Unifying to End Mass Incarceration

Ending mass incarceration is one of the largest human rights issues of our time. Less children being tracked through school on a path directing them to death or detainment. More parental guardians free and able to provide for their families, offer socio-emotional nurturing, and aid in steering our society to a better future. Addressing it will effectively stop the suffering brought upon many of our most oppressed community members; Black, Brown, Indigenous, Queer, Differently-Abled, Immigrant, Muslim, Neuro-Divergent, Trans, Atheist, Gender Non-Conforming, Impoverished, and many more people.

Our prison industrial complex has become such a behemoth that there is scant chance of finding an institution in the United States that hasn’t been impacted by it or became a part of it today:

· An unaccountable militarized/ing law enforcement that preys on the most perpetually marginalized communities in America keeping them unstable, impoverished, and prepared for eventual gentrification.

· The schools that resemble secure detention facilities with police, private security, metal detectors, and random searches occurring driving students to drop-out, to act-out, or to wind-up on the student-to-prison pipeline from their early contact with law enforcement and the judicial system.

· So many unconscionable holding centers for those awaiting deportation and the ICE agents that hunt for people to fill them.

· Businesses and our government profiting off the free or cheap labor of those incarcerated or the access to communication and goods for those being held in captivity.

· It’s ability to aid in the limitation of the people to rightfully protest, mobilize, and hold accountable our government, nation, and the conditions we live under.

· Medical centers that once experimented on those locked down and today are additionally subsidized and intertwined with the critical care of the aging and immobilized population of people incarcerated and those who have suffered a medical emergency.

· Direct links to policing and correctional training required to maintain authority, extort the public, and maintain imperialistic and colonialist influences within our country and numerous others.

· The non-profit industrial complex which is fed and supported off the people programmed within the carceral system, on there way deeper into being supervised, and on their reintegration to the community.

· Contractual labor unions that are held hostage by their retired and current correctional officer, jailer, probation/parole officer, law enforcement, security, and the other penal related supportive membership

· Our mental health system which is broken and opts to incarcerate far more people who’ve been diagnosed with some psychological, emotional, or social issue.

· University tables, street signage, desks, office chairs, lingerie, holiday coffee bags, telemarketing, forest fire fighting and every other form of labor, service, or product is being provided by our legally enslaved incarcerated workforce brought to us by the United States Constitution’s 13th Amendment clause allowing a loophole for slavery.

· A variety of other implicated manifestations of perpetual poverty inducing and entrapping cycles imposed on our most oppressed friends, family, and community members by way of all the above acting in unison simultaneously.

Incarceration is an issue that has been discussed by many of the most prominent civil and human rights leaders and activists of our time specifically because it is a lynch pin propping up the entire uncouth society we survive in today.

For those who consider themselves more conservative leaning, this is costing you and the rest of us countless dollars to inadequately and wastefully rehabilitate the 95% plus portion of those imprisoned who will currently return to their communities -our shared communities. We do not keep our communities safer by being reactionary and attacking issues on the back-end with incarceration. We must see a reinvestment in these communities to prevent crime from occurring in the first place.

Crime can be drastically lessened (more than it already has been) simply by being more cognizant of rehabilitating and repairing our struggling communities and their members by stepping away from more punitive punishments counter to rehabilitation. The regions that have fared the worst with staving off crime have been the communities most impacted by oversaturation of police patrols and the subsequent incarcerations that stem from that. If you want safer communities, less of your hard-earned cash spent on housing people ineffectively inside detention centers, and to earnestly witness more people avoiding engaging in criminal activities while transitioning into becoming productive community members -then we need to reevaluate, confront, and begin deconstructing our system of mass incarceration.

For those who consider themselves more liberal, center-left, or possibly progressive and claim to care about humanitarian crises, this is one of the largest looming targets firmly entrenched in our everyday lives. It is a feminist issue, a parental issue, and a family survival issue since it impacts the guardians and stewards of our youth. It is an issue of racism, colonialism, xenophobia, religious persecution, and political repression when you look at the disparity rates of differing demographics of people found in our carceral system. If you care to prevent poverty and perpetuated generational trauma caused by the varied traps laid out by our prison industrial complex, then it is imperative that we begin dismantling it now and utterly refuse to further enable it through bargaining on increasing bunk space or building new institutions.

For those of us who are leftists and abolitionists, you should already know why this system of mass incarceration must end. It represses the most revolutionary of us, it douses the fire inside of movements to upend the white capitalist cisgender men dominated heteropatriarchy, and it inevitably prevents us from building sustainable communities that work in solidarity. As abolitionists we know that any incarceration causes an injury to another and that we must find alternatives to this torturous model of traumatization that are reparative and reconciliatory or else we’ll continue to see over incarceration continue. Our focus on ending the system entirely leads us to bold methods for reducing harm to those inside and guide so many others including reformists on how to directly and effectively challenge the status quo.

As leftists; communists, anarchists, socialists, and utter anti-capitalists, we know that the prison industrial complex and all its might will be focused on crushing our laboring for a new more equitable, liberated, and humane society. The carceral system and all its supporting agents are one of the most massive barriers to a unified proletariat/working-class conscious of its power to change civilization as we know it on a global scale. Ending capitalism requires a direct effort to decarcerate.

For those that don’t fit any of the above political categories or are confused on how they identify themselves, I ask you this; how many of you know someone who has been directly impacted by our nation’s mass incarceration? All of you have been impacted regardless of your knowledge of it. There isn’t one issue listed in the preceding text that hasn’t affected you in some way however mundane it may seem. Please reread if you haven’t found even one issue that intersects with your own life that has been mentioned already.

Incarceration is rooted in poverty, in racism, in profiteering, in sexism, in imperialism, in colonialism, in every ism that ever was or will be. Envisioning ending it, attempting to restore the people who’ve been in to their full humanity, and actively organizing ourselves in a manner to dismantle it at some point is one of the strongest ways of revitalizing our neighborhoods, preventing poverty, diminishing crime, addressing mental health issues, gaining more control of our communities, and steers us towards a more peaceful, free, and harmonious co-existence.

If you give a damn about yourself, your family, and your community then become educated on incarceration, get active in the fight against it, and finally protect everyone you love through the realization that we all bear a responsibility to prevent the continuation of mass incarceration.