January-February 1999:
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Stopping The Prison-Industrial Juggernaut
By Linda M. Thurston
hen
the Nonviolent Activist asked me to write about last fall's Critical Resistance
conference, it came to me that, even without the parallels between the prison-industrial
complex and the military-industrial complex, even without the large number of
NVA readers who have been imprisoned, the subject has relevance for the peace
activists who read the NVA. We are not only people working to end war and militarism,
but people working to end violence. The violence of stun guns and long-term isolation
cells and communities with 40 percent of the youthful population in prison, the
violence of local economies forced to beg for a prison in order for people to
have jobs, the violence of rapist prison guards and racist courts and 11-year-old
children in high-security prisons-all of that is part of our struggle.
Conditions Worsen
More than
25 years after the uprising at New York's Attica State Prison brought prison conditions
to the forefront of the nation's consciousness, the United States imprisons its
people at a rate higher than any other country on the planet. Despite a brief
moment of hopeful reformism following the Attica uprising, conditions in U.S.
prisons are, in many ways, worse now than they were 25 years ago. International
human rights groups have issued a dozen reports in the last five years, condemning
underground isolation cells, sexual assaults on women prisoners, the incarceration
of children in adult prisons, and a range of other abuses. Prison systems across
the country have eradicated educational programs. Sentences have grown so long
that some prisoners must wait 50 years before they are eligible for parole. More
than 3,000 people sit on the nation's death rows. More than 500 have been executed
since the death penalty was reinstated.
But prisons are not only a national shame. They are also big business. Correctional Corporation of America, Wackenhut and other companies have discovered in the United States' propensity for locking away its own people a prime oportunity for profit. Private prisons have sprung up across the country. At least one, an immigration detention facility in New Jersey, has seen a major uprising in protest of conditions, yet private prisons remain even less accountable to the people than are the public prisons that pioneered mass incarceration. The business of prisons runs through these public institutions as well, as companies grow by providing food, clothing, and equipment to the public and private prisons. In many areas, as factories have headed out of the country, prisons have become the only business in town. Clusters of so-called "correctional facilities" have grown on hillsides in Colorado, in the midst of forests in Massachusetts, and by highways in Michigan. Prison guards in some states make more money than college professors, leading the working class to see their hope for financial survival in the business of locking up their fellow Americans.
Building
Resistance
So where is the resistance? Following the Attica uprising,
hundreds of local and national organizations fought prison conditions, fought
for the rights of prisoners, and worked to help ex-prisoners survive in the community
after their release from prisoners. Family members of prisoners built advocacy
and support organizations. Religious institutions created programs to work on
prison issues. Most of those organizations closed shop over the years, as funding
became harder to find, as their issues became less popular, as the increase in
executions drew their attention from one crisis to another, as people burned out,
as the situation seemed more and more hopeless.
Some groups did survive, and some activists, mostly on the local level, continued the struggle. Organizations like the American Friends Service Committee and the ACLU National Prison Project and a range of left organizations supporting social and political prisoners continued to advocate for an end to abusive conditions, to prison construction and to lengthening sentences. But the prisoner rights movement seemed largely moribund, reduced to small groups hanging on by stubborn conviction, isolated in spots around the country, working with all volunteers in borrowed office space or no office space, or working within service agencies or from home, doing whatever they could manage to get done to try to keep the situation from getting worse. Spreading the word. Getting out information. Never giving up.
Their stubbornness may well have paid off. Last year, a group of activists, academics, prisoners and ex-prisoners, musicians, students and others organized four days of panels, task force and caucus meetings and workshops aimed at re-building a movement for fundamental change in the prison system. A core organizing committee in California was joined by committees in New York, Hartford and other Eastern cities. Organizers initially expected 500 people to attend, mostly from the West Coast. As the months of organizing progressed, they realized that they'd awakened a sleeping monster of concern about prisons. They revised their expected attendance to 1,000. In late September 1998, more than 3,000 people came together from nearly every U.S. state and from several countries around the world.
Ironic Juxtapositions
The conference, called "Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison
Industrial Complex," was held at the University of California at Berkeley. The
location made for some surreal moments, such as the juxtaposition of the conference's
African drummers and the university's homecoming cheerleaders, the latter complete
with gold pom-poms and the former chanting down the prison system. Other strange
and ironic juxtapositions were transformed into organizing opportunities, such
as the demonstration and rally that closed the conference, participants flooding
out of the auditorium onto the streets of Berkeley to protest the building of
a jail across the street from the local high school.
The gathering would have been useful if all it accomplished was to spread some new information and to provide a site for national networking among activists. This conference, however, had a bigger goal:
We seek to facilitate a productive exchange between a diverse
range of individuals-including grassroots organizers, academics, former prisoners,
policymakers, lawyers and other advocates-and organizations who traditionally
have not worked together around prison issues. The goal of the conference is to
establish a broad network of individuals and organizations committed to critical
public discourse, effective social and cultural activism, further research, and
dramatic policy transformation. We hope to create a foundation for a new movement
against the prison industrial complex.
-From the Call to Critical Resistance:
Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex
Workshops, round table discussions, video conferences, caucuses and task forces met to discuss a wide range of topics, including:
-
The Production of Prisoners: How and Why the Prison Population Grows While Crime
Rates Drop
- Youth Activism Against an Incarcerated Future
- Puerto
Rican Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War
- Developing a Human Rights
Campaign Against the Prison Industrial Complex
- Media and the Prison Industrial
Complex
- Histories of Prison Activism: Past, Present, and Future
-
The Prison Business and the Corporate Connection
- Fighting for Alternatives
to Prisons
- How to Form a Student Group That Links Research and Activism
- Tribal Law Enforcement and the Prison Industrial Complex
- Women of
Color Resisting Sexual and Domestic Violence
- The Military Industrial Complex and the Prison Industrial Complex
In the plenary sessions, too, the excitement was palpable. The final plenary, televised live by Deep Dish TV, was literally filled to overflowing; organizers had to open up two overflow rooms. The presenters-all of whom had led workshops-included one-time fugitive Angela Davis, the recently released Black Panther political prisoner Geronimo Ji Jagga Pratt, a Puerto Rican independista, blues and folk singer Faith Nolan and MacArthur Fellow Ellen Barry, fonder of Legal Services for Women in Prison. Barry named the next moves forward, including Through the Wall Week this coming April 11-17, called as a national week of contact between prisoners and those on the outside.
Conferences happen all the time. Did the Critical Resistance conference jumpstart a mass movement for change in this country's criminal justice system? That remains to be seen. It is clear that the thousands of people who came together in Berkeley in September were reinvigorated, inspired and linked with people nationwide committed to making fundamental change in the system. The 3,000 gathered in Berkeley were not just the "usual cast of characters," but a broad range of activists from different movements, different histories, different politics and different styles of communication and activism. There is hope in that, as there is in the planned regional meetings to be held in 1999 and the follow-up conference being discussed by some activists on the East Coast for late 1999 or early in the year 2000.
Abolishing prisons as we know them can't be much more impossible than abolishing war, can it?
For
more info about the conference or April's Through the Wall Week contact: Critical
Resistance, PO Box 339, Berkeley, Ca 94701; (510)643-2094; e-mail: critresist@aol.com;
website: www.igc.org/justice/critical.
WAR
RESISTERS LEAGUE