Two

 

Prison Complex Index

Change in the rate of incarceration in the past forty years (1972–2012): + 439%

Rank of a metaphorical “Correctional Supervision City” by population for all US cities (2014): 2

Rank of the US incarcerated population in the world (most recent figures for all countries): 1

Percent of all of the world’s prisoners in US prisons (most recent figures for all countries): 21

Percent of Americans engaged in “guard labor”—defending property, supervising work, or otherwise keeping their fellow Americans in line (2002): 26.1

Rate of juveniles detained in the United States to all comparison nations combined (US figures from 2006): 5.5:1

Average annual cost to keep a juvenile in detention in the United States in 2011: $148,767

Average annual cost per child to fund US schools, 2010–2011: $12,926

Year that the US Supreme Court ruled that solitary confinement caused prisoners to fall into “a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane”: 1890

Estimated number of inmates in solitary confinement in “supermax” prisons (2005): 25,000

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.

—Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (1865), Section 1

 

Say what? Slavery and involuntary servitude were abolished in 1865 “except as a punishment for crime?” So if a person has been legally convicted of crime, he or she could again be enslaved or forced into involuntary servitude, according to the US Constitution. That helps explain the creepy feeling I’ve always had whenever I’m in or even near a prison: the stench of the slave market in the air, and the specter of the plantation hovering everywhere. In many places the prison/plantations didn’t even bother changing their names: Angola Plantation in Louisiana became Angola Prison, Parchman Farm is still Parchman Farm. The language remained intact, and so did the deeper political structure.

While the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 freed the enslaved workers of the Confederacy, and then when slavery was formally finished in the United States in 1865, life remained treacherous and unstable for the formerly enslaved people for many reasons, not least that crafty loophole: except as a punishment for crime. With the withdrawal of federal troops and the defeat of Black Reconstruction the former slave-holding states quickly passed laws—the infamous Black Codes that existed for over a century—designed to criminalize Black life and give the white establishment an easy pass to continued supremacy, domination, indentured servitude, and exploitation. These laws then combined with hastily instituted Jim Crow practices—racial segregation, the mass campaign of terror, the regime of lynching, disenfranchisement, and a system of peonage that entrapped workers in debt and forced them to labor indefinitely as peasants or serfs within a system of bondage—officially conformed to the new order of life-without-slavery, while undermining it in every detail and reasserting white supremacy and state control of Black bodies with a vengeance.

In Mississippi, for example, formerly enslaved people could be sentenced to forced labor for crimes including petty theft, using obscene language, or selling cotton after sunset. It’s an old tradition, tried and true: The law, in all its majesty and even-handed equanimity, censures rich and poor alike if they’re found begging on the public streets or stealing bread or sleeping under the highway bridges. An 1865 law titled “An Act to Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen” required Black workers to contract with white farmers by January 1 of each year or face punishment for vagrancy. Chain gangs and work camps sprang up everywhere as the labor of these “duly convicted” former chattels was sold to farms, factories, quarries, and mines. The workers on the chain gangs were no longer a part of the slave system, but of an easily recognizable twin: involuntary servitude as a result of being duly convicted of crime. Same work, same workers, new label.

We begin to see clearly the tough bond of white supremacy over changing times and reorganized systems, the thick white glob of glue binding slavery to Jim Crow and then to prisons, bondage, and mass incarceration. The slave system and the mass incarceration system each violently subordinate subjugated persons to the will of their masters; each insists that subjects follow strict routines dictated by the rulers; each reduces subjects to dependency for everything including food and shelter; each isolates its subjects from normal human contact or intercourse; and each forces subjects to work for minimal compensation.

Both systems comprehensively create an identifiable lower caste. Today that caste is racially coded but not explicitly race identified, which means that folks can be victimized and legally discriminated against in a wide range of ways: the criminal caste often cannot vote or serve on a jury, live in specific places, access student and other forms of loans, or hold a wide range of jobs. In 2004 more Black people were disenfranchised than in 1870, and 5.3 million citizens suffer this specific civic death penalty now.

***

For the oppressors and the exploiting class, there’s a ready rationale in every age: from the start white supremacy was promoted to justify aggression, theft, occupation, kidnapping, and murder—it was never based on inferiority, real or imagined. Racism has been aggressively employed in the service of cheap labor and in the suppression of wages and the precariousness of workers’ status, and racism justified colonial plunder from the start. As the US Empire began its long and dangerous decline and the industrial heartland collapsed in the middle of the twentieth century, creating excess labor became a fearsome predicament for the rulers. The Black freedom movement pushed forward at the same time, demanding access, recognition, and equality. But the counterrevolution pushed back—the gains of African Americans were nominally accepted as an accomplished fact, but in reality they were challenged, halted, and reversed wherever possible. When overt bigotry became socially unacceptable to many, coded markers—crime, drugs, violence—took its place. With African Americans on the march and revolution in the air, with unemployment soaring and jobs disappearing, prison became a central strategy to address multiple crises.

Like the Black Codes decades ago, a wide range of laws, practices, and traditions from mandatory minimum sentences to cash bail feed the prison and criminal caste systems. Stop-and-frisk policies in New York City for years led to young Black men having contact with the police in wildly disproportionate numbers; young African American men in Chicago are three times more likely to be taken to a police station for a curfew violation than their white counterparts; Black boys are twice as likely as white boys to be suspended or expelled from high school; disparate sentencing practices for the same or similar drug possessions result in African Americans being twice as likely as others to do time; in Ferguson the practice of imposing fines on Black residents to fill the city’s coffers has been widely scrutinized; in Chicago where police have discretion to ticket or arrest someone in possession of marijuana, Black people have accounted for 95 percent of those particular arrests over the past four years.

All of this is racism in operation, and it’s worth noting here that the word “racism” has multiple meanings. In popular usage it means bigotry, often manifest in ignorant comments, stereotyped views, and backward language. For example, Cliven Bundy, the cattle rancher from Nevada, is a racist—just listen to him and you know he’s an offensive bigot. And since you and I aren’t bigots, we can glibly claim the high moral ground. But there’s a problem: “racism” is also the structures of white supremacy and the institutional practices of oppression based on race. The examples above are instances of the execution of institutional racism. And so the question for antiracists isn’t, “Are you a bigot?” but “What are you doing to attack the institutional expressions of white supremacy?” The mayor of Chicago shuttered more than fifty public schools in predominantly Black communities and never used the N-word; a slick, sophisticated, and charming president pushed harsh legislation that resulted in mass incarceration and the overrepresentation of Black people in prisons. This is white supremacy, and racist practice on the ground and in the world. Call its name.

***

I’ve been to jail myself—arrested for sit-ins, blockades around buildings, and other acts of civil disobedience as well as “disorderly conduct” and “mob action” and “disturbing the peace”—and I’m not done yet. Of course my (mostly voluntary) encounters with the criminal justice system are vastly different from the encounters of a young, impoverished Black man—I encounter the system from a position of relative power, and I make no comparisons between myself and most of those caught up in the system. I navigate the cruel intricacies of the system from a place of privilege. Still as Thoreau so perfectly pointed out, in a war-making slave state (in his day) or a racist, war-making punishing state (in our own), an appropriate place for a free and honest person is in jail.

I’ve never lived in a prison, however, only visited, and always under heartbreaking circumstances: my partner, Bernardine Dohrn, held in federal lockup for months for refusing to participate in a star-chamber grand jury; David Gilbert, the other father of our adopted son Chesa, is in his thirty-fifth year in the New York State prison system doing a seventy-five-years-to-life bid; and Kathy Boudin, David’s partner and Chesa’s other mother, did twenty-two years in prison of a twenty-years-to-life sentence. Kathy was supremely fortunate to have gotten out at all, and since her release she’s been a marvel of good work—an extension, really, of the dazzling organizing she did while inside for family rights, decent health care, and access to education. We’ve spent hours, days, and weekends with them sharing space and time and life in whatever nasty medieval dungeon they were caged in at the time, and we’ve lived the prison experience vicariously—as millions of other family members have—for decades.

Visiting David recently, I walked into the visitor’s entrance, the guards checked my ID and asked me to sign in, first in the log book, then again at the main prison building, and finally at the check-in desk in the visiting room itself. I walked through a metal detector and had my hand stamped with ultraviolet ink, which was then scanned as I passed through a series of gates that were opened sequentially by someone in an unseen command center on my way to the visiting room. I finally sat at a small round table under the eyes of two guards on a raised platform and, I thought, several cameras installed in the ceiling. This is all standard procedure for entering a maximum-security prison—no surprises—and also a vivid reminder that to be ruled is to be regulated and checked off, ordered about and counted, noted and routinely observed. We were on the far end away from freedom, to be sure.

David is always remarkably calm and thoughtful and centered when we visit, always a reminder that every human being, no matter the circumstances, has some agency to call upon and exercise. I often wonder if I could achieve anything approaching his productivity and his Yoda-like attitude and focus while in the midst of the bedlam swirling around us—the raw reunions, the broken parents and sobbing family members, the wriggling, sometimes stressed-out kids, the high drama of these few moments of face-to-face relations followed by seemingly endless stretches of separation, the palpable tension of connecting under the watchful eyes of the keepers. The constant noise, the stale air and unnatural light, the vending machines offering a steady fare of grease and sugar, the tough feel of concrete and metal—it all conspires to diminish and erase the competing energy: humanity itself, trembling and real.

The experience of prison is one of powerlessness and confrontation, petty humiliation and shaming, isolation and individualization. The authorities have no tolerance for collective voices or community action—you must be all alone all the time—and so the escalation of noise, distraction, confrontation, and violence is built into the structure and the environment itself.

I often tried to provoke my students at the University of Illinois at Chicago by saying, “Do you know that one mile from our campus there are 15,000 Irishmen [or Jewish women, or Greeks] living in cages?” “Come on! No way!” There was always a general sense of disbelief, and a notion that maybe I was joking. “You’re kidding, right?”

Well, yes and no: I wasn’t being fully honest, so let me change it a bit—“Do you know that one mile from our campus there are 15,000 young Black and Latino men living in cages?” “No, I didn’t know that, but I’m not completely surprised either; what crimes did they commit?” The fact of Black men being imprisoned is part of the known world, the common sense of known things, normalized to the point of invisibility—you didn’t know that; indeed, you didn’t even notice that. So in another sense, you did know that.

***

Herman Melville, in his novella Benito Cereno, offers a tale that depicts what white folks didn’t notice during the rule of slavery. A New England sealing ship operating off the coast of Chile in 1805 comes upon a Spanish frigate drifting aimlessly with tattered sails and a distressed crew, and a figurehead oddly shrouded in canvas bearing the painted slogan: “Follow Your Leader.” A small party led by Captain Amasa Delano boards the ship in order to assess the situation and offer help if possible. There they encounter a skeleton crew and a diminished cargo of slaves as well as Captain Benito Cereno, who explains the troubles that had brought them to this point: terrible storms, ill fate and bad luck, disease and fevers that had taken the lives of several, including the slave master Alexandro Aranda.

Captain Delano spends hours aboard ship talking with Benito Cereno, who is always in the company of his loyal slave and servant, Babo. Delano observes and notes a series of strange events—urgent whispering among crew and cargo, a few Africans carrying knives, and an occasional physical confrontation with Spanish crew members. Benito Cereno is pale and weak, often near fainting, always insisting that Babo stay close. As Delano prepares to return to his own ship, a desperate Benito Cereno leaps from the deck onto the departing long boat and the truth becomes clear: Babo is running the ship and Benito Cereno is his prisoner; insurgents have taken control and are demanding a return to Africa; the shrouded figurehead is the bones of Alexandro Aranda, the painted slogan a targeted threat to the crew.

The entire day had been a complex dramatic performance put on by the Africans under the directorial brilliance of Babo to deceive the visitors; in order to see the reality of the drama produced on his behalf—which is bursting with hints and clues and full-blown illumination—Captain Delano, a good liberal Republican from New England, would have needed the one quality he lacked: a deep belief that Babo and the other enslaved cargo were actual people like himself, full human beings capable of intricate planning, complex intelligence, wild imaginations, and historical memory, as well as an acute sense of their own agency.

This is the exact quality we must nourish and grow within ourselves: the ability to open our eyes and see the world and all of humanity in its fullness. People in prison are not things or inferior beings or objects; they too are capable of intricate planning, complex intelligence, wild imaginations, historical memory, and an acute sense of their own agency. The Prison Nation is an intolerable abomination the moment you see that light; joining the insurgency becomes an urgent necessity.

***

The logic of prison abolition was explained to me by the great freedom fighter Angela Davis: It’s a problem of limiting our imaginations, she said, of shutting down our capacity to think more broadly and more bravely. We need to think about what lies beyond prison, beyond making a better or more functional prison system—the focus of too many reform conversations—and initiate massive conversations about de-carceration, that is, bringing folks home and shutting prisons down. Mass incarceration is, after all, part of the afterlife of slavery, and prison abolition is the next step in that long historic project called abolition. As we imagine dramatic change, we should also anticipate future attempts to contain and control, for just as Jim Crow followed abolition, and mass incarceration followed Jim Crow, some evil expression of white supremacy and Black containment as yet unseen lurks just around the corner.

Angela Davis talked about the abolitionist and humane values of liberation, community, restoration, and shared fate as opposed to the hardening practices of cruelty and punishment, revenge and retribution. She reminded us of the ten glorious words uttered by Justice Harry Blackmun in 1994 when he announced publicly that he had become a death penalty abolitionist: “I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.” He wasn’t searching for ways to make state-sanctioned murder more efficient or more palatable—he wanted to get out of the death business altogether. Let’s get out of the caging business, she said. Let’s not tinker with the machinery of mass incarceration.

I first proposed prison abolition publicly in a talk I gave about Freedom Schools at the University of Pittsburgh. Most of my talk was well received—even when I pointed out, as I always do, that the existence of an American gulag or the Prison Nation meant that you were never far from a prison—but there was a general sense of disbelief when I said I thought prisons should be abolished. The first question from the floor was a request to clarify the point, which I did, saying I thought we should work toward closing all the prisons since they were institutions of congealed violence. The next student up worried that I was kidding—and I assured them I was not—and followed up by politely accusing me of utopian romanticism and unrealistic idealism. Guilty, I said, of the idealism, but not of being unrealistic. The next person tried to show me the error of my logic, and painted a terrifying picture of a world ruled by mass murderers (hmm, I thought), pointing specifically to John Wayne Gacy, the gruesome Chicago serial killer who was the first person executed when Illinois reinstated the death penalty, a person about whom my interrogator had seemingly encyclopedic knowledge. I’m convinced, I said after an exhaustive portrayal, I give up! Okay, that’s one cell, I said, so who else? I’ll give you Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney too so now we have three prison cells total—a far cry from the millions we support in reality.

This led to a discussion I’ve now had countless times with students and others, and it begins with an exercise in the form of a question: Can we—right now—generate a thousand alternatives to caging people? It turns out we can, and so let’s.

 

A Thousand Steps toward De-carceration and a Range of Alternatives to Caging Human Beings (a Start)

1. 1. Decriminalize illegal drugs and expand drug treatment centers to meet the real needs of people caught in the grip of addiction.
2. 2. Use a public health frame to rethink issues of violence.
3. 3. Get guns off the streets.
4. 4. Generously create and support community mental health programs.
5. 5. Build “Community Restorative Justice” projects—spaces where perpetrators and victims can meet with peers and neighbors, community organizers and social workers, to discuss how to repair the harm inflicted by misbehavior.
6. 6. Redirect all misdemeanor offenses away from criminal court with its attendant culture of cruelty, humiliation, and punishment toward counseling, rehab, or anger management for some, and technological support (a simple breathalyzer device, for example, attached to a vehicle before it can be driven) for others.
7. 7. Outlaw all profiteering from prison: ban private prisons, cash bail and bail bond businesses, paid alternatives to jail, the gouging of prisoners by telephone companies, and the privatizing and outsourcing of prison services like clothing and meals.
8. 8. Do away with mandatory minimum sentencing, “three strikes you’re out,” sentence enhancements, and other punitive measures that serve to swell the prison population.
9. 9. Restore or create opportunities to reduce time inside with policies like day-for-day good time practices.
10. 10. Create massive public works programs.
11. 11. Offer homes to the homeless.
12. 12. Increase the minimum wage to $25 an hour.
13. 13. Grant income supports to the unemployed.
14. 14. Bring the endowments of all private schools, colleges, and universities under public and democratic control, and organize the redistribution of those resources toward a system of free quality education for all.
15. 15. Provide a living-wage stipend, free housing, and good child care to anyone living at or below the poverty line and attending high school or community college.
16. 16. Create a system of free universal health care.
17. 17. Immediately release all prisoners over, say, age fifty for starters.
18. 18. Develop a prisoner’s cooperative to operate the institutions, making decisions collectively about all matters concerning food, health care, education, and social services, the organization of work and leisure, and relations with outside institutions including religious, educational, and business organizations.

Whew!

Well, it’s a running start. We only have 982 to go! And, yes, none of this is possible in the absence of collective action and a social movement for radical transformation. But we need to work collectively on a vision as part of the fight for abolition. And, yes, some of it may sound a bit like fiddling with the machinery of caging, but let’s not be dogmatic hard-liners when actual people could breathe more freely with just a bit of tinkering.

The importance of beginning to make a list is that it shifts the starting point and changes the frame: instead of the ironclad logic of misbehavior = punishment and punishment = prison, which leads onward and onward without end, we begin to see incarceration as the last and least worthy alternative before us. Think of prison as the one-thousand-and-first option—the last resort and not the only choice. We begin to frame the problem in different terms: recovery and restoration, forgiveness and redemption, public health and human rights, respect and faith.

Alternatives liberate all of us from our own culturally imposed mental prisons, our dimmed consciousness and constrained imaginations. Without alternative ways of thinking and being we become destined to be confined in a lockup state of mind.

Perhaps because we’ve lived so long in a culture of discipline and punish, or perhaps because the traditional Puritanism became ravenous once again and demanded to be fed, or perhaps because our go-to-jail complex developed obsessive-compulsive disorder linked to attention-deficit hyperactivity—whatever the reasons, many folks hardly noticed as we slipped down the proverbial slope that Angela Davis and Ruthie Gilmore, Erica Meiners, Bernardine Dohrn, Beth Richie, and Dylan Rodriguez had predicted, and we woke up living in a full-blown prison nation. And that fact points to the true and deep-seated reason underneath the phenomenon of mass incarceration: white supremacy dressed up in modern garb, structural racism pure and simple. The system has been dubbed “the new Jim Crow” by the brilliant lawyer and activist Michelle Alexander who points out that there are now more Black men in prison or on probation or parole than there were living in bondage as chattel slaves in 1850; that there are significantly more people caught up in the system of incarceration and supervision in America today—over six million folks—than inhabited Stalin’s gulag at its height; that the American gulag constitutes the second largest city in this country, and that while the United States constitutes less than 5 percent of the world’s people, it holds over 25 percent of the world’s combined prison population; that in the past twenty years the amount states have spent on prisons has risen to six times the rate spent on higher education; and that on any given day tens of thousands of men, overwhelmingly Black and Latino men, are held in the torturous condition known as solitary confinement. You get the picture.

Just as slavery was a defining fact of American life in the nineteenth century, mass incarceration is a central feature in the United States today. And just as the abolition of slavery was unimaginable to most Americans then, a society with no prisons is difficult for people to wrap their heads around now. But try it—imagine a world without prisons. When enough of us become liberated from the dogma of incarceration and the totalizing logic of captivity and control, we might mobilize ourselves to dive into the hard work of building a political movement to empty the prisons and shut them down. We may look back—just as we look back at slavery—with astonishment and anguish as we realize that the prison-industrial complex was a bad choice: it generated superprofits for a few while it vitalized white supremacy, ruined millions of human lives, devastated social capital, destroyed whole communities, and diminished our society. Slavery, “the peculiar institution,” made cruelty customary and unkindness conventional, everyone forced to witness and embrace it as such, or to shut their eyes tight as communities were made more hard-hearted and hateful. Just as the abolition of slavery liberated enormous energy toward a more generous and compassionate social order, so a world without prisons will create the conditions for a more just and decent community for all.

From slavery to lynching, debt peonage, Black Codes, and Jim Crow; from Jim Crow to redlining and entrapment in crowded ghettos with all the concentrated effects of poverty—crumbling tenements, unemployment, homelessness, health problems, inadequate public and social services, crummy schools; from the slums to mass incarceration—the journey is consistent and consistently cruel and inhumane.

***

Now a treacherous conduit has been laid down by the powerful for the children of formerly enslaved human beings, recent immigrants, First Nations people, and the poor—a passage that’s earned the colorful metaphoric title “the school-to-prison pipeline.” We all know that a pipeline runs in a single direction, and once entered, destiny sweeps everything before it to the bottom. A pipeline offers no exits, no deviations or departures, no way out—unless it fractures. Let’s not focus on prison reform or tinkering with the mechanisms of the pipeline to make it “fairer” or more efficient; let’s aim, rather, at ripping open the pipeline, upending the assumptions that got us where we are, and then throwing every section of pipe and all the braces and supports into the dustbin of history.

Schools for the poor—many urban and rural schools, and increasingly suburban schools as well—share striking similarities with prisons. In each site discipline and security take precedence over knowledge or human development; in each site people are subordinated to the will of—and forced to follow a strict routine set by—others, isolated from the larger community, and coerced to do work that they have no part in defining; in each folks are regulated and ordered about, indoctrinated and assessed and corrected. Schools for the poor are the prep schools for the prisoners of tomorrow.

To imagine a world without prisons—to become a prison abolitionist—is to join a growing social justice initiative already in motion. It’s to join with millions who are thinking of prisons as sites of resistance—places to fight for educational programs, decent health care, and pay for work above slave wages—and whole communities as places of potential radical transformation. It’s to link eliminating prisons to revitalizing failing schools, ending homelessness, repairing our broken health care system, overcoming underemployment and unemployment, and ending an economic system based on predation and exploitation. It’s to join hands and reclaim and complete the mission of abolition—human liberation and exuberant democracy.