cal berkeley martin epner aff umkc round1

8/11/2019 Cal Berkeley Martin Epner Aff UMKC Round1

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1ACMinimal marijuana legalization efforts are happening in the status quo, but this iscoming at the expense of the necessary discussion of racial justice isolated

efforts that view legalization as a singular solution prevent broader institutionaltransformations that are necessary and maintains the cycle of reform and

cooption that has characterized post-racial AmericaAlexander 14

[03/10/14, Michelle Alexander, is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, a civilrights advocate and a writer Interviewed by Phillip Smith, "The New Jim Crow" Author

Michelle Alexander Talks Race and Drug War,http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2014/mar/10/new_jim_crow_michelle_alexander_tal]

Michelle Alexander: The landscapeabsolutely has changed in profound ways. When writing this book, I was f eeling incredibly frustrated by thefailure of many civil rights organizations and leaders to make the war on drugs a critical priority in their organization and also by the failure of many of my progressive friends and allies to awaken to the magnitudeof the harm caused by the war on drugs and mass incarceration. At the same time, not so long ago, I didn't understand the horror of the drug war myself, I failed to connect the dots and understand the ways thesesystems of racial and social control are born and reborn. But over last few years, I couldn't be more pleased with reception. Many people warned me that civil rights organizations could be defensive or angered by

criticisms in the book, but they've done nothing but respond with enthusiasm and some real self-reflection. There is absolutely an awakening taking

place . It's important to understand that this didn't start with my book -- Angela Davis coined th e term "prison industrial complex" years ago; Mumia Abu-Jamal was writing from prison about massincarceration and our racialized prison state. Many, many advocates have been doing this work and connecting th e dots for far longer than I have. I wanted to lend more credibility and support for the work that so

many have been doing for some, but that has been marginalized. I am optimistic, butat the same time, I see real reasons for concern. There

are important victories in legalizing marijuana in Colorado and Washington, in Holder speaking out against mandatory minimums and

felon disenfranchisement, in politicians across the country raising concerns about the size of the prison state for the first time in 40 years,but much of the dialog is still

driven by fiscal concerns rather than genuine concern for the people and communities most

impacted,the families destroyed.We haven't yet really had the kind of conversation we must have as

a nation if we are going to do more than tinker with the machine andbreak ourhabit of creating mass incarceration in America. Asha Bandele: Obama has his My Brother's Keeper initiative directed at black boys falling

behind. A lot of this is driven by having families and communities disrupted by the drug war. Obama nodded at the structural racism that dismembers communities, but he said it was a moral failing. He's

addressed race the least of any modern American president. Your thoughts? Michelle Alexander:I'm glad that Obama is shining a spotlight on thereal crisis facing black communitiestoday, in particular black boys and young men, and he's right to draw attention to it and elevate it,but I worry that

the initiative isbased more in rhetoric than in a meaningful commitment to

addressing the structures and institutions that have created these conditions in

our communities . There is a commitment to studying the problem and identifying programs that work to keep black kids in school and out of jail, and there is an aspect that seeks to

engage foundations and corporations, but there is nothing in the initiative that offers any kind of policy change fromthe governmentor any government funding of any kind to support these desperately needed programs. There is an implicit assumption that we just need to find what works to lift people up bytheir bootstraps, without acknowledging that we're waging a war on these communities we claim to b e so concerned about. The initiative itself reflects this common narrative that suggests the reasons why thereare so many poor people of color trapped at the bottom -- bad schools, poverty, broken homes. And if we encourage people to stay in school and get and stay married, then the whole problem of mass incarcerationwill no longer be of any real concern. But I've come to believe we have it backwards. These communities are poor and have failing schools and broken homes not because of their personal failings, but because we'vedeclared war on them, spent billions building prisons while allowing schools to fail, targeted children in these communities, stopping, searching, frisking them -- and the first arrest is typically for some nonviolentminor drug offense, which occurs with equal frequency in middle class white neighborhoods but typically goes ignored. We saddle them with criminal records, jail them, then release t hem to a parallel universewhere they are discriminated against for the rest of their lives, locked into permanent second-class status. We've done this in the communities most in need our support and economic investment. Rather thanproviding meaningful support to these families and communities where the jobs have gone overseas and they are struggling to move from an industrial-based economy to a global one, we have declared war onthem. We have stood back and said "What is wrong with them?" The more pressing question is "What is wrong with us?" Asha Bandele: During the Great Depression, FDR had the New Deal, but now it seem likethere is no social commitment at the highest levels o f government. And we see things like Eric Holder and Rand Paul standing together to end mandatory minimums. Is this an unholy alliance? Michelle

Alexander:We have to be very clear that so much of the progress being made on drug policy reflects

the fact that we are at a time when politicians are highly motivated to downsize prisons becausewe can't afford the massive prison state without raising taxeson the predominantly white middle class. This is the firsttime in 40 years we've been willing to have a serious conversation about prison downsizing . But I'm

deeply concerned about us doing the right things for the wrong reasons . This movement
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2014/mar/10/new_jim_crow_michelle_alexander_talhttp://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2014/mar/10/new_jim_crow_michelle_alexander_tal


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to end mass incarceration and the war on drugs is aboutbreaking the habit of forming

caste-like systems and creating a new ethic of care and concern for each of us , this idea that

each of us has basic human rights. That is the ultimate goal of this movement. The real issue that lies at the core ofevery caste system ever created is the devaluing of human beings. If we're going to do this just to

save some cash, we haven't woken up to the magnitude of the harm . If we are not willing

to have a searching conversation about how we got to this place, how we are able to lock upmillions of people, we will find ourselves either still having a slightly downsized mass

incarceration system or some new system of racial control because we will have not learned

the core lesson our racial history is trying to teach us. We have to learn to care for

them, the Other, the ghetto dwellers we demonize. Temporary, fleeting political alliances with

politicians who may have no real interest in communities of color is problematic.We need to

stay focused on doing the right things for the right reasons, and not count as victories

battles won when the real lessons have not been learned . Asha Bandele: Portugal decriminalized all drugs and drug use hasremained flat, overdoses been cut by a third, HIV cut by two-thirds. What can we learn from taking a public health approach and its fundamental rejection of stigma? Michelle Alexander: Portugal is an excellent

example of how it is possible to reduce addiction and abuse and drug related crime in a non-punitive manner without filling prisons and jails. Supposedly,we criminalize drugs

because we are so concerned about the harm they cause people, but we wind up inflicting far

more pain and suffering than the substances themselves. What are we doing really when wecriminalize drugs is not criminalizing substances, but people. I support a wholesale shift to a public health model for dealing with drug

addiction and abuse. How would we treat people abusing if we really cared about them? Would we put themin a cage, saddle them with criminal records that will force them into legal discrimination the

rest of their lives? I support the decriminalization of all drugs for personal use. Ifyou possess asubstance, we should help you get education and support, not demonize, shame, and punish you

for the rest of your life. I'm thrilled that Colorado and Washington have legalized

marijuana and DC has decriminalized it -- these are critically important steps in

shifting from a purely punitive approach .But there are warning flags. I flick on the news, and I see

images of people using marijuana and trying to run legitimate businesses, and they're almost

all white .When we thought of them as black or brown, we had a purely punitive approach.Also, it

seems like its exclusively white men being interviewed as wanting to start marijuana businessesand make a lot of money selling marijuana. I have to say the image doesn't sit right . Here are white

men poised to run big marijuana businesses after 40 years of impoverished black kids getting

prison time for doing the same thing.As we talk about legalization, we have to also be

willing to talk about reparations for the war on drugs , as in how do we repair the harm

caused. With regard to Iraq, Colin Powell said "If you break it, you own it," butwe haven't learned that basic lesson from our own racial

history. We set the slaves free with nothing, and after Reconstruction, a new caste system arose,Jim Crow. A movement arose and we stopped Jim Crow, but we got no reparations after the

waging of a brutal war on poor communities of color that decimated families and fanned the

violence it was supposed to address. Do we simply say "We're done now, let's move on" and white

men can make money? This time,we have to get it right; we have to tell the whole truth, we

have to repair the harm done. It's not enough to just stop. Enormous harm had

been done; we have to repair those communities.

The drug war incarceration regime represents the predominant mode of racist

social controlracist policies maintain economic hierarchies that prevent blackeconomic and political self determination

Alexander 6


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[2006, Michelle Alexander is an Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Civil RightsClinic at Stanford Law School, Federalism, Race, and Criminal Justice, Chapter 16 in

Awakening from the Dream Civil Rights Under Siege and the New Struggle for Equal justice,pp. 219-228]

Most Americans today can look back and see slavery and Jim Crow laws for what they were -

extraordinaryand immoral forms of social control used to oppress black and brown

people.However, few believe that a similar form of social control exists today. What I have come to

recognize is that, contrary to popular belief, a new form of social control does exist, as disastrous

and morally indefensible as Jim Crow-the mass incarceration of people of color.There is

an important storyto be told that helps explain the role of the criminal justice system in

resurrecting, in a new guise, the same policies of racial segregation, political disenfranchisement,

and social stigmatization that have long oppressed and controlled all people of color, particularly

African Americans. The story begins with federalismand its evolving methods of maintaining

white supremacy. A recent twist has been added; one that the civil rights community has failed to explain to those who do

not read reports issued by the Bureau of Justice Statistics or Supreme Court decisions. In 1980, 330,000 people were incarcerated infederal and state prisons7 - the vast majority of whom were people of color. 8 Since then, the number has more than quadrupled to

over 1.3 million.9 When prison and jail populations are combined, the number jumps to over two million. 10AlthoughAfricanAmerican men comprise less than seven percent of the population, they comprise half of the

prison and jail population.11 Today, one out of three African American men is either in prison, onprobation, or on parole.l2 Latinos are not far behind.They are the fastest growing racial group being imprisoned,comprising 10.9 percent of all state and federal inmates in 1985, and nineteen percent in 2003.13 We know how this happened. In

1980, the Reagan administration ushered in the War on Drugs, another major backlash against

civil rights. Although we typically think of the Reagan era backlash as attacking affirmative action and civil rights laws, theWar on Drugs is perhaps the most sweeping and damaging manifestation of deliberateindifference-or downright hostility-to communities of color. This war, which continues today, has

nothing to do with solving drug abuse, and everything to do with creating a political

environment in which communities of color can be lawfully targeted for mass incarceration.l4 Notunlike slavery and Jim Crow, mass incarceration provides the white elite with social benefits . By

segregating, incarcerating, and rendering unemployable huge segments of the black and brown

population, the racial hierarchy remains intact . By denying blacks an equal and adequate

education,barring them from certain forms of employment, and relegating them to the worst

neighborhoods , the white elite has ensured that whites will never occupy the bottom

rung of that hierarchy.Today, slavery and Jim Crow laws no longer exist, and affirmative action has opened doors to

some, upsetting the racial caste system. Mass incarceration, however, has emerged as a new, and arguablymore durable, form of social controL'sIn addition to protecting their social position, mass incarceration

provides white elites with clear economic and political benefits. The prison industry is hugely profitable.Marc Mauer's excellent book Race to Incarcerate documents the unprecedented expansion of our criminal justice system and the

ways that the race to incarcerate has devastated communities of color.16 He cites promotional literature fromthe prison industry, one piece of which stated: "While arrests and convictions are steadily on the rise, profits are to be made-profits

from crime. Get in on the ground floor of this booming industry now." I? Prisons have become central to the

development of many small, predominately white, rural communities, not unlike the

economic base formerly provided by plantations in the rural South .18 Moreover, the

Thirteenth Amendment, which bars slavery, provides an exception for forced labor in prisons.'9

Corporationslike Victoria's Secret, therefore, commonly use prison labor, paying prisoners sweatshopwages.20 On the political front, felon disenfranchisement laws in many states, especially those with large black


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populations, have tilted the scales of power in favor of thewhite electorate . 21 In fourteen

states, a felon permanently loses the right to vote; in seven states, one in four black men has

been permanently disenfranchised.22 A total of 1.4 million black men, or thirteen percent of the black male adultpopulation, are either temporarily or permanently disen-franchised.23 The 2000 presidential election illustrated

the dramatic effects of felon disenfranchisement.Florida disenfranchisesthe most, including six

hundred thousand who have served their sentences and have been discharged from the criminaljustice system. Had those people been allowed to vote, Al Gore could have won Florida by more

than thirty-one thousand votes.24 To make matters worse, mass incarceration results in fewer

legislative seats for communities of color.25 Because the Census Bureau counts inmates as

living where they are incarcerated,rural communities that house large prisons gain adisproportionate number of elected officials representing them in their state legislature andCongress.26 Meanwhile, no one is representing the people of color behind bars, and the

communities from which they came lose representatives because their population hasdeclined.27 Quickly, quietly, and with virtually no political opposition, this new form of social control has become

entrenched in the social, political, and economic structure.Like slavery and Jim Crow, massincarceration is predicated on the inferiority of a certain class of people, defined largely by race.

The genius of the new system is that it successfully blames the victim; black and brownpeople are segregated, stripped of political rights, and used for the economic benefit ofpropertied whites because they chose to engage in criminal behavior.That the overwhelming

majority of inmates lack a basic education and only ever earned monthly incomes ofless thanone thousand dollars goes unreported.28 Similarly, scant attention is given to the recentresegregation of schools, and how staggering proportions of black youth graduating from their

segregated, under-funded schools can barely read(discussed in chapters 3 and 12).29 The school-to-prison track for black and brown youth reflects no racial bias, we are told; rather, these kids have

chosen a life of crime. We should not be confused or distracted by such rhetoric.While

the strategies and mechanisms of control have changed, the goals and beneficiaries remain the same. The

backlash against the Civil Rights Movement has produced a new method of control

on a scale that was unimaginable just twenty years ago. And this system is built tolast.

This broader institutional racism represents the cardinal scourge of the Black

bodywe cannot reject certain tools like legal reforms and limit our purview ofavailable resistance strategiesits time to develop multi-pronged strategies

Williams 68

[March 1968, Robert F. Williams was a civil rights leader and author, best known for serving as

president of the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP in the 1950s and early 1960s.Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton cited Williamss Negroes with Guns as a major

inspiration. Reaction Without Positive Change, The Crusader, Volume 9, Number 4,

http://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/Robert_F_Williams/513.RobertFWilliams.Crusader.March.1968.pdf]

Next to naked violence and unmitigated terror, racist America's bigoted court system is the cardinal scourge

of the powerless Blackand white masses. The constitutional myth about "trial by one's peers" is a cardinal sacrilege against the

sacredness of truth.When a Black man is a defendant in Americanism's dock of Anglo-Saxon law he is


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pretty much in the same position as an humble lamb on an altar of sacrifice. White

America's savage culture erects a pious facade of devotion to the rule of lawrather than of man

and hypocritically attempts to project the ritualistic victimization of the Black man to

some remote and spiritual realm of divinityabove and beyond the tawdry arena of

satanic man.To proclaim Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence to be a rule of law; and to allow its application to be left to the whim of insensate brigands

is tantamount to casting pearls before swine. The kangaroo court system in racist America is the most archaic

of reactionary institutionalized injustice. Some phases of society modernizes and advances. Certain aspects ofculture are in a constant state of transition, but to and behold Anglo-Saxon law doggedly clings to a Magna Charta steeped in the traditions of a Middle

Ages mentality. Why does this so-called rule of law so readily invoke the heritage of ancie nt vanity in justifying modern injustice predicated on

feudalistic logic and morality? Why is it so inclined to look backwards instead of forward? Why is it a quilted patchwork of sham reform rather than a

bold new uniformed structure created out of sociology's up-to-date discoveries and premises? It is because it is an instrument of social

reaction in the employ of reactionaries hell-bent on preserving an ante-bellum and vulturouspower structure frenetically trying to maintain its encircled and battered position. Tyrants do not change

of themselves. The pressure of the people stimulated by the enlightenment derived from their social

being is the driving wheel that propels the vehicle of change. The Blackand the powerless, who face the wrathof so-called Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, must come to realize the futility of leaving their fate to the rule of law

as implemented by puppet judgeswho pander to the savage emotions of a cold blooded aristocracy. The true power of the state

derives from the people. The weakness of the people in a confrontation with state tyranny evolves from the apathy, confusion, demoralization, disunityand ignorance of their own power.All over degenerate and fascist America today the most complimentarycitizens of a civilized society are being railroaded to prison, are being removed from a decadentand sheepish society that is in dire need of highly moral and resistant fiber. These courageous

and upright citizens constitute the last thin line between regression and progression .

They are the sparse in numbers but firm pillars that so precariously prevent the society fromplunging into the tragic and chaotic depth of despotic fascism.America's jails are teaming withprincipled Black Nationalists, freedom fighters, war resisters, peace advocates, resisters of false

arrest, those forced into crime as a means of survival, the penniless and powerless guilty of

minor infractions, but unable to pay the court's tribute money and the state's bribery. America's racistcourts have assumed the despotic posture of institutionalized lynch mobs enjoying the sanctimonious solicitude of the state's ritualistic buffoonery.

This inhumane and oppressive situation can only be rectified by an aroused, united and

determined citizenry.The power of the enraged masses must be arrayed against this

Anglo=Saxon kangarooism. We must strive to create more favorable legal conditions

to disrupt the orderly and uninhibited process of perennial racist kangaroo justice.A life-and-death struggle must be waged to break this antiquated first line of the reactionary power

structure's defenseof its fast eroding position. Science changes, medicine changes, education changes, customs change, styles change but

the archaic courts still arrogantly pride themselves on the fact that they are the

true and noble hermits from the dark ages . In our life-and-death struggle,we must

convert everything possible into a weapon of defense and survival .We must not be

narrowminded and sectarian in our scope. When possiblewe must use the ballot ,we must

use the school, the church, the arts and even the evil legal system that we know to be

stacked against us. We must fight in the assemblies, we must fight in the streets. We must make war on all fronts.We must usethe word as well as the bullet.We must not only master the techniques of our enemy, but we

must surpass him in a technique that will serve our cause of liberation rather than his cause of

slavery.A liberation struggle cannot afford to hamper its possibilities of success by

straddling itself with narrow limitations,by limiting itself to only one method of

struggle.While the gun is essential and basic, it must be supplemented by actions,

sometimes less dramatic, less decisive .


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Racist marijuana policies have a uniquely debilitating effectwe should use thelegalization of marijuana as a target for our reform effortsthat doesnt tradeoff

with criticisms of the overall structureJarecki 14

[08/02/14, Eugene Jarecki is a New York-based writer and film-maker. His Grierson, Emmy and Sundance-winning works includeWhy We Fight, The Trials of Henry Kissinger and The House I Live In, As the marijuana economy takes off, let's not forget the

casualties of the US war on drugs,http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/03/marijuana-economy-casualties-us-war-on-drugs-eugene-jarecki]

Throughout America's history, official and unofficial systems of racial oppression have arisen, been

challenged, and then gone underground, shape-shifting themselves to return

another day.In the modern era, as lawyer Michelle Alexander has argued in her book The New Jim Crow, the drug war

stepped in to become the latest system. In 1971, as the gains of the civil rights movement for

black Americans and other minorities might have seemed to usher America into a post-racial

age, the drug war renewed the nation's commitment , however subtly, to the obstruction of

black progress. Today as the marijuana economies in Colorado and Washington begin to take

flight,Alexander noted the inescapable undertow of race that continues to haunt this momentofapparent progress at play: "Forty years of impoverished black kids getting prison timefor selling weed, and

their families and futures destroyed Now,white men are planning to get rich doing precisely the samething." Over those four decades, the war on drugs has failed abjectly in its stated mission addressing a legitimate concern aboutrates of US addiction but succeeded overwhelmingly in what would appear its de facto goals making drug crime the primarypreoccupation of law enforcement, flooding the courts with drug cases and overcrowding prisons with the world's largest population

of inmates, more than 50% on drug-related charges. Taken together, these accomplishments have produced a system of massincarceration that costs taxpayers an estimated $51bn a year, becoming one of the nation's leading employers. Within its walls,

black Americans represent more than 50% of those sentenced for drug crimes, despite the fact

that black people represent only 13% of the population and do not use drugs more or less thanwhite people. A decade ago, when I began investigating the drug war in what would become my documentary The House I LiveIn, acquaintances were intrigued. They knew I was neither a drug user nor a dealer. They also knew that I was a comfortable white

American, and thus highly unlikely to have been affected by the drug war personally. Inevitably, the question would ariseabout whether I was an advocate of marijuana legalisation, which had then become a primaryfocus for most reformers. I responded always with indignation, saying that I did not support

legalising marijuana if that meant simply giving dreadlocked white snowboarders easier accessto weed. Rather, I was concerned with the drug war's implications for poor and minority

Americans, whose communities had been ravaged by the war's destructive machinery. I also sawa philosophic error in separating marijuana from other drugs. Part of what is assumed by advocates of thedrug war is that the government has a legitimate role determining what substance an adult can choose to put in his or her body in

the exercise of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.Arguing that one drug should be legalised

while others not seems to elide this question of public policy. And this elision is dangerous, firstbecause it enables the country to avoid a deeper dialogue about the illegality of drugs per se and,second,because I feared it could let steam out of the debate about the drug war more broadly,

reducing public pressure for its overhaul.Worse, I even feared that by going easy on weed wewould tighten the screws on the rest, keeping the system and its predations intact. I've since

changed my mind on the importance of marijuana as a target for reformers , owing

to what I've learned about the role it plays in driving the cycle of personal, family and

community destruction on which the war thrives . "Gateway drug" has been the term often usedby drug warriors to suggest that, with one puff of a joint, a young person may find himself hurtling down a road to hard drugs.

Despite this notion's popularity, it has little or no basis in science. Yet marijuana is a gateway drug for
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/03/marijuana-economy-casualties-us-war-on-drugs-eugene-jareckihttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/03/marijuana-economy-casualties-us-war-on-drugs-eugene-jareckihttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/03/marijuana-economy-casualties-us-war-on-drugs-eugene-jareckihttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/03/marijuana-economy-casualties-us-war-on-drugs-eugene-jareckihttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/03/marijuana-economy-casualties-us-war-on-drugs-eugene-jarecki


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countless young Americans into a lifetime of involvement with the criminal justice

system.For many, an arrest for possession at a young age can start a chain reaction that leads

first to drastically reduced employability and then to a higher likelihood of becoming engaged inthe underground economy of drug distribution, often the only job available . Once this happens, it

becomes almost a fait accompli that that person will spend a serious portion of his life rotating

in and out of the system. The numbers speak volumes . Of the 2.2 million prisoners servingin the US, nearly 25% were convicted of marijuana possession . Legalisation, were it

retroactive,would dramatically reduce prisoner numbers while profoundly stemming

the tide .

Vote affirmative to endorse the 1AC as a tactic for mass mobilization to legalize

marijuana in opposition to racial oppression and the use of incarceration tomaintain a racial caste system.

There needs to be a change to how we debate policyactions to reform and changeinstitutional racism have historically failed to disrupt the fundamental

equilibrium of the racial orderactions by radicals have ignored that its a flawed

consensus and not just a flawed policy that lies at the heart of this system ofcontrolin order to change this a mass movement must emerge, and the questionof the debate should be how we achieve that consensus, as opposed to whatreforms we ultimately utilizemarijuana should be legalized, but as an act of

movement buildingAlexander 10, Associate Professor of Law

[2010, Michelle Alexander, is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, a civil rights

advocate and a writer. New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of ColorblindnessProQuest ebrary, pp. 221-224]

The list could go on, of course, but the point has been made. The central question for racial justice advocates is

this: are we serious about ending this system of control , or not? If we are, there is a

tremendous amount of work to be done . The notion that all of these reforms can be

accomplished piecemealone at a time, through disconnected advocacy strategiesseems deeply

misguided. All of the needed reforms have less to do with failed policies than a deeply flawed

public consensus , one that is indifferent, at best , to the experience of poor people of color .

As Martin Luther King Jr. explained back in 1965, when describing why it was far more important to engage in mass

mobilizations than file lawsuits,Were trying to win the right to vote and we have to focus

the attention of the world on that. We cant do that making legal cases.We have to make

the case in the court of public opinion. 21 Kingcertainly appreciated the contributions of civil

rights lawyers(he relied on them to get him out of jail), but he opposed the tendency of civil rights lawyers toidentify a handful of individuals who could make great plaintiffs in a court of law, then file

isolated cases . He believedwhat was necessary was to mobilize thousandsto make their case

in the court of public opinion. In his view, it was a flawed public consensusnot merely

flawed policythat was at the root of racial oppression. Today, no less than fifty years ago, a

flawed public consensus lies at the core of the prevailing caste system.When people think aboutcrime, especially drug crime, they do not think about suburban housewives violating laws regulating


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prescription drugs or white frat boys using ecstasy. Drug crimein this country is understood to

be black and brown, and it is because drug crime is racially defined in the public

consciousness that the electorate has not cared much what happens to drug criminalsat leastnot the way they would have cared if the criminals were understood to be white. It is this failure

to care, really care across color lines, that lies at the core of this system of control and every

racial caste system that has existed in the United States or anywhere else in theworld. Those who believe that advocacy challenging mass incarceration can be successful

without overturning the public consensus that gave rise to it are engaging in fanciful thinking, a

form of denial . Isolated victories can be woneven a string of victoriesbut in the absence of a

fundamental shift in public consciousness, the system as a whole will remain

intact . To the extent that major changes are achieved without a complete shift, the system

will rebound. The caste system will reemerge in a new form , just as convict leasing

replaced slavery, or it will be reborn, just as mass incarceration replaced Jim Crow.SociologistsMichael Omi andHowardWinantmake a similar point in their book Racial Formation in the United States. They attribute

the cyclical nature of racial progress to the unstable equilibrium that characterizes the

United States racial order. 22 Under normal conditions, they argue, state institutions are able tonormalize the organization and enforcement of the prevailing racial order , and the

system functions relatively automatically.Challenges to the racial order during these periods areeasily marginalized or suppressed, and the prevailing system of racial meanings, identity, andideology seems natural. These conditions clearly prevailed during slavery and Jim Crow.When the equilibrium

is disrupted, however, as in Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement, the state initially resists, thenattempts to absorb the challenge through a series of reforms that are, if not entirely symbolic,

at least not critical to the operation of the racial order. In the ab-sence of a truly egalitarian

racial consensus, these predictable cycles inevitably give rise to new, extraordinarily

comprehensive systems of racialized social control . One exampleof the way in which a well

established racial order easily absorbs legal challenges is the infamous aftermath of the Brown v. Board of

Education decision. After the Supreme Court declared separate schools inherently unequal in 1954, segregation persistedunabated. One commentator notes: The statistics from the Southern states are truly amazing. For ten

years, 19541964, virtually nothing happened. 23 Not a single black child attended an integrated public gradeschool in South Carolina, Alabama, or Mississippi as of the 19621963 school year.Across the South as a whole, a

mere 1 percent of black school children were attending school with whites in 1964 a full decade after

Brown was decided. 24 Brown did not end Jim Crow; a mass movement had to emerge first

one that aimed to create a new public consensus opposed to the evils of Jim Crow.

This does not mean Brown v. Board was meaningless, as some commentators have claimed. 25 Brown gave critical

legitimacy to the demands of civil rights activists who risked their lives to end Jim

Crow, and it helped to inspire the movement(as well as a fierce backlash). 26 But standing alone, Brown

accomplished for African Americans little more than Abraham Lincolns EmancipationProclamation. A civil war had to be waged to end slavery; a mass movement was necessary to bring a formal end to Jim Crow.Those who imagine that far less is required to dismantle mass incarceration and build a new,egalitarian racial consensus reflecting a compassionate rather than punitive impulse toward

poor people of color fail to appreciate the distance betweenMartin Luther King Jr.s dream and the

ongoing racial nightmare for those locked up and locked out of American society. The

foregoing should not be read as a call for movement building to the exclusion of

reform work. To the contrary, reform work is the work of movement building , provided


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that it is done consciously as movement-building work. If all the reforms mentioned above

were actually adopted, a radical transformation in our society would have taken

place . The relevant question is not whether to engage in reform work, but how.

There is no shortage of worthy reform effortsand goals. Differences of opinion are inevitable about which reforms

are most important and in what order of priority they should be pursued. These debates are worthwhile, but it is critical to

keep in mind that the question of how we do reform work is even more important than thespecific reforms we seek.If the way we pursue reforms does not contribute to the building

of a movement to dismantle the system of mass incarceration , and if our advocacy

does not upset the prevailing public consensus that supports the new caste system,

none of the reforms, even if won, will successfully disrupt the nations racial equilibrium .

Challenges to the system will be easily absorbed or deflected, and the

accommodations made will serve primarily to legitimate the system, not

undermine it. We run the risk of winning isolated battles but losing the larger war.

The 1ACs tactic works through a combination of radical critique and policy action.Actions to reduce the size of the prison system through drug reform in conjunction

with advocacy can avoid the failures of conventional reform by transformingpublic conscious and creating medium term steps towards the ultimate goal ofabolition

Sudbury 8, Professor of Ethnic Studies

[2008, Julia Sudbury is Metz Professor of Ethnic Studies at Mills College. She is a leadingactivist scholar in the prison abolitionist movement. She was a co-founder of Critical Resistance,

a national abolitionist organization. Rethinking Global Justice: Black Women Resist theTransnational Prison-Industrial Complex, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture,and Society, Volume 10, Issue 4]

Chronic overcrowding has led to worsening conditions for prisoners. As a result of the unprecedented growth in sentenced populations, prison authorities h ave packed three or four prisoners into cells designed for two, and have taken over recreation rooms, gyms,and rooms designed for programming and turned them into cells, housing prisoners on bunk beds or on the floor. These new conditions have created challenges for activists, who have found themselves expending time and resources in pressuring prison authorities

to provide every prisoner a bed, or to provide access to basic education programs. As prison populations continue to swell, anti-prison activists are faced with the limitations

of reformist strategies.Gains temporarily won are swiftly undermined , new women-centered prison regimes are replaced with a focus on cost -efficiency and minimal programming and even changes enforced by legal cases like Shumate vs. Wilson are subject to backlash a nd resistance. 19 Of even greater concern is the well-documented tendency of prison regimes to co-opt reforms and respond to demands for changes

in conditions by further expanding prison budgets.The vulnerability of prison reform efforts to

cooption has led Angela Y. Davis to call for non-reformist reforms, reforms that do

not lead to bigger and betterprisons. 20Despite the limited long-term impact of human

rights advocacy and reforms,building bridges between prisoners, activists, and family members

is an important step toward challenging the racialized dehumanization that

undergirds the logic of incarceration. In this way,

human rights advocacy carried out in solidaritywith prisoner activists is an important component of a radical anti-prison agenda . Ultimately,

however, anti-prison activists aimnot to create more humane, culturally sensitive, women-centered prisons, but to dismantle prisons and enable

formerly criminalized people to access services and resources outside the penal system. After three decades ofprison expansion, more and more people are living with criminal convictions and histories of incarceration. In the U.S., nearly 650,000 people are released from state and federal prisons to the community each year. 21 Organizations of formerly incarcerated peoplefocus on creating opportunities for former prisoners to survive after release, and on eliminating barriers to r eentry, including extensive discrimination against former felons. The wide array of post-incarceration sentences that felons are subjected to has led activiststo declare a new civil rights movement. 22 As a class, former prisoners can legally be disenfranchised and denied rights available to other citi zens. While reentry has garnered official attention, with President Bush proposing a $300 million reentry initiative in his2004 State of the Union address, anti-prison activists have critiqued this initiative for focusing on faith-based mentoring, job training, and housing without addressing the endemic discrimination against former prisoners or addressing the conditions in the

communities which receive former prisoners, including racism, poverty, and gender violence. Organizations of ex-prisoners working to oppose discrimination against former prisoners and felons include All of Us Or None, the Nu Policy Leade rship Group, SisterOutsider and the National Network for Women Prisoners in the U.S., and Justice 4 Women in Canada. All of Us Or None is described by members as a national organizing initiative of prisoners, former prisoners and felons, to combat the many forms ofdiscrimination that we face as the result of fe lony convictions. 23 Founded by anti-imperialist and former political prisoner Linda Evans, and former prisoner and anti-prison activist Dorsey Nunn, and sponsored by the Northern Californiabased Legal Services forPrisoners with Children, All of Us Or None works to mobilize former prisoners nationwide and in Toronto, Canada. The organization 's name, from a poem by Marxist playwright Bertold Brecht, invokes the need for solidarity across racial, class, and gender lines increating a unified movement of former prisoners. Black women play a leading role in the organization, alongside other people of color. All of Us Or None focuses its lobbying and campaign work at city, county, and state levels, calling on local authorities to enddiscrimination based on felony convictions in public housing, benefits, and employment, to opt out of lifetime welfare and fo od stamp bans for felons, and to ban the box requiring disclosure of past convictions on applications for public employm ent. In addition,the organization calls for guaranteed housing, job training, drug and alcohol treatment, and public assistance for all newly released prisoners. 24 In the context of the war on drugs, many people with felony convictions also struggle with addictions. The recovery

movement, which is made up of 12-step programs, treatment pr ograms, community recovery centers, and indigenous healing programs run by and for people in recovery from addiction, offers an alternative response to problem drug use through programs focusing


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on spirituality, healing, and fellowship. However, the recovery movement's focus on individual transformation and accountability for past acts diverges from many anti-prison activists' focus on the harms done to criminalized communities by interlocking systems ofdominance. As a result, anti-prison spaces seldom engage with the recovery movement, or tap th e radical potential of its membership. Breaking with this tr end, All of Us Or None has initiated a grassroots organizing effort to reach out to people in 12-step programswith felony convictions. This work is part of their wider organizing efforts that aim to mobilize former prisoners as agents of social change. Building on the strengths of identity politics, these organizations suggest that those who have experienced the prison-industrial complex first-hand may be best placed to provide leadership in dismantling it. As former prisoners have taken on a wide range of leadership positions across the movement, there has been a shift away from leadership by white middle-class progressives,and a move to promote the voices of th ose directly affected by the prison-industrial complex. Politicians who promote punitive tough -on-crime policies rely on racialized controlling images of the criminal to inspire fear and induce compliance among voters. Once

dehumanized and depicted as dangerous and beyond rehabilitation, removing people from communities appears the only logical means of creating safety.Activists who pursue decarceration

challenge stereotypical images of the criminalby making visible the human stories of

prisoners,with the goal of demonstrating the inadequacy of incarceration as a response

to the complex interaction of factors that produce harmful acts.Decarceration usually

involves targeting a specific prison population that the public sees as low-risk and arguing for

an end to the use of imprisonment for this population. Decarcerative strategies often

involve the promotion of alternatives to incarceration that are less expensive and more effectivethan prison and jail. For example, Proposition 36, the Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act, which passed in California in 2000 and allowed first- and second-time non-violent drug offenders charged with possession to

receive substance abuse treatment instead of prison, channels approximately 35,000 people into treat ment annually. 25 Drug law reform is a key area of

decarcerative work. Organizations and campaigns that promote drug law reforminclude Drop the Rock, a coalition

of youth, former prisoners, criminal justice reformers, artists, civil and labor leaders working to repeal New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws. The campaign combines racial justice, economic,

and public safety arguments by demonstrating that the laws have created a

pipeline of prisoners of color from New York City to newly built prisons in rural, mainly white areas represented Republican senators, resulting in a transf er of funding and electoral influence fromcommunities of color to upstate rural communities. 26 Ultimately, the campaign calls for an end to mandatory minimum sentencing and the reinstatement of judges' sentencing discretion, a reduction in sentence lengths for drug-related offenses and the expansionof alternatives, including drug treatment, job training, and education. Former drug war prisoners play a leadership role in decarcerative efforts in the field of drug policy reform. Kemba Smith, an African American woman who was sentenced to serve 24.5 years as aresult of her relationship with an abusive partner who was involved in the drug industry, is one potent voice in opposition to the war on drugs. While she was incarcerated, Smith became an active advocate for herself and other victims of the war on drugs, securinginterviews and feature articles in national media. Ultimately, Smith's case came to represent the failure of mandatory minimums, and in 2000, following a nation-wide campaign, she and fellow drug war prisoner Dorothy Gaines were granted clemency by outgoing

President Clinton. After her release, Smith founded the Justice for People of Color Project (JPCP), which aims to empower young people of color to participate in drug policy reform and to promote a reallocation of public expenditures from incarceration toeducation. While women like Kemba Smith and Dorothy Gaines have become the human face of the drug war, prison invisibilizes and renders anonymous hundreds of thousands of drug war prisoners. The or ganization Families Against Mandatory Minimums(FAMM) challenges this process of erasure and dehumanization through its Faces of FAMM project. The project invites people in federal a nd state prisons serving mandatory minimum sentences to submit their cases to a database and provides online access to

their stories and photographs. 27 The Faces of FAMM project highlights cases where sentencing injustices are particularly visible in order to galvanize public support for sentencing reform. At the same time, it dismantlespopular representations of the war on drugs as a necessary protection against dangerous drugdealers and traffickers, demonstrating that most drug war prisoners are serving long sentences

for low-level, non-violent drug-related activities or for being intimately connected to someone involved in these activities. Decarcerative work is not limited to drug law refo rm. FreeBattered Women's (FBW) campaign for the re lease of incarcerated survivors is another example of decarcerative work. The organization supports women and transgender prisoners incarcerated for killing or assaulting an abuser in challenging their convictions by

demonstrating that they acted in self-defense. Most recently, FBW secured the release of Flozelle Woodmore, an African American woman serving a life sentence at CCWF for shooting her violent partner as an 18 year old. Released in August 2007, after five paroleboard recommendations for her release were rejected by Governors Davis and then Schwarzenegger, Woodmore's determined pursuit of justice made visible and ultimately challenged the racialized politics of gubernatorial parole releases. 28 While the number ofwomen imprisoned for killing or assaulting an abuser is smallFBW submitted 34 petitions for clemency at its inception in 1991, and continues to fight 23 cases FBW's campaign for the release of all incarcerated survivors challenges the mass incarceration ofgender-oppressed prisoners on a far larger scale. FBW argues that exper iences of intimate partner violence and abuse contribute to the criminalized activities that lead many women and transgender people into conflict with the law, including those imprisoned on

drug or property charges, and calls for the release of all incarcerated survivors. Starting with a population generally viewed with sympathysurvivors of intimate partner violenceFBW generates a radical critique of both state and interpersonal violence, arguing that

the violence and control used by the state against people in prison mirrors the dynamics of battering that many incarcerated survivors have experienced in their intimate relationships and/or as children. 29 In theorizing the

intersections of racialized state violence and gendered interpersonal violence, FBW lays the

groundwork for a broader abolitionist agenda that refutes the legitimacy of

incarceration as a response to deep-rooted social inequalities based on

interlocking systems of oppression . By gradually shrinking the prison system, Black women

activists involved in decarcerative work hope to erode the public's reliance on the

idea of imprisonment as a commonsense response to a wide range of social ills. At theother end of anti-expansionist work are activists who take a more confrontational approach. By starving correctional budgets of funds to continue building more prisons and jails, they hope to force politicians to embrace less expensive and more effective alternativesto incarceration. Prison moratorium organizing aims to stop construction of new prisons and jails. Unlike campaigns against prison privatization, which oppose prison-profiteering by private corporations, and seek to r eturn imprisonment to the public sector, prisonmoratorium work opposes all new prison construction, public or private. In New York, the Brooklyn-based Prison Moratorium Project (PMP), co-founded by former prisoner Eddie Ellis and led by young women and gender non-conforming people of color, does thiswork through popular education and mass campaigns against prison expansion. Focusing on youth as a force for social change, New York's PMP uses compilations of progressive hip hop and rap artists to spread a critical analysis of the prison-industrial complex and

its impact on people of color. PMP's strategies have been effective; for example, in 2002 the organization, as part of the Ju stice 4 Youth Coalition, succeeded in lobbying the New York Department of Juvenile Justice to redirect $ 53 million designated for expansion inBrooklyn and the Bronx. 30 PMP has also worked to make visible the connections between underfunding, policing of schools, andyouth incarceration through their campaign Stop the School-to-Prison Pipeline. By demonstrat ing how zero tolerance policies andincreased policing and use of surveillance technology in schools, combined with underfunded classrooms and overstretched teachers, has led to the criminalization of young people of color and the production of adult prisoners, PMP argues for a reprioritization of

public spending from the criminal justice system to schools and alternatives to incarceration. 31 Moratorium work often involves campaigns to prevent the construction of a specific prison or jail. In Toronto, for example, the Prisoner

Justice Action Committee formed the 81 Reasons campaign, a multiracial collaboration of

experienced anti-prison activists,youth and student organizers, in response to proposals to

build a youth superjail in Brampton, a suburb of Toronto. 32 The campaign combined popular education on injustices

in the juvenile system, including the disproportionate incarceration of Black and Aboriginal youth,with an exercise in popular democracy thatinvited young people to decide themselves how they would spend the $81 million slated for the

jail.Campaigners mobilized public concerns about spending cuts in other areas , including health care and

education,to create pressure on the provincial government to look into less expensive and less punitivealternatives to incarceration for youth. While this campaign did not ultimately prevent the construction of the youth jail, the size of the proposed facility was reduced. More importantly,the

campaignbuilt a grassroots multiracial antiprison youth movement and raised

public awareness of the social and economic costs of incarceration. Moratorium campaigns face tough opposition from advocates whobelieve that building prisons stimulates economic development for struggling rural towns. Prisons are sold to rural towns that have suffered economic decline in the face of global competition, closures of local factories, and decline of small farms. In the context ofeconomic stagnation, prisons are touted as providing stable, well-paying, unionized jobs, providing property and sales taxes and boosting real estate markets. The California Prison Moratorium Project has worked to challenge these assertions by documenting the


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actual economic, environmental, and social impact of prison construction in California's Central Valley prison towns. According to California PMP: We consider prisons to be a form of environmental injustice. They are normally built in economically depressedcommunities that eagerly anticipate economic prosperity. Like any toxic industry, prisons affect the quality of local schools, roads, water, air, land, and natural habitats. 33 California PMP opposes prison construction at a local level by building multiracial coalitionsof local residents, farm workers, labor organizers, anti-prison activists, and former prisoners and their families to reject the visions of prison as a panacea for economic decline. 34 In the Californian context, where most new prisons are built in predominantlyLatino/a communities and absorb land and water pre viously used for agriculture, PMP facilitates communication and solidarity between Latino/a farm worker communities, and urban Black and Latino/a prisoners in promoting alternative forms of economicdevelopment that do not rely on mass incarceration. Scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore's research on the political economy of prisons in California has been critical in providing evidence of the detrimental impact of prisons on local residents and the environment.35 As an active member of CPMP, Gilmore's work is deeply rooted in anti-prison activism and in turn informs the work of other activists, demonstrating the important relationship between Black women's activist scholarship and the anti-prison movement. 36

Many anti-prison activists view campaigns for decarceration or moratorium as

building blocks toward the ultimate goal of abolition. These practical actions promise

short and medium-term successes that are essential markers on the road to long-term

transformation. However, abolitionists believe that like slavery, the prison-industrial complex is a system of racialized state violence that cannot be fixed. The contemporary prisonabolitionist movement in the U.S. and Canada dates to the 1970s, when political prisoners like

Angela Y. Davis and Assata Shakur, in conjunction with other radical activists and scholars in

the U.S., Canada, and Europe, began to call for the dismantling of prisons.38 The explosion in political prisoners, fuelled by the FBI'sCounter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and targeting of Black liberation, American Indian and Puerto Rican independence movements in the U.S. and First Nations resistance in Canada as threats to national security, fed into an understanding of the role of

the prison in perpetuating state repression against insurgent communities. 39 The new anti-prison politics were also shaped by a decade of prisoner litigation and radical prison uprisings, including the brutally crushed Attica Rebellion.Thesecommon prisoners, predominantly working-class people of color imprisoned for everyday acts of survival,challenged the state's legitimacy bydeclaring imprisonment a form of cruel and unusual punishment and confronting the brute

force of state power. 40 By adopting the term abolition activists drew deliberate links between the dismantling ofprisons and the abolition of slavery. Through historical excavations, the new abolitionists identified the abolition of prisons as the logical completion of the unfinished liberation marked by the 13thAmendment to the United States Constitution, which regulated, rather than ended, slavery. 41 Organizations that actively promote dialogue about what abolition means and how it can translate into concrete action include Critical Resistance (CR), New York's Prison

Moratorium Project, Justice Now, California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Free Battered Women, and the Prison Activist Resource Center in the U.S. and the Prisoner Justice Action Committee (Toronto), th e Prisoners' Justice Day Committee (Vancouver) andJoint Action in Canada. CR was founded in 1998 by a group of Bay Ar ea activists including former political prisoner and scholar-activist Angela Y. Davis. Initially, CR focused on popular education and movement building, coordinating large conferences wherediverse organizations could generate collective alternatives to the prison-industrial complex. Later work has included campaigns against prison construction in California's Central Valley and solidarity work with imprisoned Katrina survivors. CR d escribes abolition

as: [A] political vision that seek s to eliminate the need for prisons, policing, and surveillance by creating sustainable alt ernatives to punishment and imprisonment .An abolitionist vision means thatwe must build models today that can represent how we want to live in the future. It

means developing practical strategies for taking small steps that move us toward

making our dreams real and that lead the average person to believe that things

really could be different . It means living this vision in our daily lives.42 In this sense, prison

abolitionists are tasked with a dual burden: first, transforming people's consciousness so that

they can believe that a world without prisons is possible , and second, taking practical

steps to oppose the prison-industrial complex. Making abolition more than a utopian

vision requires practical steps toward this long-term goal . CR describes four steps that

activists can get involved in: shrinking the system , creating alternatives, shifting public

opinion and public policy, and building leadership among those directly impacted by the prison-industrial complex. 43 Since its inception in the San Francisco Bay Area, Critical Resistance has become anational organization with chapters in Baltimore, Chicago, Gainesville, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Tampa/St. Petersburg, and Washington, D.C. As such, CR has played a critical role in re-invigorating abolitionist politics in the U.S. This work is rooted inthe radical praxis of Black women and transgender activists.

Current grassroots tactics have opened new political possibilities for dismantlingthe racialised state violence of mass incarcerationreal resistance works by

articulating popular understandings and generating new social meanings to createa vocabulary that can contribute to mass mobilization and combines those with

specific demandsSudbury 9, Professor of Ethnic Studies

[2009, Julia Sudbury is Metz Professor of Ethnic Studies at Mills College. She is a leading

activist scholar in the prison abolitionist movement. She was a co-founder of Critical Resistance,

a national abolitionist organization. Reform or abolition? Using popular mobilisations todismantle the prison-industrial complex', Criminal Justice Matters, volume: 77 issue: 1 page:26-28]

In April 2009, California officials unveiled historic plans to cut $400 millionfrom the state's $9.8 billion

corrections budgetby reducing the prison population by 8,000. With half the reductions coming from changes inparole policy that would reduce the revolving door of parolees being returned on technical violations, and the other half from

changes in the treatment of property crimes and enhanced credits for prisoners attending education programmes, the CaliforniaDepartment of Corrections and Rehabilitation effectively adopted part of a larger plan created by Californians United for a


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Responsible Budget, a lobby group made up of 43 prison abolitionist, reform and social justice organisations. This temporaryalignment between anti-prison activists and one of the nation's largest and most powerful

correctional departments is a dramatic shift from a political terrain in which activists have reliedon direct action, mass protests and lawsuits to block state officials bent on inexorable prison

expansion. I want to argue that the grassroots tactics used by the anti-prison movement over the past

decade to transform popular understandings of mass incarceration have opened up the doorto new political possibilitiesat a time of economic crisis.Where prisons were once seen as a recession-

proof inevitability, the anti-prison movement has created a chink in the armour that may be

the first step in ending America's over-reliance on imprisonment as a solution to

deep-rooted social problems . The US anti-prison movement is made up of a plethora of

grassroots organisations, lobby groups, activist collectives, prisoner associations and student

groups(Sudbury, 2008).While the organisations that make up the movement are diverse in their

organising strategies , they share the common goal of ending the use of imprisonment to

respond to harm.The anti-prison movement differs from voluntary organisations working for criminal justice reform in twokey ways. First, rather than viewing imprisonment as a necessary sanction that should perhaps be used with less frequency or made

more effective and humane, anti-prison activists view prisons and jails as a form of racialised state

violence that must be dismantled as part of a wider social justice agenda. Second, while voluntaryorganisations provide important research, policy work, lobbying and direct services, their remit seldom includes community

organising or mass mobilisation. As a result, the non-profit model of organising is ill-equipped to bring

about radical social change(Incite!, 2007).Voluntary organisations can and do influence government policy, but

they cannot generate the people-power necessary to create the kind of fundamental social and

economic re-organisation necessary to dismantle what has become a multibillion-dollarindustry. In addition, the non-profit model of social change may actually undermine grassroots mobilising because it producespaid experts who are seen as having more legitimacy than directly affected communities, and tends to eschew popular protest that

may lead to conflict with the state. In contrast, as anti-globalisation activist Arundhati Roy has stated:

Realresistance has real consequences. And no salary. To confront mass incarceration and its

corollaries the overpolicing and criminalisation of poor and racialised communities anti-prison activists in the US

have come to believe that a mass movement similar to the civil rights and anti-warmovements is necessary. This movement must involve the active participation and leadership of those from directly

affected communities, including low-income racialised youth. Like other new social movement actors, anti-prison

activists have focused much of our attention on rearticulating popular understandings

and generating new social meanings . Central to this intellectual project has been the

creation and popularisation of a new language to talk about imprisonment. In 1998,when Critical Resistance (CR), the leading abolitionist organisation, organised a conference called CR: Beyond the Prison-Industrial

Complex, the prison-industrial complex (PIC) was a little known concept . The groundbreaking conferenceattracted approximately 3,000 students, educators, activists, lawyers, former prisoners and their families for three days ofworkshops, panels, cultural performances and direct action, and garnered significant media attention. As a result of the gathering,groups opposing prisons began to spring up across the country, and the rubric of the prison-industrial complex emerged as a popular explanation and organising tool. Eleven years later, theconcept is widely used in both progressive and mainstream media,wielded by Democrats critical of bloatedcorrections budgets and examined in criminology textbooks and classrooms. Critical Resistance has grown from its Oakland roots toencompass chapters in nine cities and most recently hosted a conference to celebrate its 10th anniversary that was attended by over3,500 people. The term prison-industrial complex was first used by urban theorist Mike Davis to describe a prison building boom

that, he argued rivals agribusiness as the dominant force in the life of rural California and competes with land developers as thechief seducer of legislators in Sacramento (Davis, 1995). Angela Y Davis, a co-founder of CR, describes the prison-industrial

complex as a symbiotic relationship between state criminal punishment agencies, politicians, corporations and other interest groups,manifested most obviously in the transformation of prisoners into profits (Davis, 2003). Private prisons, for example, transform the

warehousing of prisoners and immigrant detainees into a transaction that is traded on the stock market. Prison expansion in the US,UK and internationally has also generated profit-making opportunities for construction and architecture firms, manufacturers of


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security and telecommunications equipment, and for service industries including real estate agencies, banks and restaurants

(Sudbury, 2000). As a result, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore documents, small towns and entire regions have become economicallydependent on prisons to absorb surplus land and labour displaced by decades of global economic restructuring (Gilmore, 2007).Using the term prison-industrial complex turns our attention to the enormous and growing cost of imprisonment, reveals the

dependencies that influence criminal justice policy, and demonstrates who profits from a continued over-reliance on policing and

imprisonment.Anti-prison activists alsowork to erode popular support for the tough-on-

crimephilosophy underpinning US criminal justice policy. In the context of drug-relatedviolence and despair in urban centres, even members of communities negatively impacted by racial profiling and police brutality

may see harsher sentences as the only solution. In contrast to the claim that prisons work, CR refutes the

belief that cagingand controlling people makes us safe.CR reminds us that both

perpetrators and victims coexist in a social context devastated by a combination of social

exclusion, poverty, racism, addiction and government neglect . This analysis shifts our

focus from the commonsense assumption that policing and prisons create security,to the

possibility of creating safety by redirecting resources to provide for the basic

human rights of all community members . On their website, CR asserts: We work for PIC abolition becausewe do not believe that any amount of imprisonment, policing, or surveillance will ultimately make our communities safer or more

self-determined, prevent crime, or help repair the damage that happens when one person hurts another. We believe, instead, thataccess to basic necessities like food, shelter, meaningful work and freedom as well as alternative systems of accountability create the

conditions for healthier, more stable neighbourhoods, families, and our wider communities. Contrary to popular understandings, CRargues that prisons undermine safety by absorbing scarce public resources that might otherwise pay for social services that address

the root causes of survival crimes from education, youth and drug treatment programmes, to housing and employment. For thisreason, an anti-prison agenda that includes alternatives to cage-based punishment as a response to harm, as well as investment in

community infrastructure has become popular in urban communities as a pathway to genuine security. Popularising theconcept of abolitionis also central to the anti-prison movement's radical critique of

imprisonment. By adopting this term, activists make deliberate links between dismantling prisons andthe abolition of slavery. Taking the analogy further, these new abolitionistsidentify the abolition ofprisons as the logical completion of the unfinished liberation marked by the 13th Amendment to

the US Constitution, which regulated, rather than ended slavery. In this sense, abolition of the

prison-industrial complex is seen as central to contemporary struggles for racial justice.

Abolition exists in productive tension with efforts to reform the penal system .While

abolitionists point out that reform in isolation of a broader decarcerative strategy serves tolegitimate and even expand the prison-industrial complex, we also work in solidarity with

prisoners to challenge inhumane conditions inside. Described by Angela Y. Davis as

non-reformist reforms , these efforts are assessed first in terms of whether they

contribute toward decreasing or increasing prison budgets and the reach of the

criminal justice system . For anti-prison activists, however, reform is not the primary

objective. Rather we work toward dual priorities. First,we aim to transform popular

consciousnes s, so that people can believe that a world without prisons is possible. Second,we

take practical steps toward dismantling the prison-industrial complex. Thesesteps include

campaigns for a moratorium on prison expansion, mobilising community power to prevent the construction of

proposed new prisons, shrinking the system through decarcerative efforts and creatingcommunity-based alternatives to imprisonment . By helping the public to imagine

the possibility of shrinking the prison-industrial complex and ending their

reliance on imprisonment, the anti-prison movement has created a new political

climate in which closing prisons is a viable solution to the current economic crisis .

For a nation in which being tough-on-crime has been a prerequisite for election, this is a significant

achievement . Given the success of the US anti-prison movement in mobilising popular


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support to confront mass incarceration, academics and nonprofits should pay more attention to

the role of popular movements in shaping criminal justice policy and consider

how they might use their own resources to facilitate and support grassroots

popular protest.

Connecting our critiques to an advocacy of the legalization of marijuana uniquelyprovides a training ground for movement buildinglegalization is ripe forgalvanizing a collaboration at the grassroots and enables an exit strategy from theracist politics of the status quo

Tate 2014, Professor of Political Science at UC Irvine

(Katherine, Something's in the Air: Race, Crime, and the Legalization of Marijuana, pg. 9)

For increasing numbers of Americans, legalizationofpersonal- use marijuana is the only alternative to

draconian laws drawn up in the "war on drugs" regime of the past three decades. It is well establishedthat concern and paranoia over petty "crack" cocaine arrests for sales, possession, and use drove the mass warehousing of

California's prisons and jail populations to become the largest in the United States (Lusane 1991: Provine 2007: Reinerman andLevine 1997: Weatherspoon 1998: Weaver 2007). Miller (2008) contends that the U.S. federal system of crime control

has left minority citizens less able to challenge unfair sentencing laws. Noting that marijuanapossession constituted nearly 8 of 10 drug- related arrestsin the 1990s. Michelle Alexander (2010) insists thatthis period of "unprecedented punitiveness" resulted "in prison sentences(rather than dismissal,

community service, or probation)" to the degree that "in two short decades, between 1980 and 2000 thenumber of people incarcerated in our nation's prisons and jails soared from roughly 300.000 to

more than 2 million. By the end of 2007. more than 7 million Americansor one in every 31adultswere behind bars, on probation, or parole" (Alexander 2010. 59). Pushed by drugprosecutions, the rising rate of incarceration reached unprecedented levels in the 1990s. Today'smovement toward more prisons, mandatory minimums and reinstatement of the death penalty logically followed the raciallyexploitative "law and order" campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s (Murakawa 2008). Conservative American politicians use the

mythical Black or Hispanic male drug dealer, like the Black female welfare queen, to drum up votes. A widespread consensus inreported government statistics, advocacy studies, and policy think tanks suggests thatAfrican Americans bear the brunt

of law-and-order management of U.S. marijuana laws because of how marijuana use isracialized. Political scientist Doris Provine contends that the U.S. government increased its punitive responsetoward drug use as a response to racial fears and stereotypes.She writes: "[d]rugs remain,

symbolically, a menace to white, middle-class values" (2007. 89). Both politicians and media have used this issueto construct a crisis and sustain punitive state drug laws. The war on drugs, she concludes, has greatly harmed

minority citizens through their imprisonment, contributing to deep inequalities in education,housing, health care, and equal opportunities to advance economically. The facts of use. sales, andpossession, confirmed by academic and critical legal studies literature, are strikingly different from how the national and local media

choose to present them. One study focusing on marijuana initiate found "among Blacks, the annual incidence rate (per 1.000

potential new users) increased from 8.0 in 1966 to 16.7 in 1968. reached a peak at about the same time as "Whites" (19.4 in 1976).then remained high throughout the late 1970s. Following the low rates in the 1980s, rates among Blacks rose again in the early

1990s, reached a peak in 1997 and 1998 (19.2 and 19.1. respectively), then dropped to 14.0 in 1999. Similar to the general pattern forWhites and Blacks. Hispanics' annual incidence rate rose during late 1970s and 1990s, with a peak in 1998 (17.8)" (National Survey

on Drug Use 1999). Individuals and groups in civil society, advocacy communities, and state legislaturesmust put forth a serious struggle among activists and potential coalition partners who can

understand the need for reform as a matter of civil rights and justice, and not the morality of

marijuana consumption.Supporting decriminalization potentially can be the training

ground for a new generation of leadership in addressing the larger problem of

mass incarceration and social and political isolation associated with it.For Black people and


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their allies who long for the daysagainst all oddsof political education, voter mobilization,legal reform, group solidarity, challenge to the political parties, and political empowerment,

expressed in the modern civil rights movement, the matter of decriminalization is ripe

for galvanizing a collaboration at the grassroots. Too many Blacks have assumed that the "War onDrugs" ended with the dissipation of the "crack" emergency, when, in sum, marijuana's criminalizationrather than incarceration

of Black people has been more perennial. If Michelle Alexander (2010) is correct in arguing that mass incarceration has

effectively reasserted Jim Crow second-class citizenship(or no citizenship) rights on AfricanAmerican people, then they must get off the sidelines of the legalization of cannabis or decriminalization struggle and stopallowing others to fight what is essentially their battle. This has long been the case in the challenge to the crushing "prison industrialcomplex." Whites and others, for the most part, have been the leaders in reform efforts concerning such things as mandatory

minimums, the old 100:1 gram of cocaine-to-crack formula, and health care for geriatric or HIV AIDS patients in prisons, while we

have seen Calvin "Snoop- Dogg"' Broadus become more influential than the congressional Black Caucus to our young.Whenordinary people change their thinking and consciousness and begin to demystifysmall, personal- use

marijuana, thenthe leaders will eventually come around without reticence or fear.

The marijuana debate needs to be reframed to remove all penalties against its use

(Scherlen 2012). This is our exit strategy: decriminalization reform is the only path to

reversing the dismal trends minorities face in America.

The affirmative strategically combines radical critique with pragmatic demandsthe distinction between pragmatism and radicalism is falsely constructedthe

creative tension within our approach enables us to take advantage of currentconditions like the legalization movement without sacrificing our political visionBerger 13

[2013, Dan Berger is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Bothell, Social

Movements and Mass Incarceration: What is To Be Done?, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black

Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 15, Issue 1-2, 2013, pages 3-18]

The strategy of decarceration combines radical critique, direct action, and tangiblegoals for reducing the reach of the carceral state. It is a coalitional strategy that

works to shrink the prison system through a combination of pragmatic demands

and far-reaching, open-ended critique . It is reform in pursuit of abolition . Indeed,

decarceration allows a strategic launch pad for the politics of abolition , providing what

has been an exciting but abstract framework with a course of action . 32 Rather than

juxtapose pragmatism and radicalism, as has so often happened in the realm of radical activism, the strategy of

decarceration seeks to hold them in creative tension . It is a strategy in the best

tradition of the black freedom struggle .It is a strategy that seeks to take advantage of

political conditions without sacrificing its political vision. Todaywe are in a moment

where it is possible, in the words of an organizer whose work successfully closed Illinois's infamous supermax prison Tamms

in January 2013, to confront prisons as both an economic and a moral necessity.33 Prisons bring togetherdiverse forms of oppression across race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship status, HIV status and beyond. The movements

against them, therefore,will need to bring together diverse communities of resistance. They willneed to unite people across a range of issues, identities, and sectors. That is the coalition underlying groups such as Californians

United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), the Nation Inside initiative, and Decarcerate PA. The fight against prisons is

both a targeted campaignand abroad-based struggle for social justice.These movementsmust include the leadership by those directly affected while at the same work to understand that prisons affect us all. This message is


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the legacy of prison rebellions from Attica in 1971 to Pelican Bay in 2012. The challenge is to maintain the

aspirational elements of that message while at the same time translating it into a

political program.Decarceration, therefore,works not only to shrink the prison system

but to expand community cohesion and maximize what can only be called

freedom. Political repression and mass incarceration are joined at the hip. The struggles

against austerity, carcerality, and social oppression, the struggles for restorative and

transformative justice, for grassroots empowerment and social justice must be equally

interconnected .For it is only when the movement against prisons is as interwoven in the social

fabric of popular resistance as the expansion of prisons has been stitched into the widerframework of society that we might hope to supplant the carceral state. There are many obstacles on thepath toward decarceration; the existence of a strategy hardly guarantees its success. Until now, I have focused largely on thechallenges internal to the movement, but there are even taller hurdles to jump in encountering (much less transforming) the deeplyentrenched carceral state. Perhaps the biggest challenge, paradoxically, comes from the growing consensus, rooted in the collective

fiscal troubles of individual states, that there is a need for prison reform. In that context, a range of politicians, think tanks, andnonprofit organizationsfrom Right on Crime to the Council on State Governments and the Pew Charitable Trustshave offered a

spate of neoliberal reforms that trumpet free market solutions, privatization, or shifting the emphasis away from prisons but stillwithin the power of the carceral state. Examples include the Justice Reinvestment processes utilized by states such as Texas and

Pennsylvania that have called for greater funding to police and conservative victim's rights advocates while leaving untouched some

of the worst elements of excessive punishment. These neoliberal reforms canalsobe found in the sudden burstof attention paid to reentry services that are not community-led and may be operated by

private, conservative entities.34 Perhaps the grandest example can be found in California, where a Supreme Court rulingthat overcrowding in the state's prisons constituted cruel and unusual punishment has been met with a proposal for realignment,

that shifts the burden from state prisons to county jails. 35 A combination of institutional intransigence and ideological commitment

to punish makes the road ahead steep. Even as many states move to shrink their prison populations, theyhave done so in ways that have left in place the deepest markings of the carceral state, such asthe use of life sentences and solitary confinement, and the criminalization of immigrants. Social

movements will need to confront the underlying ideologies that hold that there is an

acceptablelevel of widespread imprisonment , that there is a specter of villainy out therebe they

illegal immigrants, cop killers, sex criminalswaiting in the wings to destroy the American way of life. 36

There is a risk, inherent in the sordid history of prison reform, that the current reformimpulse will be bifurcated along poorly defined notions of deservingness that will continue to

uphold the carceral logic that separates good people from bad people and which decides thatno fate is too harsh for those deemed unworthy of social inclusion.This, then, is a movement that

needs to make nuanced yet straightforward arguments that take seriously

questions of accountability while showing that more cops and more (whether bigger or

smaller) cages only takes us further from that goal . 37At stake is the kind of world we want

to live in, and the terms could not be more clear: the choice, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, is eithercarceral chaos or liberatory community. The framework of communityas expressed Decarcerate PA slogan buildcommunities not prisons and the CURB budget for humanity campaignallows for a robust imagination of the institutions and

mechanisms that foster community versus those that weaken it. It focuses our attention on activities, slogans, programs, and

demands that maximize communities. In short, it allows for unity. If the state wants to crush dissent through

isolation, our movements must rely on togetherness to win. Solidarity is the difference

between life and death . State repression expands in the absence of solidarity.

Solidarity is a lifeline against the logic of criminalization and its devastating consequences.For

the most successful challenges to imprisonment come from intergenerational movements:

movements where people raise each other's consciousness and raise each other's children,

movements that fight for the future because they know their history. Here, in this pragmatic


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but militant radicalism, is a chance to end mass incarceration and begin the

process of shrinking the carceral state out of existence.

Accessibility arguments are FYIsthat dont address th