{"id":5717,"date":"2024-10-14T09:01:05","date_gmt":"2024-10-14T16:01:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/agog\/?p=5717"},"modified":"2024-10-14T09:01:05","modified_gmt":"2024-10-14T16:01:05","slug":"abolish-the-prison-industrial-complex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mutanteggplant.com\/agog\/2024\/10\/14\/abolish-the-prison-industrial-complex\/","title":{"rendered":"Abolish the Prison Industrial Complex"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unbuild Walls; Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition, Silky Shaw 2024<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The title of this book, Unbuild Walls, references a quote from Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s 1874 sci-fi classic The Dispossessed. In the story, the \u201cwalls\u201d are both the physical wall that exists between the two societies and the invisible walls we put up that constrain us and prevent human connection. This book is about breaking down the literal prison, jail, and detention center walls as well as the border walls, whether tangible, imaginary, or digital. But it is also about unbuilding the walls between our movements for social change. These walls are often intentional; we are fighting for a specific cause and must make that special case. Inadvertently, the divisions and lack of shared analysis because of these walls have resulted in harm to other causes and movements. Abolition helps us better understand that the struggle for immigrant justice is also a fight for racial, gender, and economic justice. By embracing abolition, maybe we can finally begin to bring the walls down.<\/p>\n

The \u201cnation of immigrants\u201d incarcerated more immigrants than anywhere else in the world. Major milestones dot the history of the contemporary immigrant detention system in the United States. In 1980, when detaining immigrants was a rare practice, the arrival of Cuban and Haitian refugees by boat in the Cold War led to the birth of the modern system with the opening of the Krome Detention Center in South Florida. Later, during the height of the war on drugs, mandatory detention became law, stripping certain immigrants of due process rights. In 1996, the passage of two draconian immigration bills under president Bill Clinton expanded the grounds for deportation and doubled the existing detention capacity. But it was 9\/11 that made immigrants an unequivocal target of the government in the name of protecting the \u201chomeland\u201d, after which billions of dollars were funneled into the deportation machinery. In recent memory, Trump\u2019s wholesale attack on immigration led to a considerable expansion of the system, reaching a peak of half a million people detained in 2019.<\/p>\n

But beneath these common points of departure lies another aspect of immigrant detention\u2019s history; the rise in mass incarceration. In 1970, the United States incarcerated less than two hundred thousand people; three decades later, that number had risen to over two million. The prison boom that took place over the last half century is central to the story of immigrant detention in the United States. Critical Resistance defines the prison industrial complex (PIC) as \u201cthe overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social, and political problems\u201d. As the PIC was fortified through various developments, including increased funding for law enforcement, harsher sentencing laws at the state and federal levels, and the promise of jobs and revenue derived from a growing prison economy, the response to unnaturalized immigrants living in the United States, and those arriving at our borders increasingly took on a carceral logic. Since the 1980s, a combination of economic restructuring and increasingly tough-on-crime policies have produce devastating results; the highest rates of incarceration in the world and the greatest number of deportations in US history.<\/p>\n

The restrictions on the number of visas due to Hart-Celler (1965) coupled with the end of the Bracero Program in 1964 resulted in an unprecedented rise of unauthorized migrations. At the time, some 200,000 Mexicans were coming to the United States for work annually. Now the first 20,000 immigrants from Mexico could be issued visas, but the 20,001 immigrant would not be; if they had to cross for work , they would be considered illegal. Immigration related apprehensions increased rapidly each year after the law passed, from 44,000 arrests in 1964 to over a million in 1977.<\/p>\n

Contrary to popular thinking on the issue, the expansion of immigrant detention was not merely a xenophobic response to increasing undocumented immigration. It was a direct outgrowth of the rise of mass incarceration in the United States…Immigrant detention is part of the broader carceral landscape in the United States, and thus abolition of immigrant detention must be seen as concurrent with the demand to abolish the prison industrial complex.<\/p>\n

Advocates and the Obama administration affirmed the idea that immigration was a \u201cpublic safety\u201d issue, reinforcing the narrative of immigrants as criminals. Our experience during the Obama years underlined for me the way that reformist reforms
\nsetting out to \u201cimprove\u201d prison and detention actually serve to expand it. This is a critical lesson to carry forward that explains why we must redirect our movement energy to abolitionist and decarceral reforms that dismantle and defund the system rather than try to make it \u201cmore human\u201d…Ultimately, the intention to improve conditions only served to expand detention, consolidate the system, and benefit private prison corporations. The implementation of a risk classification assessment tool did little to release people from detention and reinforced existing racist frameworks. Along with ATDs (alternatives to detention), such reforms have repeatedly failed at reducing the number of people incarcerated or improving the lives of those subject to incarceration…Obama accepted nativist arguments that immigrants were threats to national security and public safety and enabled racial profiling through strengthening the ties between immigration enforcement and the criminal legal system, just as Clinton had done before him. In doing so, he not only oversaw more formal deportations than any other president, but likewise gave credence to Republican attacks on immigrants.<\/p>\n

As outrage over family separations escalated that summer (2018), the call to abolish ICE gained steam among activists and even some politicians, who introduced legislation to do away with the agency. Family separation had become a flashpoint that exposed the harms of the system, leading many to focus on the agency that carries out mass deportations. What the demand to abolish ICE failed to acknowledge, however, was that the zero-tolerance policy went far beyond ICE\u2019s purview.
\nFamily separation under Trump emerged directly from a long-standing strategy aimed at deterring immigration through use of the criminal legal system to punish people for the act of immigration itself…In the process, and unbeknownst to most Americans, immigration became to most commonly prosecuted crimes in US federal courts. As a result, a parallel system of prisons and jails arose to to incarcerate immigrants serving criminal sentences…While the family separation policy under Trump rightly provoked significant outrage, what it revealed most was the complete moral bankruptcy of the institutions that implements it. Often the liberal critique of Trump\u2019s immigration policy sees him and his administration as an aberration, a departure from the basic norms of governing. This perspective ignores the fact that many of his policies were continuations and expansions of what previous administrations, especially since Clinton, had been seeding; the use of the criminal legal system to punish immigrants as a tool for deterring future migration.<\/p>\n

Closing Private Prisons<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the short time between AB32\u2019s (California act to force closing of private prisons used by ICE) passage in October and when it became law, ICE accelerated the process and entered into fifteen-year contracts at the remaining private detention centers in California…Biden phased out private prisons for DOJ while simultaneously defending their use by another branch (ICE) of the federal government…Learning from the efforts in California, organizers and advocates in several states (Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington State) have been successful at passing legislation ending detention contracts or preventing new expansion, and others are considering similar legislation…By December 2022, the Biden administration had ended contracts at five detention centers, siting concerns about conditions. Three of the five detention centers had been included on DWM\u2019s (Department of Migrant Workers) First Ten to Committees Not Cages list…The belief that detention was necessary had started to lose its hold on advocates and politicians alike…But the reduction in the system during these years and the end of contracts at numerous facilities were important movement victories that would not have been possible without the demand for abolition.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany remedies proposed for the all-purpose use of prisons to solve social, political, and economic problems got caught in the logic of the system itself, such that reform strengthens, rather than lessons, prison\u2019s hold. In a sense, the professionalizaton of activism has made many committed people so specialized and entrapped by funding streams that they have become effectively deskilled when it comes to thinking and doing what matters most.\u201d
\nRuth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag<\/em><\/p>\n

On the Rightward ideological trend of the Supreme Court<\/strong><\/p>\n

Howard Zinn made this point many years ago; \u201cIt would be naive to depend on the Supreme Court to defend the rights of poor people, women, people of color, dissenters of all kind.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Abolition movement building<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s about doing the work, not just making a demand. Yes, the demand is important \u2013 it helps clarify where we\u2019re going and opens up space for us to make our case to reduce the harm caused by the prison industrial complex. But our ability to create change is dependent on the power that we have. It requires building a base, identifying targets, developing strategies, waging campaigns, deploying various tactics, and harnessing our power when there are openings. That is the work. That is abolition.<\/p>\n

The moral panic around the border now drives most policy decisions on immigration. In our work for migrant justice, it is critical that we challenge the right-wing fearmongering about the border in order to create safer conditions for people wanting the migrate. The immigrant rights struggle is inherently an intersectional struggle. People migrate for a variety of reasons. Global inequality as a result of capitalism and US empire has created unstable, impoverished, and often violent conditions across the world. Climate catastrophe has only exacerbated these conditions. As more migrants seek safety, the tools the federal government uses to deter migration, including prisons, police, and the military, will continue to be lifted up as necessary for preventing the \u201csurge\u201d or \u201cflood\u201d or whatever the disaster metaphor of the day is.<\/p>\n

The intersectional nature of the immigrant rights struggle should not be seen as a challenge, but as an opportunity to bridge issues and connect the dots to imagine another world in which everyone can thrive.<\/p>\n

In 2019, the Poor People\u2019s Campaign, which is rooted in civil rights\u2014era demands, released a moral budget, arguing that \u201cthe abundance of our society will grow even greater when we stop investing in maintaining injustice to benefit the few, and turn instead to policies based on the needs of the many.\u201d<\/p>\n

For example, NPP (National Priorities Project) points out that in 2023 \u201cthe average taxpayer paid $298 to the top five military contractors, and paid just $19 for mental health and substance abuse programs.\u201d On immigration \u201cT,he average taxpayer paid $70 for deportations and border control, versus just $19 for refugee assistance.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Unbuild Walls; Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition, Silky Shaw 2024 The title of this book, Unbuild Walls, references a quote from Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s 1874 sci-fi classic The Dispossessed. In the story, the \u201cwalls\u201d are both the physical wall that exists between the two societies and the invisible walls we put up that constrain … <\/p>\n

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