding GED programs in prisons, etc.) ultimately will not “fix” the United States’ addiction to mass incarceration nor will it make the nation safer for all. Reforms, while perhaps an interim step, are really like putting lipstick on a pig – it’s still a pig.
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Here are a few reasons why good men should consider supporting the prison abolition movement:
The PIC is an economically unsustainable and parasitical system that really only benefits the top 1%.
- The bankers who peddle the bonds to build the prisons, the private companies that construct the prisons, and the private industries that make money off of servicing the growing numbers of prisoners, are the ones who are benefitting most from our influx of tax dollars into the PIC. And, this is even before we take into account the expansion of private prisons or private corporations’ use of prisoners as cheap labor.
- Those benefiting economically from public investment in the PIC have left nothing to chance. They have lobbied for laws that keep people in prison longer (three strikes law, truth in sentencing act), thereby ensuring a steady supply of bodies for beds. They have also welcomed more punitive immigration laws and juvenile sentencing since this has opened up new markets.
- Although often pitched to rural areas (especially those hard hit by deindustrialization and the corporatization of farming) as engines of economic development, prisons have proven to be quite the opposite in many cases. Prisons have tended to lower the local tax base, depress local wage markets, and reduce the local quality of life.
Removing people from their neighborhoods and putting them in cages does not make their communities (or society at large) any safer. Yet supporters of prison expansion have sold it as a matter of “public safety,” capitalizing on longstanding stereotypes about the inherent criminality and violence of people of color.
- Crime rates were already decreasing when the PIC began expanding, and crime rates have continued to fall even as the PIC continues to grow exponentially.
- The War on Drugs created a whole new set of “crimes,” thereby filling the prison system with drug addicts and non-violent offenders. According to Critical Resistance, only about 1% of the approximately 2.5 million people locked up in U.S. prisons are there for violent offenses like murder, rape, and pedophilia. Ample research has also shown that imprisonment does nothing to solve problems of chemical dependency.
- Instead, communities with high incarceration rates tend to be less stable and less safe. With the decimation of families and the general collapse of trust among people, communities hit hard by the PIC tend to become more reliant on the state to intervene in disputes that normally would have been resolved by the people themselves.
- Prison is a violent place that often makes non-violent inmates become more violent. This violent institution only begets more forms of violence – domestic violence, child abuse, assault – beyond the walls of the prison.
The PIC has helped to create a permanent racial underclass.
- Michelle Alexander has called the U.S. prison system the New Jim Crow. As she explains:
“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.”
- This ensures not only the economic disenfranchisement of people of color, but also their political disfranchisement – in effect creating a whole “new” category of second-class citizens.
The PIC – from policing to the penitentiary – is rife with human rights abuses.
- The abuses at Abu Ghraib were by no means an aberration; instead, they bore a strong resemblance to the dehumanizing tactics practiced at all levels of the PIC.
- Human rights violations are particularly acute in private prisons (as noted by Amnesty International), which are protected by legal grey areas that prevent prisoners from bringing charges against their abusers for cruel and unusual punishment.
- Across the U.S. prison system, solitary confinement continues to be used even though research has shown that it makes people even more unstable and volatile.
What makes prison abolition an even more pressing issue is that other nations are now looking to the United States’ PIC as a model for dealing with their own issues of “public safety.” Do you want this to be your nation’s legacy to the world, and your legacy to your children?
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photo: (main) stevesnodgrass / Flickr
(inset) community alliance
About Theresa Runstedtler
An interesting and timely article. I’d like to see the statistics as to how many incarcerated criminals are there on drug charges. The figures given simply note that most people in prison aren’t guilty of violent crimes, implicitly suggesting (incorrectly) that the other 99% have violated anti-drug laws.
There’s a lot of correlation/causation confusion at play here. Communities with lots of incarcerated tend to be less stable, sure. This could suggest that prisons do a poor job of stabilizing these areas, or even that the incarcerations increase instability. You could also argue that instability is to be expected of poor areas full of people driven to commit crimes by the pressures of poverty.
I can get behind this, with one big question:
Even if the majority of those in prison are products of poor-turned-violently-mercenary communities whose needs are grossly under-met (which is something I absolutely believe – as with children, I believe most people don’t behave poorly unless they’re doing so because they *need* something that isn’t being provided or made available to them), what of those who are genuinely, criminally sadistic? What of those with a pathological drive towards violence, subjugation, death or chaos? I know they’re in the relatively slim minority, but what becomes of them in the process?
My attitude has long been that we’ll empty prisons (and spend much less money on them) when we provide for that vast swath of the population who had few opportunities and virtually no reason to dream of any other life, but we’d still NEED prisons for the truly dangerous, those who do harm not for external reasons that can be fixed, but for internal reasons with no real solution but to keep them far from where they can harm others.
This article was not persuasive except as an argument for prison reform. Of course we should seek to prevent human rights abuses. Of course we should legalize recreational drug use. Of course we should seek to minimize the control that the PIC has over American politics (just like Big Agro). Of course we should seek to expand opportunities for education and employment in all regions of the country. Etc. I agree with all of that. But that doesn’t mean that rapists and murderers and robbers and other violent criminals should not be in prison or that the community without them becomes less safe. On the face of it, both assertions seem clearly absurd and would require some pretty persuasive evidence to support. These problems don’t mean that the problem is the existence of prisons. And that’s a correlation/causation confusion in arguing that an unsafe community having a large number of incarcerated criminals would become safer if none of those criminals were incarcerated.
“According to Critical Resistance, only about 1% of the approximately 2.5 million people locked up in U.S. prisons are there for violent offenses like murder, rape, and pedophilia.”
And what is the opinion of the Prison Abolition Movement towards this 1%? The movement likes to focus upon non-violent offenders and drug offenders who supposedly are the majority of the incarcerated. Fair enough. But if the “abolition” movement lives up to its literal name, does that mean that this 1% shall also be spared from incarceration? Does “Abolition” mean literal abolition or does it really mean “Abolition with reservations”?
Prison abolitionists are careful to say that it is the “prison industrial complex” that they want to abolish. I could only say so much in 1,500 words, and this is just the beginning of the discussion. If you want to learn more, please check out http://www.criticalresistance.org/ and its various resources. We want to shift the debate from how do we make the prison industrial complex better (it is already doing what it was designed to do), to 1) is the PIC really ensuring public safety and healthy communities and 2) how could we proactively (and often for a lot less money), rather than reactively deal with the economic and social problems that the PIC claims to, but is failing to solve? We don’t have all the answers, but we would like to see the debate begin to shift away from our “common sense” paradigms. I appreciate everyone’s comments. I’m just trying to spread the word about alternative ways for imagining a better future.
No, they do not have all the answers. But Critical Resistance seems to have an answer for the question of responding to truly violent offenders, though they sort of dance around the issue.
http://www.criticalresistance.org/article.php?id=37
In the FAQ section, they say:
“Obviously, murder, rape and the sexual abuse of children are very serious problems, and obviously, acts of great harm bring up feelings of anger and fear. Given how grave these problems are, we need to examine whether locking someone in a cage is the best way to prevent these harms?”
After they cited the statistics about how only 1% of the prison population actually committed violent offenses, they go on to say:
“Many people do not believe that locking someone in a cage is an answer to drug addiction or poverty. If locking someone up does not address these problems, why would locking someone in a cage be any more of an effective answer to harm between people?”
Crimes related to “drug addiction” and “poverty” are usually the non-violent offenses upon which the prison abolition movement bases its strongest advocacy. But reading these FAQ answers, it seems clear that Critical Resistance believes that murderers, rapists, child molesters and the like should not be incarcerated either. Well, I guess that is consistent with a truly “abolitionist” stance.
You ask “how could we proactively (and often for a lot less money), rather than reactively deal with the economic and social problems that the PIC claims to, but is failing to solve?”
I hope for the day when proactive action remedies abound and vastly reduce the number of situations that the state must “react” to. But Critical Resistance concedes that despite proactive efforts, situations that require “reaction” will still result. Their answer:
“The answer lies in developing systems of harm prevention and when harm still occurs, because it will, systems of accountability and ways to address the causes of the harm that do not rely on the failed, back end response of locking someone up.”
So what is the “accountability” that the abolition movement wants to employ to react to the hopefully rarer acts of harm that still would occur?
“Abolition does not mean that we don’t hold people accountable for their actions. But punishment creates the opposite of accountability — a sense of social isolation instead of responsibility to others. If anything, punishment makes future harm more likely since it encourages people to lash out. People who have seriously harmed another need appropriate forms of support, supervision and social and economic resources.”
So the proper response to acts of murder, rape, etc. is assistance, remedy and reparation given to the perpetrator? It seems that Critical Resistance wants us to use the same methods at all times, whether we act “proactively” or “reactively.” Whether the subject person has or has not committed a violent crime seems to matter for little. And what if the offender who committed a violent crime comes from the privileged, dominant class?
Lots of law & order types say things like “the law is the law” and “crime is crime” and callously say all offenders deserve incarceration, whether they have commit murder or just have vicodin pills without a prescription. They would agree different offenses may merit different amounts of incarceration, but incarceration is still the standard answer. I’m sure you don’t care for that. In contrast to that, Critical Resistance seems to say that all offenders deserve therapy and assistance, whether they hoard vicodin or committed murder.
They slip the word “supervision” into their proposed version of “accountability,” perhaps to suggest some kind of mandatory aspect. But if we would be rejecting the concept of incarceration, confinement and coercion, what kind of “supervision” would this be? Supervision based upon the voluntary compliance of the supervised?
This does not seem to be only about abolishing the Prison-Industrial Complex, as grand a mission that is. This is about totally abolishing the whole concept of punishment and retribution, for anyone, no matter what the crime. That will be a harder thing to sell. Persons may not want to begin a debate if one of the intended conclusions is that murderers get therapy.
Is it possible, in a paragraph, to summarise what the prison abolitionist movement thinks should be done with the, admittedly tiny minority of, offenders who are a genuine danger to their community. Locking people like Charles Manson up in cages makes everyone else a great deal safer.
The prison system in my own country, Ireland, is just as corrupt and abusive of human rights. But the assertion that its all some kind of moneymaking conspiracy is bizarre. Sure private contractors make money out of doing their job (just as they do on any government contract) but they’re not the ones who decide to keep prisons the way they are, our elected representatives do, and largely at our behest.
The examples given in the final section of the article are rather circular: Crime has indeed been on the wane in most areas for some time while prisons have been expanding. If anything that suggests that they work. Also, the fact that the communities with the highest incarceration rates are unsafe doesn’t suggest that incarceration causes unsafe communities, it suggests that its a reaction to unsafe communities.
Why is “public safety” in quotes? Are these snigger quotes, indicating that “public safety” is an inappropriate concern for the enlightened? Does it mean there is no such thing?
What is the plan for crimes committed by non-imprisoned convicted criminals?
Dealing effectively with the small number of people in prisons who have caused great harm to people is still one of the challenges in addressing our current system. There is a movement called Restorative Justice that addresses crime by means other than incarceration. I would recommend a book called Return to the Teachings by Rupert Ross. It is about native peoples in Canada who chose to address child sexual abuse through a restorative process rather than the current punitive process. This led to a lot of healing throughout their community.