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Home > Angela Davis and asha bandele: Getting People out of Prison Is Just
the Start to Solving America's Incarceration Crisis
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Angela Davis and asha bandele: Getting People out of Prison Is Just the
Start to Solving America's Incarceration Crisis
By April M. Short [1] / AlterNet [2]
May 3, 2016
The United States is locking up and dehumanizing its people at extraordinary
rates. Just over 4 percent of the world's population lives in the U.S., yet
we hold captive within our borders a whopping 25 percent of the world's
prisoners. This gives the U.S. the largest prisoner population in the world.
And that population is growing [3], though not for any noble reason, like
"crime is on the rise" (au contraire [4]). It's growing because of the same
sleaze that's behind most of our country's problems: giant corporations are
incentivizing, and profiting from [5] the expansion of the prisons industry.
Over that gaping wound that is mass incarceration, we're pouring a noxious
vinegar called racism, which is distilled from the most putrid seeds that
sprouted our nation: slavery. Our bloated prisons are disproportionately
full of poor men and women of color, and it's no accident. Nor is it a
coincidence that as smartphones have turned us all into vigilante
documentarians, able to capture injustice on our streets, some cops are
caught murdering black men, and seldom forced to answer for their crimes.
These issues are all linked. They are part of a perpetual motion set off a
couple hundred years ago with this nation's shameful beginnings on the backs
of stolen and imported humans. This is the crux of a powerful argument that
activist, author and scholar Angela Davis threw down in a recent public
phone conversation [6] about the prison-industrial complex with asha bandele
of the Drug Policy Alliance.
"It would seem to me that the recent emergence of the Black Lives Matter
movement causes us to reflect on the connection between our lives in the
second decade of the 21st century and the history of slavery, and
particularly the failure to entirely abolish the consequences of slavery. We
are still living with those consequences today. I like to think of racism
also as a way of acknowledging the fact that we continue to be haunted by
the institutions connected with slavery," Davis said.
Davis and bandele-who prefers to spell her name in lower case-took the
conversation past mass incarceration into a compelling overview of what the
residual label of criminal does to a person, as well as the community, and
society at large. What happens, they asked, when your community is targeted
and generationally oppressed; when you are raised to fear the police because
you've seen whose blood it is they're spilling; when your father and uncle
and siblings and cousins are all labeled criminals?
bandele opened the conversation on that note, which she said DPA has been
grappling with for decades.
"While it's certainly true that there are 2.2 million people living in the
worst conditions in America's prisons and jails, it's also true that more
than twice that number are monitored, their movements measured and
controlled, their citizenry redacted in ways that diminish their humanity,"
bandele said during her opening comments. "It's also painfully true that
[mass incarceration proponents'] defining of particularly, although not
exclusively, young black and brown men as criminals, has created what I
think is an open hunting season on young black and brown men."
Davis pointed out that schools, particularly those in poor communities of
color, "reflect the impact of the prisonization of our society."
"We inhabit a carceral society," Davis said. "We might talk about the U.S.
as a prison nation, and that not only refers to the fact that we have the
largest prison population and the largest number of prisons and the largest
rate of incarceration. It not only refers to the fact that racism is largely
what has driven that soaring prison population, but also the fact that
carceral institutions determine the way our children are educated. It refers
to the fact that the health-care system is very much linked to this what you
call 'mass criminalization.'"
Davis continued, "It seems to me that if we seriously want to move from mass
incarceration, also from mass criminalization, we'll have to think about
what it might mean to transform some of the other major institutions in our
society."
Davis said that while the official retelling of America's history of
incarceration often begins with the creation of the penitentiary in Auburn,
New York, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, our punishment systems truly began
with slavery. She explained how slavery systems have played a key role in
the development of systems of punishment.
"As a matter of fact, in the aftermath of slavery," Davis said, "when one
sees the convict lease system develop, when one sees the transformation of
some of the huge slave plantations, into places where prisoners work, where
convicts work, and of course Angola and others remain as witness to that
connection between punishment and slavery and the mass incarceration in the
21st century," she said.
Racism in this country is embedded in the language of many of our laws, and
drug laws in particular, "as Drug Policy Alliance has made us aware," Davis
said. She noted those laws "have been a large driver in the contemporary
increase in the numbers of people in prison. But the institution itself is
grounded in slavery."
To Davis, it has long been clear that the issues society faces have deep
roots. It appears that today, with more widespread awareness and education,
public grasp of the complexities of the prison-industrial complex is
beginning to catch up with reality.
bandele reflected on the way Democrats and Republicans have both switched
gears, from once calling for mass incarceration to now seeking ways to
reduce it via reforms (largely due to budgetary pressures [7]). She asked
Davis to share her concerns about the way mass incarceration has taken
center stage within the mainstream political discourse.
Davis responded with, "It's about time." She said it did not surprise her
that the right may have figured out a way to incorporate the issue into its
call for smaller government, but its solutions are all "carceral."
Davis said, "Their solutions are more ways to control and surveil people
without necessarily keeping them within prison institutions. That is not a
solution, that is a part of the problem, and as a matter of fact, more
electronic bracelets, more probation, more parole, all of that adds up to
creating ... a society that is even more determined by the carceral."
The consensus of the talk was that, when talking about criminalization,
incarceration "doesn't take it far enough." Along the same vein, bandele
noted, when talking about drug crimes, the dichotomy of violent vs.
nonviolent is also a simplification.
"[We've] developed this sense of compassion for people who use drugs over
the last several years, but we have little or no compassion for people who
sell drugs," bandele said. "That was made evident recently by Bill Clinton
in his rant [8], and I wonder how we can begin to disrupt some of these
dichotomies we have. ... We care about the drug user, but not the drug
seller. We care about the nonviolent prisoner, but not the violent prisoner.
How do we begin to tear down these walls? Or should we?"
Davis' said often the notions that delineate violent from nonviolent are
constructed.
"What counts as violence?" she asked. "As a matter of fact, law enforcement
people have an enormous amount of discretion in terms of charging someone
with a so-called violent or nonviolent offense. Say, the difference between
robbery and shoplifting, or whatever."
She called the distinction between drug user and drug seller "totally
artificial," using the example of women who are charged disproportionately
with drug-dealing charges over men.
"[I]t's women who are most affected by the drug laws. As a matter of fact,
proportionately, more women are in prison for drug offenses, and this is
true not only in the U.S., all over the world," she said. "It often has to
do with the fact that often male prisoners-a male defendant escapes
imprisonment, or they have their sentences reduced, because they're able to
enter plea-bargaining deals and they're able to provide information to the
prosecution. And women are not. So we have a disproportionate number of
women going to prison on drug selling charges, and often times it's only
because of relationships with men. Often times it's not even because they
have been actively involved in the process of drug selling."
While 4 percent of the world's women live in the U.S., 33 percent of the
world's incarcerated women live in the U.S. That is almost a third of the
world's woman prisoners.
Midway into their conversation, bandele asked Davis a question that is
rarely asked, "I wonder if you can help us think through that particular
harm. What does it mean that we have just exponentially removed our mothers
and our grandmothers and our sisters from our communities? We've talked, and
we should continue to talk about what it's meant that we've removed our
fathers and our brothers, but what does it mean that we've lost our mothers
in this way? What harm does that cause, especially black and brown
communities?"
Davis called this a major trend, "regardless of the numbers."
"However, there are issues that we discover by looking very closely at the
predicament of women in prison as we understand the relationship between
intimate violence, which so many women have experienced, and institutional
violence or state violence," she said. "And issues that we've become aware
of over the last period, especially since the campaign around CeCe McDonald
in Minnesota, has been the question of trans women prisoners."
The talk with Davis was the seventh in a series of public conversations DPA
has hosted, which began in 2014 with Michelle Alexander [9], law professor
and author of The New Jim Crow; Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness [10]. DPA launched the talks as a way to broadcast some of
the organization's most urgent internal conversations to the public.
"We've wondered privately and aloud, what if we do the urgent and important
work of emptying out the prisons, but people's lives are still controlled in
myriad and dehumanizing ways?" bandele said.
The issue of mass criminalization has been paramount, bandele said,
especially as both major U.S. political parties begin to feel the pressure
to reduce the prison population [11].
Listen to the full talk [12].
April M. Short writes and edits for AlterNet. She previously worked as
AlterNet's drugs and health editor.
.
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Source URL:
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g-people-out-prison-just-start-solving-americas
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/april-m-short
[2] http://alternet.org
[3]
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/09/17/3568232/the-united-states-had-ev
en-more-prisoners-in-2013/
[4]
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/the-many-causes-of-ameri
cas-decline-in-crime/385364/
[5]
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/6-shocking-revelations-about-how-pri
vate-prisons-make-their-money
[6]
http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/2016/04/april-11-telephone-town-hall-politica
l-activist-dr-angela-davis-ending-americas-obsessi
[7]
http://nypost.com/2015/07/12/obama-democrats-and-republicans-push-for-prison
-reform/
[8]
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/04/08/473508384/roundup-reaction
s-to-bill-clintons-exchange-with-black-lives-matter-protesters
[9]
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/michelle-alexander-white-men-get-rich-legal-po
t-black-men-stay-prison
[10] http://newjimcrow.com/
[11]
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/how-congress-can-cut-federal-prison-population
[12]
https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/261
457106&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comme
nts=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=tr
ue
[13] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Angela Davis and asha
bandele: Getting People out of Prison Is Just the Start to Solving
America's Incarceration Crisis
[14] http://www.alternet.org/
[15] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
