PIC Take Two

As soon as I saw that the syllabus for Professor Yellow Bird's class called for attending a conference or seminar, I hoped to find one that dealt with the Drug War or the Prison Industrial Complex. I have been interested in how societies deal with crime for a long time. In my early teens I became acutely interested in victimless crimes, and this led me to an abiding interest in the drug war. While I had never formally studied the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) prior to this workshop, it is something I have read about here and there over the years, and something that dovetails with my interest in drug prohibition.

One of the things that I will take away from the workshop is a much deeper understanding of the extent of the so-called prison boom in California. While I had known, based on an interest in the three-strikes law, that California has such an inordinate number of prisoners, many of them incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses or for non-violent third strikes, I had no idea of the full extent of the prison building frenzy, nor a context in which to situate it. So the numbers, to me, were startling: from 1984 to 2005 California built 33 prisons, nearly three times the number that had been constructed in the previous 130 years!

It is certainly a complex confluence of events that led to such an expansion of the California prison system. So-called “tough on crime” politicians who pushed ever more draconian drug prohibitions; a nation-wide push to move discretion away from judges by making mandatory sentencing guidelines; ever increasing militarization of police forces; the American public’s seeming predisposition to punishment; and the media, ever ready to fan the flames by spotlighting statistical outliers and fantastic cases, while simultaneously refusing to make a serious critique of an system spiraling out of control.

But while I had known about these factors in the rise of the prison industry I had not paid much attention to the corporate interests involved. I had not really considered that one of the driving forces in the caging of American citizens could be corporate greed--I had always thought that morally corrupt politicians intentionally exploiting, for personal gain, an insouciant and lazy public’s basest urges represented a complete explanation.

Looking at the commodification of the prisoners, and the dozens of corporations that don’t just profit from prisons but seem to pay an overactive role in getting them created, is saddening and sickening. Even if one views this “partnership” between the prison industry and corporate America in the most charitable light, the relationship clearly raises serious and shocking concerns; if one views this collusion in, I think, a reasonable light, then the relationship appears morally bankrupt and seems to be cause for legitimate alarm by the American public.

There are a few issues that I left the seminar wanting to know more about. I read with interest Angela Davis’ book, Are Prisons Obsolete prior to the seminar and thought it really laid the groundwork for what we discussed in lecture. Professor Davis makes a stark and compelling argument for the inequities inherent in the American Criminal Justice system and the systemic racism and sexism inherent in it. However, I was really interested to hear more about concrete alternatives to using prisons as the fulcrum of our justice system.

In a way, I think that I would be perfect candidate to be involved in the prison abolition movement: I firmly believe in legalizing all drugs, decriminalizing victimless crimes, doing away with three-strikes laws, mandatory minimums, and any other sentence enhancements that result in ridiculously long sentences for offenders, and, basically, completely re-hauling the prison system. Yet I failed to find an explanation for the “obsolescence” of prisons in her book.

In order for something to be obsolete there needs to be a better alternative. While I am sure that for prison abolitionists the question “what about the murders and rapists?” is tiresome, it is also a legitimate question. While they are relatively few and far between, there are thousands of dangerous offenders who need to be incapacitated. There also needs to be some mechanism for deterring serious crime, and not just the rapist and murders, but the Madoffs of the world. I am completely ready to imagine a world completely without prisons, I just need someone to paint the picture a little more fully for me.