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The emergence of a vibrant anti-prison movement has brought attention to the crisis of mass incarceration in the United States. Although men make up over 90 percent of prison populations in the United States and globally, women, particularly women of color, play critical roles in anti-prison movements. These movements focus on a range of intertwined issues, from incarcerated women and LGBT (lesbian-gay-bisexual-transsexual) prisoners to political prisoners, private prisons, prison expansion, prison financing, the death penalty, juvenile justice, human rights violations in prisons, and access to health care. This chapter examines four interlocking factors that underlie the prison crisis: the impacts of globalization and economic restructuring on low-income communities in the United States; the war on drugs; the role of globalization in fueling migration from the global South, the criminalization of migration, and the growth in immigrant incarceration in the United States; and the emergence of the prison-industrial complex. The second part of the chapter discusses the anti-prison movement. It looks at the anti-racist and feminist abolitionist visions developed by anti-prison activists and describes steps toward a world without prisons.

This chapter provides an analysis of the relationship between the academy and U.S. imperialism, which benefits from an examination of new regimes of mass incarceration and their imbrication within the fabric of institutions of higher education. It argues that a symbiotic relationship developed between the academy and the “prison-industrial complex”—a conglomeration of state surveillance and punishment machinery—and corporate profit making. This has emerged as a response to the rising numbers of “refugees” displaced by and troubling to global economic and political elites. The chapter also identifies four ways that carceral dependency ties the university to the political economy of prisons. Additionally, it explores what it would mean to work toward the abolition of the academic-military-prison-industrial complex.

This chapter traces the desk in the author's office at California State University back to its production in California's Prison Industry Authority—a carceral manufacturing system that, at a rate of thirty to ninety-five cents per hour, employs a segment of the state's imprisoned population to provide goods and services to state agencies that the latter are legislatively mandated to purchase. It analyzes this hidden background of carceral production in terms of the prison industrial complex, the convict lease system, and other Reconstruction-era legal rituals that refashioned American prisons into receptacles that grant sanctuary to racialized forms of punishment prevalent during slavery. It advances a concept of semiotic transfer to explain how the institution of the prison became a functional substitute for the plantation, and how the discourse of “criminality” became racialized. It argues that the antebellum positionality of the “slave” and the postbellum positionality of the “criminal” came to be semiotically and associatively paired and are thus genealogically linked through postbellum legal rituals and everyday practices. The chapter concludes by outlining a two-sided account of abolition involving intertwining movements aimed at mass decarceration and socioeconomic and political reconstruction.

This essay examines how the biblically-based theologies deployed in faith-based prison programs are intertwined with carceral technologies and how the emotional/spiritual objectives of the increasingly theologically supported prison industrial complex are bound up with the affective structures and strategies of (racialized) interest and debt. In effect, the essay brings a range of affect theorists into conversation with critics of the prison industrial complex to tease out the interconnected affective, financial, theological, moral, and environmental components of contemporary carceral technologies. Without such analysis, it is argued, prison reform can only ever be a further occluded phase of radical neoliberalism.

This chapter presents a roundtable discussion on the intersections, divergences, and collisions between trans/queer politics and critical theory in service of abolishing the prison industrial complex. Working from recent interventions in critical prison studies that focus on the specificity of dis/ability, sexuality, and gender, the participants discuss the ways in which Derrida, Fanon, and Foucault push the analysis beyond legal comfort, prison reform, and constitutional fetishism. They consider a wide range of questions from the viability of contemporary formations of “queerness as anti-normativity” for the project of prison abolition, to the innocent/guilty binary as it appears in current mainstream political immigration debates and AIDS Action Now! and ACT UP HIV/AIDS activism, to the questions that arise with “neoliberal queer inclusion” in the carceral state. The responses pay careful attention to the perceived and possibly real antagonism between deconstruction and the materiality of prison, and they consider the moments when deconstruction can work in the interest of queer/trans, disability, race, and gender prison abolition activists.

The primary agents of social control as the War on Drugs escalated were police, courts, jails, prisons, and drug treatment programs. This chapter discusses the social, historical, and economic forces behind the rise of the prison industrial complex and the recent pendulum swing from punishment to treatment, motived by the widespread acceptance of addiction as a disease and the unsustainable costs of mass incarceration. However, as treatment alternatives to jail became more popular, the criminal justice system incorporated treatment into its own administrative costs to maintain control. This led to the merging of the prison industrial complex with the treatment industrial complex—both with vested interest in perpetuating the War on Drugs. The analysis of treatment models suggests that while the social environment is recognized as an influential factor of problematic drug use, it is rarely addressed in treatment protocols, whose focus continues to be on changing the individual with little effort to change the structural barriers and situational context that led to problematic drug use and relapse.

This chapter introduces the concept of the prison town—a nonmetropolitan municipality that has secured and constructed a prison for a federal, state, or private operator—as a strategic site to investigate the intersection of race, spatial disadvantage, and the expansion of the criminal justice system. Forty years ago, there were 511 prison facilities in the United States. Since then we have embarked on an unparalleled expansion, constructing 1,152 new facilities. This dramatic growth in prison building is known as the prison boom. Because prison building is often portrayed as a dichotomous decision for communities by describing the process that culminated in the placement of the Forrest City Federal Correctional Facility (FCFCF), I argue that we can begin to understand the multiple social, political, and economic shifts that drove the United States to triple prison construction in just over thirty years. Forrest City’s campaign to win a prison helps explain how rural communities get from NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) to PIMBY (Please in My Backyard).

In chapter 3 Derbes discusses efforts during the antebellum era by southern state legislators to create financially self-sustaining penitentiaries that encouraged inmate rehabilitation through silent reflection and physical labor. The European Enlightenment’s influence on new methods of punishment and technological innovation from the Industrial Revolution contributed to the rise of prison workshops and inmate labor in the Deep South. An examination of inmate labor at the state penitentiaries of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia highlights a controversial aspect of free labor within a slave society. Convicts provided a captive, reliable, and inexpensive workforce, but their use as labor attracted criticism from local artisans and mechanics’ organizations. This competition between costly private and cheap inmate labor led to conflict that abated temporarily when demand for military supplies increased during the Civil War. The modern prison-industrial complex evolved from experimental workshops established at southern state penitentiaries nearly two centuries ago.

In 1982, in a residential neighborhood in Los Angeles, a speeding police car hit a five-year-old boy and killed him. Susan Burton, the mother of the little boy, experienced the agony of losing her son because of this preventable “police incident.” In 1999, with her own recovery under way, Burton founded A New Way of Life (NWOL), a group of transition homes for women coming home from prison in the Watts district of Los Angeles. Burton's life reveals how an abolitionist perspective works to transform the lives of incarcerated women. This chapter elaborates how prison abolition works to transform and heal lives. It describes the transformation of Burton and the Leadership, Education, Action and Dialogue (LEAD) Project—a political education program that fosters critical analysis of the prison-industrial complex. The LEAD project grew out of a collaboration of NWOL and the Los Angeles chapter of Critical Resistance, an abolitionist organization that Burton began working with in 2003.

This chapter contends that antiprison and anti-death penalty activists need to reexamine their rhetorical habits and political strategies if they hope to achieve any lasting change in the nation's prison system. It draws from literature theorizing the death penalty's place in the prison-industrial complex, rhetoric of anti-death penalty activists, and personal experiences of grassroots abolitionist organizers to critique the prevalence of LWOP (life imprisonment without the possibility of parole) in the death-penalty abolitionist movement. Specifically, the chapter argues that while the alternative of LWOP serves as an understandable rhetorical strategy to spread the anti-death penalty gospel to more ambivalent audiences, it undermines a central organizational posture of the abolitionist cause: understanding capital punishment as only the most macabre expression of a colossal and broken prison-industrial complex.

Angela Davis argues that the prison-industrial complex (PIC) is about racism, social control, and profit. This chapter shows that the PIC was built right on the ancestral lands and the very lives of the indigenous people of the American continent. It talks from the position of a California Indian woman, a tribal woman, recognized as a member of the Tule River Yokuts tribe, also Kashaya Pomo. The author also speaks as an ex-prisoner of the state of California housed at the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco. She believes her incarceration was a result of her being a poor woman, a woman of color, or an American Indian woman. The author talks in this chapter of how she tried to find out how many American Indians were in prison, especially numbers of women. But she found it almost impossible to obtain an accurate count. For her, the American criminal justice system in Indian country is complex and highly difficult to understand, let alone explain.

This chapter focuses on the prison industrial complex in the United States to ask again about what gets remembered and how, to take us back to the question of what happens to a manumitted slave, and to revisit the figure of the slave as an uncanny object in the blind spot of modernity. It contests the sharp divide between past and present that lies behind the discourse of new slavery and focuses not on rupture, but on the continuities and persistent connections between the racial slavery of the past and the incarceration of the present. It looks at a past that refuses to pass away by exploring the meanings of imprisonment, the prison itself, the border regime and the status of felons and prisoners as outsiders, shut out of civil society.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book brings together a diverse group of scholars to offer their analysis of issues raised by the U.S. prison system. These scholars write from perspectives including deconstruction, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and critical theory, as well as sociopolitical discourses such as critical race theory, feminism, queer theory, and disability studies. They engage with issues such as the hyperincarceration of people of color, the incomplete abolition of slavery, the exploitation of prisoners as workers and as “raw material” for the prison industrial complex, the intensive confinement of prisoners in supermax units, and the complexities of capital punishment in an age of abolition. They reveal the many ways in which prisons have failed to protect people or to address the harm of violent crime, functioning instead to manage and control populations that have been marginalized by poverty, racism, sexism, heterosexism, able-ism, and other forms of oppression. Finally, and most importantly, they develop strategies for intellectual and political resistance to the apparent inevitability of incarceration and state execution as responses to crime and social difference.

The chapter begins with an overview of the growth of the prison population from the end of the civil war to the Obama administration. The authors describe all of the structural inequalities African Americans faced that stymied their growth economically and socially as a people, and subsequently led to the mass incarceration of Black men. The authors discuss the historical underpinnings of the factors that lead to mass incarceration and how these factors ultimately fueled the prison-industrial complex. The chapter also discusses the ways in which the Black Church contributes to the rehabilitation of former incarcerated persons, and, lastly, the authors discuss the implications for social work education.

This chapter presents a powerful case for the transformative potential of service-learning initiatives in prisons. It shows how undergraduate and graduate service-learning projects provide important learning opportunities to imprisoned students in Michigan, and also transform the perspectives of the free students who participate in the projects. Prison activism, in conjunction with strong educational initiatives that foster deep understanding of how economics, race, and class interact to produce the prison-industrial complex (PIC), holds great promise for achieving long-term policy and institutional changes in national, state, and local communities. The chapter argues that activism, by itself, presumes the existence of an audience that is rational, compassionate, informed, and capable of developing an enlarged understanding of the systemic forces that produce and sustain the PIC.

On an average day in 2009, there were about 33,000 immigrants in detention centers around the country—six times as many as in 1994. In that same year, there were 2 million people incarcerated—five times what the number had been in 1972. This chapter explores the intersections between immigrant detention and incarceration, drawing from the stories of deportees who experienced both forms of confinement. The author argues that a political economy of mass incarceration helps us to understand these trends as well as how mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex fit into the story of mass deportation.

Chapter Five clarifies theoretically the overlaps and distinctions between problematizing contemporary mass incarceration in terms of capitalist production, on the one hand, and in terms of social reproduction, on the other. Greater precision in this regard opens out the question rather than assumption of “racial” significance and signification today, specifically with reference to the “prison industrial complex” as a process of genocide—systematic extermination through arrested life and social incapacitation. Chapter Five concludes by examining the manipulation of prison mail in acts of retaliation and torture: wherein punishment does not operate primarily to discipline a labor force but to deaden those who refuse to be neutralized. Considering the letter as sign of living potential in this context, this chapter ultimately views the violence it magnetizes not as the negation but as the most apparent “evidence” of the letter’s social force.