#abolition study group

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But it should be remembered that the ancestors of many of today's most ardent liberals could not have imagined life without slavery, life without lynching, or life without segregation.

Angela Davis “Are Prisons Obsolete?”

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Breaking Down the Prison Industrial Complex by Critical Resistance

Interviews with Mary Hooks, Angela Davis, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Summary of Key Points

Mary Hooks describes the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) as the web of systems, rules, and institutions that not only cause such high numbers of people to be imprisoned, but also benefit from it.

Angela Davis explains that coining the term PIC was an attempt to explain the number of people in prison, the racial disparities thereof, and the decline of social services, as well as the global nature of this phenomenon. It focuses the discussion on the larger societal questions instead of the issue of prison in isolation.

Prison is not only a site of political repression, but also the key to how racism works and is maintained in our society; George Jackson commented on this in the 60′s.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes how the PIC has always targeted vulnerable people; it’s just that the precise definition of who is vulnerable can fluctuate over time.

Over time, police organizations have gained power in roles traditionally filled by social service organizations, and have imposed the logic of policing (and especially self-policing) on these services. In turn, social service agencies have internalized the logic of policing, leading the the absurd situation today in which the US Department of Education has their own SWAT team.

The videos are very short, I really recommend watching them directly. Ruthie in particular just immediately begins dropping knowledge bombs; all three women are powerhouses of abolitionist thought.

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From Khalil Gibran in the podcast “American Police” by NPR Throughline.

[ID: Black text, underlined with gold stripes, set against a sunset with the silhouette of a mountain.  “And so the question that has to be asked in the wake of George Floyd is, do white people in America still want the police to protect their interests over the rights and dignity and lives of Black, brown, Indigenous and Asian populations in this country?” Khalil Gibran Muhammad]

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Underlying the prison industrial complex, there's been a consistency. And the consistency has been to target vulnerable people. And the definition of vulnerable has some variation over time and space, and we can see greater intensities in certain times and places and lesser in others

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “When the PIC Masquerades as Social Welfare” a video by Critical Resistance, for the series “Breaking down the PIC”

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From Chapter 2 of “Are Prisons Obsolete?”

[ID: Empty classroom desks with green text that reads “When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison.” Angela Y Davis]

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Abolition 101, video lecture by Orisanmi Burton

Summary of Key Points

There is no one right definition of abolition. It includes dismantling the old system and building a new one in its place. It is a continuous struggle towards liberation. It affirms the capacity of everyday people, and is in its nature a hopeful and imaginative process. Abolitionists believe that the world can change, and that the struggle will have been worthwhile.

Policing is and always has been a form of class warfare; It is necessary to prevent us from forming a multi-racial class solidarity.

Modern day policing in the US has its roots in slave patrols, militias, night watch brigades, and more. Both the original forms and the modern day variant were formed to protect the property of the powerful at the expense of the lives of everyday people. (The police do not exist to protect us)

Police, prisons, and the criminal punishment system is a strategy for maintain peace and order under conditions of social economic inequality created under capitalism. Abolitionists ask, how can we make policing obsolete?

Crime is any act that is subject to criminal sanctions. Many acts that are harmful are not crimes (e.g. oil pipeline spills), and many crimes are not harmful (e.g. squatting)

The root cause of harm is unmet needs. Abolitionists engage in harm reduction by working to meet everyone’s needs.

Because the entire criminal punishment system is a form of class warfare, we are not interested in reforming it to be more efficient or effective.

Reformist reforms are those changes that do not challenge the existing systems of power. Non-reformist or abolitionist reforms change the relations of power in some way.

Reform and abolition are not opposing projects, necessarily. It is unlikely that we will completely abolish the current system in one revolutionary moment, and so a series of abolitionist reforms are likely needed.

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“Lessons About Police Brutality from the Chicanx Experience” by Joseph Orosco

Summary of Key Points

This essay provides a very brief summary of some notable incidents of police brutality and corruption from the Chicanx perspective. These include:

The Texas Rangers, who were specifically formed to patrol the Texas-Mexico border, were brutal. They abducted and murdered hundreds of Mexican-Americans from 1915-1919 during a period known as La Hora de Sangre.

In 1942, in an incident known as the Sleep Lagoon Murder, over a dozen  Mexican-American youth were arrested in connection with the death of a Chicano man. They were denied lawyers, were forced to appear in court in dirty clothes, and they were stereotyped as “violent” and “savage” by experts for the prosecution. They were taken away from their families and sent to reform school despite shaky evidence.

In 1951, in an incident known as Bloody Christmas, the LAPD arrested a group of young Mexican-American men. During a Christmas party, LAPD officers forced beat the men with clubs, resulting in severe injuries. Though initially covered up, families of the men joined up with Community Services Organization (CSO), a grassroots civil rights organization, to pressure the city. A review led to several convictions and many reassignments.

The Chicano Moratorium March was a nonviolent demonstration against the Vietnam War, in August 1970. 30,000 people showed up. When a nearby business was broken into, LAPD declared the entire assembly unlawful, attacked protestors with tear gas and other less-lethal weapons, injuring many and killing some, including a journalist.

These incidents reveal that police brutality and racism is not restricted to anti-Black racism.

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Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y Davis, Chapter 2

Summary of Key Points

Prison is not the first racist institution that has been targeted for abolition. At various times in history, it seemed impossible to imagine life without chattel slavery, legal segregation, and widespread organization of lynch mobs. Yet all these were abolished.

The penitentiary system was itself a reform of earlier forms of capital and corporal punishment. It was seen as a progressive reform, and it was believed that criminals would repent their crimes if given the time to reflect on their behavior (basically adult time-out)

In order for imprisonment to be a punishment, it has to represent a material change in conditions. Because imprisonment shares so many similarities with slavery, (and because it doesn’t make economic sense to lock up an enslaved worker) it was incredibly rare for enslaved people to be imprisoned. According to Mary Ellen Curtin, 99% of prisoners in Alabama were white during slavery.

This changed dramatically, however, after the end of chattel slavery. Because slavery was legal as a punishment for crime, the South set about criminalizing all aspects of Black life under the Black Codes. Now prisoners were majority Black and formerly enslaved peoples.

In addition to criminalizing the behaviour of Black people, in many cases charges were simply fabricated. White people could and often did use the courtroom to exact revenge on formerly enslaved people.

As former slaves were integrated into the prison system, so too were the punishments formerly used to enforce slavery, e.g. lashing. The convict leasing system was developed, were convicts were rented out to plantations or other industries. This system was largely considered worse than slavery by contemporaries, as convicts were regularly worked to death.

Convict leasing kept control in the hands of the planter class and delayed the development of a paid working class in the South. Alex Lichtenstein calls it “a most efficient and most rational deployment of racist strategies to swiftly achieve industrialization in the South”.

Under both the convict leasing system and the current for-profit prison industrial complex, there is an incentive to lock up more people for longer sentences. It’s simply more profitable.