By Hans Bennett
Z Magazine, February, 2009
A Book review of:
The Real Cost of Prisons Comix, edited by Lois Ahrens, PM Press, 2008.
Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free US Political Prisoners, edited by Matt Meyer, PM Press, 2008.
Abolition Now! Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against The Prison Industrial Complex, edited by the CR10 Publications Collective, AK Press, 2008.
2008
marked the ten-year anniversaries of both the prison abolitionist
Critical Resistance (CR) conference in Oakland, CA that coined the
phrase “prison industrial complex” (PIC) and the National Jericho
Movement’s march in Washington DC that demanded the release of all US
political prisoners and prisoners of war. To commemorate the 1998
events, the CR10 conference was held in Oakland in September, and
Jericho organized a march to the United Nations in October.
These
two important events in 1998 successfully re-energized the
prison-activist and political prisoner support movements rooted in the
1960s and 1970s. However, while recognizing this accomplishment, three
new books document how the prison industrial complex has actually grown
bigger and stronger since 1998, while the post-911 climate has further
escalated political repression. While recognizing this frustrating
reality, these new books look honestly at both the accomplishments and
shortcomings of the last ten years.
The Real Cost of Prisons
The
new book The Real Cost of Prisons Comix, reprints three comic books
published as part of the Real Costs of Prisons Project (RCPP), which
began in 2000. So far, 125,000 comic books have been printed, with over
100,000 distributed for free to community groups and college classes
alike. Featuring artwork by Kevin Pyle, Sabrina Jones and Susan
Willmarth, all three comic books can be freely downloaded at
www.realcostofprisons.org.
Prison abolitionists Ruth Wilson
Gilmore and Craig Gilmore write in the book’s introduction that the
RCPP’s value “has been to show us how the system of mass incarceration
permeates our lives, who is paying the costs of that system and the many
ways the system is vulnerable to people who put their thought and
effort into organizing to shrink it.” Significantly, the RCPP’s comics
“demonstrate that the ideas we need to change the world can be explained
simply enough and packaged attractively enough to be used by all kinds
of readers.” Prisoners and their families can “understand material
usually circulated only among academics and those who focus on policy.”
Editor
Lois Ahrens writes that “a central goal of the comic books is to
politicize, not pathologize.” She argues that the “deregulation and
globalization” of the last 30 years has “resulted in impoverishing urban
economies, limiting opportunities for meaningful work and slashing
funding for quality education, marginalizing the poor, and creating more
inequality. The comic books place individual experience in this context
and challenge a central message of neo-liberal ideology: the myth that
people can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. In this paradigm,
racism, sexism, classism, and economic inequality are not part of the
picture. Most people now believe that change happens through personal
transformation rather than political struggle and change.”
The
recent growth of the PIC and mass incarceration is staggering. Ahrens
writes that “every year from 1947 through the beginning of the 1970s,
approximately 200,000 people were incarcerated in the US. Today, there
are more than 2.3 million men and women incarcerated, with more than 5
million more on parole and probation.”
The Prison Town comic
book debunks the myth that building a new prison actually helps to
revitalize a town with an ailing economy, and instead illustrates the
many negative costs that a new prison can impose. Importantly, Prison
Town also documents how many towns learned by example and cited the
prisons’ negative impact in successful campaigns to stop prison
construction in their community.
Prisoners of the War on
Drugs is a heart-wrenching look at the victims of the so-called “war on
drugs.” At least according to its official purpose, the “war on drugs”
has been a total failure, resulting in the mass incarceration of
non-violent drug offenders at a huge, inefficient expense to tax-payers.
Prisoners emphasizes “harm reduction” and treatment as a better
solution, stating that the “war on drugs locks up more users than
dealers. Most want to quit, but can’t. A year of treatment costs much
less than a year of incarceration, plus: the person can work, pay taxes
& take part in family life.” While drug laws may seem insane, they
appear to have unofficial motives that are highly rational. For example,
they have served to accelerate mass imprisonment, the criminalization
of poverty, and the erosion of civil-liberties.
Prisoners of a
Hard Life: Women & Their Children concludes the three-comic book
series. The stories presented here are mostly fictional, but are based
on the writers’ research and personal experience working with women
prisoners. Therefore, Ahrens explains that the stories “represent the
lives of hundreds of thousands of people suffering as a result of the
war on drugs.” Perhaps most outrageous is the true story of Regina
McKnight, the first woman in the US to be convicted of murder because of
behavior while pregnant. When McKnight’s baby was delivered stillborn
and an autopsy found traces of cocaine in the fetus she was arrested and
convicted of murder with a 20-year sentence. In 2008, following several
appeals and eight years in prison, the South Carolina Supreme Court
unanimously reversed her conviction, after concluding that there is no
medical evidence of cocaine causing stillbirths.