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 by cops in schools ... has drawn far less
attention [in spite of the fact that] over
the past five years at least 28 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 ticketed, fined, arrested, suspended and pushed into the criminal legal
system. In 2014 over 92,000 students 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 mentally ill/disordered),1 the prison has become central to the

(re)production and (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 an 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
supremacy and intensified racist state violence. Rather, the
primary question is whether and how the act 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 in socioeconomic structures, and the vast populations of
incarcerated people of color is dramatic 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 systematic as the explicit forms of
racism associated with the era of the struggle for civil rights. The
ideological space 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. Yet it
has been changes in our lawsparticularly 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 correctional supervisioni.e., on probation or parole.89 Merely
reducing prison terms does not 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 offenses, drug offenses, and offenses against
the public order.92 For
those released on probation or 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 maintain employment, or failing a drug test.95 In this system of control,
failing to cope well with 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 there), you can be sent right back to prison
where society apparently thinks millions of Americans belong. This 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 with the stigma of the prison label and their permanent pariah status. Reducing the amount of
time 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_2014_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, however.
Conditions in many prisons do produce physical deathboth through violence 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 innovative thinking. Abolition is the

commitment to engage in those creative processes 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 studentsacross 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 mechanisms of capitalism and
other forms of oppression. For the first time since the 1960s, political
unity is no longer 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.