Are Prisons Obsolete Quotes

[Prison] relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.

The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs—it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.

Deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane.

The lawbreaker is thus no longer an evil-minded man or woman, but simply a debtor, a liable person whose duty is to take responsibility for his or her acts, and to assume the duty of repair.

The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison. There are thus real and often quite complicated connections between the deindustrialization of the economy—a process that reached its peak during the 1980s—and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began to spiral during the Reagan-Bush era. However, the demand for more prisons was represented to the public in simplistic terms. More prisons were needed because there was more crime. Yet many scholars have demonstrated that by the time the prison construction boom began, official crime statistics were already falling.

Despite the important of antiracist social movements over the last half century, racism hides from view within institutional structures, and its most reliable refuge is the prison system.

Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison. There are thus real and often quite complicated connections between the deindustrialization of the economy—a process that reached its peak during the 1980s—and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began to spiral during the Reagan-Bush era.

According to a recent study, there may be twice as many people suffering from mental illness who are in jails and prisons than there are in all psychiatric hospitals in the United States combined.

An attempt to create a new conceptual terrain for imagining alternatives to imprisonment involves the ideological work of questioning why "criminals" have been constituted as a class and, indeed, a class of human beings undeserving of the civil and human rights accorded to others. Radical criminologists have long pointed out that the category "lawbreakers" is far greater than the category of individuals who are deemed criminals since, many point out, almost all of us have broken the law at one time or another.

Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison.

We thus think about imprisonment as a fate reserved for others, a fate reserved for the "evildoers," to use a term recently popularized by George W. Bush. Because of the persistent power of racism, "criminals" and "evildoers" are, in the collective imagination, fantasized as people of color. The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers.

To reiterate, rather than try to imagine one single alternative to the existing system of incarceration, we might envision an array of alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society. Alternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination will not, in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition.

For example, women have been incarcerated in psychiatric institutions in greater proportions than in prisons. Studies indicating that women have been even more likely to end up in mental facilities than men suggest that while jails and prisons have been dominant institutions for the control of men, mental institutions have served a similar purpose for women. That is, deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane.

In Victoria, prison and police officers are vested with the power and responsibility to do acts which, if done outside of work hours, would be crimes of sexual assault.

Thus, critiques of the prison industrial complex undertaken by abolitionist activists and scholars are very much linked to critiques of the global persistence of racism. Antiracist and other social justice movements are incomplete with attention to the politics of imprisonment.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments

The massive prison-building project that began in the 1980s created the means of concentrating and managing what the capitalist system had implicitly declared to be a human surplus. In the meantime, elected officials and the dominant media justified the new draconian sentencing practices, sending more and more people to prison in the frenzied drive to build more and more prisons by arguing that this was the only way to make our communities safe from murderers, rapists, and robbers.

Personne – pas même les plus ardents défenseurs de la prison supermax – n’oserait aujourd’hui déclarer que l’isolement total, y compris sensoriel, est un régime fortifiant et thérapeutique.

Despite the important gains of antiracist social movements over the last half century, racism hides from view within institutional structures, and its most reliable refuge is the prison system.

To think about this simultaneous presence and absence is to begin to acknowledge the part played by ideology in shaping the way we interact with our social surroundings. We take prisons for granted but are often afraid to face the realities they produce.

I just got another kitten, you know. Found another trademark. It's quite embarrassing I missed it." "Nine cats? They can send you to prison for that." He pushed his glasses back on his nose. "I'm calling him Murad, after the cigarettes." "Never heard of them." "They're an obsolete Turkish brand, popular in the 1910s and '20s. Murad means 'desire' in Arabic. The only brand that ever appears in a Cordova film is Murad. There's not one Marlboro, Camel, or Virginia Slim. It goes further. If the Murad cigarette is focused upon by the camera in any Cordova film. The very next person who appears on-screen has been devastatingly targeted. In other words, the gods will have drawn a great big X across his shoulder blades and taped an invisible sign there that reads FUCKED. His life will henceforth never be the same.

Studies indicating that women have been even more likely to end up in mental facilities than men suggest that while jails and prisons have been dominant institutions for the control of men, mental institutions have served a similar purpose for women. That is, deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane.

Why were people so quick to assume that locking away an increasingly large proportion of the U.S. population would help those who live in the free world feel safer and more secure? This question can be formulated in more general terms. Why do prisons tend to make people think that their own rights and liberties are more secure than they would be if prisons did not exist?

Moreover, the prison sentence, which is always computed in terms of time, is related to abstract quantification, evoking the rise of science and what is often referred to as the Age of Reason. We should keep in mind that this was precisely the historical period when the value of labor began to be calculated in terms of time and therefore compensated in another quantifiable way, by money. The computability of state punishment in terms of time—days, months, years—resonates with the role of labor-time as the basis for computing the value of capitalist commodities. Marxist theorists of punishment have noted that precisely the historical period during which the commodity form arose is the era during which penitentiary sentences emerged as the primary form of punishment.

And there is even more compelling evidence about the damage wrought by the expansion of the prison system in the schools located in poor communities of color that replicate the structures and regimes of the prison. 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.

If we expand our definition of punishment under slavery, we can say that the coerced sexual relations between slave and master constituted a penalty exacted on women, if only for the sole reason that they were slaves. In other words, the deviance of the slave master was transferred to the slave woman, whom he victimized. Likewise, sexual abuse by prison guards is translated into hypersexuality of women prisoners.

What, then, would it mean to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in which race and class are not primary determinants of punishment? Or one in which punishment itself is no longer the central concern in the making of justice? An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment—demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance. The creation of new institutions that lay claim to the space now occupied by the prison can eventually start to crowd out the prison so that it would inhabit increasingly smaller areas of our social and psychic landscape. Schools can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails and prisons. Unless the current structures of violence are eliminated from schools in impoverished communities of color—including the presence of armed security guards and police—and unless schools become places that encourage the joy of learning, these schools will remain the major conduits to prisons. The alternative would be to transform schools into vehicles for decarceration.

Il ne s’agirait pas de rechercher des substituts similaires à la prison, comme par exemple l’assignation à résidence avec bracelet électronique, mais plutôt de réfléchir à un continuum de solutions permettant d’éviter l’incarcération : démilitarisation des écoles, revitalisation de l’éducation à tous les niveaux, mise en place d’un système de santé dispensant des soins médicaux et psychiatriques gratuits et instauration d’un système judiciaire basé sur la réparation et la réconciliation plutôt que sur la rétribution et la vengeance.

A prisão se tornou um buraco negro no qual são depositados os detritos do capitalismo contemporâneo.

Nos Estados Unidos em particular, raça sempre desempenhou um papel central na construção de presunções de criminalidade. Depois da abolição, os estados antes escravagistas aprovaram uma nova legislação que revisava os Códigos Escravagistas a fim de regular o comportamento de negros livres de formas similares àquelas que vigoravam durante a escravidão. Os novos Códigos Negros proibiam uma série de ações — como vadiagem, ausência no emprego, quebra de contrato de trabalho, porte de arma de fogo e gestos ou atos ofensivos — que eram criminalizadas apenas quando a pessoa acusada era negra. Com a aprovação da Décima Terceira Emenda à Constituição, a escravidão e a servidão involuntária foram presumidamente abolidas. No entanto, havia uma exceção significativa. Na redação da emenda, a escravidão e a servidão involuntária foram abolidas “exceto como punição por crime, pelo qual a parte deve ter sido justamente condenada”. De acordo com os Códigos Negros, havia crimes definidos pela lei estadual pelos quais apenas pessoas negras podiam ser “justamente sentenciadas”. Assim, ex-escravos, que tinham acabado de ser libertados de uma condição de trabalho forçado perpétuo, podiam ser legalmente condenados à servidão penal.

Durante a minha carreira como ativista antiprisional, vi a população das prisões norte-americanas aumentar com tanta rapidez que muitas pessoas nas comunidades negras, latinas e de nativos americanos, atualmente, estão muito mais propensas a ir para a prisão do que a ter uma educação decente.

Slavery, lynching, and segregation are certainly compelling examples of social institutions that, like the prison, were once considered to be as everlasting as the sun.

Steven Donziger, drawing from the work of Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie, argues: [C]ompanies that service the criminal justice system need sufficient quantities of raw materials to guarantee long-term growth . . . In the criminal justice field, the raw material is prisoners, and industry will do what is necessary to guarantee a steady supply. For the supply of prisoners to grow, criminal justice policies must ensure a sufficient number of incarcerated Americans regardless of whether crime is rising or the incarceration is necessary.

Why do prisons tend to make people think that their own rights and liberties are more secure than they would be if prisons did not exist?

while jails and prisons have been dominant institutions for the control of men, mental institutions have served a similar purpose for women. That is, deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane.

Psychiatric drugs continue to be distributed far more extensively to imprisoned women than to their male counterparts

The belief in the permanence of slavery was so widespread that even white abolitionists found it difficult to imagine black people as equals.

People who were to be subjected to some form of corporal punishment were detained in prison until the execution of the punishment. With the penitentiary, incarceration became the punishment itself.

Like Southern slaves, prison inmates followed a daily routine specified by their superiors. Both institutions reduced their subjects to dependence on others for the supply of basic human services such as food and shelter. Both isolated their subjects from the general population by confining them to a fixed habitat. And both frequently coerced their subjects to work, often for longer hours and for less compensation than free laborers.

When black and Native American women were imprisoned in reformatories, they often were segregated from white women. Moreover, they tended to be disproportionately sentenced to men’s prisons.

To understand the social meaning of the prison today within the context of a developing prison industrial complex means that punishment has to be conceptually severed from its seemingly indissoluble link with crime. How often do we encounter the phrase "crime and punishment"? To what extent has the perpetual repetition of the phrase "crime and punishment" in literature, as titles of television shows, both fictional and documentary, and in everyday conversation made it extremely difficult to think about punishment beyond this connection? How have these portrayals located the prison in a causal relation to crime as a natural, neces-sary, and permanent effect, thus inhibiting serious debates about the viability of the prison today? The notion of a prison industrial complex insists on understandings of the punishment process that take into account economic and political structures and ideologies, rather than focusing myopically on individual criminal conduct and efforts to "curb crime." The fact, for example, that many corporations with global markets now rely on prisons as an important source of profit helps us to understand the rapidity with which prisons began to proliferate precisely at a time when official studies indicated that the crime rate was falling. The notion of a prison industrial complex also insists that the racialization of prison populations--and this is not only true of the United States, but of Europe, South America, and Australia as well--is not an incidental feature. Thus, critiques of the prison industrial complex undertaken by abolitionist activists and scholars are very much linked to critiques of the global persistence of racism. Antiracist and other social justice movements are incomplete with attention to the politics of imprisonment.

vagrancy was coded as a black crime, one punishable by incarceration and forced labor, sometimes on the very plantations that previously had thrived on slave labor.

Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that anyone, including ourselves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives.

In arrangements reminiscent of the convict lease system, federal, state, and county governments pay private companies a fee for each inmate, which means that private companies have a stake in retaining prisoners as long as possible, and in keeping their facilities filled.

An attempt to create a new conceptual terrain for imagining alternatives to imprisonment involves the ideological work of questioning why “criminals” have been constituted as a class and, indeed, a class of human beings undeserving of the civil and human rights accorded to others. Radical criminologists have long pointed out that the category “lawbreakers” is far greater than the category of individuals who are deemed criminals since, many point out, almost all of us have broken the law at one time or another. Even President Bill Clinton admitted that he had smoked marijuana at one time, insisting, though, that he did not inhale. However, acknowledged disparities in the intensity of police surveillance—as indicated by the present-day currency of the term “racial profiling” which ought to cover far more territory than “driving while black or brown”—account in part for racial and class-based disparities in arrest and imprisonment rates. Thus, if we are willing to take seriously the consequences of a racist and class-biased justice system, we will reach the conclusion that enormous numbers of people are in prison simply because they are, for example, black, Chicano, Vietnamese, Native American or poor, regardless of their ethnic background.

Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei

Fighting against mass incarceration means building alternatives to prison, and insofar as these alternatives exist and the conditions underpinning the prison-industrial complex recede, the carceral state will wither away.

Because of the persistent power of racism, “criminals” and “evildoers” are, in the collective imagination, fantasized as people of color. The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers.

Today, aside from death, solitary confinement—next to torture, or as a form of torture—is considered the worst form of punishment imaginable. Then, however, it was assumed to have an emancipatory effect. The body was placed in conditions of segregation and solitude in order to allow the soul to flourish. It is not accidental that most of the reformers of that era were deeply religious and therefore saw the architecture and regimes of the penitentiary as emulating the architecture and regimes of monastic life.

What societal interest is served by prisoners who remain illiterate? What social benefit is there in ignorance? How are people corrected while imprisoned if their education is outlawed? Who profits (other than the prison establishment itself) from stupid prisoners?65

If we expand our definition of punishment under slavery, we can say that the coerced sexual relations between slave and master constituted a penalty exacted on women, if only for the sole reason that they were slaves. In other words, the deviance of the slave master was transferred to the slave woman, whom he victimized. Likewise, sexual abuse by prison guards is translated into hypersexuality of women prisoners. The notion that female “deviance” always has a sexual dimension persists in the contemporary era, and this intersection of criminality and sexuality continues to be racialized.

The violent sexualization of prison life within women's institutions raises a number of issues that may help us develop further our critique of the prison system. (...) For women, the continuity of treatment from the free world to the universe of the prison is even more complicated, since they also confront forms of violence in prison that they have confronted in their homes and intimate relationships .

In Elliott Currie’s words, “[t]he prison has become a looming presence in our society to an extent unparalleled in our history or that of any other industrial democracy. Short of major wars, mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social program of our time.

Radical opposition to the global prison industrial complex sees the antiprison movement as a vital means of expanding the terrain on which the quest for democracy will unfold. This movement is thus antiracist, anticapitalist, antisexist, and antihomophobic. It calls for the abolition of the prison as the dominant mode of punishment but at the same time recognizes the need for genuine solidarity with the millions of men, women, and children who are behind bars.

Cultural critic Gina Dent has pointed out that our sense of familiarity with the prison comes in part from representations of prisons in film and other visual media.

How can we take seriously strategies of restorative rather than exclusively punitive justice? Effective alternatives involve both transformation of the techniques for addressing "crime" and of the social and economic conditions that track so many children from poor communities, and especially communities of color, into the juvenile system and then on to prison. The most difficult and urgent challenge today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.

De surcroît, cette peine d’emprisonnement, qui s’articule toujours en termes de durée, est liée à une quantification abstraite liée à l’essor de la science du temps des Lumières. N’oublions pas que c’est précisément à cette époque que la valeur du travail a commencé à être calculée en termes de temps, et compensée par un autre moyen quantifiable : l’argent.

Les abus sexuels sont sournoisement associés à l’une des pratiques les plus couramment imposées aux femmes incarcérées : les fouilles corporelles. Comme l’ont souligné militants et détenues, l’État est directement impliqué dans cette banalisation des abus sexuels.

Pour les entreprises privées, la main-d’œuvre carcérale est du pain béni. Pas de grèves. Pas de syndicalisation. Pas de sécurité sociale, d’assurance chômage ni d’indemnités à verser.

Après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, les expériences médicales sur les détenus ont permis d’accélérer le développement de l’industrie pharmaceutique.

Dans le domaine de la justice criminelle, la matière première n’est autre que les prisonniers eux-mêmes, et l’industrie fera toujours ce qu’il faut pour s’en garantir un approvisionnement constant. Pour que ce stock de prisonniers augmente, les politiques de justice criminelle doivent fabriquer un nombre suffisant de prisonniers, quelle que soit l’augmentation ou la diminution de la criminalité et la nécessité réelle de la détention.

L’ironie, c’est que même les opposants à la peine capitale considèrent souvent l’emprisonnement à perpétuité comme une solution de remplacement raisonnable.

Lorsqu’on réfléchit à la question de l’obsolescence des prisons, il est essentiel de se demander comment la population carcérale a pu connaître une telle inflation sans qu’on s’interroge véritablement sur l’efficacité de l’enfermement.

The term “prison industrial complex” was introduced by activists and scholars to contest prevailing beliefs that increased levels of crime were the root cause of mounting prison populations. Instead, they argued, prison construction and the attendant drive to fill these new structures with human bodies have been driven by ideologies of racism and the pursuit of profit.

The notion of a prison industrial complex insists on understandings of the punishment process that take into account economic and political structures and ideologies, rather than focusing myopically on individual criminal conduct and efforts to “curb crime.” The fact, for example, that many corporations with global markets now rely on prisons as an important source of profit helps us to understand the rapidity with which prisons began to proliferate precisely at a time when official studies indicated that the crime rate was falling. The notion of a prison industrial complex also insists that the racialization of prison populations—and this is not only true of the United States, but of Europe, South America, and Australia as well—is not an incidental feature. Thus, critiques of the prison industrial complex undertaken by abolitionist activists and scholars are very much linked to critiques of the global persistence of racism. Antiracist and other social justice movements are incomplete with attention to the politics of imprisonment.

One of the grave consequences of the powerful reach of the prison was the 2000 (s)election of George W. Bush as president. If only the black men and women denied the right to vote because of an actual or presumed felony record had been allowed to cast their ballots, Bush would not be in the White House today. And perhaps we would not be dealing with the awful costs of the War on Terrorism declared during the first year of his administration. If not for his election, the people of Iraq might not have suffered death, destruction, and environmental poisoning by U.S. military forces.

This is the ideological work that the prison performs—it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.

We thus think about imprisonment as a fate reserved for others, a fate reserved for the "evildoers," to use a term recently popularized by George W. Bush. Because of the persistent power of racism, "criminals" and "evildoers" re, in the collective imagination, fantasized as people of color. The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs—it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.

Prior to the appearance of punitive incarceration, such punishment was designed to have its most profound effect not so much on the person punished as on the crowd of spectators. Punishment was, in essence, public spectacle. Reformers such as John Howard in England and Benjamin Rush in Pennsylvania argued that punishment—if carried out in isolation, behind the walls of the prison—would cease to be revenge and would actually reform those who had broken the law.

Schools can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails and prisons. Unless the current structures of violence are eliminated from schools in impoverished comummities of color-including the presence of armed security guards and police-and unless schools become places that encourage the joy of learning, these schools will remain the major conduits to prisons.

Luana Ross's study of Native American women incarcerated in the Women's Correctional Center in Montana argues that "prisons, as employed by the Euro-American system, operate to keep Native Americans in a colonial situation/'87 She points out that Native people are vastly overrepresented in the country's federal and state prisons. In Montana, where she did her research, they constitute 6 percent of the general population, but 17.3 percent of the imprisoned population. Native women are even more disproportionately present in Montana's prison system. They constitute 25 percent of all women imprisoned by the state.

The criminalization of black and Latina women includes persisting images of hypersexuality that serve to justify sexual assaults against them both in and outside of prison. Such images were vividly rendered in a Nightline television series filmed in November 1999 on location at California's Valley State Prison for Women. Many of the women interviewed by Ted Koppel complained that they received frequent and unnecessary pelvic examinations, including when they visited the doctor with such routine illnesses as colds. In an attempt to justify these examinations, the chief medical officer explained that women prisoners had rare opportunities for "male contact," and that they therefore welcomed these superfluous gynecological exams. Although this officer was eventually removed from his position as a result of these comments, his reassignment did little to alter the pervasive vulnerability of imprisoned women to sexual abuse.

But why is an understanding of the pervasiveness of sexual abuse in women's prisons an important element of a radical analysis of the prison system, and especially of those forward-looking analyses that lead us in the direction of abolition? Because the call to abolish the prison as the dominant form of punishment cannot ignore the extent to which the institution of the prison has stockpiled ideas and practices that are hopefully approaching obsolescence in the larger society, but that retain all their ghastly vitality behind prison walls. The destructive combination of racism and misogyny, however much it has been challenged by social movements, scholarship, and art over the last three decades, retains all its awful consequences within women's prisons. The relatively uncontested presence of sexual abuse in women's prisons is one of many such examples. The increasing evidence of a U.S. prison industrial complex with global resonances leads us to think about the extent to which the many corporations that have acquired an investment in the expansion of the prison system are, like the state, directly implicated in an institution that perpetuates violence against women.

One of the many ruses racism achieves is the virtual erasure of historical contributions by people of color. Here we have a penal system that was racist in many respects—discriminatory arrests and sentences, conditions of work, modes of punishment—together with the racist erasure of the significant contributions made by black convicts as a result of racist coercion. Just as it is difficult to imagine how much is owed to convicts relegated to penal servitude during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we find it difficult today to feel a connection with the prisoners who produce a rising number of commodities that we take for granted in our daily lives. In the state of California, public colleges and universities are provided with furniture produced by prisoners, the vast majority of whom are Latino and black.

Moreover, as Lucia Zedner has pointed out, sentencing practices for women within the reformatory system often required women of all racial backgrounds to do more time than men for similar offenses. "This differential was justified on the basis that women were sent to reformatories not to be punished in proportion to the seriousness of their offense but to be reformed and retrained, a process that, it was argued, required time." At the same time, Zedner points out, this tendency to send women to prison for longer terms than men was accelerated by the eugenics movement, "which sought to have 'genetically inferior' women removed from social circulation for as many of their childbearing years as possible.

Some critics of the prison system have employed the term "correctional industrial complex" and others "penal industrial complex." These and the term I have chosen to underscore, "prison industrial complex," all clearly resonate with the historical concept of a "military industrial complex," whose usage dates back to the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower. It may seem ironic that a Republican president was the first to underscore a growing and dangerous alliance between the military and corporate worlds, but it clearly seemed right to antiwar activists and scholars during the era of the Vietnam War. Today, some activists mistakenly argue that the prison industrial complex is moving into the space vacated by the military industrial complex. However, the so called War on Terrorism initiated by the Bush administration in the aftermath of the 2002 attacks on the World Trade Center has made it very clear that the links between the military, corporations, and government are growing stronger, not weaker.

Most people are quite surprised to hear that the prison abolition movement also has a long history—one that dates back to the historical appearance of the prison as the main form of punishment.

White antislavery abolitionists such as John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison were represented in the dominant media of the period as extremists and fanatics.

the cottage system, domestic training, and so on—were designed ideologically to reform white women, relegating women of color in large part to realms of public punishment that made no pretense of offering them femininity.

this tendency to send women to prison for longer terms than men was accelerated by the eugenics movement, “which sought to have ‘genetically inferior’ women removed from social circulation for as many of their child-bearing years as possible.ʺ

Paradoxically, demands for parity with men’s prisons, instead of creating greater educational, vocational, and health opportunities for women prisoners, often have led to more repressive conditions for women.

Early on, Elster cited one of the meanings of rendering — a coat of plaster applied to a masonry surface. From this he asked the reader to consider a walled enclosure in an unnamed country and a method of questioning, using what he called enhanced interrogation techniques, that was meant to induce a surrender (one of the meanings of rendition-a giving up or giving back) in the person being interrogated. I didn't read the piece at the time, knew nothing about it. If I had known, before I knew Elster, what would I have thought? Word origins and covert prisons. Old French, Obsolete French and torture by proxy. The essay concentrated on the word itself, earliest known use, changes in form and meaning, zero-grade forms, reduplicated forms, suffixed forms. There were footnotes like nested snakes. But no specific mention of black sites, third-party states or international treaties and conventions. He compared the evolution of a word to that of organic matter. He pointed out that words were not necessary to one's experience of the true life.

Today, the growing social movement contesting the supremacy of global capital is a movement that directly challenges the rule of the planet—its human, animal, and plant populations, as well as its natural resources—by corporations that are primarily interested in the increased production and circulation of ever more profitable commodities. This is a challenge to the supremacy of the commodity form, a rising resistance to the contemporary tendency to commodify every aspect of planetary existence. The question we might consider is whether this new resistance to capitalist globalization should also incorporate resistance to the prison.

Today, the growing social movement contesting the supremacy of global capital is a movement that directly challenges the rule of the planet—its human, animal, and plant populations, as well as its natural resources—by corporations that are primarily interested in the increased production and circulation of ever more profitable commodities. This is a challenge to the supremacy of the commodity form, a rising resistance to the contemporary tendency to commodify every aspect of planetary existence. The question we might consider is whether this new resistance to capitalist globalization should also incorporate resistance to the prison.