Critical Resistance in the Guardian Newspaper

Taking on the Titans

by Julia Sudbury

The first slavery abolitionists were represented as extremist and utopian. Until the late 18th century, the idea of eliminating this deeply-rooted institution was unimaginable. Yet, 12 individuals who first met in a London printing shop in 1787 eventually managed to create enough momentum that, 51 years later, slavery ended in Britain's colonies.

Today, I believe that imprisonment – another practice violating human freedom and equality – could follow suit.

I am not alone. In September 1998, over three thousand people gathered in Berkeley, California, for the founding conference of Critical Resistance and thousands more are expected to attend our 10-year anniversary conference and strategy this September.
Today, Critical Resistance is a grassroots organisation that seeks to abolish the "prison-industrial complex": a symbiotic relationship between politicians, state correctional apparatus and corporations that promotes racialised mass incarceration as a catch-all "solution" to deep-rooted social, political and economic problems.

Those who profit from the prison-industrial complex include private prison corporations like US-based Wackenhut, which operates prisons for profit in the UK; politicians who win votes by promising to be tough on the latest overblown crime fad; and local chambers of commerce which embrace prison construction as a "recession-proof industry". Prison is, after all, one of the few industries that sees business go up when the economy goes down.

So, what is the abolitionist alternative? Abolition defines both the goal we seek and the way we do our work today. Abolitionists recognise that we do not create safer communities by locking people in cages; that prisons do not solve the problems that lead to crime, like drug use, poverty, violence or mental illness.

We also draw attention to the massive cost of perpetual prison expansion, which siphons public resources away from services that could be used to build safer and more egalitarian communities. We take seriously the ways in which people harm others, and seek to transform the social and economic conditions that promote violence, as well as creating community-based strategies to address harm and create accountability.

We believe that the violence of crime cannot be solved through the additional violence of policing, surveillance and separation from loved ones. Instead, we advocate focusing attention and resources on building empowered communities, with decent housing, secure jobs, food security, healthy environments and high-quality education, as the ultimate alternative to incarceration.
The challenge facing us is immense. In the US alone, over 2.3 million people are warehoused in prisons and jails. A recent report from the Pew Center found that, for the first time, in the US we now imprison one in every 100 adults; the figure is one in nine for black men aged between 20 and 34. The Pew report also found that this massive incarceration is impacting state budgets without delivering a clear return on public safety.

Although many academics and policy-makers recognise that the US penal system is a bloated and wasteful failure, the UK is increasingly emulating the US. Britain's prison population has grown by more than a third in the past decade, and residents of England and Wales are more likely to be imprisoned than residents of any other western European country. Rather than seeking to reduce the number of people in prison, the Ministry of Justice proposes to increase the prison population further to 96,000 by building three US-style "superjails". These proposals are going ahead despite evidence from the US that superjails breed violence, dehumanise prisoners, and lead to medical neglect, self-harm and preventable deaths.
The prison-industrial complex will not be dismantled overnight. But many of us believe that the prison, like the institution of slavery, will one day be viewed as an obsolete and shameful relic of history. Until that day, I invite you to join the global movement to help build a world without prisons.

This article was completed with help from Rose Braz, national campaign director of Critical Resistance.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/26/prisonsandprobation.ukcrime