We need to abolish Prisons. They've done almost nothing but harm to our society. But what specifically have they done and how can we solve this? -Orion songster, 9th grade
The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) is the relationship between government systems and the businesses that profit from incarceration. It takes advantage of everything about the systems in place to make a profit off mass-incarceration, all while hiding their selfish, racism coated plans under a blanket of public concern. This whole time, the PIC has just been another tool to force people who are already in horrible situations into more poverty, never able to get out, while billionaires sit in their mansions built on the bones of those who died trying to make a living.
But how has the PIC done this? Through the processes of providing little to no rehabilitation, forcing inmates to work (and draining any wealth they do earn), mass-policing, and the infamous war on drugs, the PIC has achieved that sick dream.
1. No (good) rehabilitation
Since 2018, the world has gone through two presidents, a pandemic, political uprisings, and more. Someone who was incarcerated for possession of 28 grams of crack in March 2018 would be getting out of prison just about now. Even though they might have had access to things like the news in prison, they wouldn’t have access to many aspects of today’s culture that are often very prominent in life.
When people first get out of prison, they are often left on the street with nowhere to go. Since a disproportionate percentage of inmates are from impoverished communities, chances are most people who are released won’t know what to do next. Prisons often are shown as ways for people to be punished and think back on what they’ve done, then find a way to correct that after being released. But prison doesn’t actually help rehabilitate prisoners, and according to Harvard Political Review, “Within three years of their release, two out of three former prisoners are rearrested and more than 50% are incarcerated again.”[¹]
2. Makes inmates work (for cheap!!)
If able, all inmates must work. Yet prison jobs are exhausting, and barely pay. In California, jobs pay between 8 and 37 cents per hour. Companies like McDonald's, Walmart and Starbucks profit from this mass-exploitation [²]while prisoners are overworked and barely paid.
Furthermore, any money that inmates do earn is often given right back to prisons and prison food companies. With often badly cooked, expired, and overall disgusting food, prison diets aren’t much to brag about. Luckily there is a commissary. Here you can buy most things you might need, including food that doesn’t make you want to shove your plastic fork down your throat. Keyword buy. Any money inmates do earn just goes back to the prisons through commissaries and other services like phone calls. Many companies that produce prison supplies profit whenever prison populations go up. So it’s no wonder that they’ve formed relationships with government systems that keep incarceration high.
3. Mass-policing
Since 1970, the U.S. prison population has increased 500%[³], but crime rates have only dropped by 50%. And despite higher funding and more cops than ever before being hired to actually stop this crime, it hasn’t worked. If you google what the job of police is, your answer will be to enforce the laws and keep people safe. But combined with how police brutality has recently come to an even clearer light and how police obviously aren’t doing their jobs correctly, it may be time to reconsider what we are even using police for at this point, other than imprisoning people for simply smoking a bit of weed.
4. The War on Drugs
In 2019, 15% of arrests[⁴] were drug-related, with over 80% for simple possession[⁵]. Of course, drug abuse is a horrible thing, but incarceration (with a pretty big drug trade amongst prisoners) is not a good way to go about it. When Nixon began the War on Drugs in 1971, it soon became clear that the drug war was more of a color war. Crack cocaine and powder cocaine are practically the same substance. Yet crack cocaine, mostly used by black people, is criminalized much more than powder cocaine, which is often used by white people.[⁶] If this doesn’t show that the war on drugs was just a plot to incarcerate more people, especially those of color, surely this quote from Richard Nixon’s right hand man, John Ehrlichman, will. “By getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities… Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.”
Invisible genocide is an organized, systemic killing of a group of people, with the goal to eliminate that group, but in subtle or hard to see ways. With these four strategies of the PIC, the police killing innocent black people every single day, the system targeting black people by placing them in poverty, and how life expectancy in these communities are lowered by multiple years, it seems as if we are creating an invisible genocide. We need to consider ways to end it as soon as possible. To do that, we will need to abolish prisons.
Prison abolition is more than just removing prisons from our society, which is what most people believe. It aspires to create effective, community bound solutions to crime, not let serial killers run free.
To make Prison Abolition happen, we need to do at least three main things.
First, we need to expel the systemic processes that force people into conditions where they feel they need to steal or do drugs. Rather than arrest people who steal from the local grocery store, think about why they are stealing in the first place. Of course, this is a complicated process which takes time, money, and effort. None of prison abolition is simple. It will require much of our world to be turned upside down, but will result in a shift of wealth inequality and poverty that forces people to do things they shouldn’t feel forced to do.
Second, we need to establish rehabilitation facilities and better mental institutions that actually help to heal people rather than lock them up. Where prisons fail to help out the people they contain, placing people where they can find the tools they need would make society function better.
Third, we need to establish a way to “arrest” people. We obviously cannot continue to use police, but instead, create something similar but never to the power or extent of our current police. These new “police” would not be armed with deadly weapons and would be under the law just like any other citizen. They would be trained in crisis support and how to keep something worse from happening instead of just how to shoot a gun.
There is most likely much more to do than just those three ideas, but prison abolition is a process, and other problems to solve will continue to reveal themselves. As a society, we may never reach fully abolition, but we can sure as hell try.
But how has the PIC done this? Through the processes of providing little to no rehabilitation, forcing inmates to work (and draining any wealth they do earn), mass-policing, and the infamous war on drugs, the PIC has achieved that sick dream.
1. No (good) rehabilitation
Since 2018, the world has gone through two presidents, a pandemic, political uprisings, and more. Someone who was incarcerated for possession of 28 grams of crack in March 2018 would be getting out of prison just about now. Even though they might have had access to things like the news in prison, they wouldn’t have access to many aspects of today’s culture that are often very prominent in life.
When people first get out of prison, they are often left on the street with nowhere to go. Since a disproportionate percentage of inmates are from impoverished communities, chances are most people who are released won’t know what to do next. Prisons often are shown as ways for people to be punished and think back on what they’ve done, then find a way to correct that after being released. But prison doesn’t actually help rehabilitate prisoners, and according to Harvard Political Review, “Within three years of their release, two out of three former prisoners are rearrested and more than 50% are incarcerated again.”[¹]
2. Makes inmates work (for cheap!!)
If able, all inmates must work. Yet prison jobs are exhausting, and barely pay. In California, jobs pay between 8 and 37 cents per hour. Companies like McDonald's, Walmart and Starbucks profit from this mass-exploitation [²]while prisoners are overworked and barely paid.
Furthermore, any money that inmates do earn is often given right back to prisons and prison food companies. With often badly cooked, expired, and overall disgusting food, prison diets aren’t much to brag about. Luckily there is a commissary. Here you can buy most things you might need, including food that doesn’t make you want to shove your plastic fork down your throat. Keyword buy. Any money inmates do earn just goes back to the prisons through commissaries and other services like phone calls. Many companies that produce prison supplies profit whenever prison populations go up. So it’s no wonder that they’ve formed relationships with government systems that keep incarceration high.
3. Mass-policing
Since 1970, the U.S. prison population has increased 500%[³], but crime rates have only dropped by 50%. And despite higher funding and more cops than ever before being hired to actually stop this crime, it hasn’t worked. If you google what the job of police is, your answer will be to enforce the laws and keep people safe. But combined with how police brutality has recently come to an even clearer light and how police obviously aren’t doing their jobs correctly, it may be time to reconsider what we are even using police for at this point, other than imprisoning people for simply smoking a bit of weed.
4. The War on Drugs
In 2019, 15% of arrests[⁴] were drug-related, with over 80% for simple possession[⁵]. Of course, drug abuse is a horrible thing, but incarceration (with a pretty big drug trade amongst prisoners) is not a good way to go about it. When Nixon began the War on Drugs in 1971, it soon became clear that the drug war was more of a color war. Crack cocaine and powder cocaine are practically the same substance. Yet crack cocaine, mostly used by black people, is criminalized much more than powder cocaine, which is often used by white people.[⁶] If this doesn’t show that the war on drugs was just a plot to incarcerate more people, especially those of color, surely this quote from Richard Nixon’s right hand man, John Ehrlichman, will. “By getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities… Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.”
Invisible genocide is an organized, systemic killing of a group of people, with the goal to eliminate that group, but in subtle or hard to see ways. With these four strategies of the PIC, the police killing innocent black people every single day, the system targeting black people by placing them in poverty, and how life expectancy in these communities are lowered by multiple years, it seems as if we are creating an invisible genocide. We need to consider ways to end it as soon as possible. To do that, we will need to abolish prisons.
Prison abolition is more than just removing prisons from our society, which is what most people believe. It aspires to create effective, community bound solutions to crime, not let serial killers run free.
To make Prison Abolition happen, we need to do at least three main things.
First, we need to expel the systemic processes that force people into conditions where they feel they need to steal or do drugs. Rather than arrest people who steal from the local grocery store, think about why they are stealing in the first place. Of course, this is a complicated process which takes time, money, and effort. None of prison abolition is simple. It will require much of our world to be turned upside down, but will result in a shift of wealth inequality and poverty that forces people to do things they shouldn’t feel forced to do.
Second, we need to establish rehabilitation facilities and better mental institutions that actually help to heal people rather than lock them up. Where prisons fail to help out the people they contain, placing people where they can find the tools they need would make society function better.
Third, we need to establish a way to “arrest” people. We obviously cannot continue to use police, but instead, create something similar but never to the power or extent of our current police. These new “police” would not be armed with deadly weapons and would be under the law just like any other citizen. They would be trained in crisis support and how to keep something worse from happening instead of just how to shoot a gun.
There is most likely much more to do than just those three ideas, but prison abolition is a process, and other problems to solve will continue to reveal themselves. As a society, we may never reach fully abolition, but we can sure as hell try.
