A prisoner has just soiled his pants with feces due to the lack of toilets in the area. He waits for an opportunity to clean himself—this is not given until 11 hours later, when a fellow incarcerated individual hands him a new uniform. This instance as illustrated in an article from the Georgetown Journal, Prison Abolition Is Needed Now: Prisons and Jails Do Not Keep Anyone Safe, occurred in a Rikers Island facility in 2022.
Prisons are not doing nearly enough to ensure the health and safety of their inhabitants. Many offer the solution of ‘reform’ through financial means. That is if prisons were given more money for the facility, and the care of its occupants, they would improve. However, this solution falls flat when faced with reality. In the Georgetown article, one comes to understand that money is not a problem considering that around $400,000 is allocated to each prisoner per year. Still conditions and renovations do not happen. Abolitionists such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore argue that a society without prisons translates to social welfare for all. That, in not caging and hiding people away from the world, all can flourish. That, in having a stable economy with citizens content and able to make a means of living without turning to crime, all can flourish. And, contrary to the racial populations in the U.S. (White being the majority), in prisons, Black and Brown persons make up most of the population.
Slavery and prison have always been intertwined with each other. Prison often mimics the systems perpetuated pre-emancipation. In an article by Kim Gilmore, Slavery and Prison – Understanding the Connections, chattel slavery, Black codes, Jim Crow and the 13th Amendment are examined about their influence and effect on the prison-industrial complex. Firstly, one must understand what the ‘prison-industrial complex’ means. Critical Resistance, an organization working to dismantle this very term, explains the PIC (prison-industrial complex) as “the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.” In Gimore’s article, one is immediately faced with grave realism. People are given longer sentences than previously for nonviolent drug offenses. For instance, in an archived page by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one learns that “prison sentences imposed increased from an average of 55.1 months during 1988 to 59.7 months during 2006. For drug offenses, prison sentences increased from an average of 71.3 months to 87.2 months.” Children are also orphaned due to the criminal justice system, and incarcerated individuals participate in forced, or, unfree, labor. Gilmore goes on to claim that the 13th amendment authorized the state to use prison labor as a bridge between slavery and paid work. The 13th amendment—as defined by the National Archives and Records Administration—states that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The constitution endorses slavery if used through the prison-industrial complex. If one is convicted of a crime, they may be subject to slavery, and worse yet, legally. After this addition to the constitution and the official end of racialized slavery, White Redeemers—White people who enforced white supremacy, and wanted to regain the original racial order in the U.S.—made ‘Black codes’. As a result, convict-labor (the labor of convicted individuals for private citizens) became increasingly racialized, resembling, now illegal, slavery. This is because the convicted individuals were mostly Black, and the private citizens they were leased to by the state, were White. Black people—both men and women—were seen as better suited for harder physical labor work, and often were forced to work on railroads and Southern prison farms. Black people were criminalized for not following rules that resembled that of the ‘Black Code’. Black Code rules, included limiting Black people to working solely for White people, restricting Black people to congregating in certain areas after sundown, and prohibiting them from owning weapons, according to the New Jersey State Bar Foundation. Black people during this time period were given tougher sentences in contrast to their White counterparts who committed similar crimes.
In her book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Y. Davis articulates how prisons stop the public from realizing the deeper-rooted issues of our society. She writes that “the prison . . . 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” (6). Angela Davis features French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault in her book, with both agreeing that the two words ‘prison’ and ‘reform’ are so easily linked together—almost as if prison is solidified as the main and only effective mode of punishment, and that there are no alternatives except reform. They argue that people cannot imagine a world without prisons, and believe that the only way to maintain a safe and structured society is to utilize prisons. But, are societies with prisons—and prison reforms—safe and structured?
Education can be the most effective approach in changing the behaviors of prisoners and their livelihoods. The Attica Prison Uprising in 1971, in which prisoners rebelled and voiced their concerns about the quality of guards, their diets, realistic rehabilitation programmes, and education programmes, resulted in the deaths of many prisoners and guards from the National Guard. Over 500 prisoners were transferred to the Greenhaven Prison after this uprising. In 1973, Marist College—a college close to Greenhaven—began offering courses at the site, and later on made a four-year programme. However, in 1994, Congress prohibited eligibility of Pell Grants (money the government provides to students that need to pay for college; they do not need to be repaid) for incarcerated individuals in its Crime Bill (1994). This forced Marist College to terminate their programme in 1995. Prison journalist Abu-Jamal and other prison writers criticized the bill. As a result of the bill, creative writing courses were defunded, literary journals that published prisoner work collapsed, and more programmes were set in motion which prevented prisoners from getting an education. Education is regarded as the pathway to enlightenment—Malala Yousafzai famously stated that pens and books are the most powerful weapons for liberation. During Malcom X’s time in prison, as further emphasized by a New York Times article, When X = Literacy, he taught himself to read. He utilized a dictionary, and copied it page by page relentlessly. Malcolm X’s makeshift education in prison led him to become interested in history, Islam, philosophy and politics. He read books concerning those subjects diligently in his seven years of solitude. It was a pivotal period in his life that later shaped him to be the man known today—one of the most influential and inspiring leaders of the Civil Rights, and Black Power movements.
Prisons are also no strangers to sexual assault and misconduct. In fact, it has been quite the running gag in various films and television shows. The phrase “don’t drop the soap,” refers to a situation in which an inmate drops their bar of soap during showering and bends to pick it up, leaving their naked backside exposed and unprotected, with their vigilance turned off. The supposed joke here is that someone is going to be sexually assaulted, either by a fellow prisoner, or a guard due to their exposure. However, this phrase refers to men and male facilities. So, what about women? In female facilities, sexual assault is just as prevalent. Davis adds in her book that female prisoners are raped, sexually assaulted and abused by male correctional employees. These employees also use tactics such as coercion through violence or authority, to grant or deny privileges to prisoners.
When discussing abolition of prisons and the intersectionality of feminism in this movement (such as diminishing and ultimately eliminating the prevalance of sexual assault), carceral feminism becomes of interest. Carceral feminism is “a law and order agenda and . . . a drift from the welfare state to the carceral state as the enforcement apparatus for feminist goals.” In an article written by Elizabeth Bernstein titled, Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns, one is introduced to realms of carceral feminism. Bernstein explains that carceral politics aims to solve social issues through the criminal justice system and incarceration. Bernstein notes that the carceral feminist movement encompasses political spectrums—both conservatives and liberals. She argues the movement has a commitment to heteronormative family values and crime control. Bernstein uses former democratic congresswoman, Carolyn Maloney, as an example of liberal carceral feminists at their core. In her book, The Pretty Woman Myth, a book that Bernstein notes to already not acknowledge male sex-workers, Maloney concludes by stating that the best way to fight sexual slavery is to arrest and incarcerate the pimps and prostitutes, and take better ‘protection of children’. Elizabeth Bernstein pairs Maloney’s conclusions with dirty realism. Pimps can be given 99-year prison sentences as sex-traffickers, and sex-workers are increasingly arrested and deported for the sake of their ‘safety’. Essentially, carceral feminism does not seek to rehabilitate or even reform prisons and systems that negatively affect many individuals. Instead, they seek to punish with an ineffective method of crime mitigation, and push heteronormativity and family values.
Arthur Waskow, as showcased in Davis’s book, describes a society without prisons simply as a society that doesn’t need them. If redistribution of power occurs, if proper support, reintegration, and rehabilitation occur, the world would have no need for the prison system.
Ultimately, all that can be asked is this: when are we going to truly solve the problems, rather than put trust in a system built not for the protection and safety of individuals, but rather for unfree labor and diversion to the ever-broken foundations of the United States’s empire? According to an article by Vera Institute, Research Shows That Long Prison Sentences Don’t Actually Improve Safety, prison does not deter crime. In the article, it states that “a 2021 meta-analysis of 116 studies found, for example, that custodial sentences do not prevent reoffending—and can actually increase it. That’s because incarceration destabilizes people’s lives. The brutality of U.S. prisons, the difficulties securing employment and housing with a conviction history, and the overall lack of financial security all negatively impact people—and their ability to succeed—after prison.”
When do we put aside retribution, and focus on prevention and rehabilitation? When will we break the cycle?
Written by Aisosa Ighile of Paint Branch High School
Graphic by Arpa Gomes of Springbrook High School