Social Movements and Mass Incarceration

Abstract

This article reads social movements into the story of the American carceral state in two ways. First, rather than see mass incarceration as emanating only from the war on drugs, I locate it within a broader framework of political repression of radical movements. Second, I argue that there is a new social movement against imprisonment on the rise. This burgeoning movement pursues what I call a strategy of decarceration that combines radical critique, direct action, and tangible goals for reducing the reach of the carceral state.

Keywords:

• carceral state
• decarceration
• mass incarceration
• political prisoners
• prisons

Notes

This article is based on a series of talks that I gave as part of a four-city tour across Germany in January 2013. My thanks to three longtime political prisoners—Sundiata Acoli, David Gilbert, and Oscar López Rivera—for their statements that accompanied my talks in Germany and which also inform this article. Copies of the original statements are available through www.sundiataacoli.org. I would like to offer extra thanks to David Gilbert, Laura Whitehorn, and the German Free Mumia coalition for their comments on earlier drafts. Many of the ideas presented here emerge from years of shared conversations and organizing with Decarcerate PA and the Wild Poppies Collective, so I thank the individuals involved for the collective inspiration.

Erica Goode, “Incarceration Rates for Blacks Have Fallen Sharply, Report Shows,” New York Times, February 27, 2013, A12.

Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History (December 2012) 97, no. 3: 703–734.

Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Lorna Rhodes, Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Robert Perkinson, “Shackled Justice: Florence Federal Penitentiary and the New Politics of Punishment,” Social Justice (Fall 1994) 21, no. 3, 117–132; Ray Luc Levasseur, “Trouble Coming Every Day: ADX—the First Year,” Solitary Watch. http://solitarywatch.com/solitary-voices/trouble-coming-every-day-adx-the-first-year/ (consulted February 5, 2013).

Martín Espada, The Lover of a Subversive is also a Subversive: Essays and Commentaries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).

Journalist Will Potter has covered these grand jury proceedings and other legal incidents involving environmental and animal rights activists on his site, www.greenisthenewred.com.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California at Berkeley, 2007), 28. See also Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011); Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (Oakland: AK Press, 2011).

James Q. Whitmore, Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide Between America and Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001).

For a brilliant reading of the history of campaigns in defense of such dissidents, see Rebecca N. Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law: Antilynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Winslow, eds., Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s (New York: Verso, 2010); Jefferson Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010).

Ward Churchill, “‘To Disrupt, Discredit, and Destroy’: The FBI's Secret War Against the Black Panther Party,” in Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds., Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party (New York: Routledge, 2001), 78–117; Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers (Boston: South End Press, 1990); Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Black Against Empire: A History of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Winston A. Grady-Willis, “The Black Panther Party: State Repression and Political Prisoners” and Akinyele Omowale Umoja, “Set Our Warriors Free: The Legacy of the Black Panther Party and Political Prisoners,” both in Charles E. Jones, The Black Panther Party Reconsidered (Baltimore: Black Classics Press, 1998), 363–390, 417–442.

See, for example, Michael Flamm, Law and Order: Street Crime, Urban Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990).

Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors; Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (Oakland: AK Press, 2006), 256–257; Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Policing and Prisons in an Age of Crisis (London: Verso, 1999); Human Rights Watch, “World Report, 2013,” http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2013 (consulted February 15, 2013).

Naomi Murakawa, “The Origins of the Carceral Crisis: Racial Order as ‘Law and Order’ in Postwar American Politics,” in Joseph Lowndes, Julie Novkov, and Dorian T. Warren, eds., Race and American Political Development (New York: Routledge, 2008), 237, 236.

Haldeman recounted this conversation in his diary; it is quoted in Parenti, Lockdown America, 3.

For more on the prison movement of this era, see, for example, Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming); Dan Berger, “The Real Dragons: A Brief History of Political Militancy and Incarceration,” in Matt Meyer, ed., Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners (Oakland: PM Press, 2008); Heather Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Uprising (New York: Pantheon, forthcoming); Daniel S. Chard, “Rallying for Repression: Police Terror, Law and Order Politics, and the Decline of Maine's Prisoners' Rights Movement,” The Sixties 5, no. 1 (2012); Robert Chase, “Slaves of the State Revolt: Southern Prison Labor and a Prison-Made Civil Rights Movement,” in Robert Zeiger, ed., Life and Labor in the New, New South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 177–213.

See Alan Eladio Gomez, “Resisting Living Death at Marion Federal Penitentiary: 1972,” Radical History Review, 96 (2006): 58–86; Nancy Kurshan, Out of Control: A Fifteen-Year Battle Against Control Unit Prisons (San Francisco: Freedom Archives, 2013).

BBC, “Prison Numbers Reach Record High in England and Wales,” August 21, 2011, BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14681776 (consulted February 15, 2013). The article lists the amount at 86,821 people.

Victoria Law, Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (Oakland: PM Press, 2012).

Beth E. Ritchie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation (New York: NYU Press, 2012).

MILK was a project of former Black Panther Safiya Bukhari, during her time as a political prisoner in the late 1970s and 1980s. For more, see Bukhari, The War Before (New York: The Feminist Press, 2010).

For more on organizing against AIDS in prison, see Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 225–237; Susan Rosenberg, An American Radical: Political Prisoner in my Own Country (New York: Citadel, 2012), 131–163, 266–285; Esther Kaplan, “Organizing Inside,” POZ Magazine, November 1998, http://www.poz.com/articles/233_1656.shtml (consulted February 5, 2013).

Bernard Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).

For an overview of these and other examples of specific political prisoner campaigns in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s, see Meyer, Let Freedom Ring.

Perhaps the most consistent chronicle of these prisoner struggles can be found in the San Francisco Bay View, an online national black newspaper, available at http://sfbayview.com/. The Pelican Bay prisoners have vowed to resume the strike in response to institutional intransigence in the summer of 2013. See http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/ for updates.

For an ethnographic take on antiprison organizing since the 1990s, see Julia Sudbury, “Maroon Abolitionists: Black Gender-oppressed Activists in the Anti-Prison Movement in the U.S. and Canada,” Meridians 9, no. 1 (2008): 1–29. Theoretical sketches can be found in the writings and works of Angela Y. Davis, Joy James, Dylan Rodríguez, Critical Resistance, and INCITE!: Women of Color Against Violence, among elsewhere.

While there is no central clearinghouse for these movements on the outside, there is some consistent coverage at http://unprison.com/. For more on the National Day of Action coming from the Occupy movement, see www.occupy4prisoners.org.

For more on these actions, see http://decarceratepa.info/content/protest.

Much of this work has been undertaken by the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, www.theniya.org.

See www.puenteaz.org for more on the Phoenix campaign.

There is a growing body of literature on abolition. See, for instance, CR10 Publications Collective, Abolition Now! Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex (Oakland: AK Press, 2008); Joy James, The New Abolitionists: Neo-Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005); Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories, 2005).

Laurie Jo Reynolds, quoted in IPR, “Group Happy with Prison Closing,” aired June 21, 2012, http://wglt.org/wireready/news/2012/06/04849_TamsTen1_061615.shtml (consulted February 5, 2013).

These comments are inspired by the respective remarks given by Todd Clear and Marie Gottschalk at “Mass Incarceration in America: Arts, Advocacy, and the Academy,” Temple University, November 29, 2012; see also the report by James Austin et al., “Ending Mass Incarceration: Charting a New Justice Reinvestment,” April 16, 2013, http://www.justicestrategies.org/sites/default/files/publications/Charting%20a%20New%20Justice%20Reinvestment.pdf (consulted April 19, 2013); Loic Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

For a legal take on realignment, see Margo Schlanger, “Plata v. Brown and Realignment: Jails, Prisons, Courts, and Politics,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 48, no. 1 (2013): 1–51.

Seth Freed Wessler, “How Immigration Reform Could Expand Incarceration of Immigrants,” ColorLines February 6, 2013, http://colorlines.com/archives/2013/02/how_immigration_reform_could_mean_more_incarceration_of_immigrants.html (consulted February 6, 2013); Don Thompson, “California Challenges Feds' Inmate Population Cap,” Mercury News January 8, 2013, http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_22330173/california-debates-futur (consulted February 6, 2013). For a critique of the sex offender registries, see Erica R. Meiners, “Never Innocent: Feminist Trouble with Sex Offender Registries and Protection in a Prison Nation,” Meridians 9, no. 2 (2009): 31–62.

Small-scale examples of this can be found in contemporary abolitionist writings; see, for example, Ching-in Chen, Jai Dulani, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence within Activist Communities (Brooklyn: South End Press, 2011); and the special issue of Social Justice 37, no. 4 (2011) on the theme of “Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dan Berger

Dan Berger is Assistant Professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington, Bothell. He is the author or editor of three books on racial and radical formations, most recently The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (Rutgers University Press, 2010). He is currently completing a book entitled Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era (forthcoming in the Justice, Power, and Politics series at the University of North Carolina Press). Berger is also a cofounder, turned long-distance member, of Decarcerate PA.