In the United States, where organized abandonment has happened throughout the country, in urban and rural contexts, for more than 40 years, we see that as people have lost the ability to keep their individual selves, their households, and their communities together with adequate income, clean water, reasonable air, reliable shelter, and transportation and communication infrastructure, as those things have gone away, what’s risen up in the crevices of this cracked foundation of security has been policing and prison.
Now it’s not that surprising when we stop and think that if in an organized way, state and capital abandon people, something is going to arise to shape and direct what those people do who are not absorbed back into the political economy in other ways. It’s really not that surprising, though it is frightening.
So if we look then more specifically at what has happened in state and municipal budgets, we see the expansion of budgets devoted to mass incarceration, to jails, and to police. We see not only that but, in agencies that are supposed to be working toward other ends — education, health, and so forth — a rise in police functions.
One thing that we see happening, for example, is that police in schools has spread across the United States in this period. Or we can look at something as relatively technical and one would imagine benign as a student financial aid, and we see that student financial aid officers in colleges and universities have a policing function as well. Or the fact that the United States Department of Education has a SWAT team. So we see that the policing function has risen not only in the traditional agencies of the police, that is to say, police jail in prison, but also in social welfare agencies. And so it’s that twinned growth that shows us that we’ve been so thoroughly abandoned that we have to take back, we have to take back, which is to change, transform, and move to something new.
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