The Prison Industrial Complex and Abolition
Content Warning, references interpersonal violence and Sexual Assault (SA)
What is the Prison-Industrial Complex (PIC)?
“PIC” refers to the network of public and private entities that construct, maintain, and profit from policing and incarceration. It includes public and private prisons, the companies that build and service prisons, telecommunications firms like GTL and Securus, police departments, parole officers, probationary services, and Amazon Ring doorbell cameras. This industry is a profitable and ever-expanding opportunity for the capitalist class earning billions off of labor paid between 15 and 95 cents an hour.
Much more than a product of capitalist expansion, the PIC represents the latest historical stage in the United States of America’s war on racial minorities, LGBTQ people, and the poor. This war has its origins in the enslavement of Africans and the displacement and genocide of Native Americans and perpetuates these systems of racist exploitation today. Below (and at the bottom of this page in mobile view) are some statistics that guide the IWCSP and the larger movement towards abolition.
Abolition
What do we mean by abolition?
Abolition is about tearing down the PIC and replacing it with systems, practices, and resources that reduce violence, protect survivors of domestic and sexual abuse, and promote accountability when harm is committed. This means freeing people prison, tearing prisons down, but also ensuring that everyone has the resources they need to live dignified, safe, stable lives. Abolition is a process of destruction and creation, un-making and world building.
What about violent “predators”?
While prisons are often seen as the only response to violent crime such as sexual violence, prisons do nothing to address these things. They fail to prevent them, and many victims of sexual violence already do not turn to the police to solve these problems because the police do nothing but make these difficult situations worse for the victims.
In addition to failing to prevent this violence, prisons perpetuate it. Incarcerated people are regularly subject to forced and routine sexual assault. This institution does not prevent rape: it is the rapist.
As such, prisons are an ineffective response to these harms. New institutions of accountability are required to repair harm and prevent it from occurring in the future. We need practices that can resolve the root causes of harm and center the needs of survivors.
For further reading, see this graphic: Prison Abolition Arguments Chart
I thought incarceration reduced violence.
Violence is ordinary in prison, and it flows from corrections officers, medical staff, isolation from community, and administrative policies. These experiences of violence are traumatic, and the incarcerated people subject to this malice and neglect can express this trauma by being violent themselves. The result is a cycle of violence through which prison perpetuates harm—inflicting it directly and by accustoming people to a violent environment. Prison is only successful at beginning or reproducing these cycles while creating an avenue for exposure to mass state-surveillance, violence, and SA.
Hypothetically, what happens after prisons are torn down?
As prominent abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, “abolition not about absence but about presence.” Abolition is about tearing down prisons brick by brick while, at the same time, building up institutions, systems, and practices that enable people to live dignified, safe lives.
Restorative justice practices and accountability organizations and networks run through avenues other than the state can help replace carceral institutions and police. In addition to RJ practices, we will also need non-state institutions that support the needs of survivors and provide some non-punitive means of accountability. According to the Prison Policy Institute, the prison-industrial complex costs the state and families at least $182 billion dollars a year. Reinvesting this money at the community level—in already-existing programs that support and aid survivors—could provide the financial resources necessary for creating systems of community-level accountability and survivor protection.
Haven’t prisons and police always existed? A world without them seems impossible!
Practicing abolition begins from the idea that preventing sexual violence and protecting survivors is a communal responsibility. This prevention/protection must include material support (housing, access to healthcare), the development of community networks of support and accountability, and social spaces safe for everyone—especially survivors. This involves centering the needs of survivors at the household and community level. Creating and maintaining these social spaces is described in detail in The Revolution Starts At Home, a zine on community accountability that applies these concepts in activist circles.
What are “carceral” and “abolition” feminism?
Carceral feminism is a kind of feminism that advocates for expanded incarceration as a response to patriarchal and sexual violence. This school of thought has been successful and its success has meant mandatory arrest and dual arrest laws in cases of domestic violence, which has lead to increase rates of arrest. It has also lead to longer prison sentence, and an increase and prison and police funding over the last several decades. However, this expansion has not led to an increased or sustained level of protection of survivors.
According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), 25 out of 1,000 sexual assaults result in the assailant’s incarceration. These low rates of incarceration of those who commit harm raises the question of where the increased population of incarcerated persons is coming from. Part of the answer can be found in the dramatically increasing rate of incarceration among women—people who are themselves often survivors harms.
Concurrent with the rise of dual arrest policies, which enable police to arrest both parties at the scene of domestic violence when they “cannot determine the true perpetrator of harm,” the expansion of the prison-industrial-complex was facilitated by the dismantling of welfare assistance granted to the poor, which had been facilitating survivors escape from abusers. As a result, survivors are trapped in abusive relationships, incarcerated for self-defense against abusers, and making up a dramatically growing segment of the prison population. Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, these numbers will grow as women are criminalized for seeking abortions or experiencing miscarriages as a result of domestic abuse.
By relying on the assumption that the state can be reshaped to support and defend victims of the violence of patriarchy, carceral feminism, has facilitated the expansion of patriarchal state violence.
Abolition feminism addresses the safety and protection of survivors through other means. By ensuring survivors have access to local institutions of accountability and support at the peer and community levels, the material resources to sustain themselves, and an ability to share their experiences with other survivors, abolition feminism seeks to create and normalize community relationships and responsibilities that actively support survivors.
For Further reading on Anti-Carceral Feminism, visit the website of INCITE!, a radical, womxn of color led abolitionist organization.
What is the alternative to incarceration?
1) Mental health interventions and drug treatment programs
What Actually Treats Drug Abuse?
“Drug abuse” should be reframed as addiction: a health issue that can be resolved in the same way most can be. Expanded access to healthcare and greater investment in the healthcare system, combined with the decriminalization of drug use, will incentivize users to seek treatment while removing barriers to access preventing people from doing so currently. Additionally, networks and services outside the emergency room, such as syringe distribution networks, mobile health clinics, and other resources decrease drug use overall while providing substantive, meaningful care to people currently struggling with drug addiction.
This solution is a straightforward one that has been rejected in favor of the white-supremacist “War on Drugs”. This was a conscious and political decision, not an inevitability in the face of drug epidemics. To abolish prison requires the deconstruction of institutions existing for the purpose of enacting race and class based violence, and the replacement of these with systems of care and accountability.
2) Restorative and Transformative Justice Practices
Restorative Justice focuses on community satisfaction of survivors’ needs and accountability for the person who caused the harm. This involves participatory engagement of all concerned or people representing them (from their community, not as elements of a larger bureaucratic state structure). RJ requires “joint responsibility and accountability”. RJ also requires collaborative dialogues about responsibility, accountability, forgiveness, re-integration, and reparations/repairing harms and damages. While the input and desires of the survivor are given space in restorative justice, redress is determined by community decision making processes.
Transformative Justice is a framework for preventing, intervening in, and addressing harm through non-punitive practices of accountability. Instead of incarceration being the inevitable response to harm, TJ begins from the premise that the boundaries of criminalization are political and fluid. TJ focuses on harm rather than crime and seeks to address this problem at “individual, community, and social levels”. What this means more concretely is that transformative justice approaches require understanding the conditions that lead to harm and transforming them in order to minimize harm in the future and facilitate healing in the present. Like RJ, TJ involves emphasizing the needs of the survivor, communication with the person who caused harm, and community input. Acknowledging that punishment undermines safety, TJ involves working to transform the conditions that led to harm in the first place.
“Restorative justice is not the opposite of Retributive Justice. The contrast is a false one. Both approaches agree that people who cause harm owe something and victims need redress. The currency is different. Justice from a retributive perspective says ‘pain,’ while restorative justice says, ‘healing.’ ”
The population of incarcerated womxn increased by 32% from 2010 to 2014 alone (ACLU, 2018).
Nearly one in six transgender people (16%) (including 21% of transgender womxn) have been incarcerated at some point in their lives—far higher than the rate for the general population (NCTE 2012 , page 50)
Among Black transgender people, nearly half (47%) have been incarcerated at some point (NCTE 2012 , page 50).
Given the age of this data and low availability of data currently on incarceration rates of transgender women, this data likely understates the rates of incarceration experienced by trans women of color.
Among womxn in state prisons in the U.S., 57 percent had been physically or sexually abused prior to incarceration. The rate of prior sexual abuse of womxn was six times higher than the comparable rate for incarcerated men (ACLU 2018).
When compared with girls who have not been abused and neglected during childhood:
Abused and neglected girls are nearly twice as likely to become involved in the juvenile justice system, twice as likely to be arrested as adults, and 2.4 times more likely to be arrested for a violent crime (ACLU 2018).
More than half of all womxn in U.S. prisons and 80% of all womxn in U.S. jails are mothers, and most were the sole or primary caretakers of their children (ACLU, 2018).
Of all the womxn incarcerated in the U.S., 25 percent are pregnant or have a child under the age of one at the time of their incarceration (Motherhood Behind Bars).
Mass incarceration functions as a way of targeting those most marginalized by white-supremacist, hetero-patriarchal society. Abolition of the Prison-Industrial-Complex and the reunification of families torn apart by this system is the only way forward. The IWCSP believes that working and advocating for the release of womxn, trans, and nonbinary people in prisons, who often experience criminalization for acts of survival, is a critical component of abolition and necessary for the reunification of incarcerated mothers and their children, as well as the stabilization of families, and low- income communities.
Continued Resources
The decades-long work of countless BIPOC activists, scholars, and organizers cannot be easily summarized in a hundred websites, let alone one. For more resources on prison abolition, both in theory and in practice, the following resources, crafted by radical organizers and scholars, provide a scope of materials that are freely accessible and can serve as guiding lights in the work of abolishing the prison industrial complex and the racist institutions that uphold it.
Critical Resistance Abolitionist Toolkit
Abolitionist Futures Reading List
Tank Magazine: A world without cops reading list
Transform Harm abolition article list
All Our Trials:Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight Against Violence zine by Emily Thuma here
Incarcerated Women and Girls 2023 fact sheet by The Sentencing Project here
Women’s Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2023 by Prison Policy Initiative here
The New Jim Crow PDF By Michelle Alexander
Survived and Punished organization Website: here
Micah Herskind- Prison Abolition Resources
Prison Abolition Arguments Chart
Aorta Handout- Restorative Justice
The 1 Million Experiments Podcast
Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators
Prison Abolition FAQ- People Against Prisons Aoteoroa
Incarcerated Women and Girls Fact Sheet, The Sentencing Project (2023)
California Coalition for Women Prisoners
Vera Institute, Incarceration Trends in Virginia
Images Sourced from Scalawag Magazine, Abolitionist Toolkit, Ricardo Levins Morales, Truthout.org, Maya Winshell, and Women’s Foundation of California
