Prison Abolition as an Ecosocialist Struggle

With all our boasted reforms, our great social changes, and our far-reaching discoveries, human beings continue to be sent to the worst of hells, wherein they are outraged, degraded, and tortured, that society may be “protected” from the phantoms of its own making.

Prison, a social protection? What monstrous mind ever conceived such an idea? Just as well say that health can be promoted by a widespread contagion. (Emma Goldman 1917, 71–72)

Opened in 1989, Pelican Bay State Prison (PBSP), 111 ha in the middle of the Northern California rainforest, is among the most brutal of institutions. With a capacity to sequester 2,280 people, the prison authorities have forced as many as 1,111 people, many for more than ten years, into seven-square-meter cages called SHUs (Secure or Security Housing Units), with no windows, subjected to a constant illumination by fluorescent light. Seventy-eight people have been caged there for twenty or more years. Over the past few years, conditions have further deteriorated, with cases of putrescent food served, lack of basic health provisions, and cuts to basic services. This has been occurring while the California prison system is under quite some pressure on many fronts. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has revealed horrific abuses of prisoners by Los Angeles prison officials and guards. The U.S. Supreme Court, acknowledging an overcrowding problem, has ruled that over the next two years the state of California must reduce to 100,000 the number of prisoners (meaning that 33,000 people will have to be freed).

It is in this context of extreme violence against prisoners, financial breakdown, and legal actions that one of the most impressive hunger strikes in history recently erupted and ended on the 13^th of October 2011, quickly overshadowed—if most people even noticed—by events unfolding on New York City's Wall Street, the October 15^th protests, and other actions worldwide. The PBSB strike was organized through the sort of channels typically used by incarcerated “gang”1 members, with crucial help from many activists, especially African-American women and Latina. Eventually, the number of strikers reached more than 6,000 and included different prisons in California and beyond. They faced and still face incredible odds, literally risking their lives. During the strike, many were threatened with or were actually punished with placement in isolation units or other privation (through absurd charges, like talking loudly in the library). In spite of malicious media misrepresentation and false accusations, the prisoners, assisted by lawyers, were able to carry out negotiations with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR).

At first, the negotiations seemed to be yielding positive results, and so the hunger strike was suspended in the first week of August. But the CDCR was merely biding its time without addressing prison conditions at all. The hunger strike was therefore called again on September 26^th, and the number of strikers expanded to 12,000, with solidarity actions extending at least as far Ohio. Violence and threats against strikers continued, such as denying medical assistance when it was most needed, reducing cell temperatures to 15°C, stopping postal service, and carrying out forced prison transfers. Despite it all, negotiations proceeded, and the hunger strike ended when promises were made to consider at least some of the prisoners’ demands.

The Pelican Bay State Prison inmates’ demands are as straightforward as they are revealing of the general fraud of prisons. They seek an end to: (1) collective punishment; (2) infiltration and entrapment activities; (3) long-term solitary confinement; (4) inadequate food; and (5) overly stringent limitations on allowances, such as visiting times and the number of phone calls inmates are allowed to receive (see http://www.prisons.org/documents/FinalNoticewith5CoreDemands.doc). Key to these issues is the SHUs, the widespread use of which eventually sparked the protest movement in the first place.

This is hardly the first time that prisoners have employed non-violent means like the hunger strike as a strategy to fight horrific conditions and treatment. One might recall the 1981 self-immolation of Irish political prisoners, including Bobby Sands, struggling against British dictatorship. This is in part what inspired the Pelican Bay prison protests, possibly including the formulation of five demands (see below). What is different about the Pelican Bay protests is the fact that, like the 2010 non-violent Georgia prisoners’ strike (and many others before it), organizing overcame existing divisions among inmates—divisions often encouraged by incarceration institutions—and that it occurred across prisons within and outside California. Despite the spreading protest, the strikers’ demands continue to be largely ignored. Furthermore, it is likely that pressure and violent reprisals by prison authorities hastened the strike's end, as in the case of Georgia the previous year.

This being a maximum-“security” prison, one might be led to believe that the gratuitous torture is deserved. For who knows what sort of terrible deeds such people have committed, one might think. Certainly some have committed atrocities, though we should note that, in the main, acts of single prisoners are emphatically lesser in scale than the U.S. military and no more gruesome than those of some murderous police officers that remain at large. However, the majority of prisoners have landed in such a horrid place through nothing but immigrant status, gang association, and non-violent drug-related activities, if not through outright political persecution by the U.S. government. As is well documented, incarceration in the U.S. is meted out predominantly according to level of wealth and skin tone, with the intent of raising profits for the few by locking up those most impoverished by the willful creation of huge wealth disparities since the 1970s. It is a system that is expanding in most industrialized wealthy countries like Italy, the U.K., and France (Ruggiero 2011). It is the reflection of an oppressive system at national and international levels, rife with classist sexual/racist violence and binary gender enforcement, mirroring what happens at home and in the workplace (Alexander 2010; Coyle, Campbell, and Neufeld 2003; Davis 2003; Gilmore 2007; Gottschalk 2006; Solinger, et al. 2010).

It should anyway be understood even by the most inveterate bourgeois moralist that incarceration and torture help little in reducing “crime.”2 There is no relationship between “crime” rates and the expansion of criminalized activities, incarceration rates, or the existence of the death penalty. What prisons actually achieve, especially maximum “security” ones, is the reproduction and inducement of more of institutionalized patriarchal (sexist/homophobic) and racist violence, and the exacerbation—if not creation and proliferation—of disease and health problems (including mental health deterioration), among other deleterious effects. Such outcomes imperil prisoners, prison guards, and affected families, especially in racialized and criminalized communities, but also in mainstream society at large with, for example, the spread of tuberculosis and yet more violence (Delgado and Humm-Delgado 2009; Rhodes 2005; Rosen, Schoenbach, and Wohl 2008).

To return to Emma Goldman's analogy, contagion may literally be, at least in part, what prisons are designed to achieve, raising human misery to deliver a steady flow of profits during times of economic downturn. The analogy could not be more apt today. The health of capitalism is promoted by widespread contagion of all sorts, including violence and disease. The prisoners’ actions at PBSP and other prisons are part of a fight against general state repression and the prison-industrial complex. Perhaps they can even be turned into the prospect for the abolition of prisons, at least in California, beset as it is with bankruptcy and draconian budget slashing in education and social services generally.

But the struggle is also much more than that. It is at the same time an environmentalist struggle. It might seem at first far-fetched to connect prisons to environmental degradation. In fact, only recently have activists, and then only a few, begun to see connections between prisons and environmental concerns. This has been by way of understanding the manifold manifestations of racism as two ways in which many communities are being attacked and undermined systematically by capitalist institutions that steal and poison lives (Braz and Gilmore 2006).

There is more to it than a mere linkage among movements, however. As Ruthie Gilmore succinctly puts it, “Prisons and other locally unwanted land uses accelerate the mortality of modestly educated working people of all kinds in urban and rural settings, and [they demonstrate] how economic and environmental justice are central to antiracism” (Gilmore 2007, 247). Sentencing people to prison, millions of them, as in the U.S., is to condemn them to live in degraded and often toxic environments, with long-term dire health effects and lives cut short for those who manage to survive and leave prisons. In this sense, prisons should also be viewed, studied, resisted, and destroyed as socially constructed physical environments that often replace life-enhancing ecosystems, like Northern California rainforests, and that, as part of purposefully inflicted violence, are designed to expose people to pathogens, toxins, inadequate nourishment, and mentally debilitating sensory and social deprivation. It could not be more obvious, then, that the struggle for the abolition of prisons is intrinsically an ecosocialist struggle.

One way to begin understanding anti-prison struggles as ecosocialist is to extend the insights already offered by the likes of Angela Davis, who writes:

An abolitionist approach…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 (Davis 2003, 107).

There could be many ways in which an ecosocialist approach could assist prison abolitionism to achieve the above-described ends. One could be in showing and fighting against the wastefulness and environmental destruction implied by building prisons and all the materials extracted and marshalled in the infrastructure that subtends the prison-industrial complex. These include all the resources used by the network of “correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards’ unions, and legislative and court agendas” (Davis 2003, 107). Another could be studying the prison as an ecosystem, with all its interspecific interactions, physical environmental variables, and population dynamics, as an ecosystem intentionally produced socially to cripple and murder. Prison, in this regard, is something to be removed not just from the social and ideological, but from the biophysical landscape as well. Industrial hygienists, physicians, and ecologists could all contribute to such an endeavor, and some actually are—unbeknownst to them—through various reports and publications on prison conditions. Yet another could be in identifying and exposing the linkage between imprisonment and the racist/classist denial or pollution of basic means of life to many communities, including pauperized Euro-American ones (e.g., racist and classist hazardous waste siting, soil pollution, and diversion of water courses to privilege Euro-American farmers and agribusinesses, etc.).

These are no easy tasks, but connecting decarceration to ecosocialist objectives is well worth the effort. The prison is a main fulcrum of capitalist domination and simultaneously a form of environmental degradation, especially for the incarcerated. The challenge before ecosocialists is therefore to grasp the simultaneously capitalist and environmentally destructive aspects of prisons so as to become relevant to the prison abolitionist movement.

—Saed

Notes

¹Given the sordid, mass-murderous histories of state institutions, one should wonder why inmates should be the only ones branded with such a term in the public eye.

²Crime is such an ambiguous term it is nearly devoid of meaning, for it alludes to whatever is decreed by a government at a given time. The most obvious example is the production and sale of alcoholic beverages in the U.S., which was made into a crime in 1920, and then somehow it was no longer a crime after 1933.