The prison industrial complex requires a white supremacist state. At the heart of the criminal justice system is the belief that some people are evil to their very core, and so cannot be reformed or transformed or sympathised with, but must be punished. The prison industrial complex thrives when it has a supply of undesirable bodies and a justification for punishing and exploiting them. White supremacy provides that supply and justification. Because of this, when we push back against white supremacy, it is in the prison industrial complex’s nature to reinforce it. The prison system teaches us about the inherent criminality of black youths, to make it uncritically accepted when police plant drugs or falsify evidence or straight out murder. So we cannot speak of abolition of white supremacy without also speaking of prison abolition. This means that our opposition to white supremacy requires a radical shift in our notions of justice.
But white supremacy also requires the prison industrial complex. Prisons have a twofold purpose for white supremacy. The first is as a convenient dumping ground for those fighting back against the oppression they face, or simply when the damage done by white supremacy becomes obvious enough to cause public unrest. Community organisers and activists are routinely harassed and victimised by police, in order to quell resistance to white supremacy. And Sarah Reed died in prison after her life was destroyed not just by racist police brutality but also by a systemic lack of support for black women surviving domestic violence and mental health problems. Arresting her, and disappearing her from the public eye, serves to hide the damage that characterises this instutitional white supremacy. The second purpose is to create scapegoats to appear reasonable in itself. By punishing white supremacist mass murderers like Dylann Roof, society gets to claim that it does not have white supremacy built into its very core. The criminal justice system issues a veneer of fairness to a deeply oppressive society. This makes it possible to sound reasonable when defending white supremacy in public discourse, which makes it possible for white supremacy to be upheld by courts and laws. So we cannot speak of prison abolition without also requiring the abolition of white supremacy. This requires us to think intersectionally about prison abolition and prioritise voices from black and brown communities.
So we cannot separate prison abolition from white supremacy in either direction. They exist in a state of symbiotic violence: they both require and sustain each other in the acts of violence they commit. And any attempt to destroy one will make the other stronger unless they are both destroyed at once. We must place the abolition of white supremacy and the abolition of the prison system as equal and inextricably linked demands, and we must understand them to be one and the same.
But white supremacy is not the only dynamic which is linked in this way to the prison industrial complex: classism, xenophobia, ableism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia all have a similar relationship with the prison system. This means we cannot speak of ending any oppression without speaking of prison abolition, and we cannot speak of ending the prison system without speaking of ending every oppression. And each oppression is then linked to each other through the medium of the prison industrial complex, so we cannot speak of ending any oppression without us speaking of ending every oppression.
— abigail
One piece of useful feedback that I've received is that this doesn't touch on class and capitalism as much as it probably should. Capitalism is a primary motivator for the prison industrial complex (it makes money out of locking people up). White supremacy uses capitalism and class as a tool of oppression. Class is partially a combination of all the other oppressions that somebody faces (you are twice as likely to be from a low-income household in the UK if you're not white, and 25% of homeless youth are LGBT+), but also has a life of its own. I think there's easily enough to be said on that to write another essay about though, but I'm not sure how to do the issue justice here without getting sidetracked.