In this blog page, students reflect on multiple issues related to prisons as spaces of power and resistance. The blogs are purely reflective, using critical, decolonial, and intersectional approaches to understand prisons as global structures.
Grit. A word I grew up hearing, and a quality I once strove to possess and embody. My American high school liked to emphasize the importance of grit: strength of character, courage, resolve, and above all, resiliency. Again and again, I listened through motivational talks from the school president about how resiliency is a quality and a skill that would allow us to overcome all obstacles we might one day face. Again and again, we studied literature imbued with an underlying message of the importance of grit. Tupac Shakur’s “The Rose That Grew From Concrete,” for example, was required reading for all the American literature classes, and while I appreciated the poem at the time, I never quite agreed with its message. It was in studying prisons and spaces of violence and resistance that I began to understand why stories about grit and resiliency felt somehow incomplete.
Resiliency narratives (like Shakur’s piece) tend to glorify the success and beauty of the rose while ignoring the fact that roses ought not be planted in concrete cracks in the first place. This phenomenon can easily be understood in the context of prisons. Prison emerged as a humane alternative to beatings, torture, and capital punishment, but even amongst its most ardent supporters and workers, it is not known as a place of vitality or humanity (Kushner 2019). No one who experiences prison finds it a place conducive to growth, compassion, and care. And yet, those who survive prisons are pointed to as evidence of the prison system’s success. Look! The system works! That criminal served time and emerged a better person, a better part of society. But we must continue to ask: emerged from where? If those who emerge from prison are Shakur’s roses, then surely the prison system itself is concrete: unyielding, unforgiving, and unable to foster the sort of growth our society needs. Whether the concrete is Ferguson, Missouri, South Africa under Apartheid, or Gaza under unlawful occupation (Davis 2016), the roses should not be separated from the cracks from which they emerged.
The One Summer Chicago youth program in Austin found inspiration in the resiliency narrative and created the mural “The Rose That Grew From Concrete” to serve as a message of hope, power, and peace for the young men and women of the city’s crime-ridden west side. While I am glad that others find comfort in this poem’s message, I still think it important to problematize the resiliency narrative. Success in the face of adversity obviously deserves praise, but I argue that we must question whether lauding grit as the solution to adversity and violence is truly beneficial. Those who face incarceration certainly deserve admiration for surviving—much like Shakur’s rose—but not to the extent that the horrors of their experiences are forgotten. And so we must ask: Does grit allow us to overcome all obstacles we might face, as my high school contended? And do narratives of resiliency inspire those who most need hope, or do they silence the suffering of those who most need compassion and care?
References
Davis, Angela Y. 2016. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. New York, NY: Haymarket Books. Accessed January 30, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.
(This is a sketch I did showing that abolishing prison will take teamwork but also lead to a happier society)
As a kid, you are taught that bad guys go to prison, we have sayings in society such as, “don’t do the crime, if you can’t do the crime,” and kids dress up as police for Halloween. The idea of prisons is ingrained in us at such a young age. As a result, prison abolition has always felt so out of reach for me; getting rid of the correctional system seemed like a utopian idea. Prisons are such a constant that questioning them did not even occur to me until college, and even then, abolition was not my first thought.
In my undergrad degree, I studied criminology, and in my three years of doing so, abolition was never presented as a viable option. It was a topic that was mentioned briefly or presented in a way that made it seem unattainable. Therefore, it took me a while to come to terms with the reality of the situation. Before now, I have always been an advocate for reform in prisons. Whether it be more green spaces, better health services, or lessening sentences, I thought they were the way forward. While reform may be part of the process of moving towards abolition, I now believe that reform alone will not lead us to the society I want. Being in a course right now that positions it as a possibility for our world fills me with new hope and makes the impossible seem like it could happen.
One reading that really helped me with this was a chapter in “Are Prisons Obsolete” by Angela Davis (2003). In this reading, she says that one of the keys to imagining a world without prisons is to stop imagining prison as a single institution, and instead as something made up of relationships; therefore, there is not a single thing that will replace them but a network (Davis, 2003). Before, I struggled to come up with an alternative, but knowing that there can be many solutions is helpful. With this, is the idea that we need to tackle the root causes of violence. Taking steps like demilitarizing schools, funding mental and physical health services, and decriminalizing drugs and sex work all contribute to this aim (Davis, 2003). Prisons do nothing to end the cycle of violence, as can be seen by recidivism rates; they do not stop people from committing such acts.
Lastly, I feel much more capable of talking about this goal now. A big hurdle I faced in my relationship with abolition was the word. It is quite daunting to face, and it may keep people from wanting to engage with the process as it seems difficult to tackle or to some, even too radical. In the past, I may feel unequipped or unwilling to talk about it, but now, learning about the steps to abolition and the real results it can have, makes me ready to share it with others. Abolition is more than a dream; it is a real theory that can produce real results.
References
Davis, A. (2003). Are Prisons Obsolete? Seven Stories Press.
Tales from Abu Ghraib: Prisoners’ Struggle for Recognition Amidst Unending Torture
By Aarushi Sharma
(Source: leftfutures)
“The torture is at the very least doubly embedded in sociality: it constitutes apposite punishment for terrorists and the bodies that resemble them”
– Jasbir K. Puar
The images of sexual torture at Abu Ghraib is an exordium that directs gaze towards a serpentine phenomenon of prison torture. The various images of sodomization and feminization of prisoners (in Abu Ghraib) stimulate the question of ‘How do prisoners become targets of ferocious torture amidst the growing focus on universal claims for dignity?’. My blog post is steered by an attempt to investigate what legitimates extreme torture inflicted upon the bodies of prisoners. I argue that prisons birth an obstinate space where prisoners cease to exist as ‘humans’ and become ‘monsters’. The attestation of these monsters manifests in torture practices. Michel Foucault talks about categorization of certain bodies as monsters in his book “Abnormal”. He untangles how certain bodies are viewed as being encoded with monstrosity. According to him “the monster is a breach of the law that automatically stands outside the law,, so to speak, the spontaneous, brutal, but consequently natural form of the unnatural” (Foucault, 55). This construction of monstrosity is visible in the ways prisoners are viewed within prison complexes.
The most discernible example of this is the testimonies of ex-prisoners. “There were a lot of different forms of torture, including sexual abuse. They used devices to make us less of a man” (Wilczewska, 2021). Testimonies from ex-prisoners unveil how prisons build discourses that strip prisoners of their humanity and engineer their bodies into monsters. This disposition of bodies as monsters is a podium for unleashing infernal violence upon the bodies of prisoners. Construction of monstrosity births abjection where all the meanings of dignity and universal rights collapse. In his text, Foucault argues how the construction of the ‘monster’ is followed by a lust for punishment that knows no boundaries. The case of Abu Ghraib appears to be the most accurate manifestation of this desire for punishment. Looking at the Abu Gharib prison torture alongside Foucault’s theory of the abnormal guides us to a transcendent truth about prisons.
Prisons are structures where prisoners experience a transfiguration from humans to monsters. The way prisoners are intuited is entangled with the construction of abnormal bodies that transgress laws and therefore eclipse the “natural”. This transgression is viewed as a monstrosity that further germinates the seeds for torture. The tale of ‘prison torture’ not only complicates the scope of human rights within the prison complex but also postulates that being a prisoner creates zones of exceptionalism where unfathomable amounts of torture are inflicted upon the body, which is justified by constructing them (prisoners) as monsters. In this case, perception is inseparable from a power nexus that renders certain bodies monstrous and gives other bodies hegemonic control. The tag of being a prisoner comes with a burden as it is an unending struggle for recognition as humans, not monsters.
References
Foucault, M. (2003). Four 29 January 1975. In Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-1975. Verso.
Like many people, I was initially sceptical about prison abolition. I asked myself the same questions that abolitionists are regularly confronted with, what about the rapists and the murderers? Should violence go unpunished? Shouldn’t certain people be locked away from society, for our protection?
However, once I started reading the work of abolitionists such as Angela Davis, Ruth Gilmore and Lola Olufemi, I quickly realised how flawed my thinking was. I began to understand that, not only does the prison system offer no justice for victims of violent crimes, it actually perpetuates the cycle of harm and suffering. I started to consider how a world without prisons would provide genuine justice for victims, specifically survivors of sexual assault.
It is important to note that justice looks different for everyone. Our conceptualisation of justice can vary depending on a number of factors, including religion, nationality, age and class. That being said, most survivors actually don’t cite revenge or punishment as their priority, instead they care more about protecting themselves and others from further harm (BBC 2020). For me, justice also involves acknowledgement and accountability.
In the context of sexual assault, I argue that victims cannot get justice, within the current criminal justice system. When those who experience sexual assault report the crime to the police and take their perpetrators to court, they are often retraumatised and humiliated. For instance, in 2018, a young woman who had reported being raped had her underwear passed around the courtroom to be examined (Sherwood 2018).
Furthermore, the current ‘justice’ system does nothing to keep victims and others safe from further harm. Even when perpetrators are found guilty and sent to jail, the average sentence for rape in the UK in 2020 was less than 5 years (Jayanetti 2021). When these individuals are released from prison they are often more prone to violence, placing themselves, their victims, and others, in danger. I believe that if we completely overhaul the structure of the system, we stand a chance of providing victims of sexual assault with justice.
Lola Olufemi (2020, 120) proposes a process of “community accountability” as an alternative to “relying on the law, prison and police to rectify the harm committed by an individual”. This would entail a group of people within a community coming together to hold an individual accountable without sending them away. Olufemi lists community service, reflective practice, coping methods for rage and shame, therapy, mental health support and trauma-centred work to identify the root causes of behaviour, as specific examples of how community accountability would work.
I believe it is also important that perpetrators of sexual violence attend intensive consent workshops in order to ensure they do not reoffend. On top of this, victims should be offered the opportunity to engage in discussions with their assailant in order to have their pain acknowledged. Not only would this framework allow victims of sexual assault to come forward and tell their story without being humiliated and victim-blamed, it would offer them reassurance that real work was being done to keep them and others safe from harm.
Pictured above is an inmate from Miami Dade County bootcamp where male inmates as young as 14 are subject to ‘shock incarceration’ as an alternative to typical prisons and juvenile centres. Learning of the hyper-masculinity ingrained into boys and men in correctional bootcamps in the U.S. made me question the effectiveness of state responses (incarceration through imprisonment and bootcamp) to perpetrators of gendered violence on reducing male violence against women. This blog will illustrate how I support prison abolition whilst caring about protecting women and girls against male violence – an issue particularly close to me as a feminist.
Before learning about abolition feminism, my reaction towards hearing stories of violence against women was fear that could be partially mediated by the knowledge that perpetrators could be sent to prison: to be separated from more potential victims and punished. Crucially, I felt this was a feminist position. The reassurance I found in the UK justice system came from a relatively privileged position that allowed me to believe that law enforcement can maintain order, separating the good from the bad. In this entry I will explain how, in the last couple of years, my idea of a feminist approach to violence against women and girls has changed as I have been introduced to abolition feminism.
Lola Olufemi challenged my conception of order and separatism as safety in asking ‘order for whom and at what cost?’ (Olufemi, 2020, p. 110). Angela Davis answers this question in much of her work advocating for the total abolition of prisons. Davis argues that the order promised by advocates of the prison system is for the ‘agendas of politicians, the profit drive of corporations, and media representations of crime’ (Davis, 2003, p. 81). The order is not, then, for the safety of the vulnerable and the cost is the endurance of forced labour and confinement by prisoners.
Learning the scale of the prison-industrial complex – the UK has the most privatised prison system in Europe – was one of the most important stages in making the mental leap to abolition feminism as it disrupted my belief that the justice system served the vulnerable. It also challenged me to think critically about the binary of violent and non-violent crime – did I really believe that those who have acted violently deserve violence and punishment? Who does this binary serve? It encourages us to consent to the cruel treatment of ‘violent’ prisoners, ensuring they are cut off from their loved ones and society whilst engaging in forced, unpaid labour in the name of feminism. Cruelty has never had a place in my definition of feminism.
The reality is that rape conviction rates have seen record lows in recent years, recidivism rates of perpetrators of gendered violence remain high, and victims of gendered violence are consistently retraumatised in the courtroom as they justify themselves as victims of abuse. Olufemi’s point that ‘gendered violence is a systemic problem’ is crucial. Male violence against women is motivated by misogyny as a by-product of patriarchy which can only be tackled by disrupting ‘normative masculinity’ before it becomes ‘cemented in the bodies of individuals’ (Olufemi, 2020, p. 113).
Current responses to male violence such as incarceration and correctional boot camps (U.S.) where men (and boys) are trained in military values of discipline and individual strength over empathy and care arguably perpetuate the masculinity that leads to misogynistic violence against women by the very state institutions that claim to facilitate women’s safety. Abolition feminists allow us to imagine and consequently cultivate a future where the response to male violence against women is a collective and preventative one in which normative masculinity does not have a place and grassroots restorative justice is used to resolve conflict.
Relearning perceptions on prison as a structure is a process which has provided critical thinking tools with which to recontextualise my past experiences with prisons. In 2019, my mother (a US diplomat), was engaged in a long, bureaucratic battle to free an elderly American prisoner in Mozambique. He was incarcerated at the Maputo Central Prison (pictured above) after getting scammed online and allegedly tricked into unknowingly carrying drugs across the South African border.
My mother visited him weekly as per the Vienna Convention (1963), her concern growing as the old man shrunk into skin and bones on a diet of rice and bean cooking liquid, and became a popular target among other prisoners. Only once he was on the brink of death, and as Covid-19 became a threat, he was granted humanitarian release, essentially because countries generally avoid causing the death of an American (Geers, 2021). This story is now ironic to me for two reasons: first, it begs the question of why poor treatment of American prisoners overseas is unacceptable and worthy of humanitarian intervention, but not to the extent that the US government fights to protect prisoners local to said country? Second is the contradiction that powerful states are willing to strain diplomatic relationships to free their own citizens from violence in prisons overseas, yet refuse to recognize similar injustices happening within their own prisons. These contradictory policies uphold white supremacy in American foreign policy, and reveal a lack of critical thinking on behalf of policymakers.
I finally am viewing this story through a post-colonial lens, with more empathy for Mozambique’s position, still recovering from decades of colonisation and the difficult transition from Communism to Capitalism. With a capacity rate of 232.8% in Mozambican prisons, it is easily fathomable that conditions there are no place for a human–American citizen or not (Mozambique World Prison Brief 2019). The UN’s Responsibility to Protect norm is an understandable measure, but normatively speaking, when it is evident that the treatment of prisoners overseas is so inhumane that governments intervene to free their own citizens, it should be reason enough to warrant large-scale intervention to defend the rights of all prisoners, regardless of nationality.
If this extent of intervention were practiced, however, it would require intervening states to recognise human rights in their own prisons, and reform accordingly. Yet, millions of prisoners in America are also subject to overcrowding, poor nutrition, and abuse. Currently, Rikers Island in New York City is under fire after its 12th death in 2021, earning it the label of humanitarian crisis (Economist.com, 2021). Mayor de Blasio has been resistant towards calls to shut the prison down, reflecting the issue of liberal leaders, states, and institutions continually turning a blind eye to systemic violence in the global prison model. Ultimately, it is far easier for the US to leverage its power and save its own (often white) people from demise abroad (often in ‘peripheral’ states with majority people of colour) under humanitarian concerns than to problematize the violence and abuse inherent to the prison system it relies on, leaving the majority of the world’s prisoners with little to no advocacy.
References
(1963) Vienna convention on CONSULAR Relations together with the final act of the Conference, optional protocols and resolutions Vienna, April 24, 1963, H.M.S.O.
Geers I (2021) Interviewing Jeanne Geers on freeing an imprisoned American abroad. personal.
Mozambique World Prison Brief (2019) Mozambique | World Prison Brief, Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research. Available from: https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/mozambique (accessed 29 September 2021).
Prison Abolition is the Fight Against White Supremacy: Lessons from Foucault’s Theory of Biopolitics
by Marisa Turner
An image of a quilt art from Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative. The words stitched read “If all Lives Matter ‘Cause We’re All Equal, Why Are Some Lives More Equal Than Others?”. This quilt powerfully questions the reality of state sponsored violence against marginalized communities in the United States when the values of equal protection are codified by the state. The history of quilt art is powerfully intertwined with the experiences of disenfranchised communities in the states, and reflects the story of resistance to racial oppression.
The American prison system locks up communities of color at a disproportionate rate relative to their population size. Experiences such as social inequality and institutional racism rationalize this reality. Still, with extensive information known about the causes and consequences of incarceration, these answers alone cannot explain the continued lack of political will that has characterized efforts to solve the social and racial inequalities that lead to imprisonment.
In the New York Times article, “Is Prison Necessary,” Ruth Gilmore is quoted saying: “Prisons are not a result of a desire by ‘bad’ people[…]to lock up poor people and people of color” explaining that “the state did not wake up one morning and say, ‘Let’s be mean to Black people'”. While hindsight is 20/20, it seems obvious that reforms passed in the ’90s to curb crime rates would disproportionately affect communities of color and do little to stop the issue of crime and the existence of poverty at its root. President’s such as Bill Clinton have expressed remorse for passing legislation that worsened the problem of mass incarceration years after their making; these apologies however, mean little to the lives of those affected by the prison industrial complex. It is almost tempting to think that there is a conspiracy by white upper-middle-class male neoliberal politicians to subjugate another generation of Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies. Still, for all the faults of politicians, I believe this disturbing reality was not a conscious effort of racial subjugation by them.
Foucault’s theory of biopolitics provides a possible answer to questions surrounding the continuation of structural racial inequality. His theory claims that society’s politics have fundamentally changed over history, evolving into a political strategy around differential biological vulnerability. The popular formal “making live and letting die” embodies this concept . This provocative proposition uncovers an essential revelation about state operations: it relies on reproducing structural inequality and its underlying racism to preserve the population in power. In Western countries, this means preserving white power through the protection and maintained purity of the white population.
If this is true, then the prison industrial complex that has come to engulf the lives of communities of color and the socially vulnerable is a purposeful construction by state power. Above all, prisons have become a powerful site for reproducing and strengthening inequalities that dictate who must live and who must die. Disagreeing with Gilmore, I believe Foucault’s idea illuminates the way the state leverages racism to maintain power through the use of biopower. Furthermore, the ongoing issue of forced sterilization in prisons exemplifies the concept of racial purification motivating state behavior.
In the last year and a half since the start of the George Floyd protests and the capital riot, there has been increasing conversation about a present or imminent race war. Foucault’s theory of biopower recognizes the omnipresence of a race war between the powerful race and less powerful races in modern society. I believe prisons have become a crucial tool to normalize the racial purification of society. It is no wonder then that there are strong parallels in the imprisonment and disempowerment of indigenous and communities of color across Western societies.
Deviance or necessity: critique of criminalisation during Covid-19
by Mina
Photograph from France 24 (2021); Informal vendors in Ghana awaiting the Ghana-Côte d’Ivoire border re-opening.
A comprehension of criminalisation rooted in sociology—and the focus of this reflection—is driven by the assumption that the ‘audience’ holds the power to perceive something as correct or incorrect, criminal or not. The audience, however, marginalises those most vulnerable. Those excluded are ‘the deviant,’ a criminal identity created by the public audience not by an act but by the social reaction or response to such act.
Critical criminology theory refocuses from a criminal act in isolation to understand ‘those who conceive those behaviours as criminal’. Prison abolitionists similarly challenge mainstream ‘consensual norms’ of crime to evaluate a political, economic, and social spheres that allows people to be criminalised without premeditated support. Without understanding localised vulnerabilities, we—as critical members of some audience—cannot challenge the nature of crime or asymmetrical repercussions for such crimes.
For this reason, I would like to extend this theoretical framework of deviance to informal, cross-border trade in West Africa during Covid-19. In West Africa, informal trade of secures food and livelihoods for up to 43% of the sub-Saharan population. Often confused with illicit [wildlife] trade, informal economies such as these benefit those that contribute with work and access to grains, fish, produce, or bushmeat without formal transport and regulatory costs that typically make such goods inaccessible or expensive in rural regions. Between 70-94% of those involved in this sector are women; women lack access to continued education, social-movement, independent savings accounts, credit, or loan opportunities [in this region] making them reliant on informal income.
Covid-19 and discourse surrounding the emergence of Covid-19 altered the perceived crime of informal, cross-border trade in two ways. Firstly, the nature of Covid-19 as a zoonotic virus discredited the perception of wildlife trade and consumption. Those that live separate to wildlife, in a city or industrialised space, may not have regularly consider wildlife trade beyond perhaps a politically charged sense of wrongness of poaching or illegal ivory trade. The fear enabled by Covid-19, as with the reaction to the Ebola outbreak, refocused the public’s eyes globally on informal wildlife trade to create a greater audience from which to judge. Secondly, national lockdowns in West Africa reduced or ended all border-crossing, imposed curfews, and shut markets, legally criminalising regional trade. This simultaneously enhanced the risk of informal trade, while nearly halting formalised commerce and increasing the demand for unregulated, informal goods. This leaves a void of stability for those trading wildlife, despite the stigmatisation not changing the importance of or safety of wildlife trade in west Africa; the deviant was created without assessing the circumstances that made their deviant acts necessary.
It highlights systematic and national gaps that create ‘crime’. The War on Drugs in the United States made drug addiction the public enemy and by association made those likely to suffer drug addiction the enemy. The criminalisation of addicts and drug users radically increased arrests and imprisonment—predominantly people of colour—without once regarding the circumstances that bred such outcomes. Deviantising acts of the most vulnerable—either by incarcerating or impoverishing—does not productively provide safety or justice to the public.
References
Addo, P., 2006. Cross Border Criminal Activities in West Africa: Options for Effective Responses.
Karkare, P., Byiers, B., Apiko, P. and Kane, M., 2021. A system, not an error.
Muncie, J., 2008. The theory and politics of criminalisation: John Muncie argues that a critical understanding of criminalisation remains crucial. Criminal Justice Matters, 74(1), pp.13-14.
Nshimbi, C.C., Moyo, I. and Oloruntoba, S.O., 2018. Borders, informal cross-border economies and regional integration in Africa-an introduction. Africa Insight, 48(1), pp.3-11.
Stark, R., 1987. Deviant places: A theory of the ecology of crime. Criminology, 25(4), pp.893-910.
