Policing and Prisons Essay

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Total Length: 2238 words ( 7 double-spaced pages)

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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.

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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….....

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