Prison 1AC (2071)

Modern schools are microcosms of state-led violence in

America. The U.S. education system has become an extension
of the police state, exposing students to violence and
discipline and replacing pedagogy with conformity students
of color are particularly targeted and attacked
Giroux 16
(Henry A. Giroux is the McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public
Interest and The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy, The United
States' War on Youth: From Schools to Debtors' Prisons, Truthout, 19 October 2016)
We live at a time in which institutions that were meant to limit human suffering and
misfortune and protect young people from the excesses of the police state and the
market have been either weakened or abolished. The consequences can be seen
clearly in the ongoing and ruthless assault on public education, poor students and
students of color. Schools have become, in many cases, punishment factories that
increasingly subject students to pedagogies of control, discipline and surveillance .
Pedagogy has been emptied of critical content and now imposes on students mind-
numbing teaching practices organized around teaching for the test. The latter
constitutes both a war on the imagination and a disciplinary practice meant to
criminalize the behavior of children who do not accept a pedagogy of conformity
and overbearing control. No longer considered democratic public spheres intended
to create critically informed and engaged citizens , many schools now function as
punishing factories, work stations that mediate between warehousing poor students of color and creating a path that will
lead them into the hands of the criminal legal system and eventually, prison. Under such circumstances, it becomes more
difficult to reclaim a notion of public schooling in which the culture of punishment
and militarization is not the culture of education. Hope in this instance has to begin
with a critical discourse among teachers, students, parents and administrators
unwilling to model the schools after a prison culture. Many schools are now modeled
after prisons and organized around the enactment of zero tolerance policies which , as
John W. Whitehead has pointed out, put "youth in the bullseye of police violence." Whitehead argues
rightfully that: The nation's public schools -- extensions of the world beyond the schoolhouse gates, a world that is
increasingly hostile to freedom -- have become microcosms of the American police state,
containing almost every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless,
overcriminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that plagues
those of us on the "outside." Not only has there been an increase in the number of police in the schools, but the
behavior of kids is being criminalized in ways that legitimate what many call the school-
to-prison pipeline. School discipline has been transformed into a criminal matter now
handled mostly by the police rather than by teachers and school administrators, especially in regard to the
treatment of poor Black and Brown kids. But cops are doing more than arresting young people for trivial
infractions, they are also handcuffing them, using tasers on children, applying physical
violence on youth, and playing a crucial role in getting kids suspended or expelled
from schools every year. The Civil Rights Project rightly argues that public schools are becoming
"gateways to prisons." One estimate suggests that a growing number of young people will have been arrested for minor
misbehaviors by the time they finish high school. This is not surprising in schools that already look like
quasi-prisons with their drug-sniffing dogs, surveillance systems, metal detectors,
police patrolling school corridors, and in some cases, police systems that resemble
SWAT teams. While there has been a great deal of publicity nationwide over police officers killing Black people, there has
been too little scrutiny regarding the use of force by police in the schools. As Jaeah Lee observed in Mother Jones, the "use of force
over the past five years at least 28
by cops in schools ... has drawn far less attention [in spite of the fact that]
students have been seriously injured, and in one case shot to death, by so-called
school resource officers -- sworn, uniformed police assigned to provide security on k-12 campuses." According to
Democracy Now, there are over 17,000 school resource officers in more than half of the public schools in the United States, while
only a small percentage have been trained to work in schools. In spite of the fact that violence in schools has dropped precipitously,
school resource officers are the fastest growing segment of law enforcement and their presence has resulted in more kids being
In 2014 over 92,000 students
ticketed, fined, arrested, suspended and pushed into the criminal legal system.
were subject to school-related arrests. In the last few years, videos have been aired showing a police officer
inside Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina throwing a teenage girl to the ground and dragging her out of her
classroom. In Mississippi schools, a student was handcuffed for not wearing a belt, a black female student was choked by the police,
and one cop threatened to shoot students on a bus. Neoliberalism is not only obsessed with accumulating capital, it has also
lowered the threshold for extreme violence to such a degree that it puts into place a law-and-order educational regime that
criminalizes children who doodle on desks, bump into teachers in school corridors, throw peanuts at a bus, or fall asleep in class.
Fear, insecurity, humiliation, and the threat of imprisonment are the new structuring
principles in schools that house our most vulnerable populations. The school has
become a microcosm of the warfare state, designed to provide a profit for the security industries, while
imposing a pedagogy of repression on young people.

However, the school-to-prison pipeline is only a symptom, one

which reveals the omnipresence of the prison industrial
complex. The prison has become the state, and it portrays
itself as the possibility of freedom this has structured policy
and social relations towards mass incarceration and locked-in
racialized and gendered oppression
Rodrguez 10
(Dylan Rodrguez is Professor of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside.
"The Disorientation of the Teaching Act: Abolition as Pedagogical Position." Radical
Teacher, No. 88, 2010. Pg. 7-19)
The global U.S. prison regime has no precedent or peer and has become a primary
condition of schooling, education, and pedagogy in every possible site. Aside from its sheer
accumulation of captive bodies (more than 2.5 million, if one includes children, military captives, undocumented migrants, and the
the prison has become central to the (re)production and
mentally ill/disordered),1
(re)invention of a robust and historically dynamic white supremacist state: at its farthest
institutional reaches, the prison has developed a capacity to organize and disrupt
the most taken-for-granted features of everyday social life, including family,
community, school, and individual social identities. Students, teachers, and administrators
of all kinds have come to conceptualize freedom, safety, and peace as a relatively
direct outcome of state-conducted domestic war (wars on crime, drugs, gangs,
immigrants, terror, etc.), legitimated police violence, and large-scale, punitive
imprisonment. In what follows, I attempt to offer the outlines of a critical analysis and schematic social theory that might be
useful to two overlapping, urgent tasks of the radical teacher: 1) to better understand how the prison, along with the relations of
power and normalized state violence that the prison inhabits/produces, form the everyday condition of possibility for the teaching
act; and 2) to engage a historically situated abolitionist praxis that is, in this moment, primarily pedagogical. A working conception
of the prison regime offers a useful tool of critical social analysis as well as a theoretical framework for contextualizing critical,
radical, and perhaps abolitionist pedagogies. In subtle distinction from the criminological, social scientific, and common sense
understandings of criminal justice, prisons/ jails, and the correctional system, the notion of a prison regime
focuses on three interrelated technologies and processes that are dynamically
produced at the site of imprisonment: first, the prison regime encompasses the
material arrangements of institutional power that create informal (and often nominally illegal)
routines and protocols of militarized physiological domination over human beings held
captive by the state. This domination privileges a historical anti-black state violence
that is particularly traceable to the latter stages of continental racial chattel slavery and
its immediate epochal aftermath in post-emancipation white supremacy and
juridical racial segregation/apartheida privileging that is directly reflected in the actual
demography of the imprisoned population, composed of a Black majority. The institutional
elaborations of this white supremacist and anti-black carceral state create a n
overarching system of physiological domination that subsumes differently racialized
subjects (including whites) into institutional routines (strip searching and regular bodily
invasion, legally sanctioned torture, ad hoc assassination, routinized medical
neglect) that revise while sustaining the everyday practices of genocidal racial
slavery. While there are multiple variations on this regime of physiological dominanceincluding (Latino/a, Muslim, and Arab)
immigrant detention, extra-territorial military prisons, and asylumsit is crucial to recognize that the genealogy of the
prisons systemic violence is anchored in the normalized Black genocide of U.S. and
New World nation-building.2 Second, the concept of the prison regime understands the place of
state-ordained human capture as a modality of social (dis)organization that
produces numerous forms of interpersonal and systemic ( race, class, gender,
sexual) violence within and beyond the physical sites of imprisonment. Here, the
multiple and vast social effects of imprisonment (from affective disruptions of
community and extended familial ties to long-term economic/geographic
displacement) are understood as fundamental and systemic dimensions of the
policing and imprisonment apparatus, rather than secondary or unintended consequences of it.3 Third, the
prison regime encompasses the multiple knowledges and meanings that are created
around the institutional site and cultural symbol of the prison , including those that circulate in
popular culture and among the administrative bureaucracies and curriculum of schools. Given this conception of the prison regime
as a far-reaching and invasive arrangement of social power, state violence, and human domination, we might better be able to
understand the significance of everyday routines of school-based discipline that
imply the possibility of imprisonment as the punitive bureaucratic outcome of
misbehavior, truancy, and academic failure. What, then, is the condition of teaching in the context of a
prison regime that is so relentless in its innovation and intrusiveness? We might depart from another critical premise: that the
prison4 (jail, detention center, etc.) cannot be conceptualized as a place that is wholly
separate or alienated from the normalized intercourses of civil society or the free world.
Speaking more precisely to the concerns raised by this issue of Radical Teacher, the massive carceral-cultural
form of the prison has naturalized a systemic disorientation of the teaching act, so
that teaching is no longer separable from the work of policing, juridical discipline, and state-
crafted punishment. Thus, I do not think the crucial question in our historical moment is whether or not our teaching ultimately
supports or adequately challenges the material arrangements and cultural significations of the prison regimejust as I believe the
central question under the rule of apartheid is not whether a curriculum condones or opposes the spatial arrangements of white
the primary question is whether and how the act
supremacy and intensified racist state violence. Rather,
of teaching can effectively and radically displace the normalized misery, everyday suffering,
and mundane state violence that are reproduced and/or passively condoned by both
hegemonic and critical/counterhegemonic pedagogies.
Carceral logic is fundamentally violent status quo pedagogy
emphasizes civically engaged, free students, which
naturalizes state oppression and requires the constant
production of unfree bodies. We must directly challenge the
structural conditions for education
Rodrguez 10
(Dylan Rodrguez is Professor of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside.
"The Disorientation of the Teaching Act: Abolition as Pedagogical Position." Radical
Teacher, No. 88, 2010. Pg. 7-19)
It is virtually indisputablethough always worth restatingthat most pedagogical practices (including
many critical/radical ones) invest in producing or edifying free and self-
governing citizen/subjects. The assumptive framework of this pedagogical
framework tends to conflate civil society with freedom, as if ones physical
presence in civil society is separable from the actual and imminent state violence of
criminalization and policing. (Is a criminalized and policed person really free?). This pedagogical approach also
leaves unasked the question of whether the central premise of the teaching practice itselfthat a
given pedagogy is actually capable of producing free citizen/subjects under such
historical conditionsmight implode if its conditions of possibility were adequately
confronted. To clarify: as teachers, our generic pedagogical assumption is that we are
either teaching to free studentcitizens who must be empowered and encouraged
to live up to the responsibilities of their nominal freedom (a task that may be interpreted differently
and contradictorily depending on the teacher), or that our pedagogy intends to participate in the
creation of free student-citizens who are capable of being trained to participate
robustly in civil society, outside and apart from the social dominance and
institutional violence of the prison regime . In both instances, the underlying task of the
teacher is to train the student to avert direct confrontation with the policing and
imprisonment apparatus, and to remain un-incarcerated and relatively un-criminalized by
the state. Whether or not the teacher can claim to succeed in this task, a basic historical truth is obscured and
avoided: the structural symbiosis between the schooling and prison regimes has
already rendered the prevailing cultural and institutional rubrics freedom an utter
sham, no less than the Declaration of Independence was a pronouncement of displacement, liquidation, and enslavement for the
majority of the continents inhabitants. Within the schooling regime/prison regime nexus, many
are taught into freedom in order to administer, enforce, and passively reproduce the
unfreedom of others, while some are trained into a tentative and always temporary
avoidance of unfreedom, meagerly rewarded with the accoutrements of civic
inclusion (a job, a vote, a home address). Numerous others are trained to inhabit a space across or
in between these fraudulent modalities of freedom. If the radical teachers primary
challenge does not initially revolve around the creation of pedagogical strategies that can produce free,
self-governing, critical student/ subjects, but instead centers on the structurally
violent conditions of possibility for pedagogy itself, in what form can critical,
radical, liberationist teaching actually occur? To revise a previous question: how might the conceptual
premises and practical premises of classroom pedagogy be transformed, rethought, and strategically disrupted in order that an
abolitionist reorientation of teaching becomes feasible and effective?
Unfreedom will always be occupied by marginalized groups,
particularly people of color. The fear of crime relies on racist
notions of criminality, allowing the state to construct its
identity in opposition to black people and to justify endless
violence
Davis 97
(Angela Davis is a Distinguished Professor Emerita in Feminist Studies at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. Race and Criminalization. The House that
Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Pg. 296-271)
And how does race matter? Fear has always been an integral component of racism . The
ideological reproduction of a fear of black people, whether economically or sexually grounded, is
rapidly gravitating toward and being grounded in a fear of crime. A question to be raised in this
context is whether and how the increasing fear of crime this ideologically produced fear of crime serves to
render racism more simultaneously more invisible and more virulent. Perhaps one way to
approach an answer to this question is to consider how this fear of crime effectively summons black people to imagine black people
as the enemy. How many black people present at this conference have successfully extricated ourselves from the ideological power
of the figure of the young black male as criminal or at least seriously confronted it? The lack of a significant black presence in the
rather feeble opposition to the three strikes, youre out bills, which have been proposed and/or passed in forty states already,
evidences the disarming effect of this ideology. California is one of the states that has passed the
three strikes, youre out bill. Immediately after the passage of that bill, Governor
Pete Wilson began to argue for a two strikes, youre out bill . Three, he said, is too many. Soon
we will hear calls for one strike, youre out. Following this mathematical regression, we can
imagine that at some point the hardcore anti-crime advocates will be arguing that
to stop the crime wave, we cant wait until even one crime is committed . Their slogan will
be Get them out before the first strike! And because certain populations have already been
criminalized, there will be those who say, We know who the real criminals are
lets get them before they have the chance to act out their criminality . The fear of
crime has attained a status that bears a sinister similarity to the fear of communism
as it came to restructure social perceptions during the fifties and sixties. The figure of the criminal the
racialized figure of the criminal has come to represent the most menacing enemy
of American society. Virtually anything is acceptable torture, brutality , vast
expenditure of public funds as long as it is done in the name of public safety .
Racism has always found an easy route from its embeddedness in social structures
to the psyches of collectives and individuals precisely because it mobilizes deep
fears. While explicit, old-style racism may be increasingly socially unacceptable precisely as a result of antiracist movements
over the last forty years this does not mean that U.S. society has been purged of racism. In fact, racism is more deeply embedded
the vast populations of incarcerated people of color is dramatic
in socioeconomic structures, and
evidence of the way racism systematically structures economic relations . At the same
time, this structural racism is rarely recognized as racism. What we have come to recognize as open, explicit racism has in many
ways begun to be replaced by a secluded, camouflaged kind of racism, whose influence on peoples daily lives is as pervasive and
The ideological space
systematic as the explicit forms of racism associated with the era of the struggle for civil rights.
for the proliferations of this racialized fear of crime has been opened by the
transformations in international politics created by the fall of the European socialist countries.
Communism is no longer the quintessential enemy against which the nation
imagines its identities. This space is now inhabited by ideological constructions of
crime, drugs, immigration, and welfare. Of course, the enemy within is greater than
the enemy without, and a black enemy within in the most dangerous of all.
We shouldnt even have to say this, but prison itself is violent.
It ruins lives, destroys communities, and doesnt prevent
crime. The only thing prisons do is perpetuate a constant cycle
of violence, poverty, and dehumanization
Alexander 10
(Michelle Alexander is an associate professor of law at Stanford Law School, civil
rights lawyer, advocate and legal scholar. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in
the Age of Colorblindness, 2010, p. 93-6)
The Prison Label Most people imagine that the explosion in the U.S. prison population during the past twenty-five
years reflects changes in crime rates. Few would guess that our prison population leaped from approximately
350,000 to 2.3 million in such a short period of time due to changes in laws and policies, not changes in crime
rates. Yetit has been changes in our laws particularly the dramatic increases in the
length of prison sentencesthat have been responsible for the growth of our prison
system, not increases in crime. One study suggests that the entire increase in the
prison population from 1980 to 2001 can be explained by sentencing policy
changes.88 Because harsh sentencing is a major cause of the prison explosion, one
might reasonably assume that substantially reducing the length of prison sentences
would effectively dismantle this new system of control . That view, however, is
mistaken. This system depends on the prison label, not prison time. Once a person
is labeled a felon, he or she is [they are] ushered into a parallel universe in which
discrimination, stigma, and exclusion are perfectly legal, and privileges of
citizenship such as voting and jury service are off-limits. It does not matter whether you have
actually spent time in prison; your second-class citizenship begins the moment you are
branded a felon. Most people branded felons, in fact, are not sentenced to prison. As of 2008, there were
approximately 2.3 million people in prisons and jails, and a staggering 5.1 million people under community
Merely reducing prison terms does not
correctional supervisioni.e., on probation or parole.89
have a major impact on the majority of people in the system. It is the badge of
inferiority the felony recordthat relegates people for their entire lives, to
secondclass status. As described in chapter 4, for drug felons, there is little hope of escape.
Barred from public housing by law, discriminated against by private landlords,
ineligible for food stamps, forced to check the box indicating a felony conviction
on employment applications for nearly every job, and denied licenses for a wide range of
professions, people whose only crime is drug addiction or possession of a small amount
of drugs for recreational use find themselves locked out of the mainstream society
and economypermanently. No wonder, then, that most people labeled felons find
their way back into prison. According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics study, about
30 percent of released prisoners in its sample were rearrested within six months of
release. 90 Within three years, nearly 68 percent were rearrested at least once for a new
offense.91 Only a small minority are rearrested for violent crimes; the vast majority are rearrested for property
For those released on probation or
offenses, drug offenses, and offenses against the public order.92
parole, the risks are especially high. They are subject to regular surveillance and
monitoring by the police and may be stopped and searched (with or without their consent) for any reason
or no reason at all. As a result, they are far more likely to be arrested (again) than those whose behavior is not
subject to constant scrutiny by law enforcement. Probationers and parolees are at increased risk of arrest because
their lives are governed by additional rules that do not apply to everyone else .
Myriad restrictions on
their travel and behavior (such as a prohibition on associating with other felons), as well as various
requirements of probation and parole (such as paying fines and meeting with probation officers ), create
opportunities for arrest. Violation of these special rules can land someone right back in prison. In fact, that
is what happens a good deal of the time. The extraordinary increase in prison admissions due
to parole and probation violations is due almost entirely to the War on Drugs. With
respect to parole, in 1980, only 1 percent of all prison admissions were parole violators. Twenty years later, more
than one third (35 percent) of prison admissions resulted from parole violations.93 To put the matter more starkly:
About as many people were returned to prison for parole violations in 2000 as were admitted to prison in 1980 for
all reasons.94 Of all parole violators returned to prison in 2000, only one-third were returned for a new conviction;
twothirds were returned for a technical violation such as missing appointments with a parole offi cer, failing to
In this system of control, failing to cope well with
maintain employment, or failing a drug test.95
ones exile status is treated like a crime. If you fail, after being released from prison with a criminal
recordyour personal badge of inferiorityto remain drug free, or if you fail to get a job against all the odds, or if
you get depressed and miss an appointment with your parole officer (or if you cannot afford the bus fare to take you
This
there), you can be sent right back to prisonwhere society apparently thinks millions of Americans belong.
disturbing phenomenon of people cycling in and out of prison , trapped by their
second-class status, has been described by Loc Wacquant as a closed circuit of
perpetual marginality.96 Hundreds of thousands of people are released from prison
every year, only to find themselves locked out of the mainstream society and
economy. Most ultimately return to prison, sometimes for the rest of their lives . Others
are released again, only to find themselves in precisely the circumstances they occupied before, unable to cope
Reducing the amount of time
with the stigma of the prison label and their permanent pariah status.
people spend behind barsby eliminating harsh mandatory minimumswill
alleviate some of the unnecessary suffering caused by this system, but it will not
disturb the closed circuit. Those labeled felons will continue to cycle in and out of
prison, subject to perpetual surveillance by the police, and unable to integrate into
the mainstream society and economy. Unless the number of people who are labeled
felons is dramatically reduced, and unless the laws and policies that keep ex-
offenders marginalized from the mainstream society and economy are eliminated,
the system will continue to create and maintain an enormous undercaste.

Ultimately, the goal of this violence is the construction of a

necropolitical zone that invisibilizes bodies in order to destroy
them that makes the prison industrial complex a modern tool
of genocide
Sharman 14
(Samantha, Destabilizing the Prison Industrial Complex: Necropolitics, Biopolitics
and the Reproduction of Sovereignty, University of Arizona,
http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/bitstream/10150/321955/1/azu_etd_mr_2
014_0202_sip1_m.pdf, LB)
Prisons are not death factoriesthey are not Nazi camps or even necessarily way stations before execution (though in some cases
they may be). I do not mean that every body that enters a prison is executed or physically destroyed . Prisons, I contend, are
a necropolitical tool, a mechanization of social death . I would like us to think about death as a
politics of death, which, as I contend in the case of the PIC, manifest in two ways: the erasure and
destruction of racialized bodies and populations, and the production of the living
dead, the socially dead. The PIC invisibilizes bodies and razes populations. It
removes individual people from their communities 4 , from the social world, thus
invisibilizing them and erasing them from the collective imaginary. And because this
emerges through a racialized process, it dismantles and attempts to extirpate whole
communities and populationsall the while cloaked in colorblindness and
neoliberalism. The process through, and rate at which, these communities are being razed is reflective of
genocide. Regarding genocide, Gregg Barak, Jeanne Flavin, and Paul Leighton contend in Class, Race, Gender and Crime:
Social Realities of Justice in America: [Many Americans] tend to associate genocide with the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, which
creates a distorted standard because it is an extreme case rather than a more typical one .
The core concept, however, is
an attempt to exterminate a racial, ethnic, religious, cultural, or political group,
either directly through murder or indirectly by creating conditions that lead to the
groups destruction. Such destruction encompasses not only killing but creation of conditions that materially or
psychologically destroy or diminish peoples dignity, happiness, and capacity to fulfill basic material needs [emphasis added] (90).
Just as the presence of Jewish peoples does not undermine the reality and severity of the Holocaust of Nazi Germany (Barak, 2001,
91), the presence of black communities in the U.S. does not mean that black communities are not being systemically socially and
physically destroyed. Next I would like to introduce the concept of social death. I bring us into conversation with Achille Mbembe,
Lisa Cacho, and F.W.J. Schelling to produce the following definition of social death: [is] the expulsion of the
subject from humanity through the removal of potentiality . We should understand
death not just as physical death, but as life incapable of life. This is the condition of
the subject living under social death: the erasure of the possibility of potentiality In
other words, life incapable of living, of realizing their potential. The prisoner, not unlike the slave, experiences four
forms of loss: loss of community, loss of home, loss of rights over ones body, and
loss of political power (Mbembe, 2003, 21). Value and autonomy are removed from the
body of the prisoner. This loss is identical with absolute domination and social death
(Mbembe, 2003, 21). Bodies are made intelligible through visibility and the assignation of value. When these components are
removed, what is left of the body? What is left for the body? If life entails being able to live, having the possibility to fulfill
personhood, those who live social deaths may be physically alive, but their bodies are void of life. As Lisa Marie Cacho argues in
Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected, the PIC produces (and is produced by) a larger
context of social death. Bodies do not have to physically be in a prison to be socially killed by the PIC. Members of certain categories
of racialized populations are always and already criminalized. Gang members and illegal aliens for example, regardless of
behavior or acts, are criminalized for their inclusion in social groups. In other words, they are criminalized for their identities.
Criminalized subjects, though they may not be exiled in prisons, are socially dead: they do not have the possibility to fulfill
personhood, and their value is removedmaking them unintelligible to the population at large. This is the death to which I refer
when I argue that the PIC is a necropolitical tool of death. This is not to undermine the reality of physical death produced by PIC,
Conditions in many prisons do produce physical death both through violence
however.
and neglect. Furthermore, the violence which both perpetuates, and is perpetuated
by, the PIC produces physical death dailyoverwhelmingly for black men. I want us
to think bigger, however, and see the PIC as a cultural project which produces
socially dead subjectsbodies of the living dead.

Thus, we affirm an abolitionist pedagogy and demand the

refusal of carceral logic.
Our advocacy recognizes that the prison industrial complex
isnt broken and it cant simply be reformed rather,
abolitionist pedagogy directly challenges the idea that cages
can serve any social benefit, opening space for alternative
policies
Stanley et al. 12
(Eric A. Stanley is a PhD candidate in the history of consciousness at the University
of California, Santa Cruz, and is editor of the collection Captive Genders: Trans
Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex; Dean Spade is assistant professor
at the Seattle University School of Law, teaching administrative law, poverty law,
and law and social movements and the founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project;
Joey L. Mogul is a partner at the People's Law Office in Chicago, Illinois and Director
of the Civil Rights Clinic at DePaul University College of Law; Andrea J. Ritchie is a
police misconduct attorney who has engaged in extensive research, writing,
speaking, litigation, organizing and advocacy on profiling, policing, and physical and
sexual violence by law enforcement agents against women and LGBT people; and
Kay Whitlock is a Montana-based writer, organizer and consultant working for
progressive social change; Mogul, Ritchie, and Whitlock write collectively as "Queer
(In)justice." "Queering Prison Abolition, Now?" American Quarterly, Volume 64, No.
1, March 2012, pg. 115-127)
From many points of the political spectrum people are now willing to argue that the
current criminal justice system is broken. Reformers often suggest prisons are wasteful and do not act as
deterrents, while others argue the criminal justice system is racist, classist, homophobic, and more. However, in contrast, an
abolitionist analysis argues that the system is not broken but, according to its own
logics, it is working perfectly. How has this discussion affected your thinking, and how do you analyze this debate?
Spade: Its interesting to think about the parallel conversation going on about whether our immigration system is broken.
These conversations about these two broken systems that operate to exile, cage,
and torture immigrants, poor people, people of color, and people with disabilities
always seem to rely on an idea that we need these systems , we just need to clean
them up or fix them up somehow. I think that abolitionists are asking, in a variety of ways, if we can
imagine letting go of the idea that some people need to be caged, exiled, or kept
out. If we know that the logics that support criminalization and immigration enforcement are
lies these systems do not keep us safer but actually increase and perform
violence, these systems do not improve our economic well-being but actually
enhance exploitation and consume enormous resources , these systems do not heal
harm but in fact cause and exacerbate harmthen our advocacy cannot and should
not participate in those logics by assuming that exile and caging are , indeed,
necessary. When we decide that there is no problem that is best solved by exile or
caging, we get to ask all the other questions about how we want to actually solve
complex, serious problems, some of which we have really well-developed answers to and some of which people are
still working to build responses to. Some have clear models that have worked historically or in other places, others require
Abolition is the commitment to engage in those creative processes
innovative thinking.
rather than to continue to assume the necessity of a set of practices that have
always been and will always be, as long as they are in use, harmful, targeted at
certain populations because of processes of racialization and gendering,
rationalized through patriarchy, ableism, settler-colonialism and white supremacy,
and unredeemable.

The prison industrial complex portrays itself as inevitable and

common sense, silencing dissent and rendering prisoners
invisible we must embrace a radical imagination of abolition
which demystifies the prisons flaws
Rodrguez 10
(Dylan Rodrguez is Professor of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside.
"The Disorientation of the Teaching Act: Abolition as Pedagogical Position." Radical
Teacher, No. 88, 2010. Pg. 7-19)
I have had little trouble convincing most students across distinctions of race, class, gender, age,
sexuality, and geographyof the gravity and emergency of our historical moment. It is the
analytical, political, and practical move toward an abolitionist positionality that is
(perhaps predictably) far more challenging. This is in part due to the fraudulent and stubborn
default position of centrist-to-progressive liberalism/reformism (including assertions of civil
and human rights) as the only feasible or legible response to reactionary, violent, racist
forms of state power. Perhaps more troublesome, however, is that this resistance to engaging with
abolitionist praxis seems to also derive from a deep and broad epistemological and
cultural disciplining of the political imagination that makes liberationist dreams
unspeakable. This disciplining is most overtly produced through hegemonic state
and cultural apparatuses and their representatives (including elected officials, popular political pundits
and public intellectuals, schools, family units, religious institutions, etc.), but is also compounded through the
pragmatic imperatives of many liberal and progressive nonprofit organizations and
social movements that reproduce the political limitations of the nonprofit industrial complex.22 In this context, the
liberationist historical identifications hailed by an abolitionist social imagination also
require that such repression of political-intellectual imagination be fought,
demystified, and displaced. Perhaps, then, there is no viable or defensible pedagogical
position other than an abolitionist one. To live and work, learn and teach, and survive and thrive
in a time defined by the capacity and political willingness to eliminate and neutralize
populations through a culturally valorized, state sanctioned nexus of institutional violence, is to
better understand why abolitionist praxis in this historical moment is primarily
pedagogical, within and against the system in which it occurs. While it is conceivable that in
future moments, abolitionist praxis can focus more centrally on matters of (creating and
not simply opposing) public policy, infrastructure building, and economic reorganization, the
present moment clearly demands a convening of radical pedagogical energies that can build
the collective human power, epistemic and knowledge apparatuses, and material
sites of learning that are the precondition of authentic and liberatory social
transformations.

Embrace a praxis of everyday abolition we must build

alternative institutions which center on harm reduction and
community-building
Lamble 11
(Sarah Lamble is a Professor in the Birkbeck College of Law at the University of
London. TRANSFORMING CARCERAL LOGICS: 10 Reasons to Dismantle the Prison
Industrial Complex Through Queer/Trans Analysis and Action." Captive Genders:
Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, ed. Eric A. Stanley and Nat
smith. Oakland: AK Press, 2011. Pg. 253-254.)
Develop effective alternatives. Dismantling the prison industrial complex is
impossible without developing alternative community protocols for addressing
violence and harm. Creating abolitionist alternatives means encouraging non-
punitive responses to harm, enacting community-based mechanisms of social
accountability, and prioritizing prevention. Such alternatives include
restorative/ transformative justice initiatives, community-based
restitution projects, social and economic support networks, affordable
housing, community education projects, youth-led recreational programs,
free accessible healthcare services, empowerment-based mental health,
addiction and harm reduction programs, quality employment
opportunities, anti-poverty measures, and support for self-determination
struggles.101 Practice everyday abolition. Prison abolition is not simply an
end goal but also an everyday practice. Being abolitionist is about changing the
ways we interact with others on an ongoing basis and changing harmful patterns in
our daily lives. Abolitionist practice mean questioning punitive impulses in our
intimate relationships, rethinking the ways that we deal with personal conflicts, and
reducing harms that occur in our homes, workplaces, neighborhoods, and schools. In
this way, living abolition is part of the daily practice of creating a world without cages.

Hope, solidarity, and a radical vision of justice are the only

options our advocacy demand a new vision of politics which
undermines the violence of the status quo
Giroux 16
(Henry A. Giroux is the McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public
Interest and The Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy, The United
States' War on Youth: From Schools to Debtors' Prisons, Truthout, 19 October 2016)
Yet,resistance cannot be obliterated, and we are seeing hopeful signs of it all over
the world. In the US, Black youth are challenging police and state violence, calling
for widespread alliances among diverse groups of young people, such as the
Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), worker-controlled labor movements, the
movement around climate change, movements against austerity and movements
that call for the abolition of the prison system among others. All of these are
connecting single issues to a broader comprehensive politics, one that is generating
radical policy proposals that reach deep into demands for power, freedom and
justice. Such proposals extend from reforming the criminal legal system to ending the exploitative privatization of natural
resources. What is being produced by these young people is less a blueprint for short-
term reform than a vision of the power of the radical imagination in addressing long
term, transformative organizing and a call for a radical restructuring of society.
What we are seeing is the birth of a radical vision and a corresponding mode of
politics that calls for the end of violence in all of its crude and militant death-dealing
manifestations. Such movements are not only calling for the death of the two-party system and the distribution of wealth,
power and income, but also for a politics of civic memory and courage, one capable of analyzing the ideology, structures and
political unity is no longer
mechanisms of capitalism and other forms of oppression. For the first time since the 1960s,
a pejorative term, new visions matter and coalitions arguing for a broad-based
social movement appear possible again. A new politics of insurrection is in the air,
one that is challenging the values, policies, structure and relations of power rooted
in a warfare society and war culture that propagate intolerable violence. State
violence in both its hidden and visible forms is no longer a cause for despair but for
informed and collective resistance. Zygmunt Bauman is right in insisting that the bleakness and
dystopian politics of our times necessitates the ability to dream otherwise, to
imagine a society "which thinks it is not just enough, which questions the sufficiency
of any achieved level of justice and considers justice always to be a step or more
ahead. Above all, it is a society that reacts angrily to any case of injustice and
promptly sets about correcting it." It is precisely such a collective spirit informing a
resurgent politics within the Black Lives Matter movement and other movements --
a politics that is being rewritten in the discourse of critique and hope, emancipation
and transformation. Once again, the left has a future and the future has a left.