Policing and Prisons

Introduction
As Ruth Wilson Gilmore points out in Golden Gulag, prisons have become “catchall solutions to social problems.”[footnoteRef:2] Those problems can be rooted in drug issues stemming from the abuse of opioids that have proliferated on the black market thanks to the pharmaceutical industry’s expertise in developing highly addictive substances that filtered through physicians on to patients and then on to the streets. They can be rooted in familial situations where socioeconomic factors, education, and cultural variables impact the stability of families, bringing tension, stress and strife to an environment that should otherwise be calm, stable and welcoming. They can be rooted in society’s cultural history, and the racist and classist problems that have long been encountered therein. The prison industrial complex arose out of the whirlwind of these seeds being scattered across the earth of the U.S. It came about in response to the “moral panics” surrounding issues of race, gender, sexuality, crime, and law and order. While alternatives to mass criminalization are possible when conceived from the perspective of social movements, in the U.S. incarceration has become an industry that has also become a politicized issue. This paper will describe and analyze how policing and prisons have become what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “geographical solutions” to social and economic crises over the past four decades. [2: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007), 5.]
A Geographical Solution?
What is imprisonment? It is the transference of an individual from a place of freedom to a place of confinement, away from free persons. It is, as Gilmore describes, “a geographical solution that purports to solve social problems by extensively and repeatedly removing people from disordered, deindustrialized milieus and depositing them somewhere else.”[footnoteRef:3] Yet, she notes, in all honesty it cannot be said to be a system that results in lower crime communities—for she shows that those communities that do not have prisons are the ones with the least crime.[footnoteRef:4] What this suggests is that communities that focus on incarceration as the solution to community problems actually never end up solving or adequately addressing those community problems because they instead just try to treat the symptoms by removing the products of those problems to another location—i.e., to prison. The problems persist because they have not been addressed: crime is just symptom of the socioeconomic issues that underlie the criminality. [3: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 14.] [4: Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 15. ]
From the policing perspective, the theory of Broken Windows has long served as a rationale for making more stops and more arrests of citizens in communities where negligence, vandalism, theft, graffiti, litter, abandoned buildings and broken windows serve as invitations to the criminal class that here is a neighborhood that does not care about itself, that does not care whether the criminal elements come to it to live and fester. But not every accepts that theory. Rachel Herzing is one who rejects it, stating that it is in fact “not much of a theory at all….it has become an incantation, a spell used by law enforcement, advocates, and social scientists alike to do everything from designing social service programs to training cops.”[footnoteRef:5] This idea of Broken Windows theory being used as a spell to wave away crime is the trick that Herzing states authorities, or the elites who control the public system, use to fool communities into thinking that their policing is there to help them. The reality, Herzing postulates, is the opposite: the police are patrolling the streets in the name of protecting the community and making sure broken windows do not lead to more crime—but the reality is that they are actually there to oppress the communities and get them to behave as the elites want them to behave. Broken Windows theory is the pretext for invasion, in other words. [5: Rachel Herzing, “The Margical Life of Broken Windows,” Policing the Planet, 219.]
The Motive
This invasion is essentially is what Gilmore gets at in Golden Gulag: she shows that policing and prisons are systems of control that are there to perpetuate a social structure that has been originated among the elitist fabrication of how society should look and conduct itself. For communities where national minorities are actually the local majority, policing and prisons crop up as a way for the elitists to manifest their control over that population. The very fact that incarceration does not lead to lower crime rates in communities where prisons are used to solve the so-called crime problem shows that prisons are not really an effective means of addressing community problems. Instead, there is an alternate issue that is occurring—an ulterior motive behind the policing and prison industrial system that has arisen.
In “Beyond Bratton,” Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore identify the motive as “the military-industrial complex,” which “is the short name for all of these activities, relationships, people, and places.”[footnoteRef:6] The military industrial complex is the representation of the elitist system in all its glory: it represents the machinery of capitalism engendered to destroy all forms of competition in a zero sum game of which there is one winner—and every else loses. Hegemony is the goal, both domestically and abroad. The elites run the game and those who are not part of the elitist tribe do not get to play—or at least are not entitled to equal or fair treatment. Instead, to corral the undesirables, the elites manipulate social systems and movements in order to suppress communities, and the prison industrial complex that has arisen under the shadow of the military industrial complex is the means by which communities are kept in line. It has nothing to do with crime, according to Gilmore and Gilmore. [6: Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore, “Beyond Bratton,” in Policing the Planet, 159.]
Alternative Approaches
Julia Sudbury describes three social movements that have arisen to promote the “freedom visions” of the up and coming generations who reject the direction in which the nation is heading—who reject the idea of incarceration, too, as a solution to the problems of community (problems that are really projections of the elitist system and not really necessarily problems that are felt keenly by the communities that are so forcefully and routinely policed).
The social movements identified by Sudbury are: 1) the anti-globalization movement, 2) the popular movement against the prison industrial complex, and 3) the anti-war movement. These three movements each rail against a form of the military industrial complex and its various incarnations (of which the prison industrial complex is certainly to be considered one).[footnoteRef:7] The connections between these three movements are situated in the fact that the opponents of these three movements are all the same—i.e., they are the elitist class whose socioeconomic system is a structure that today governs many of the nations and practices engaged in by those nations. Save a few “rogue” regimes whose leaders are reviled by the elitists, their command is nearly total. The social movements that have emerged thus show that at the grassroots and even on some level at the international stage there is a resistance to the control that the elitists have. And in terms of defying the prison industrial complex and envisioning a better way to deal with crime and criminals, these social justice advocates also have some ideas of their own. [7: Julia Sudbury, “A World Without Prisons: Resisting Militarism, Globalized Punishment, and
Empire,” Social Justice 31.2 (2004): 9.]
What is the prison industrial complex? Understanding this can help to show why social movements advocate for its abolishment, just as they advocate for an end to the international wars that seem to be waged perpetually against other peoples in other places, where there exist resources that the elites want to possess or control for their own usage and purposes. The prison industrial complex is “derived from the ‘military industrial complex,’ a term coined by Dwight Eisenhower to describe the ‘conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry’.”[footnoteRef:8] The establishment of corporate interests behind the military might of the elitist system was the tipping point for some in other parts of the world who have protested, for instance, America’s interventionism in their own countries—but this tipping point has also been observed by local communities within America’s own land, as the little brother of the military industrial complex—the prison industrial complex—came into being. The person responsible for coining that phrase is Mike Davis who used it to “describe a multibillion dollar prison building boom in California,” which went on to be one of the biggest financial instruments in the state.[footnoteRef:9] The result o this new complex was a relationship that formed among politicians, businesses, the media, and state correctional institutions and it led to the “racialized use of incarceration as a response to social problems rooted in the globalization of capital.”[footnoteRef:10] In other words, the prisons were used as a “geographical solution” to the ill effects of globalization, the ill effects of capitalism run amok, the ill effects of an ill elitist system and structure that sought only to pursue its own dreams of Manifest Destiny to the chagrin of all others. [8: Julia Sudbury, “A World Without Prisons,” 12.] [9: Julia Sudbury, “A World Without Prisons,” 12.] [10: Julia Sudbury, “A World Without Prisons,” 12.]
The solution of course to this disease must therefore begin at the top—with the structure that is in place, with this insistence upon globalization, with this assertion that capital must be the end all, be all of society and that materialistic aims within this zero sum game are to be the only pursuit of all stakeholders in the lands of America. The solution is to be found in a rejection of this ever-onward approach to expansion, this new imperialism. Instead of constantly moving capital about and investing it in one region or body of work until it has recouped a significant return and then putting it elsewhere, leaving a wave of destruction in its wake, capital should be invested at home, in the communities that need it most. As globalization has allowed so many jobs to be outsourced to other parts of the world, workers at home have gone without work. They have lost jobs because corporations owned by the elites have sought to enrich themselves and grow their bottom line. Their aim has been selfish and the prison system and the policing are just new forms of enforcing the slave system that still persists in spite of slavery’s abolishment more than a century ago. The same racist doctrines that allowed slavery in the first place still allowed slave based mentalities to persist and to redirect that energy in to new ways of keeping undesirable communities suppressed. The solution to incarceration is simply this: a rejection of the elitist rule.
But of course that is easier said than done. Without an armed uprising, there is no force that could oppose the forces of the elites. Without another nation coming to the defense of the helpless in much the way that Russia and Iran have come to the defense of the Syrians under attack from Western-backed terrorists, the communities who are currently oppressed by policing and prisons in America may never know a better way to dealing with crime and societal issues. As Sudbury points out, however, the movement to abolish the prison system may take inspiration from “popular movements in the global South such as the Movimento Sim Terra in Brazil and the Ruta Pacifica in Colombia” where the people organized workers, women, homeless persons, students, farmers and indigenous people to oppose their countries’ “globalization, imperialism, and militarism.”[footnoteRef:11] Activism is what is needed—but there is a large difference between activism in a third world country and activism in a first world country. In a country like America, activism can only be so successful before the elite’s armies intervene to stop it. [11: Julia Sudbury, “A World Without Prisons,” 27.]
Conclusion
In conclusion, the geographical solution of prison is really no solution at all, but rather a means of control, as Gilmore shows. The problems of communities really stem from the problems of globalization and the exodus of capital from our own country and the exodus of jobs and the means of support and stability that families rely upon with it. Opposing the prison system and its alleged solution to these problems is a step that needs to be taken. But as the history of activism in the U.S. has shown, it is a costly step and one that does not always reap dividends. Nonetheless, communities have to band together to oppose the system that has been constructed to oppress them as there is no other way for them to undo the constructs that have evolved to keep them enslaved and under the thumb of the prison industrial complex. The geographical solution has been used to make communities believe that their elitist rulers are taking care of them—but the opposite is true, and at the end of the day the communities must show that they are able to care for themselves.
Bibliography
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson and Craig Gilmore. “Beyond Bratton,” in Policing the Planet.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2007.
Herzing, Rachel. “The Margical Life of Broken Windows,” in Policing the Planet.
Sudbury, Julia. “A World Without Prisons: Resisting Militarism, Globalized
Punishment, and Empire,” Social Justice 31.2 (2004): 9-28.