Conference Urges Critical Resistance to Prison System

Conference Urges Critical Resistance to Prison System
by Tammi Coles

April 2001
Volume 38, No. 3

Before my years with the Peace Center, I didn't know much about prisons outside of the daily news reports and my own family. The news was grim, certainly, but remote. My family news, however, was delivered in weekly installments by my mother who I could hear shaking her head with disgust over 300 miles of phone lines. In installments, it was my father-jailed, released and jailed again for drug sales to the embarrassment of us all. It was my cousin, Debbie, whose kids were snatched by her mother-in-law because she had again been arrested for prostitution. It was Uncle George, locked away for a series of petty crimes in a rural Virginia prison far from our family. There were other relatives-wheelers, dealers, wife-abusers and drug users-all getting their time in my Mom's Family News Hour. This news never seemed remote; it seemed normal.

In contrast, what I understood from television was not normal-it was fear and terror. According to the news, the "superpredators" were out to get us and the police-"NYPD Blue" tough but ultimately "Law and Order" just-were our saviors in getting these criminals off the street. From television, I learned it was time to forsake our lily-liberal-leanings and become tough on crime. Lock them up. Throw away the key. Tough love.

I am now employed on a project that takes me across the country to see for myself what these efforts-police build-up, new prisons, harsher penalties, and no parole-have meant for our communities.

What I have learned is horrifying. Under the guise of saving our communities, the police have distinguished themselves for new levels of brutality such that the Department of Justice is conducting investigations of police forces as close as Prince Georges County and as far as Los Angeles. The names of Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, and Prince Jones have given us a face for police terror.

Under the guise of saving our communities, the courts have sentenced more women to prison than ever before. The number of incarcerated women has tripled since 1985. Most are mothers. Most are African-American and Latinas. African-American women are incarcerated at a rate 8 times that of white women.

Under the guise of saving our communities, there are now more than 2 million people behind bars. These 2 million-our mothers, sisters, fathers and sons-will not receive educational opportunities, employment training, addiction services or any other rehabilitative measures that will mitigate their transition back into our communities as responsible, healthy citizens. They will be returned to us brutalized, stigmatized, broken-and will still be as targeted for what they do and don't do as when they were first taken into the prisons.

To learn more about prisons and to enhance my work, I attended the Critical Resistance East Conference in New York City, March 9-11. There, more than 2,000 advocates, students, researchers, organizers, service providers, ex-prisoners and their families joined to tell their stories and to share effective strategies for truly gaining peace in our communities. I sat in on workshops ranging from a networking session of Asian and Pacific Islander anti-prison activists to a session on the increasing development of large-scale prisons in rural communities. There were many commonalities that I was able to draw from all the workshops:

First, prisons are just one stage in a process that does not actually begin with the commission of a crime. Instead, it may begin for many with racial profiling, which I mean in its broadest sense, not just in traffic stops. This process is augmented by extracted "confessions" in police stations days before a suspect is assigned an attorney in a courtroom.1 Further, prisons are enhanced by a poor public defender service in which few attorneys are skilled in or paid for the work assigned and, thus, tend to be motivated more to bring events to a speedy conclusion by encouraging guilty pleas rather than investing time and effort in representing the best interests of their clients. The prison process is bolstered by increasingly punitive policies (e.g. "Three Strikes You're Out", mandatory minimums, the elimination of parole) and limited judicial review, post-conviction.

Second, prisons shift precious economic resources from communities. According to the Justice Policy Institute, in states across the nation from 1987 to 1995, "general fund expenditures for prison operations increased by 30%, while general fund expenditures for universities decreased by 18%." Here in D.C. the priorities are just as stark: "D.C.'s corrections system experienced a 312% increase in funding from 1977 to 1993, compared to an 82% increase in university funding during that 16 year period."2 In the rural communities to which urban prisoners are being shipped, large scale prison development is being touted as "economic development." Over 240 prisons have been built on current and former farm lands in the past 10 years. According to a conference speaker from the California Prison Moratorium Project, most of the economic gains will not be seen by these communities but by outside contractors, utility companies and food vendors that supply the prison facility.

Third, prisons destroy families in ways beyond the impact of the crime itself. Prisoners who are connected with their families will have a better chance of avoiding repeat incarceration than those who are not. In a 1972 study of the California Department of Corrections, researchers Norman Holt and Donald Miller reported that their study confirmed, much like the two that preceded it -of Illinois state prisoners in 1954 and of federal prisoners in 1964-that there is a "strong and consistent positive relationship that exists between parole success and maintaining strong family ties while in prison."3 For many families, however, inconsistent, variable and seemingly inexplicable regulations may serve to undermine their attempts to see a prisoner. In "Family First: Communicating with Loved Ones in the D.C. Criminal Justice System," the D.C. Prisoners' Legal Services Project states that "inmates are immediately isolated from outside society...not only are inmates locked in, but also family and friends are locked out."

Further, although more than 1.5 million children in the U.S. have parents in prison, few prisons have programs that create opportunities for prisoners to maintain bonds with their children that can be built upon when they are released. According to a National Institute of Justice article on prisoner reentry "roughly half of these children do not see their mothers the entire time they are in prison."4 Recent policies like the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 go even farther in undermining families by shortening the time frame within which a prisoner's parental ties can be legally severed from her or his children.

Finally, as educational and vocational programs have been cut from prison operations to be replaced by isolation units, longer sentences, and no parole, 600,000 inmates annually return largely uneducated and unskilled to fight an uphill battle in the communities from which they were taken. This situation may be as grim as the conditions they left behind. With a criminal record, these men and women will find employment opportunities closed to them at every turn. New HUD policies may mean that they or their families are denied Section 8 housing vouchers because of the drug or violent criminal activity even though they have served their time. In many cases, lack of access to identification and destruction of identification by the police may delay their ability to access the social welfare programs that remain open to them.

Prisons do not save our communities. Instead, they leave our communities to grapple with the return of jobless, potentially homeless, ex-prisoners who lack the strong family connections or even basic identification that will mitigate their return to normal society.

The context is a bitter one. However, Critical Resistance participants presented a compelling vision for a radically reformed and just community. In sharing their stories of family reunification programs, rural organizing against prison developments, community-based reentry programs, ex-prisoner-led advocacy initiatives and more, Critical Resistance serves to educate us all on the role we must play in defeating the Prison Industrial Complex.

Tammi Coles is a former staff and board member of the Washington Peace Center.

1 According to First Defense Legal Aid in Chicago, while the Supreme Court's 1963 ruling in Gideon v. Wainright established the public's obligation to provide defense services to people accused of crimes who cannot afford to hire lawyers, a public defender may not be assigned until a bond hearing is held before a judge. The result is that men, women and children who do not otherwise have access to counsel may remain in custody for sometimes as much as 24 to 72 hours without contact with an attorney, or advice as to her or his legal rights beyond Miranda.

2 Schiraldi, Vincent. "Is Maryland's System of Higher Education Suffering Because of Prison Expenditures?" February 1998.

3 Holt, Norman and Donald Miller. "Explorations in Inmate-Family Relationships." January 1972.

4 Petersilia, Joan. "When Prisoners Return to the Community: Political, Economic and Social Consequences." Sentencing & Corrections: Issues for the 21st Century. November 2000.