Are Prisons Obsolete? | Will O'Pedia

tags: Angela Davis Prison Abolition

Notes

Chapter 1: Introduction - Prison Reform or Prison Abolition?

there may be twice as many people suffering from mental illness who are in jails and prisons than there are in all psychiatric hospitals in the United States combined

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I do not believe that the U.S. government will be able to lock up so many people without producing powerful public resistance. No, this will never happen, not unless this country plunges into fascism

NOTER_PAGE: (9 . 0.30775075987841943)

in a way that recalled the emergence of the military industrial complex, we began to refer to a "prison industrial complex"

NOTER_PAGE: (10 . 0.4278115501519757)

Her analysis of the prison industrial complex in California describes these developments as a response to surpluses of capital, land, labor, and state capacity

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On the whole, people tend to take prisons for granted. It is difficult to imagine life without them. At the same time, there is reluctance to face the realities hidden within them, a fear of thinking about what happens inside them. Thus, the prison is present in our lives and, at the same time, it is absent from our lives

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Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that anyone, including ourselves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives

NOTER_PAGE: (13 . 0.7401215805471124)

This is the ideological work that the prison performs—it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society

NOTER_PAGE: (14 . 0.3047112462006079)

by the time the prison construction boom began, official crime statistics were already falling

NOTER_PAGE: (15 . 0.28419452887537994)

The prison is one of the most important features of our image environment

NOTER_PAGE: (16 . 0.7608530083777608)

The most difficult and urgent challenge today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor

NOTER_PAGE: (19 . 0.16603198781416603)

Chapter 2: Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist Perspectives Toward Prison

NOTER_PAGE: (20 . 0.16351249053747163)

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.

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Slave owners may have been concerned for the survival of individual slaves, who, after all, represented significant invest ments. 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

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"convict labor was in many ways in the vanguard of the region's first tentative, ambivalent, steps toward modernity."

NOTER_PAGE: (33 . 0.14134542705971279)

Chapter 3: Imprisonment and Reform

NOTER_PAGE: (38 . 0.12244897959183673)

punishment was designed to have its most profound effect not so much on the person punished as on the crowd of spectators.

NOTER_PAGE: (39 . 0.45351473922902497)

prison as we know it today did not make its appearance on the historical stage as the superior form of punishment for all times. It was simply—though we should not underestimate the complexity of this process—what made most sense at a particular moment in history

NOTER_PAGE: (41 . 0.4520030234315949)

The computability of state punishment in terms of time—days, months, years—resonates with the role of labor-time as the basis for computing the value of capitalist commodities

NOTER_PAGE: (42 . 0.5230885692657078)

Since women were largely denied public status as rights-bearing individuals, they could not be easily punished by the deprivation of such rights

NOTER_PAGE: (43 . 0.30839002267573695)

the working class needed to be constituted as an army of self-disciplined individuals capable of performing the req uisite industrial labor for a developing capitalist system.

NOTER_PAGE: (44 . 0.668433005299016)

"[t]hose who have undergone this punishment MUST pass into society again morally unhealthy and diseased."

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authorities began to send prisoners housed throughout the system whom they deemed to be "dangerous" to the federal prison in Marion, Illinois. In 1983, the entire prison was "locked down," which meant that prisoners were confined to their cells twenty-three hours a day. This lockdown became permanent

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Michael Ignatieff

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Chapter 4: How Gender Structures the Prison System

NOTER_PAGE: (58 . 0.1360544217687075)

masculine criminality has always been deemed more "normal" than feminine criminality.

NOTER_PAGE: (64 . 0.11413454270597129)

deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane

NOTER_PAGE: (64 . 0.5215419501133787)

sexual abuse by prison guards is translated into hypersexuality of women prisoners. The notion that female "deviance" always has a sexual dimension persists in the contemporary era, and this intersection of criminality and sexuality continues to be racialized

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"prisons, as employed by the Euro-American system, operate to keep Native Americans in a colonial situation"

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parity for women and men prisoners should consist in their equal right to be fired upon by guards

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sexual abuse—which, like domestic vio lence, is yet another dimension of the privatized punish ment of women—has become an institutionalized compo nent of punishment behind prison walls

NOTER_PAGE: (75 . 0.6916099773242631)

Chapter 5: The Prison Industrial Complex

NOTER_PAGE: (82 . 0.1360544217687075)

way to define the relationship between the military industrial complex and the prison industrial complex would be to call it symbiotic

NOTER_PAGE: (84 . 0.7150415721844293)

acres of skin

NOTER_PAGE: (88 . 0.11337868480725624)

"an anthropoid colony, mainly healthy"

NOTER_PAGE: (88 . 0.23507180650037793)

private companies have a stake in retaining prisoners as long as possible, and in keeping their facilities filled

NOTER_PAGE: (93 . 0.6228269085411943)

major reason for the profitability of private prisons consists in the nonunion labor they employ

NOTER_PAGE: (98 . 0.18925056775170326)

Chapter 6: Abolitionist Alternatives

NOTER_PAGE: (103 . 0.149886449659349)

having no alternative at all would create less crime than the present criminal training centers do

NOTER_PAGE: (103 . 0.3777441332323997)

the only full alternative is building the kind of society that does not need prisons

NOTER_PAGE: (103 . 0.4186222558667676)

let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment that would occupy the same footprint as the prison system

NOTER_PAGE: (104 . 0.8099924299772899)

NOTER_PAGE: (105 . 0.5480696442089327)

Schools can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails and prisons.

NOTER_PAGE: (106 . 0.13907785336356765)

racial and class disparities in care available to the affluent and the deprived need to be eradicated

NOTER_PAGE: (106 . 0.54421768707483)

makes sense to consider the decriminalization of drug use as a significant component

NOTER_PAGE: (106 . 0.8148148148148149)

proposals to decriminalize drug use should be linked to the development of a constellation of free, community-based programs accessible to all people who wish to tackle their drug problems

NOTER_PAGE: (107 . 0.1927437641723356)

operation should not be under the auspices of the criminal justice system

NOTER_PAGE: (107 . 0.690098261526833)

In the cases of drugs and sex work, decriminalization would simply require repeal of all those laws that penalize individuals who use drugs and who work in the sex industry

NOTER_PAGE: (108 . 0.2140695915279879)

dismantling the processes that punish people for their failure to enter this country without documents

NOTER_PAGE: (108 . 0.6187594553706506)

NOTER_PAGE: (109 . 0.4293272864701436)

job and living wage programs, alternatives to the disestablished welfare program, community-based recre ation

NOTER_PAGE: (109 . 0.6447467876039304)

pulling apart the conceptual link between crime and punish ment

NOTER_PAGE: (110 . 0.14285714285714285)

"punishment" does not follow from "crime" in the neat and logical sequence offered by discourses that insist on the justice of imprisonment

NOTER_PAGE: (110 . 0.23431594860166288)

linked to the agendas of politicians, the profit drive of corporations, and media representations of crime

NOTER_PAGE: (110 . 0.3303099017384732)

ideological work of questioning why "criminals" have been constituted as a class

NOTER_PAGE: (110 . 0.6424792139077854)

the category "law-breakers" is far greater than the category of individuals who are deemed criminals

NOTER_PAGE: (110 . 0.7399848828420257)

They are sent to prison, not so much because of the crimes they may have indeed committed, but largely because their communities have been criminalized.

NOTER_PAGE: (111 . 0.3303099017384732)

suggested that crime needs to be defined in terms of tort and, instead of criminal law, should be reparative law

NOTER_PAGE: (111 . 0.7883597883597884)

person whose human duty is to take responsibility for his or her acts, and to assume the duty of repair

NOTER_PAGE: (112 . 0.09689629068887207)

sometimes it pays to shut up and listen to what other people have to say, to ask; 'Why do these terrible things happen?' instead of simply reacting

NOTER_PAGE: (113 . 0.5715367146101439)

Notes

Chapter 1: Introduction - Prison Reform or Prison Abolition?

there may be twice as many people suffering from mental illness who are in jails and prisons than there are in all psychiatric hospitals in the United States combined

I do not believe that the U.S. government will be able to lock up so many people without producing powerful public resistance. No, this will never happen, not unless this country plunges into fascism

in a way that recalled the emergence of the military industrial complex, we began to refer to a "prison industrial complex"

Her analysis of the prison industrial complex in California describes these developments as a response to surpluses of capital, land, labor, and state capacity

Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that anyone, including ourselves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives

This is the ideological work that the prison performs—it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society

by the time the prison construction boom began, official crime statistics were already falling

The prison is one of the most important features of our image environment

The most difficult and urgent challenge today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor

Chapter 2: Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist Perspectives Toward Prison

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.

"convict labor was in many ways in the vanguard of the region's first tentative, ambivalent, steps toward modernity."

Chapter 3: Imprisonment and Reform

punishment was designed to have its most profound effect not so much on the person punished as on the crowd of spectators.

prison as we know it today did not make its appearance on the historical stage as the superior form of punishment for all times. It was simply—though we should not underestimate the complexity of this process—what made most sense at a particular moment in history

The computability of state punishment in terms of time—days, months, years—resonates with the role of labor-time as the basis for computing the value of capitalist commodities

Since women were largely denied public status as rights-bearing individuals, they could not be easily punished by the deprivation of such rights

the working class needed to be constituted as an army of self-disciplined individuals capable of performing the req­ uisite industrial labor for a developing capitalist system.

"[t]hose who have undergone this punishment MUST pass into society again morally unhealthy and diseased."

Michael Ignatieff

Chapter 4: How Gender Structures the Prison System

masculine criminality has always been deemed more "normal" than feminine criminality.

deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane

sexual abuse by prison guards is translated into hypersexuality of women prisoners. The notion that female "deviance" always has a sexual dimension persists in the contemporary era, and this intersection of criminality and sexuality continues to be racialized

"prisons, as employed by the Euro-American system, operate to keep Native Americans in a colonial situation"

parity for women and men prisoners should consist in their equal right to be fired upon by guards

sexual abuse—which, like domestic vio­ lence, is yet another dimension of the privatized punish­ ment of women—has become an institutionalized compo­ nent of punishment behind prison walls

Chapter 5: The Prison Industrial Complex

way to define the relationship between the military industrial complex and the prison industrial complex would be to call it symbiotic

acres of skin

"an anthropoid colony, mainly healthy"

private companies have a stake in retaining prisoners as long as possible, and in keeping their facilities filled

major reason for the profitability of private prisons consists in the nonunion labor they employ

Chapter 6: Abolitionist Alternatives

having no alternative at all would create less crime than the present criminal training centers do

the only full alternative is building the kind of society that does not need prisons

let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment that would occupy the same footprint as the prison system

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

Schools can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails and prisons.

racial and class disparities in care available to the affluent and the deprived need to be eradicated

makes sense to consider the decriminalization of drug use as a significant component

proposals to decriminalize drug use should be linked to the development of a constellation of free, community-based programs accessible to all people who wish to tackle their drug problems

operation should not be under the auspices of the criminal justice system

In the cases of drugs and sex work, decriminalization would simply require repeal of all those laws that penalize individuals who use drugs and who work in the sex industry

dismantling the processes that punish people for their failure to enter this country without documents

violence against women is a pervasive and complicated social problem that cannot be solved by imprisoning women who fight back against their abusers

job and living wage programs, alternatives to the disestablished welfare program, community-based recre­ ation

pulling apart the conceptual link between crime and punish­ ment

"punishment" does not follow from "crime" in the neat and logical sequence offered by discourses that insist on the justice of imprisonment

linked to the agendas of politicians, the profit drive of corporations, and media representations of crime

ideological work of questioning why "criminals" have been constituted as a class

the category "law-breakers" is far greater than the category of individuals who are deemed criminals

They are sent to prison, not so much because of the crimes they may have indeed committed, but largely because their communities have been criminalized.

suggested that crime needs to be defined in terms of tort and, instead of criminal law, should be reparative law

person whose human duty is to take responsibility for his or her acts, and to assume the duty of repair

sometimes it pays to shut up and listen to what other people have to say, to ask; 'Why do these terrible things happen?' instead of simply reacting

the working class needed to be constituted as an army of self-disciplined individuals capable of performing the req uisite industrial labor for a developing capitalist system.

sexual abuse—which, like domestic vio lence, is yet another dimension of the privatized punish ment of women—has become an institutionalized compo nent of punishment behind prison walls

job and living wage programs, alternatives to the disestablished welfare program, community-based recre ation

pulling apart the conceptual link between crime and punish ment