This article covers the prison industrial complex, the history of the abolitionist movement, and the current trends in what is known as transformative justice.
Reforming The Reformers – The Prison Abolition Movement
The Prison Industrial Complex
The “prison industrial complex” is a term that gained resonance through the activist work of thinkers like Angela Davis in the late 1990s, as the phenomena of what we now call “mass incarceration” was beginning to expand rapidly across the United States.
Part of why this frame gained popularity was its reference to the phrase “military-industrial complex,” used by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s to describe the informal alliance between the United States military and the defense industry working together to shape public policy. When activists use this frame to describe the economic and political networks built around the prison, they call on the term to do similar work.
Supporting Private Businesses
Here, the “industrial complex” names the competing and supporting private business interests that have bolstered and propelled the prison boom over the past forty years. It accounts for entities like construction companies, security vendors, surveillance technologies, food and medical suppliers, lawyers, private bail bond companies, probation services, prison guard unions, cheap prison labor, and of course, the lobbyists who represent them all.
What is wrong with supporting private businesses?
If we need prisons to be built and services to be supplied to them, isn’t it best to have companies competing to see who can provide the best services for the lowest cost?
The answer requires multiple economic, social, and ethical considerations
One primary concern put forth by activists is that business interests routinely prioritize profit over people. In the prison industry, this has a particularly corrosive effect, as it pits personal financial gain against the rehabilitation process, which is the supposed goal of imprisonment.
It’s also helpful to remember the two basic tenets of capital accumulation, growth, and profitability. Many organizations, including groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, claim that developing a prison industrial complex is unethical because monetizing the prison may perpetuate a need for more incarcerated people.
Contrast the above views with the deeply rooted views of those who wish to abolish the barbaric nature of prisons their entirety.
Prison Abolition Movement
What is The Prison Abolition Movement?
The prison abolition movement is a political vision and justice movement dedicated to eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance systems while creating lasting alternatives to punishment and incarceration (Critical Resistance).
Prison abolition functions as both a practical grassroots organizing tool and a long-term societal vision. It is responsible for many of the structural critiques of the prison that gained resonance over the past 30 years. Through activist and intellectual work by thinkers like Angela Davis in the late 1990s, the movement evolved partly in response to the phenomena of “mass incarceration.”
The mandate for prison abolition is precisely what it proposes, a call for a world without prisons and police. For many people, this may seem like a naïve or unrealistic goal. How will we ever find ourselves in a world without prisons? What about the murders and rapists?
Abolitionists would say that this bold demand requires us to answer these questions together as we collectively build new life-affirming societal systems. But before any of this can happen, people have to believe a new world is possible.
Imprisoned by our own belief systems
For many people, the mind functions as its own type of ideological prison. The presence of violent policing and imprisonment for crimes is so endemic to American life that it is nearly impossible to imagine another way. Although, it’s helpful to remember that prison abolition emerges from a genealogy of prior abolitionist movements responding to forces like labor exploitation, the development of private property, and chattel slavery.
History tells us there was also a time most Americans couldn’t envision a country without slavery either, but eventually, slavery was abolished. One of the most valuable positions of prison abolitionists is their push for a robust debate on how to dismantle prisons and what we will build to replace them.
But abolition is about more than imaginative visioning. Over the past fifty years, abolitionists have organized to end solitary confinement and the death penalty, stop the construction of new prisons, eradicate cash bail, organize to free people from prison, opposed the expansion of punishment through hate crime laws and surveillance, pushed for universal health care, and developed alternative modes of conflict resolution that do not rely on the criminal punishment system (Jacobin 2017).
Ultimately, the abolition project urges us toward hope and collective action, and to never surrender to what is possible. It is clear that the ideas, actions, and responsibilities needed to achieve such transformation reside in all of us.
Transformative Justice
In recent years there has been a trend toward a system of transformative justice.
What is transformative justice?
‘Transformative Justice (TJ) is the practice of responding to acts of violence without creating more violence.
Often led by community members outside the purview of the official legal system, transformative justice seeks to mediate conflict through accountability, healing, and collective safety practices.
These practices arise primarily out of marginalized communities, such as indigenous, queer, or undocumented, to name a few. Most marginalized communities have never seen the traditional legal system as a safe space to adjudicate harm because these dominant systems of power have also been the purveyors of violence.
Small groups with trained facilitators
Transformative justice processes often happen in small groups led by trained facilitators who, through careful dialogue, move both the victim and perpetrator of a harmful act through a process of accountability and healing. No two TJ processes are the same, and they can often take weeks or months (or even years in rare cases) to resolve fully.
TJ practices happen anywhere people are experiencing harm and seeking to redress that harm away from traditional courts or prisons. They exist in community organizing spaces, families, prisons, schools, and sites of labor. Studies show that most perpetrators of violence live or work in the same community as the person they harm.
Knowing this, TJ seeks to support the person who committed the violence in breaking the cycle of harm within them so everyone involved can heal and return to strengthen the community.
Bulk data is scarce on these projects to date. Still, peripheral studies show healing rates much higher than traditional legal avenues such as prisons.
Every transformative justice process is unique, but it’s essential to know that you need not be a trained professional to begin using the frameworks of transformative justice in your relationships and communities.
Begin with your local community
There are many family-support programs that can help you get started with learning more about the transformative justice process
