Skip to main content

Elizabeth Waller- Prison Industrial Complex research


The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) is described by Critical Resistance as “the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems” (Critical Resistance, 2019). It consists of a web of relations between powerful legal and for-profit entities that source their power from racial, economic, and social privileges. It helps to maintain the authority of these groups, putting minorities and poverty-stricken people into a severely unbalanced cycle of imprisonment for corporate profit. These groups include (but are not limited to) prisons, courts, police, media platforms, the probation service, and any companies that profit from clothing, transporting, and feeding prisoners, or from exploiting prisoner labor.
The Prison Industrial Complex doesn’t only affect the prisoners, but their families and friends as well. Prisoners’ families are often required to shell out large sums of money for bail, legal fees, representation, etc., and are deprived of their incarcerated family members’ income while they are in prison. This is a huge financial burden for many families. Furthermore, once the prisoners are released, they receive little help in terms of transitioning back into society, and often have difficulty finding or maintaining employment or housing. These financial hardships only perpetuate the poverty cycle and maintain the power of the privileged groups.
Private, for-profit prisons are some of the main agents in the Prison Industrial Complex. When a prison makes money off of how full the prison is, and there are multiple multinational companies investing in said prison, there is far more incentive to fill the prison than to focus on humane treatment of the prisoners. In these cases, the prisoners stop being seen as human beings, and instead become capital for the stockholding companies. The police and overall justice system also benefit from this, so they feed into this by targeting and criminalizing specific communities in order to fill the prisons. The Empty Cages Collective lists “poor people, people of colour [sic], queer communities, individuals with psycho-emotional health challenges trying to survive in our culture, as well as political organisers [sic] and those that resist capitalism and the state” as commonly target groups (Empty Cages Collective, 2019). This is criminalization is assisted by the media, which perpetuates racial and social stereotypes by showing limited, skewed images of these groups. For example, like we saw in The Roof is On Fire, minority teens are almost exclusively portrayed as criminals and troublemakers on the news. When viewers buy into and believe these stereotypes, they don’t question the injustice of the Prison Industrial Complex and the system is allowed to continue.

Sources:
“What Is the PIC? What Is Abolition?” Critical Resistance, criticalresistance.org/about/not-so-common-language/.
“What Is the Prison Industrial Complex?” Empty Cages Collective, 2019, www.prisonabolition.org/what-is-the-prison-industrial-complex/.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

HIP HOP AND THE PRISON SYSTEM

“With five percent of the world's population, the US incarcerates 25 percent of the world's prisoners” (Daisy Hudson, Noisey Magazine. 2014). That same year “African Americans constituted 2.3 million, or 34%, of the total 6.8 million correctional population, though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately 32% of the US population, they comprised 56% of all incarcerated people in 2015 (NAACP). The prison system in America serves not as a correctional facility, but a container for which black bodies are buried alive. The conditions of which inmates are kept, the disparity in numbers and portrayal of those incarcerated. There is no question that factors such as education, employment, mental and physical health; the lack of access to such resources targets and propels African Americans through the pipeline to prison. In our history, it seems that prison, or largely the criminalization of African Americans, Black men in particularly, has been used as a tactic of oppr...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tuition meeting

Speaking point: We have spent over 60 thousand dollars on this school so far, we have tolerated the raise each year. At some point we do not have more money to give and we are pushed out along with all of our debt including interest. With this false start we lack the motivation to attend another school in the future, therefore leaving us uneducated and in debt. Other than the knowledge gained, this would be a waste of two years of my life and in fact sets me back in my career.
Post a Comment
Read more

CalArts Garden

The reason why I choose this topic is that I know a lot of students are complaining that CalArts is too plain. It is just one main building with a small campus. I would like to design a space for the CalArts campus where students and teachers can work together as a community and taking care of the plants. The community can hold a farmers market, season food festival or food-related artwork competition.    Few things I read about the benefits of school garden:   -  Gardens create opportunities for students to work cooperatively and to take on responsibilities.  - Gardens provide unique opportunities for cross-generational connections.  - Students learn to focus and patience, cooperation, teamwork, and social skills.  -Combining language arts and gardening activities brings a hands-on element to a subject normally taught lecture-style, providing inspiration and motivation for students who struggle to focus in traditional cl...
Post a Comment
Read more