Two Million Imprisoned = Too Many

By Vanessa Huang, WireTap. Posted August 4, 2005.

On August 13, thousands of people from around the nation are expected to march in a "Journey for Justice" to our nation’s capitol. Times have certainly changed since the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, but this year’s march still has everything to do with what many view as institutionalized racism.

Lois Ahrens, a participant in the 1963 March and a local Journey for Justice organizer, hopes the march will "make the connections between the promise of that march and that movement for civil rights and mass incarceration."

The U.S. is the world’s leading jailer, imprisoning around 22 percent of the world’s prison population in spite of representing only around 4.6 percent of the world’s population. Of black men in their 20s and 30s, one in eight is imprisoned in the U.S., compared to only one in 63 white men. Yet Justice Department statistics show that from 1994 to 2003, violent crime fell by over 33 percent and property crimes by 23 percent.

This year, family, friends and allies of the more than two million people in U.S. jails and prisons will convene to voice their opposition to what is known as the prison industrial complex (PIC) -- the ever-expanding web of relationships among institutions, individuals, and corporations that benefit from continued reliance on mass imprisonment.

Roberta Franklin, director of Family Members and Friends of People Incarcerated in Montgomery, Alabama, and her group are the main organizers of the march and have obtained sponsorship from over 70 other organizations in their fundraising efforts for the event.

These include diverse prison reform groups targeting specific aspects of the criminal justice system, such as capital punishment, drug-related sentencing and juvenile justice.

The march has also secured sponsorship from groups with broader, more radical critiques of the PIC and the oppressive systems that drive it. These include groups with a long-term vision of a world without prisons, where everyone could thrive regardless of race, class, sexuality or gender.

This unprecedented alignment of organizers with politics ranging from liberal and progressive to radical and revolutionary speaks to widespread consensus on the severity of the current crisis of imprisonment.

Despite all this, the U.S. continues to push "tough on crime" rhetoric and invest in punishment and surveillance rather than nurturing local communities that have survived years of systemic oppression on the basis of race, class, sexuality and gender. This means that the mass imprisonment of communities of color and poor communities of all races only exacerbates existing inequities by taking loved ones away from families and communities.

Challenging mass imprisonment can be a tough sell even in leftist and progressive crowds, so opportunities like the "Journey for Justice" are important steps in amplifying these common demands to end imprisonment as the primary response to poverty and a lack of mental health care or effective responses to addiction.

But as with any social movement of activists who share deep concern about an issue, this one also harbors internal contradictions between those who seek "damage control" -- prison reformists -- and those who seek to challenge root causes driving the problem -- prison abolitionists. Enabling reformists and abolitionists to engage with each other allows them to focus on the common goals.

Reform and Abolition

Abolitionism is grounded in a vision of radical social and cultural transformation in building a world beyond the PIC. Prison abolitionists have been critiqued by reformists for prioritizing concerns with systemic harm experienced by groups of people -- for instance, institutionalized or state violence like policing and prisons and economic violence -- over harm experienced by individuals, as in incidences of interpersonal violence. Reformists also criticize abolitionists for prioritizing political theory over the actual conditions faced by people in prison.

Abolitionists, on the other hand, reproach reformists abolitionists for emphasizing conditions of confinement in the here-and-now at the expense of a longer-term vision of what a safer world without cages would actually look like. Abolitionists have thus argued that reformist efforts have historically failed to address the root causes underlying the PIC.

Vanessa Huang is a fellow at Justice Now, a human rights organization that works with women in prison to build a world without prisons.

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