Lock 'Em Up and Throw Away the Key

I'm never far removed from thinking about prisons, prisoners and those who so relish incarcerating their fellow citizens in tiny cavities of darkness and pain. Those of you who've read this blog fairly regularly know by now that I was highly involved in the national prison abolition movement in the 1970's. I've counseled prisoners and their families. I've trained people to work with those re-entering society. I've worked with teenaged boys already locked into the system and trained others to do so. I designed programs for adjudicated and "at-risk" kids for an Africentric agency for two years. And I taught a wildly popular and very reality-based course on adolescence and delinquency at a university for more than five.

I met both of my children's fathers while they were still incarcerated. I have friends who did as much as twenty-five years straight. I have friends today who are still caught up in the system in one way or another. I went up to the craft fair in Angola last October and very much want to return, if possible, next month. And I'm incredibly clear about the fact that the criminal code is the line between personal freedom and the power structure, which is made up of those, we should remember, who get to decide what constitutes a crime and how it should be punished.

There are few of us by now, I expect, who don't know that the United States has more people behind bars than any other nation in the world. Far more. Roughly two and one-half million of us are "doing time" these days. And the majority of us must surely know that men of color and most particularly, African-American men, are far and away the most disproportionately likely to be those individuals.

No wonder so many "decent, God-fearing" White folks have the impression Black men are dangerous. Why else would so MANY of them be locked up? We sure are lucky, one can almost hear average White folks say, that we have plenty of prisons to put all these bad Black guys in so we can all be "safe." Besides, prisons and jails and law enforcement bodies of all kinds provide millions of jobs for the rest of us, right? And jobs are something we're getting pretty desperate about of late.

If you find yourself agreeing with this sentiment (or even leaning in that direction), I strongly suggest that you read "Slavery Haunts America's Plantation Prisons" by Maya Schemwar. And if that article leaves you wanting more, you might read God of the Rodeo: the Quest for Redemption in Louisiana's Angola Prison by David Bergner. And then, if you really want to get a good grasp on the bottom line (literally), you can pick up Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon.

I've been talking and writing about prison so long, I'm running out of words.

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The photo above appears in Douglas A. Blackmon's book, Slavery by Another Name. The poster is an example of Ricardo Levins Morales' work and is available from Northland Poster Collective. It reads "More than ninety thousand inmates in US prisons labor in a booming "prison industrial complex" for a growing list of major corporations. As unprecedented numbers of Americans are swept into the penal system by crime, drug, and welfare policies, their labor is being sold at bargain rates. Laws prohibiting prison labor have fallen as prison sales have swelled to nearly a billion dollars per year. At the close of the century, the prison workforce is an increasingly important arena for organizing."