from slavery to prisons

quotes from are prisons obsolete? by angela davis

“the u.s. population in general is less than five percent of the world's total, whereas more than twenty percent of the world's combined prison population can be claimed by the united states. In elliott currie's words, ‘the prison has become a looming presence in our society to an extent unparalleled in our history or that of any other industrial democracy. Short of major wars, mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social program of our time.’"

“Geographer Ruth Gilmore describes the expansion of prisons in California as 'a geographical solution to socio-economic problems.' Her analysis of the prison industrial complex in California describes these developments as a response to surpluses of capital, land labor, and state capacity.

'California's new prisons are sited on devalued rural land, most, in fact on formerly irrigated agricultural acres. . . The State bought land sold by big landowners. And the State assured the small, depressed towns now shadowed by prisons that the new, recession-proof, non-polluting industry would jump-start local redevelopment.'”

“the ideologies governing slavery and those governing punishment were profoundly linked during the earliest period of u.s. history. While free people could be legally sentenced to punishment by hard labor, such a sentence would in no way change the conditions of existence already experienced by slaves. Thus, as hirsch further reveals, thomas jefferson, who supported the sentencing of convicted people to hard labor on road and water projects, also pointed out that he would exclude slaves from this sort of punishment. Since slaves already performed hard labor, sentencing them to penal labor would not mark a difference in their condition. Jefferson suggested banishment to other countries instead.

Particularly in the united states, race has always played a central role in constructing presumptions of criminality. After the abolition of slavery, former slave states passed new legislation revising the Slave Codes in order to regulate the behavior of free blacks in ways similar to those that had existed during slavery. The new Black Codes proscribed a range of actions – such as vagrancy, absence from work, breach of job contracts, the possession of firearms, and insulting gestures or acts – that were criminalized only when the person charged was black. With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, slavery and involuntary servitude were putatively abolished. However, there was a significant exception. In the wording of the amendment, slavery and involuntary servitude were abolished 'except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.' According to the Black Codes, there were crimes defined by state law for which only black people could be 'duly convicted.' Thus, former slaves, who had recently been extricated from a condition of hard labor for life, could be legally sentenced to penal servitude.

In the immediate aftermath of slavery, the southern states hastened to develop a criminal justice system that could legally restrict the possibilities of freedom for newly released slaves. Black people became the prime targets of a developing convict lease system, referred to by many as a reincarnation of slavery. The Mississippi Black Codes, for example, declared vagrant 'anyone/who was guilty of theft, had run away [from a job, apparently], was drunk, was wanton in conduct or speech, had neglected job or family, handled money carelessly, and . . . all other idle and disorderly persons.' Thus, vagrancy was coded as a black crime, one punishable by incarceration and forced labor, sometimes on the very plantations that previously had thrived on slave labor.”

“the expansion of the convict lease system and the county chain gang meant that the antebellum criminal justice system, which focused far more intensely on black people than on whites, defined southern criminal justice largely as a means of controlling black labor. According to mancini: 'among the multifarious debilitating legacies of slavery was the conviction that blacks could only labor in a certain way – the way experience had shown them to have labored in the past: in gangs, subjected to constant supervision, and under the discipline of the lash. Since these were the requisites of slavery, and since slaves were blacks, southern whites almost universally concluded that blacks could not work unless subjected to such intense surveillance and discipline.'”

“Slave owners may have been concerned for the survival of individual slaves, who, after all, represented significant investments. Convicts, on the other hand, were leased not as individuals, but as a group, and they could be worked literally to death without affecting the profitability of a convict crew.”

"thus far i have largely used gender-neutral language to describe the historical development of the prison and its reformers. but convicts punished by imprisonment in emergent penitentiary systems were primarily male. this reflected the deeply gender-biased structure of legal, political, and economic rights. since women were largely denied public status as rights-bearing individuals, they could not be easily punished by the deprivation of such rights through imprisonment. this was especially true of married women, who had no standing before the law. according to english common law, marriage resulted in a state of 'civil death,' as symbolized by the wife's assumption of the husband's name. consequently, she tended to be punished for revolting against her domestic duties rather than for failure in her meager public responsibilities. the relegation of white women to domestic economies prevented them from playing a significant role in the emergent commodity realm. this was especially true since wage labor was typically gendered as male and racialized as white. it is not fortuituous that domestic corporal punishment for women survived long after these modes of punishment had become obsolete for (white) men. the persistence of domestic violence painfully attests to these historical modes of gendered punishment."

“alderson's regimes were based on the assumption that 'criminal' women could be rehabilitated by assimilating correct womanly behaviors – that is, by becoming experts in domesticity – especially cooking, cleaning, and sewing. Of course, training designed to produce better wives and mothers among middle-class white women effectively produced domestic servants among black and poor women.”

“for most of the period after world war II, the female incarceration rate hovered at around 8 per 100,000; it did not reach double digits until 1977. today it is 51 per 100,000. . . at the current rates of increase, there will be more women in american prisons in the year 2010 than there were inmates of both sexes in 1970. when we combine the effects of race and gender, the nature of these shifts in the prison population is even clearer. The prison incarceration rate for black women today exceeds that for white men as recently as 1980.” - elliot currie

“for private business prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes. No union organizing. No health benefits, unemployment insurance, or workers' compensation to pay. No language barriers, as in foreign countries. New leviathan prisons are being built on thousands of eerie acres of factories inside the walls. Prisoners do data entry for chevron, make telephone reservations for TWA, raise hogs, shovel manure, and make circuit boards, limousines, waterbeds, and lingerie for victoria's secret, all at a fraction of the cost of 'free labor'.” -linda evans and eve goldberg

“the notion of a prison industrial complex insists on understandings of the punishment process that take into account economic and political structures and ideologies, rather than focusing myopically on individual criminal conduct and efforts to 'curb crime'. The fact, for example, that many corporations with global markets now rely on prisons as an important source of profit helps us to understand the rapidity with which prisons began to proliferate precisely at a time when official studies indicated that the crime rate was falling. The notion of a prison industrial complex also insists that the racialization of prison populations – and this is not only true of the united states, but of europe, south america, and australia as well – is not an incidental feature. Thus, critiques of the prison industrial complex undertaken by abolitionist activists and scholars are very much linked to critiques of the global persistence of racism. Antiracist and other social justice movements are incomplete without attention to the politics of imprisonment.”

“i hesitate to make unmediated use of such statistical evidence because it can discourage the very critical thinking that ought to be elicited by an understanding of the prison industrial complex. It is precisely the abstraction of numbers that plays such a central role in criminalizing those who experience the misfortune of imprisonment. There are many different kinds of men and women in the prisons, jails, and INS and military detention centers, whose lives are erased by the bureau of justice statistics figures. The numbers recognize no distinction between the woman who is imprisoned on drug conspiracy and the man who is in prison for killing his wife, a man who might actually end up spending less time behind bars than the woman.

With this observation in mind, the statistical breakdown is as follows: there were 1,324,465 people in 'federal and state prisons', 15,852 in 'territorial prisons', 631,240 in 'local jails', 8,761 in 'immigration and naturalization detention facilities', 2,436 in 'military facilities', 1,912 in 'jails in indian country', and 108,965 in 'juvenile facilities'. [2001] In the ten years between 1990 and 2000, 351 new places of confinement were opened by states and more than 528,000 beds were added, amounting to  1,320 state facilities, representing an eight-one percent increase.”

“companies that service the criminal justice system need sufficient quantities of raw materials to guarantee long-term growth. . . in the criminal justice field, the raw material is prisoners, and industry will do what is necessary to guarantee a steady supple. For the supple of prisoners to grow, criminal justice policies must ensure a sufficient number of incarcerated americans regardless of whether crime is rising or the incarceration is necessary.” - nils christie

“extensive corporate investment in prisons has significantly raised the stakes for antiprison work. It means that serious antiprison activists must be willing to look much further in their analysis and organizing strategies than the actual institution of the prison. Prison reform rhetoric, which has always undergirded dominant critiques of the prison system, will not work in this new situation. If reform approaches have tended to bolster the permanence of the prison in the past, they certainly will not suffice to challenge the economic and political relationships that sustain the prison today. This means that in the era of the prison industrial complex, activists must pose hard questions about the relationship between global capitalism and the spread of u.s.-style prisons throughout the world.”

“radical opposition to the global prison industrial complex sees the antiprison movement as a vital means of expanding the terrain on which the quest for democracy will unfold. This movement is thus antiracist, anticapitalist, antisexist, and antihomophobic. It calls for the abolition of the prison as the dominant mode of punishment but at the same time recognizes the need for genuine solidarity with the millions of men, women, and children who are behind bars. A major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners- calling for less violent conditions, an end to state sexual assault, improved physical and mental health care, greater access to drug programs, better educational work opportunities, unionization of prison labor, more connections with families and communities, shorter or alternative sentencing – and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, nor more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place of the prison in our future?”

“it is within this context that it makes sense to consider the decriminalization of drug use as a significant component of a larger strategy to simultaneously oppose structures of racism within the criminal justice system and further the abolitionist agenda of decarceration.”

“it is true that if we focus myopically on the existing system – and perhaps this is the problem that leads to the assumption that imprisonment is the only alternative to death – it is very hard to imagine a structurally similar system capable of handling such a vast population of lawbreakers. If, however, we shift our attention from the prison, perceived as an isolated institution, to the set of relationships that comprise the prison industrial complex, it may be easier to think about alternatives. In other words, a more complicated framework may yield more options than if we simply attempt to discover a single substitute for the prison system. The first step, then, would be to let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment that would occupy the same footprint as the prison system.

Since the 1980s, the prison system has become increasingly ensconced in the economic, political, and ideological life of the united states and the transnational trafficking in US commodities, culture, and ideas. Thus, the prison industrial complex is much more than the sum of all the jails and prisons in this country. It is a set of symbiotic relationships among correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards' unions, and legislative and court agendas. If it is true that the contemporary meaning of punishment is fashioned through these relationships, then the most effective abolitionist strategies will contest these relationships and propose alternatives that pull them apart. What, then, would it mean to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in which race and class are not primary determinants of punishment? Or one in which punishment itself is no longer the central concern in the making of justice?

An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategyy, we would try 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.

The creation of new institutions that lay claim to the space now occupied by the prison can eventually start to crowd out the prison so that it would inhabit increasingly smaller areas of our social and psychic landscape. Schools can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails and prisons. Unless the current structures of violence are eliminated from schools in impoverished communities of color – including the presence of armed security guards and police – and unless schools become places that encourage the joy of learning, these schools will remain the major conduits to prison. The alternative would be to transform schools into vehicles for decarceration. Within the health care system, it is important to emphasize the current scarcity of institutions available to poor people who suffer severe mental and emotional illnesses. There are currently more people with mental and emotional disorders in jails and prisons than in mental institutions. This call for new facilities designed to assist poor people should not be taken as an appeal to reinstitute the old system of mental institutions, which were – and in many cases still are – as repressive as the prisons. It is simply to suggest that the racial and class disparities in care available to the affluent and the deprived need to be eradicated, thus creating another vehicle for decarceration.”