containing the crisis:

‘A History of Mass Incarceration and
Rustbelt Abolition Research Collective

a project of MAPS: Michigan
Abofitizm and Prisoner Solidarity
PROLOGUE

In a small town in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, about
an hour north of the Mackinac Bridge, a 50-acre site sur-
rounded by two perimeter chain-link fences, monitored
with electronic security devices, topped with razor-ribbon
wire, and patrolled by armed personnel holds 1,200 peo-
ple that have been labelled criminals. They are fathers,
husbands, workers, activists, comrades. Many of them are
from the Detroit area. This means they are held 5 hours
from their homes. This prison is named Kinross Correction-
al Facility. It is part of an archipelago of similar facilities
found across the state of Michigan and holding a total of
43,000 prisoners.

On September 9th, 2016, with the go-ahead given by
some of the Kinross prison officials, the prisoners orga-
nized a work stoppage in which no person went to their
assigned jobs. On the following day, September 10th, they
organized a peaceful demonstration to draw attention to
the inhospitable conditions of the facility. But the prison
officials lied through their teeth and responded with vi-
olence. Despite the Michigan Department of Corrections’
attempts to cover up the repression that followed, we
now know that a tactical team descended upon the pris-
on armed with rifles. These cops ripped hundreds of men
out of their cells, ziptied them, and left them in the prison
yard for hours in the middle of a rainstorm. The suppres-
sion of the rebellion cost the state upwards of $900,000.
And now many of these prisoners are facing two years in
solitary confinement. Suddenly the national spotlight was

ed on these people and the conditions that spawned
their rebellion.

But these conditions were not created overnight. The
growth of prisonsin Michigan, as in the broader Rustbelt
region, is a response to decades of crisis. To understand
the Kinross Rebellion, and to build a stronger movement
of resistance to state violence, we must look at the histo-
1y of the rise of mass incarceration in the Rustbelt region
and analyze the specific reasons for this growth of State
control and repre:

1. INTRODUCTION

The crisis of mass incarceration is a
crisis of racial capitalism

How are we to make sense of the crisis of mass incarcer-
ation? This zine lays out a material analysis of the rise of
mass incarceration in the state of Michigan. According
to the most recent data from 2016, about 1 in 46 people
i the United States are subjected to some form of State
supervision. This number in-
cludes those on- probation,

those released on parole, and
those locked up behind bars in
both prisons and ails. In Mich-
igan, this rate is about 1in 42,
which is higher than the na-
tional average. Michigan also
has the highest incarceration
rate of the Midwest. Of course,
not everyone faces the vio-
lence of the State in the same
way. Although black folks are
just 14% of Michigan's overall

state vs. State: uc copital-
ize (and emphasize) “State” when re-
or otherwise, to obey a certain set of
power,” “the violence of the State”
etc. For purposes of clarification and

comparison, we use “state” in lower
case when referring to “the state of
Michigan.
of Michigan is one particular instance

of the State.

At a basic level, the state

population, they make up 49% of its prison population.
Most incarcerated folks in the state come from the low-
er end of the national income distribution. And while the
vast majority of prisoners are men, black women are the

fastest growing prison population nationwide.
How we frame a problem shapes our response to that
problem. Given that mass incarceration affects not only
folks who are locked up i jails and prisons but also those
who have gotten out on probation or parole, it's clear that
this crisis has to do not only with prisons (and much less
with only private prisons) but with State power more gen-
erally. And beyond this, it has to do with a particular kind
of State power, one that serves to maintain and reproduce
a society characterized by both racial domination and
capitalist exploitation. We call this kind of society racial
capitalism. As the geographer and activist Ruth Wilson
Gilmore tells us, “capitalism requires inequality and racism
enshrines it

By tracing the history of mass incarceration in M
we show that the crisis of mass incarceration is a crisis of
racial capitalism. When we talk about mass incarceration
we are talking not only about the number of prisons and
prisoners but also about the organization of life and death
under racial capitalism. Our response must go beyond re-
ducing the number of prisons, or prisoners. Instead we
must consider seriously the proposition of abolishing the
very society that makes those prisons possible and nec-
essary. We hope that these pages may serve as a space to
imagine how we want to live, what a society without walls
and cages, without domination and exploitation, might
ook like.

RACIAL CAPITALISM: Cupiralion is a way of or-
ganizing society in which some people (the capitalists) own che
things mast people need in order to survive, such as: land, ma-
chines, buildings, and money. This means, on the one hand, that
other people are forced to sell their labor to capitalists in exchange
Jor a wage; and, on the ather hand, capitalists must exploit other
people’s labor or steal thei resources to compete with other capital-
ists. The word “racial” indicates that capitalism has always divid-
ed society into different populations to which different capacities
and obligations are attributed, Since the Affican slave trade and
the colonization of the Americas, capitalism has always been both
racial and racializing. Capitalism needs inequality to exist, and
racism helps to uphold that inequality. The carceral State also
plays a key role in upholding this society by using policing, impris-
onment, and surveillance to implement and enforce certain laws
(such as that of private property).
2. DETROIT, MICHIGAN, AND
THE FORMATION OF THE

RUSTBELT

The formation of Rust Belt Detroit
began in the 1970s when the post-
war period of high wages was
eclipsed by the devastating effects
of “unemployment and intensified
capitalist automation.

In order to understand the rise of mass incarceration in
the 1970s, we have to start with the conditions of the De-

troit proletariat after World War Il and the subsequent.
formation of the Rust Belt. We treat the city of Detroit as

a microcosm which allows us to analyze the dynami

of

racial capitalism in Michigan and the Rust Belt more gen-
erally (after all, most prisoners in Michigan are “produced”
in the Detroit metropolitan area). While our hypothesis is
that our analysis holds in other Rust Belt cities, we invite
the reader to test this for themselves.

By the mid-twentieth cen-
‘tury, Michigan was the corpo-

PROLETARIAT: ihis tcrm refers 1o
a class of people that are defined by their re-
lationship to the economy. It usually means
cither “workers” or “industrial workers.”
Sometimes it is used to describe anyone who
does not own the means of production or re-
production. In other words, anyone who has
to sell their labor in order to survive.

RUSTBELT: a1 area covering
tervitories lefe behind by industrial
capital , stretching betueen upstate
New York, and western Pennsylvania,
Minnesota and as far west as cities
such as Oakland, California. For de-
cades this region's economy was based
in heavy manufacturing. During the
past few decades, these industrics have
lefi the region, leaving empty and
rusted factories in their wake.
10

rate home of the "Big Three" automobile manufacturers
(that is, the Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler corpora-
tions). Migrants from all over the United States and the
world came to this industrial hub looking for jobs that, due
to struggles waged by rank-and-file workers and unions
like the UAW, were better-paying than industrial jobs else-
where. This partially explains the Second Great Migration
of black folks who migrated from rural southern states to
Rust Belt cities like Detroit, as well as the mid-20th centu-
1y migrations of Arab workers to nearby Dearborn (where
Ford headquarters i located)

In this post-war “Golden Age" of industry, so-called
“Fordist capitalism” kept unemployment low and both
labor productivity and wages high. Due to the Great
gration, by the late 1960s, the majority of workers in
Detroit's auto plants were black, although they were of-
ten employed in only the most deadly jobs. While higher
than the white workers' unemployment rate, the unem-
ployment rate among Detroit’s black workers by 1970 was
at the lowest rate it had been in two decades (9.8%). By
1980, however, the black unemployment rate in the city
of Detroit had shot up to a post-war high of 22.5% (twice
the rate of white workers). By the same time period, more
than half of the black working class employed in industry
lost their jobs. While there are multiple reasons for this
increase in unemployment during the 1970s, the most
important factors were the long and steady process of

automation and

AUTOMATION: the process by which - deindustrial-

workers are replaced with machines. Under ra- ization.

es and growing unemployment for workers.
1

the process by which industrial capital replaces workers
with machines. In principle, this can be beneficial since it
frees up workers from having to do certain activities. How-
ever, capitalist automation
means, on the one hand, in-
i DEINDUSTRIALIZATION: /o, gutput and reduced
the process by which companies relocate t
faciories (from cites to suburbs, other re- €OStS for capitalists and,
Lion or ther cauniries) n ovder 10 0n the other hand, reduced
uce production costs. Ths process chrows wages o no wages at all
workers out of employment for workers. As production
becomes increasingly auto-
mated, workers become increasingly unnecessary to cap-
italists. Similarly, deindustrialization refers to the process
by which corporations physically moved their factories,
first leaving the cities for the suburbs, and later leaving
the suburbs for other countries. As a result, people liv-
ing in the former centers of industrial production are left
without access to waged work.

While automation and deindustrialization were con-
stant processes throughout the post-war era, they partic-
ularly intensified in the 1970s. As an example, while the
number of manufacturing firms in Detroit grew 2.7% be-
tween 1947 and 1958, that number fell in the following
decades, dropping 14% between 1958 and 1967 and a
whopping 51% between 1967 and 1977. Below is a graph
that depicts the decline in both manufacturing and pro-
duction jobs in Detroit. As you can see, by the mid 1970s
the total number of these jobs in Detroit was at a post-war
low.

CAPITALISTS: people who oun

the major parts of the economy, some-
times called “the means of production.”
These are folks who make money by ex-
ploiting workers' labor.
8

TOTAL MANUFACTURING AND PRODUCTION EMPLOYMENT IN POST-WAR DETROIT

£ 08 8

NUMBER OF JOBS (N THOUSANDS)

Data from Table 5.2 in “The Origins of the
Urban Crisis” by Thomas L. Sugruc

The restructuring of global capital in the mid-1970s
through automation and deindustrialization generated
big profits for capitalists and massive unemployment for
workers—black workers in particular. Entire populations
were rendered “useless” to the needs of capital. These
processes are directly connected not only to the birth of
the Rust Belt but also to the rise of mass incarceration in
Michigan and the United States.

3. DETROIT 1967: RIOTS AND
WORKER INSURRECTION

The 1967 Rebellion offered law-
and-order politicians a convenient
rationale tojustify mass incarceration.
But this is only one piece of a larger
picture: we need to understand mass
incarceration as a response to the
broader social crisis created by racial
capitalism.

During the post-WWIl period, despite the high wages, the
city of Detroit was a site of intensive exploitation both
in the ghetto and on the shop floor. Additionally, by the
19605 industrial decline and “decentralization” by the
Big Three auto manufacturing companies gradually un-
dermined the city's tax base and led to its impoverish-
ment. Detroit was racially segregated through what the
orian Thomas Sugrue calls “a direct consequence of
a partnership between the federal government and local
bankers and real estate brokers.” Additionally, the Detroit
Police Department was an often deadly threat to the safe-
ty of black Detroiters. The poor and black Detroiters who
experienced these conditions organized against them and
prepared the kindling of rebellion for the inevitable spark.

InJuly 1967, the poor, black, and unemployed of Detroit
rose up against their living conditions and temporarily lib-

13
14

erated large sections of the city from State control. They
fought back against the racism embedded in everyday life
and the various forms of State domination to which they
were subjected. During what became known as the Great
Rebellion, the looters targeted businesses not on the ba-
sis of the race of their owner but on the basis of how much
they exploited their customers. One survey found that
lower-class black folks did not care if a shop owner had
black or white skin because both were “very much alike .

in the way they treatled] customers.” Even in Detroit's
auto plants, workers struggled against the conditions that
were killing them: in response to speed-ups of the assem-
bly line and an intensification of exploitation, the years
between 1967 and 1971 were one of the highest periods
of (wildcat) strikes in the postwar period.

The State interpreted and responded to the rebellion
in various ways. As a direct response, 7,200 people were
arrested. In the long term, the insurrection was used by
the State to justify an increase in repressive measures.
Liberal Democrats, including Detroit Mayor Jerome Cava-
naugh, clamored for more “law and order” policies. During
the Rebellion, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson
addressed the nation and asserted that “The criminals
who committed these acts of violence against the people
deserve to be punished—and they must be punished” Ad-
ditionally, a 1968 federally-funded study on urban “disor-
ders” argued that the conditions of the ghetto create an
“environmental jungle™ and recommended, among other
things, that cities increase the use of undercover police
and other specialized policing units. Detroit took this ad-
vice seriously and debuted a specialized unit called “Stop

the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets” (STRESS) that proved to
be an especially murderous arm of the police department,
carrying out the execution-style killings of a more than a
dozen black men in the space of a few years. The city also
officially introduced police into Detroit public high schools
in1969.

Following the 1967 Great Rebellion, the State solidi-
fied its view of unemployed (“surplus’) workers as secu-
rity threats. Both Democrats and Republicans began to
campaign for public office by promising more policing and
more prisons under the guise of “law and order” The black
and poor lower class articulated the connections between
the growth of the carceral state and the exploitation
in the plants. One article in a black Marxist newspaper
from 1970 described how a Chrysler plant and the Wayne
County jail were "both parts of the same thing ....a system
that puts profits above the welfare of the human beings

that live in it and

CARCERAL STATE: 4 mode of governance
that needs to police, imprison, and suruveil (different
Jforms of “incarceration”) its population in order to
function at all. The widespr
the violence of police, and the magnitude of impris-
onment are all specific historical developments that

use of surveillance,

have emerged in response to different social crises in
the ULS.

produce the prof-
its it feeds on”

Faced with a
crisis that threat-
ened their very
lives, the black
underclass in De-

troit fought back

against the structures of racial capitalism. Politicians re-
sponded by using the insurrections to justify the project
of mass incarceration, hoping to prevent future rebellions
by containing the populations that fueled them behind
walls and barbed wire.

15
16

“The carly Cold War’s countersubversive
demonology ~was rearticulated as a
counterinsurgent discourse about the rule of
law. This demonization of the ‘domestic enemy’
has underpinned mass criminalization... The
logic of counterinsurgency has traveled from
the suppression of subaltern insurrections to
the confinement of actually or potentially
rebellious populations rendered surplus by
capitalist restructuring.” (-Jordan T. Camp,

Incarcerating The Crisis;
4. THE PRISON BOOM

The response to the crisis of racial
capitalism is mass incarceration,
transferring money, jobs, and power
from the urban black population to
the rural white population.

It was only after 1973—in the context of the crisis of racial
capitalismand in the aftermath of the rebellion of 1967—
that a major shift took place in Michigan's prison system.

From 1973-2006, the state’s prison population sky-
rocketed from just under 8,000 to more than 52,000. The
growth of the prison population also required massive
new investment in Corrections on the part of the state,
and over the same period the state’s annual prison expen-
ditures grew by nearly 5,000%, from $38 million to $1.87
ion. This spending went toward building new prisons
and expanding the Corrections workforce. The state built
31 new prison facilities—more than any other Midwestern
state—and the number of Corrections employees rose by
roughly seven times. In fact, the ratio of state employees
working in Corrections spiraled from about 1/20 in 1973
to nearly 1/3 by 2006.

How do we explain the rapid growth of Michigan's pris-
on system? Many people believe the answer is simple:
“crime” Weren't all these prisons built, they say, to pun-
ish the criminals who fueled a massive crime wave? Don't

17
prisons address crime and violence? If that were true, we
would have seen rising crime rates, then the prison boo,
and finally decreasing crime rates. But as Gilmore has
demonstrated, what actually happened is almost exactly
the opposite: crime went up, then crime went down,
and only then did the prison boom take place. There is
no historical correlation between incarceration and crime

rates, and the idea that prisons solve crime and violence is
a calculated myth,

So if the prison boom can't be explained by “crime;” we
need to consider other factors. First, from the perspective

of State and capital, the crisis of racial capitalism had gen-
erated a major threat to the stability of the system. As we

have seen, a growing mass of largely (though by no means
entire-

W) black RACIALIZED SURPLUS POPULATION:
had been sectors of the population (especially black and generally poor

the auto-

mation and relocation of the factories. Without access to
wage labor, and with the dismantling of the welfare state,
this racialized surplus population was pressed by
necessity into the informal economy and a precarious life.
The rise of mass incarceration seemed to offer a conve-
nient solution to this threat: removal and containment.

Second, to the extent that Michigan's white popula-
tion, which had by this time largely abandoned urban cen-
ters through “white flight,” was also affected by dein-
dustrialization, the state-financed construction of prisons
also provided them with relatively stable and well-paid
employment. This is because prison construction was cen-
tered primarily in the rural areas of the state—more than
two-thirds of the state’s new facilities in this period were
built in rural towns with predominantly white populations.

As a result, the prison boom contributed to a major geo-
graphic shift, by which

WHITE FLIGHT: the process by the disproportionate-

which white populations abandoned urban
centers (associated with black folks, “crime,
and “violence") and relocated to suburbs, tak-
ing their tax dollars and other resources with
them. In Detroit, this process started in the
late 19505 and continued through the 19705

ly black incarcerated
population from ur-
ban centers like De-
troit was transferred
to new rural prisons
largely staffed, in new-

ly-created positions,
by white guards. The historian Heather Ann Thompson
argues that this process redirected public funds and job
opportunities away from “cities like Detroit, ravaged by
incarceration, to sparsely populated towns that held large
prisons, like lonia”

Third, by warehousing growing numbers of black folks
from the cities in rural prisons run by a largely white Cor-
rections workforce, Michigan's prison boom played a ma-
jor role in reconfiguring the balance of political power in
the state. For one thing, incarcerated folks can't vote, and
those convicted of a felony are stripped of the right to
Vote after their release. But beyond this, political repre-
sentation s calculated on the basis of the county popu-
lation as recorded in the state census. Mass incarceration

19
20

contributed to the depopulation of largely black ¢
Detroit while at the same time boosting the population
of largely white rural counties like Chippewa, lonia, Jack-
son, and Luce. As Thompson points out, four state senate
districts and five house districts drawn after the 2000
Census only met the minimum population requirements
set by the federal government because of the prisoners
they claimed as constituents. Without importing non-vot-
ing black prisoners from Michigan's urban centers, these
districts would have been stripped of political represen-
tation.

21

5. MAP OF PRISONS IN
MICHIGAN

22

6. ATTICA IS ALL OF US: THE
2008 CRISIS AND THE 2016
KINROSS PRISON REBELLION

As the federal government bailed
out Detroit’s automotive giants in
2009, Michigan initially closed
down some its_prisons to mend
its budget deficit—but reopened them
in 2o015. One of these prisons was
Kinross, which erupted in rebellion
on September 9, 2016, the 4oth
anniversary of the rebellion that had
taken place in New York’s Attica
prison in 1971.

As we have seen, Michigan's prison population peaked in
2006, in the lead-up to the financial crisis that began the
following year. The financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the
crisis of the automotive industry from 2008-2010 were
contained and controlled by State intervention. In 2009,
the State stepped in and saved Detroit's “Big Three" from
bankruptcy with a $100 billion “bailout” package. In the
midst of this crisis, the state of Michigan shut down 10
prisons in an effort to close its multibillion-dollar budget
deficit. Michigan was particularly hard hit, though anoth-
er 25 states also cut correction spendings in 2009 for sim-

ilar reasons.

What is now known as Kinross Correctional Facility was
originally opened as Hiawatha Correctional Facility (HTC)
in Michigan's Upper Peninsula in 1989. HTC was one of the
prisons that was closed during the 2009 crisis, but it was
reopened in October 2015 after the old Kinross prison (a
former Air Force base) was shut down. Below is a descrip-
tion of the conditions inside Kinross in 2015, written by
someone who was imprisoned there during the 2016 re-
bellion.

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24

In many ways, the abhorrent conditions of the re-
opened Kinross facility in 2015, as described by our in-
carcerated comrade above, spurred the March 2016 food
unity actions. These actions led to the September 2016
rebellion in that same facility. In those days of Septem-
ber, thousands of prisoners at Kinross refused to do the
reproductive labor of maintaining the prison (such as
cooking and cleaning). The strike was sanctioned by the
warden, but as folks went back to their cells an Emergen-
cy Response Team entered and assaulted the strikers—ar-
resting hundreds and retaliating against organizers, par-
ticipants, and even non-participants. As far as we've been
able to find out, the long-term effects of the retaliation
include at least 180 Kinross rebels being transferred and
put in administrative segregation, ak.a. “the hole” But
the conditions have not changed, and so we expect that
the rebellions will continue—both inside and outside.

7. NOT JUST PRISONS: THE

CARCERAL
PRISON WALLS

STATE

BEYOND

Prisons are just one piece of a

repressive State apparatus that
includes immigration detention
centers, probation, police, and
surveillance. The carceral State

reaches far beyond the prison walls.

“All America is
a prison and jails
are just a prison
within a prison.”
- Malcolm X

Until now, we have been
talking specifically about
prisons as particularly
brutal sites of exploita-
tion, as a warehousing sys-
tem for populations that
the structures of racial
capitalism have deemed
undesirable and therefore
disposable. But we must

ask: does the carceral State really end at the prison walls?
What about other forms of State supervision, from immi-
grant detention facilities to parole and probation? And
what about the police who keep the prisons full? These
questions point to the fact that merely replacing prisons
with other techniques of surveillance and social control
will not solve the problems generated by racial capitalism.

25
26

The logic of incarceration and disposability extends to all
corners of our society.

One way that the State has responded to recurring eco-
nomic crises is to cut funding, impacting allocations to-
wards corrections facilities. We have seen this in Michigan:
in the wake of the financial crisis, 10 prisons were closed
down or consolidated. But these processes are a minor
change in the organization of incarceration rather than
a solution. Indeed, closing these prisons actually made
the living conditions of incarcerated people much worse,
as evidenced by the overcrowding and uninhabitable con-
ditions at Kinross. Additionally, the slight increase in the
number of probationers and parolees—in other words, the
“replacement” of imprisonment with probation—should
be seen, in the words of a former Michigan corrections of-
ficial, as “just another burdensome condition of extending
incarceration.”

The process by which the State built up its capal
to repress populations meant the simultaneous
tling of social welfare programs. In many cases this looked
like direct attacks on the security of poor women of color.
For instance, the Clinton administration put the last nail
inthe coffin of Aid to Families with Dependent Children
in 1996. In conjunction with the processes of the forma-
n of the Rust Belt and organized abandonment of these
populations described above, these reforms have left
women, particularly black women, in violent precarious
life conditions. Black women are now the fastest growing
population of prisoners.

Similarly, the systematic and everyday forms of vio-
lence faced by imprisoned women through State-sanc-
tioned sexual assault in the form of strip searches contin-
ues beyond the walls of prisons—in the streets, at work,
or in their homes. The criminalization of sex work itself
leaves women—trans women in particular—in precarious
life conditions, as they often face sexual and deadly vio-
lence with little to no recourse. In short, the carceral State
renders their lives without value and their bodies as dis-
posable both inside and outside prisons.

As President Trump begins to use the deportation ma-
chine that was created under Obama, the forms of incar-
ceration targeting migrants are playing a more central role
in the larger carceral state. In parallel to the criminaliza-
tion of the black, urban poor, immigration police and de-
tention centers operate over a population that has been
racialized in a different way. Millions living and working in-
ide the borders of the U.S. are deemed “illegal” because
of their immigration status and are targeted for deporta-
n. Indeed, Hispanics now make up more than a third of
all federal prisoners as a consequence of the escalation in
immigration raids and criminal prosecutions of immigra-
ion violations.

The general logic of incarceration extends to many
aspects of everyday life. Some Detroiters described the
increase in policing after the 1967 Rebellion as a way of
turning the ghetto into an “open-air” prison. Today, these
forces have intensified as security cameras are found on
every corner and local police are armed with military-grade
‘weapons and vehicles. Downtown s now flled with private
security guards from Guardsmark Inc. employed by the
billionaire Dan Gilbert, “trained to spot potential trouble

27
28

and to deter thieves, drug dealers, muggers and even ag-
gressive panhandlers” Detroit police officers are in radio
communication with Gilbert's private force, and they work
in tandem to remove unwanted people from the Greater
Downtown area. Gilbert has also installed a multi-million
dollar surveillance system of over three hundred camer-
as that captures most of what happens in Downtown. And
all of it is seen by Gilbert's security staff, who monitor
the live feeds twenty-four hours a day from a Downtown
“command center” The Movement for Black Lives has ad-
dressed the general increase in surveillance, demanding an
“end to the mass surveillance of black communities, and
the end to the use of technologies that criminalize and
target our communities (including IMS! catchers, drones,
body cameras, and predictive policing software)" The tar-
gets of the State's surveillance war, however, are not only
the black community; the spying and surveillance of other
populations such as Muslims and domestic revolutionaries
have increased significantly as well. These technologies
serve a dual purpose: they increase the capacity of the
carceral State to monitor and control, while at the same
time helping to normalize our prison society by turning
surveillance and policing into just another facet of every-
day life.

Prisons are fundamental to the functioning of the capi-
talist economy in the 21st century. The number of pri
ers helps to keep the unemployment rate deceptively low.
Additionally, 70 million people in the United States today
are barred from certain kinds of employment because of
criminal history or other imprints of the carceral State. If
you add to this the number of undocumented folks who

face severe barriers to working, the total number (over 80
million)is half of the total ULS. workforce. By keeping half
of the workforce precariously employed or unemployed,
the carceral system enables the hyper-exploitation of
poor and working people in general. It also helps to keep
these potentially revolutionary classes disorganized by
imposing restrictions on voting, housing, public benefits,
and other services for people with criminal records. In oth-
er words, the racial logic of incarceration plays a central
role in the ongoing operations of capitalism as a global
system. The problem is not prisons themselues, but rather
the general system that must expel certain classes of peo-
ple from liveable conditions and employment and expose
them to “premature death.”

29
30

8. Abolition now!

“Prisons do not disappear social
problems, they disappear human
eings. Homelessness, unemployment,
drug addiction, mental illness,

illiteracy are only a few o
the pmblemsy that disi]ppea{ fiom/
public view when the human beings
contending with them are relegated
to cages.” —Angela Davis

Throughout these pages we have tried to analyze the pro-
cesses that have created the conditions for mass incar-
ceration in the Rustbelt. We explored how time and again
prisons did not solve the broader problems created by our
current society, which we have called racial capitalism. If
thisis the case, why do we spend so much money funding
them? For example, Michigan currently spends over $2
billion a year on corrections; the United States currently
spends $80.7 billion a year on prisons, jails, parole, and
probation. If we include all other elements of the carcer-
al State (such as courts, prosecutors, and police) the total
annual cost comes to $182 billion. What else could we do
with all of these resources? These are the kinds of ques-
tions that prison abolitionists ask.

Imagining and creating a world without prisons also
means seriously confronting the task of community ac-
countability. When someone harms someone else, what
practices of justice could actually attempt to address the
victim's material needs and process of healing? What can
we do to build a society that has at its foundation princi-
ples other than revenge? What collective processes can
we develop to hold each other accountable that do not
involve locking people in cages or shackling them withan-
Kle bracelets?

Abolishing prisons also means much more than creat-
ing alternative systems of social accountability: it means
re-imagining society in a fundamental way. Releasing folks
from prison alone will not solve the problems created by
capitalist exploitation nor racial and gender domination.
As such, as abolitionists we imagine not only a world with-
out prisons, but a world beyond racial capitalism.

At this historical moment, we mostly take prisons for
granted as a “normal” part of our society. But it was not
always this way. Prisons, much like racial capitalism, have
a history, a small piece of which we have tried to explore
here. If mass incarceration and the carceral State are his-
torical constructions, that s, if they aren'tjust a “natural”

r “necessary” part of

ABOLITION: a poliical prospechuman existence, they

drawing on long tradition of workers and
racialized groups (in Amerikkkas black and
brown people) fighting for freedom. Abolition
and revolutionary way so that prisons—and
the broader carceral State—are not a means
to solve social problems. “Prison abalition”
means both ending the carceral State and
building alternative forms of justice and or-
ganizing society that meet _the needs of most
communitis, not the needs of the State ror
capital.

can be transformed
and ultimately abol-
ished. As revolutionary
Assata Shakur writes in
her poem Affirmation:
“awallis justa wall, and
nothing more at all, it
can be broken down...”

31
SUGGESTED READINGS

Books

Camp, Jordan T. Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Strug-
gles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State. Oakland: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2016.

Clover, Joshua. Rio. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Upris-
ings. London: Verso Books, 2016.

Davis, Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete?New York: Seven Sto-
ries Press, 2003.

Georgakas, Dan and Marvin Surkin. Detroit, I Do Mind
Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution. Cambridge, Mass:
South End Press, 1998. Originally published in 1975

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus,
Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Oak-
land: University of California Press, 2007.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol-
ume 1. Originally published in 1867.

Sugrue, Thomas. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race
and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996.

33
34

Thompson, Heather Ann. Blood in the Water: The Attica
Prison Uprising of o7r and its Legacy. New York: Pan-
theon Books, 2016.

Thompson, Heather Ann. Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor,
and Race in a Modern American City. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2000.

Articles

Citizens Research Council of Michigan. “Growth in Michi-
gan's Corrections System: Historical and Comparative Per-
spectives.” Report 350, June 2008

Pew Center on the States. “1 in 31: The Long Reach of
American Corrections.” March 2009.

Thompson, Heather Ann. “Unmaking the Motor City in the

Age of Mass Incarceration” Journal of Law and Society,
December, 2014.

Other

Prison Policy Initiative. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/
Michigan Abolition and Prisoner
Solidarity (MAPS) came together
in the wake of the nationwide
September 9, 2016, prisoner strike to
organizer in solidarity with prisoners
against the wiolence of incarceration.
We're joining a nationwide fight to
end the prison and police “systems
that pose a constant threat to our
communities. We see support work
as key to that political commitment
and work to amplify the woices of the
incarcerated. See more of our work at:
michiganabolition.org

contact us at maps@riseup.net

When you've finished reading this text, please consider print-
ing more copies and hosting a reading group in your com-
munity.

Or, at the very least, pass this copy along to someone who
might appreciate its perspective.

You can find the PDF online at michiganabolition.org

To print as a zine, open with Adobe and print as a booklet,
double-sided, and “Jlip on short edge”.

35