Ruth Wilson Gilmore [1,2], Angela Davis [3.4] and many, many others have been making the case for decades that the entirety of the prison system needs to be abolished.
Among the more profound cases that Gilmore makes is that the it is not just for-profit prisons and policing. Racialized exclusion of Black people from the economy has essentially created a captive class -- a pool of bodies for exploitation. Essentially the industry of incarceration at the state (that is both State and Federal level) create sources of income -- for the States, the companies that supply resources to prisons, as well as the private prisons.
Further, Gilmore [2] makes the argument that we need to do away with the presumption that there are people who are "deserving" of prison. Is the very notion of prison consistent with a civilized society?
Just a further note that the incarceration rate of Black men in the U.S. [5] is comparable to that of Uyghur population in Xianjiang [6] -- that rate was estimated to be 5% for Black men across the U.S. in 2009, 5% for Uyghurs in non-Muslim majority districts, roughly 10% in majority-Muslim districts. It would be interesting to understand how the adoption of capitalist economic practices in China correlates with the rise of the carceral.
Among the more profound cases that Gilmore makes is that the it is not just for-profit prisons and policing. Racialized exclusion of Black people from the economy has essentially created a captive class -- a pool of bodies for exploitation. Essentially the industry of incarceration at the state (that is both State and Federal level) create sources of income -- for the States, the companies that supply resources to prisons, as well as the private prisons.
Further, Gilmore [2] makes the argument that we need to do away with the presumption that there are people who are "deserving" of prison. Is the very notion of prison consistent with a civilized society?
Just a further note that the incarceration rate of Black men in the U.S. [5] is comparable to that of Uyghur population in Xianjiang [6] -- that rate was estimated to be 5% for Black men across the U.S. in 2009, 5% for Uyghurs in non-Muslim majority districts, roughly 10% in majority-Muslim districts. It would be interesting to understand how the adoption of capitalist economic practices in China correlates with the rise of the carceral.
[1] Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520242012/golden-gulag
[2] Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence. In Futures of Black Radicalism, G. T.. Johnson and A. Loubin (Eds.). New York: Verso, 225–240.
[3] Are Prisons Obsolete? https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/213837/are-prisons-...
[4] If They Come in the Morning … Voices of Resistance, Edited by Angela Y. Davis, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_They_Come_in_the_Morning
[5] https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/color-of-just...
[6] https://qz.com/1599393/how-researchers-estimate-1-million-uy...