If you think we’re getting to actual liberation without bringing down the american prison system, you are very confused.

Look, I’m gonna shoot straight: the prison industrial complex was not built to protect American citizens from dangerous people. It was built to protect the systems of oppression that built this nation from being dismantled by the people.

I know this isn’t exactly news, but I am convinced that it is information that most of us have just really never taken time to wrestle with. But we need to. It is 2024 and just over a month ago, citizens from one of the most progressive states in our country voted against ending forced servitude as a punishment for crimes. Which, if you didn’t catch on, is just a fancy way of saying slavery.

Throughout the history of our country, every single time that the people have stood together to force the country toward progress, our government has fought back by finding ways to reinvent the cruelties we have actively tried to dismantle. And the prison industrial complex was, and is, their way of continuing the practice of profiting off of the forced labor of Black people. For over a century, our nation has instituted and enforced systems that keep marginalized people underresourced and over-policed, all while re-normalizing the practice of slavery.

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I know that this conversation feels hyperbolic. But I need you to take it seriously. The prison industrial complex has become the monster it is today due to systems of oppression that intentionally seek to crowd prisons with the marginalized people whose labor this country has always relied on. Which is why we have seen so many private prisons open over the last few decades. Because, built on a white supremacist foundation, this country runs smoothest when its ruling class is able to exploit as much labor as it can from their victims.

Prior to the radification of the thirteenth ammendment, the American ruling class was able to prosper off of the labor of Black slaves and the exploitation of the brown working class. As long as the American people were convinced that brown people were less deserving of humanity—and Black and native people were deserving of none—they were free to exploit our labor with virtually no cost to themselves. But with the thirteenth amendment, the country had no choice but to adjust to our legal right to humanity.

Here is where the disconnect happens though. Our children are being taught that the country did, in fact, adjust. That the ruling class accepted its losses and began relying entirely on the exploitation of the working class, while abandoning the more profitable business of using slave labor as a foundation for white advancement. But that is just not the case. Instead, our country began a very long campaign to convince Americans that, while Black and brown people are deserving of inherent humanity, some of us forfeit that humanity by succuming to our baser savagry.

Here are some facts:

• The American Government played a role in the spread of drugs in the Black community: READ MORE
• The war on drugs has played a crucial role in the mass incarceration of Black and brown people: READ MORE
• Three/fourths of the people incarcerated in American prisons are being forced to work under threat of punishment, with no protections and virtually no pay, generating billions of dollars in goods and services that they do not share in the profit of: READ MORE

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Recently, a group of inmates launched a lawsuit against the state of Alabama for this exact exploitation. When you think of prison labor, you probably conjur up images of incarcerated people doing laundry for their cellblock or banging out license plates. And while that certainly happens, what a lot of us don’t realize is that prisoners are being exploited on a very wide scale. The people involved in this lawsuit were being forced to work at local McDonalds, Home depots, and even local government offices. All while being told they were too dangerous to be considered for parole. They were expected to spend their days serving their communities while being told they were too much of a danger to actually reenter them. All while having their wages stolen by the largely private own prisons in the name of “convict leasing.” READ MORE

And don’t get me started on California, where Prisoners are “incentivized” to risk their lives fighting wildfires for almost no compensation and, prior to 2020, weren’t even able to pursue that career once out of prison.

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Neither Alabama or California is an outlier here. Most states in this country are not only comfortable with forced prison labor, but deeply rely upon it. Prisoners account for billions of dollars worth of American labor every single year. And for the most part, those billions line the pockets of the organizations that own and profit off of the imprisonment and enslavement of Americans—primarily Black and brown Americans at that. And they can do that because of decades of convincing us that crime is a reflection of the savage and evil nature of some people so that we will stand back while they create systems that entrap marginalized people and then criminialize those existences they’ve forced on us.

And while we are focused on the prison system currently, you need to understand that this same dehumanization is happening to you. Your job doesn’t do random drug tests because stoners can’t do your job well. They do them because the system is better able to exploit you if they can provide evidence that you are less civilized (professional) than the worker above you. Our entire system is actively working to dehumanize marginalized people so that it can keep its working class convinced that we deserve the exploitation we are suffering under.

Which is why Luigi Mangioni is so fascinating to me. Well, not Luigi specifically. More the American response to Luigi. In the wake of his arrest, the American working class has banded together to refuse to hear any evidence against his humanity. Not because we like him, or know him. But because we are so unanymously fed up with a healthcare system that is actively trying to convince us that it is our fault that it is murdering us by the millions. Our collective pain allowed us to see past the propoganda in order to unite under a call for change.

But when it comes to the industrial prison complex, we are largely unwilling to do that. Not because we think we deserve to have our rights and liberty stripped from us for every small infraction, but because our country has done a phenomenal job of making us think this oppression only effects people that our society still believes deserve less.

The working class doesn’t unite against the prison system because most Americans truly believe they will never be impacted by it. But I repeat… the same campaigns that convince you that Black people deserve to lose their humanity because they smoked weed are also working to convince your coworkers that you don’t deserve fair wages because you’re too lazy to overexert yourself or because you actually used your sick days.

It’s the same system.

• McDonalds is a job for kids, so it is greedy to ask for $15 an hour.
• You smoked weed legally over the weekend, so your boss can’t trust you to be reliable with more responsibility. No promotion for you.
• You aren’t available to work overtime, so you don’t deserve to get out of poverty.
• You talked about your boss’s abusive behavior, so you are not a team player.
• If you wanted adequate healthcare, you should have gotten a job that provided it.
• If you don’t want the police to shoot you, you should follow the law.

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Do you see the pattern?

I want to repeat what I said at the very beginning of this essay: If you think we’re getting to actual liberation without bringing down the american prison system, you are very confused.

The ruling class depends on the exploitation of everyone else to maintain their power. Which means that we will never dethrone them without banding together behind the people they are most effectively profitting off of.

So…in short…if you are not an abolitionist, you must be enjoying your oppression, because it won’t be going anywhere.

Now let’s talk about some books.

The first one I want to put on your radar is Chain-Gang All-Stars. Now, I am going to point you toward some non-fiction books that I think can help you to approach this conversation practically, but before I do that, I truly see value in us wrestling with the reality of the oppression we are addressing. And few books will help you to wrestle with the nature of the industrial prison system like Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei Brenyah.

It follows two Black women in a dystopian private prison where they have been given the opportunity to participate in a gladiator type competition where they could potentially win their freedom…if they survive, of course. One of them is only a few victories away from winning her freedom with dozens of deaths under her belt, and the other is quickly catching up. Meanwhile, on the outside, Americans tune in week after week to celebrate dying prisoners and to cheer for the lucky few who attain some level of notoriety in the public eye, even though it comes at the cost of actual blood on their hands.

This book forces you to stop and wrestle with just how bloody the private prison industry is. Because while our prison system does not operate gladiator competitions, it is absolutely playing with the lives of Black people to just as high a degree. It literally enslaves, abuses, exploites, rapes and murders Black and brown people with terrifying ease, all while convincing Americans that they are doing it in our best interest.

I often tell people that I thought I was an abolitionist when I picked up this book, but that I actually was one when I put it back down. And I’ll stand by that. This book will widen your eyes and challenge you to look at the horrors of this industry and, hopefully, radicalize you into helping to do something about it.

And when you are done with that, here are some non-fiction books I would strongly recommend you pick up:

• Abolition by Angela Davis
• How to Abolish Prisons by Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché
• Defund by Calvin John Smiley
• Abolishing State Violence by Ray Acheson
• We Do This 'Till We Free Us by Mariame Kaba
• We Grow The World Together by Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson
• Their End is our Beginning by brian bean

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